Oprah Chooses Dickens

Oprah recently selected Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations as her new book club picks. Clearly, I was so excited about this news a month ago that I didn't rush to post anything about it. Meh, Dickens. I've never read anything by him and I know it's a gaping hole in my literary education but...meh, I just can't get up the enthusiasm for it. I've previously attempted both of these books and never made it past page 5.

So why am I posting, you ask? One, because I posted about Freedom as her last pick and I'm trying to be more consistent with ye olde blog. But mostly because I ABSOLUTELY LOVE the cover design of the Oprah Dickens edition. I love it so much that I am considering buying it, despite the fact that I already have copies of both books...and no interest in actually reading them. (Apparently most people don't agree with me: USA Today reported that the new edition failed to crack the Top 50 on the bestseller list, theorizing that people already own these books or realize they can get them for a lot less or even for free on e-various readers.)

Apparently there's been quite a hubbub over the suitability of these classics for the average American reader. Hillary Kelly of The New Republic felt that Oprah is leading millions of the unwashed tribe astray by suggesting Dickens as a holiday hot-chocolate companion. Alan Jacobs of Wheaton College presents the counter-argument on his blog that any reading is always worth it; Beatrice.com calls Kelly's view profoundly elitist. I think all arguments have some merit - Dickens is probably not the right choice for this particular audience and I dislike the cattle mentality of Oprah's book club and yet...reading is good. So if you should choose to take up the gauntlet, I must point out that Oprah.com has posted a high school-esque reading guide to get you started.

#21 and #22: The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins

I read the The Hunger Games and Catching Fire back-to-back in October, after reading about the upcoming movie adaptation in Entertainment Weekly and generally hearing this series bandied about as "the next Twilight" (despite a distinct lack of vampires and werewolves). You know, I'm a teacher now, so I try to keep up with what the kids are reading - though despite the bestseller status, I have yet to spy one of these books in a kid's hand, alas.

The Hunger Games is the monomyth-based tale of 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who lives in District 12 of Panem, a post-apocalyptic country that stands in the place of a destroyed America. Every year to remind the people of the damage that rebellion can do, the Capitol demands that each district send them a teenage boy and girl to fight in the televised Hunger Games, a to-the-death battle in a horror-house arena. The tributes, as the sacrificial teens are called, are drawn by lottery and when Katniss' younger sister's name is drawn, she volunteers instead...which sends her out into the world on a hero's journey. (Like all monomythic heroes, she lacks at least one of her parents - in her case, a father - and she has a mentor, though he's not so magical. Harry Potter has a wand, Luke Skywalker has a light saber, and Katniss wields a bow.) Since the story is a trilogy - I have the third installment, Mockingjay, waiting for me at the library when I get home - I think you can pretty much guess how things turn out for Katniss in the arena as she learns the necessary lessons and achieves her destiny.

It's an interesting tale, considering it's a series about teenagers killing teenagers. Collins did a good job in navigating the minefield of how the reader can root for Katniss and want her to win, and still accept the horrific things that have to happen. I genuinely liked the first book. The second, not quite as much - despite its initial promise, Catching Fire unexpectedly mimics the premise of the first book. Which worked, I guess, for Harry Potter and Twilight but I've always found that repitition kinda boring. Still, I'm looking forward to Mockingjay, which seems likely to tread its own path.

#20: The Best of Friends, Mariana Pasternak

The Best of Friends is an interesting, troubling, strange book. As author Mariana Pasternak details her fractious friendship with (former) longtime pal Martha Stewart, she claims to be meditating on the bonds between females, hoping she will "inspire other women to take a close look at the intimacy of our friendships," as she writes in the final pages. But c'mon, we're all smarter than that! Really, The Best of Friends is a nasty tell-all marketed toward people like me who want to know more about one of the most famous/fascinating/vilified women in America. And it's written by someone who is nowhere near as famous - an oh-so fabulous Eastern European emigree/victim who will benefit by becoming just a little bit famous for writing said tell-all. These sorts of books are always strange, and hypocritical, and it's an icky strangeness and hypocrisy that the author and the reader participate in together.

Interestingly, I left the book feeling sorry for Martha Stewart, which was very much not Pasternak's point. (I gathered the ultimate point was to take revenge on Stewart for involving her in the ImClone scandal.) I felt sorry for Martha Stewart mostly because my biggest pet peeve is when people blame others for their own choices - which is what Pasternak spends the entire book doing. She is a grown woman who barely acknowledges the fact that she made an ongoing choice to stay in an allegedly damaging friendship. And reading between the lines, you start to see why Pasternak put up with this for 20 years: She liked what she got from the arrangement. Friendship with Martha brought prestige, introductions to famous people, trips, invitations to amazing events and dinners, and opportunities for her daughters. And that's cool, but she never recognizes that she used as much as she feels she got used.

In a nutshell, the two meet as young, recently-ish married women. They hang out with their husbands as a foursome, then as a threesome as Andy Stewart departs the scene. Then Stewart and Pasternak become a twosome since Martha's post-divorce needs put too much of a strain on Mariana's marriage. Over time, as we all know, Martha becomes incredibly rich and famous - and it turns out that a wealthy Martha likes to take fabulously exotic trips. Mariana can't afford it but apparently feels like she must keep up with the Joneses, so she accepts a loan from Martha and is then shocked when she receives a carefully calculated bill post-trip. She doesn't say anything, feels bitter, and yet accepts the same offer again, multiple times, restarting the cycle. And it's not just about exotic vacations: Generally speaking, the women compete with each other over things like money/clothes/men, Martha does something, Mariana doesn't like it but doesn't say anything and loses out, and so the disturbing dance continued.

Reading the book, you see that for Mariana, money is about friendship, and for Martha, money means business. And really, either viewpoint is acceptable - the problem becomes expectation. And that's really what this book made me think about: how you don't ever get to control others' actions, and the only thing you are truly entitled to is your own reaction. Mariana never addresses the problems in the friendship and yet seems incredibly bitter that Martha didn't perform to her specifications (which is ironic, considering one of the chief complaints lobbed at Martha is that she expected others to do exactly this). On page 319, she writes, "That was a lot of effort for Martha to make for someone else, and it impressed me when she gave Charlotte the champagne wedding brunch at Skylands, but having it done for me could only mean that Martha was finally beginning to be the kind of treasured friend I had always wanted her to be."

That's what The Best of Friends is really about: Martha Stewart was not the friend that Mariana Pasternak expected her to be. And instead of confronting her friend at the time or acknowledging her own free will in the situation now, Pasternak wrote a blame book, blaming Martha Stewart for everything. And in this, The Best of Friends is fascinating.

#19: The Tower, the Zoo, and the Tortoise, Julia Stuart

I've been a lazy blogger, oh so very lazy. And as a result a bit hard to remember what exactly happened in this book that I read more than two months ago. So let's see...the story revolves around a Beefeater named Balthazar, who owns the titular old tortoise, and as the book opens he is charged with the upkeep of the Royal Menagerie (or the titular zoo), which has just been moved to the titular Tower of London. And as it turns out, there are some strange folk who choose to make a 1,000-year-old stone prison their home, and The Tower, the Zoo, and the Tortoise is really about how their hopes and their disappointments come together.

Overall, it reminded me of a Maeve Binchy novel, how a singular event sheds light on individual hurts, ultimately bringing together a community in a sappy sweet happy ending. Personally, I like those kind of books, and I liked this one, but they're definitely not for everyone.

So, I offer a test to gauge your interest: "For once, he didn't feel the urge to poke her awake in order to rid himself of the harrowing illusion of sharing his bed with his Greek father-in-law, a man whose ferocious looks had led his relatives to refer to him as a good cheese in a dog's skin. Instead, he quickly got out of bed, his heart tight with anticipation. Forgetting his usual gazelle's step at such times, he crossed the room, his bare heels thudding on the emaciated carpet."

The passage comes from page two, as Balthazar gets out of bed in the wee hours to pursue his favorite passion, collecting rain (I kid you not). The language is pretty flowery, with many multi-syllabic adjectives per page, and Stuart uses a lot of quirky descriptions. If you like what you see, I would definitely recommend The Tower, the Zoo, and the Tortoise. It has a strange and lovely charm. But if the paragraph above doesn't suit, probably best just to move on.

#18: The Passage, Justin Cronin

After The Passage was unofficially anointed as THE book of the summer, I gave it to my dad for Father's Day. I was incredibly excited to read it when I got home from Europe, especially as I had been struggling through Orhan Pamuk's Snow, which I never ended up finishing. And then I spent the next four weeks trying to pass through The Passage - why was everyone so crazy about this book? I don't get it; neither does my father. And yeah, I will do a little spoiling.

The Passage reminded me quite a bit of I Am Legend (a movie that, incidentally, when PMS hits right, makes me cry like a baby). The U.S. military attempts to convert convicts into super-fighting machines but all goes awry and the superhumans escape the lab facility and turn the population into vampire-like creatures. The doorstop-sized tome then jumps about 100 years into the future, to one ragtag community that has managed to insulate itself from the monsters with bright spotlights. After a young girl appears in their midst, a group of people - who have never known the world as it was - inadvertently sets out on a journey that will save everyone.

It sounds interesting enough, but I just couldn't get through it. It was well-written (except for the fact that my particular copy had some printing issues, so the last sentence on one page didn't lead to the correct sentence on the next) but it took me forever to read. And then, I found the ending to be pretty disappointing - after 766 pages full of nitty-gritty details, you have to assume the ending. The characters are on their way to eradicating the vampires when The Passage just ends. You know they eventually will from some future documents that pepper the book, but it's like, I have to guess how they got from here to there? After 766 pages? When the whole book is essentially about saving the world?

#17: Pompeii, Robert Harris

Although I had other books stashed in my luggage, I ended up trading Good in Bed for Pompeii at some hostel since I spent most of my time in Europe/Asia tripping around ancient ruins. Even though Pompeii is set in Italy (hence the title) and I was not, it seemed to fit the mood - though I spent the entire book wondering if I had read it before.

It turns out that I had - clearly it was not memorable enough to be remembered in its entireity (though I am absolutely certain that I read it while I was in Athens in 2004) but was still enjoyable the second time around. Pompeii is the story of aquarius Marcus Attilus, who has been sent to the town of Misenum, in southern Italy, after the former aquarius disappears. When he gets there, the mighty Aqua Augusta starts mysteriously dropping in volume. Attilus sets out to fix the aquaduct before southern Italy goes dry, but little does he know that the oncoming eruption of Mt. Vesuvius is to blame.

It's a quick read and good for nipping into here and there on a trip like mine. It also made me realize that I still need to haul my ass to Pompeii - enough so that I almost considered trying to squeeze it into my itinerary. But since that never happened, I'll have to hit it up another time - probably forgetting, once again, that I read this book so it can have yet another go-around.

#16: Good in Bed, Jennifer Weiner

Before heading off to Europe this summer, I visited Half-Price Books to pick up some beach reads (ha, not that I spent much time on the beach). I had long heard about Good in Bed - mostly that it represented the best of chick-lit - and thought it might provide some easy entertainment as I made my way through half-lit hostels. Ugh - how wrong I was. I hated this book; in fact, I think it represents all that is wrong with the genre, a genre which I now pledge to stop reading (really, I promise).

Ostensibly, Good in Bed is about the protagonist's body issues. Cannie is a 28-year-old newspaper reporter who essentially loses her shit when her newly ex-boyfriend writes a magazine column about her entitled "Loving a Larger Woman." Even though Bruce is kind of a loser/creep, she decides that she wants him back and spends the next hundred pages obsessing. But then, on page 164, a surprise arrives and then the rest of the book veers off into something else (which I won't spoil)...and to somewhere else, an imaginary place called Never Never Land where screenplays magically get sold in an afternoon. I know chick lit generally contains fantastical elements but Good in Bed really went overboard - and it was eye-rolling because the characters were one-dimensional and Cannie barely agonized over/worked for any of her big decisions or accomplishments. The moral of the story seemed to be *whine a lot, get a lot* and it really pissed me off.

Before I let this one go, though, I do have to point out an error that really cracked me up. On page 26, Weiner writes, in Cannie's voice, "I felt scalded by shame, like I was wearing a giant crimson C..." But following the reference to The Scarlet Letter, Cannie wouldn't wear a C, because the letter isn't meant to represent her first name. In Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic - which I was forced to read twice in high school - the letter is an A, to represent the sin of adultery, not adultress Hester Prynne's first name. Clearly I really was meant to be an English teacher.

Predictable: Oprah Picks Franzen

Yes, all-powerful Oprah announced her book club pick yesterday: Jonathan Franzen's Freedom. It was a suprise to absolutely no one - not even to me, and I gave up on her endorsed books years ago. (I love her magazine but god help me if I don't want to poke my eyes out reading one of her modern-day book-club picks. I see the Oprah Book Club logo and I drop the book and run. Seriously.)

So, Jonathan Franzen...really? I don't think Oprah is obligated to pick poor, starving authors but c'mon, the man was just on the cover of Time-frickin'-magazine. If you know how to read, you know about this book. Plus, Franzen was too cool for Oprah school the first time around, when she picked The Corrections in 2001. He's already astronomically famous and apparently ungrateful...so why help him out, again?

Susan Orlean agrees with me. Yesterday she tweeted, under the hash tag #thatsmytwocents, "No bone to pick with Franzen, but Oprah could have anointed someone who actually NEEDED attention."

Um, yeah.

#12-15: Books in Review

I've hit a crisis point with my blog. In fact, with my life. I don't know what I'm doing with it, what I want to do with it, or why I'm doing it and the basic lack of traffic depresses me (not that I started this for the traffic, but, well, it's depressing anyway). So, on the blog-front, I'm not sure if I'm going to continue on. I need to reevaluate before I drown in this existential muck.

But since I haven't totally decided what to do, I thought I'd at least note the books I've read in the last month, even if the noting is only in brief:

#12: The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
I had been considering teaching The Red Tent next year so I thought I would re-read the book and make sure it was what I remembered - which was fantastic. (This is one of the few books that I consistently recommend.) Based on just a few lines in the Bible, The Red Tent focuses on Dinah - the only daughter of Jacob - and her journey as she goes from beloved daughter to wife to widow and mother, and from Israel down into Egypt. It's an exceptional book but in the end, I realized, perhaps not the best choice for semi-innocent/awkward ninth graders. They will have to read The Joy Luck Club - another fantastic book about mothers/daughter and journeys - instead.

#13: Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster by Dana Thomas
I read about this book on Jezebel.com at least a year ago - at the same time I heard about Fashion Babylon - but it took me awhile to get around to it. This well-researched book is essentially about how, as fashion houses have moved from being owned by individual designers (often the company's namesake) to a few large companies, the shift in fashion has moved from quality and clothes to $$$. Thomas did an INCREDIBLE amount of research for this book, traveling to France to smell perfumes, Italy to visit designers, and China to visit factories (where a chunk of clothes are made, even if some houses rip out the labels and replace with "Made in Italy.") I was never one for spending thousands of dollars for a piece of clothing or a purse but if I was, I would certainly think again after reading this book. The only downside to Deluxe, really, was that it was published in 2007 - it's the kind of book that would benefit from an update. (And I'd totally read it again.)

#14: The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
I had also been considering Highsmith's classic for a spot on my students' syllabus next year and wanted to re-read it to make sure it was what I thought it was. I hadn't read The Talented Mr. Ripley since spring 1996, the semester I took a law/jurisprudence class on murder at my liberal arts college.

Since my upcoming class is focused on the heroic journey (starting with The Odyssey), I thought The Talented Mr. Ripley might be a nice, end-of-the-year book to look at what happens when the hero - who is on a classic quest, like Odysseus or a Knight of the Round Table - turns out to be the villian. Because Tom Ripley is absolutely the villian - he is a poseur who convinces a man named Mr. Greenleaf to send him to Italy to convince his son, Dickie Greenleaf, a man-about-town of independent means, to come back to America. But then Tom decides he wants to lead the kind of life that Dickie has, and is willing to do anything to get it.

On my first reading, I don't think I really saw how much Tom's paranoia contributes to the out-of-control spiraling of events - how there's what Dickie says/does and then how there's what Tom says Dickie says/does...which are probably two completely different things. It reminded me quite a bit of Revolutionary Road, a book I appreciate more and more as time goes on, in how you can't be certainly what April has said and done because most of her speech/actions are relayed by someone else.

In (not-so) short, The Talented Mr. Ripley is a fascinating book - both in the plotting and in the icky feeling you have as the reader that you kinda, sorta want Tom to get away with it. (Apparently Ms. Highsmith herself was quite the unlikable character/sociopath - before the end of the year, I'm hoping to dive into Joan Schenkar's The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith.)

#15: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
I have been quite the good employee this June; I also managed to read my students' assigned summer reading book, Hurston's classic, which I never had to read myself in school. I really loved this book - I don't think it's perfect (and apparently Hurston wrote the entire thing during a seven-week working trip to Haiti) but it's a captivating story about one woman's quest for self-awareness. I think Hurston had roped in me in by page 10, when she sets 16-year-old Janie's awakening under a blossoming pear tree. "She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her." If you haven't read Their Eyes Were Watching God, run to the bookstore now! Really, it's incredible. I'll probably come back to this one in the fall, as I go over it with my students - there's so much more to say.


Alright, so there you have it. Even if I am conflicted about all things blog, I am mighty pleased to point out that I have reached Book 15 at the halfway point of the year! I think I might actually reach the finish line this year. :)

#11: The Constant Gardener, John Le Carre

Although it's been a couple of years since I've seen the excellent movie version of The Constant Gardener – starring Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz – I found that I couldn't get it out of my head as I read the novel.

The Constant Gardener is the story of married couple Justin and Tessa Quayle. Justin is a British diplomat posted to Nairobi and Tessa is his much-younger wife. At first glance, it appears that Justin is a passive guy with a passion for gardening who is seemingly oblivious as his wife takes on controversial aid work, and has an affair with a black Belgian doctor. But then, when Tessa is murdered, Justin embarks on a multi-continent search to ferret out a conspiracy that Tessa had apparently uncovered, and to find some justice for the both of them. (By the way, the murder thing – not a spoiler. You find out on page one.)

As a result of extraordinary movie bias, I don't feel like I can accurately judge the book. I didn't think it was as good as the movie – and Le Carre uses a decent amount of British slang, which I found to be annoying – but perhaps the book never had a proper shot. Since I'm feeling ambivalent about just about everything right now, I'll leave it at that.

#10: Waiter Rant, The Waiter

I finished Waiter Rant about a week and a half ago and while I liked it, I didn't love it. And, because I'm not much in the mood to blog (is it the humidity?) but want to return books to the library (I'm purging), I'm just going to go over it quickly.

The book is ostensibly by an anonymous waiter – author of an apparently popular blog of the same name – who sheds light on the ugly side of the restaurant business. (I say he's ostensibly anonymous because that's what the book jacket says; the Internet has just told me that The Waiter is a guy named Steve Dublanica, who was outed in 2008.) The parts about the actual restaurant business I enjoyed, and Waiter Rant is certainly well-written; it's also made me think twice about how to tip.

But then, at some point, the book starts veering into confessional mode as the Waiter's blog grows in popularity, he gets an agent, and freaks out about the writing of a book. I found those parts to be so self-indulgent – I think it's hard to feel invested in an anonymous story – and fairly annoying since for all the whining, it clearly worked out okay, since I was holding the book in question. I wanted to read a book about restaurants, not about some guy's existential crisis, and as Waiter Rant went on, it focused more on the personal travails of the Waiter and less on the biz.

Still, it was a quick read, which was a plus. He's a talented writer and it was easy to get through. It would be a good book to take on vacation (vacation!).

#9: The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitgerald

Ah, The Great Gatsby...how I love it. Hopefully you love it, too.

F. Scott Fitzgerald finished this, his third novel, in 1925. Although the book is short, it's sort of an epic and dreamy novel about the goings-on of high society in Long Island. Narrator Nick Carraway rents a house in West Egg and finds that his mysterious neighbor Jay Gatsby throws lavish parties almost nightly. As it turns out, Gatsby has long harbored a love for Nick's cousin, Daisy, whom he'd romanced five years before in her hometown of Louisville just after returning from his service in World War I. But complicating the reconciliation is Daisy's husband, Tom Buchanan, who's having his own affair with Myrtle Wilson, the wife of a mechanic. It all seems so glamorous and carefree until the illusion is painfully ripped away one night by an auto accident. Caught in the middle of it all is Nick, the innocent who has been thrust into this world that he doesn't totally belong to - and in the end, flees it.

For the accompanying image, I used the book cover that's actually on my Scribner classic edition, as it's the original cover. According to the introduction by Charles Scribner III, artist Francis Cugat had painted the cover before The Great Gatsby was even finished and Fitzgerald liked the image so much that he wrote it into the book. The melancholy eyes apparently belong to Daisy but for Fitzgerald, it triggered the addition of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg, an eye doctor long since out of business whose billboard eyes stare out from the road between Long Island and New York City. The bottom part of the image is supposed to represent Manhattan's carnival-like atmosphere but the yellow burst always makes me think of the car accident, as it happens right under Dr. Eckleburg's watchful stare.

Anyway...wonderful book, no surprise it's a classic.

#8: The Blind Side, Michael Lewis

As I think everyone in America knows by now, The Blind Side tells the story of Michael Oher, a homeless kid from a rough Memphis neighborhood who was taken in and "saved" by a rich, white family when he was in high school. The world had sort of given up on him but as it turns out, Michael is genetically predisposed to play left tackle - and becomes a high-school football star, eventually moving on to Ole Miss and the Baltimore Ravens. I hadn't seen the movie and decided to read the book first, before it came out on DVD, after hearing that the film version left out the contributions that other Memphis families made and instead chose to focus on the Tuohys, his main support system.

But, as it turns out, the book version isn't that much different than the movie - it simplifies some details and situations (because of time constraints, I assume) and leaves out pretty much all the football history, but the personal story is more or less the same. The Tuohys are pretty much the stars of the book too - and from what I've seen since of real-life clips, it seems accurate that they did indeed become Michael's family, with now five members instead of the previous four.

Where the book differs, really, is in the football analysis. I didn't realize The Blind Side would be quite so much about the game of football - which seems silly in retrospect as the subtitle of the book is "Evolution of a Game." Lewis spends multiple chapters explaining how the left tackle became the second-most important player in a football game - and went from anonymous grunt to high-paid star. I like football so I did enjoy learning that perspective, but I think if you're looking for a simple, heartwarming story, those chapters will seem endless.

Generally, I liked the book but I did think that it portrayed Michael Oher unfairly. For being the heart of the book, he's a pretty absent figure. Apparently this is because he was reluctant to speak with Lewis for any significant period of time but in the book, I think it comes across as condescending. The book is supposed to be about football - and how this one particular player sheds light on a greater trend - but I think it's just as much about how this family opened their generous, white hearts and saved this kid who was going nowhere. It's all about what they did for him; it's very little about what Michael Oher did for himself. And while I doubt he could have done it without them, it's also a little ridiculous to suggest, as The Blind Side does, that nothing was done with his own agency. (Which, incidentally, Oher seems to agree with in this Sports Illustrated article, even though he hasn't read the book or seen the movie.)

A lot of that was certainly the author's choice. In using dialogue, Lewis chooses to record the characters' manners of speaking - and as a result, all of the black people in the novel sound so uneducated. I also thought that Lewis manipulated perception with his use of metaphor. For example, on page 259, he likens Michael to an animal: "Like a zoo director discussing a crazed rhinoceros with its trainer, he said, ‘You got to get down here and find him.’” His (white) football coach is the zoo director and his (white) guardian is the trainer, but he's an animal.

But, on the bright side, it was announced at the end of April that Michael Oher will publish a memoir, I Beat the Odds My Amazing Journey from Foster Care to the NFL and Beyond, with the help of co-author and SI editor Don Yaeger. So in February 2011, he'll get to tell his story his way.

#7: The Secret, Rhonda Byrne

I feel conflicted about The Secret...on the one hand, I knew what I was getting myself into (fantastical self-help mumbo jumbo) but picked it up anyway and on the other, I'm kinda thinking Rhonda Byrne might be onto something. I have no doubt that there's some validity to the ideas within – it may have already worked for me – but at times, I think The Secret just takes it too far.

The book has been around for a couple of years – it even had a little cameo in the first Sex and the City movie – but I think I was inspired to pick it up after watching the first episode (and only the first episode) of E!'s Pretty Wild. The mother in that show homeschools her three teenage girls and she bases the curriculum off the teachings of The Secret movie version. The Secret is all about using positive thinking and visualization to bring the things you want to you – but ironically, in the reality show, middle daughter Alexis Neiers has misdirected the Universe and gotten herself six months in jail for being linked to a Hollywood burglary ring. I guess I just became a little curious (and a little scared) by the whole thing, by the idea of substituting math and English for a New Age philosophy and having it sort-of work.

The basic premise of The Secret is that you need to figure out what you really want in life, in all areas of your life, and then you use the Creative Process to ask, believe, and receive – and if you do this properly, the Universe will deliver all of it. The key is that you have to go beyond wishing – you have to be completely in tune with those desires and act like you've already received, since the Universe is proposed to be a type of mirror that reflects back to you whatever you're putting out. After that, you don't have to worry about how it's all going to happen – you're just supposed to believe and let the Universe work out the details.

Writing that, it sounds a little ridiculous. I think my biggest issue with The Secret is that it ignores the work and actions that have to take place for anything to happen, much less to achieve success. I mean, I can visualize a best-selling novel all day – I can believe it with every fiber of my being – but I can't attract those 80,000 words. Maybe I can attract an agent and a good review from Michiko Kakutani and an appearance on Oprah, but I can't attract the creation of a book – I will actually have to sit down every day and write it and there's no magical formula for that.

The Secret definitely delves into the ridiculous, so much so that I can't list it all. For example, the book suggests that you should be able to cure your own illnesses – because if you have a disease and you talk about it too much, you will have actually caused more diseased cells to grow. If you're fat, it's because you allowed fat thoughts into your mind – not because you gorged yourself on McDonalds. (Really, I'm not making this up. From page 59: “The most common thought that people hold, and I held it too, is that food was responsible for my weight gain. That is a belief that does not serve you, and in my mind now it is complete balderdash! Food is not responsible for putting on weight.”) For all the talk about positive thinking, there's actually a lot of blame in this book – it’s like, if you die of cancer, you obviously failed to send out the right signal. And what kind of a message is that?

But, on the other hand, I can't deny that positive thinking is a good thing. Getting clear about your goals, visualizing them, believing that they're going to happen – surely that can only help you to get closer to what you want. And even if you don't get there, you've no doubt had a better journey along the road of life because you believed happy thoughts, feeling sure that good things were on their way.

I also must confess that it's maybe already worked for me. The backstory is that my boyfriend broke up with me last August - it was very sudden, out-of-the-blue, and then he just disappeared without another word. I got two short emails at Christmas, but that was it in the space of 8 months. But then the morning after I started reading The Secret? An email. And another few emails since...with some talk on his part of reconciliation. Now, I think you could argue that this is all total coincidence (and the real secret is to run the other direction from the spineless jerk), but it's still weird.

So maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. I think the real secret of The Secret is to perhaps just absorb the worthwhile parts and ignore the looney-tunes bits, and through it all, put a smile on your face.

#6: The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan

The odds are good that I never would have picked up this book if I hadn't joined a new book club - and that would have been a true pity because The Botany of Desire is a fascinating read. It took me a little while to get into it - people kept telling me to at least read until I got to marijuana - and indeed by then, I was hooked.

Author Michael Pollan chose four different types of domesticated plants - the apple tree, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato - and gave each of them their own section to look at how the plants have evolved to gratify human desires and how we have made them evolve to gratify our desires. Throughout, Pollan combines history, travel, and research with his own experiences as a gardener.

In Apple, Pollan primarily looks at the myth of Johnny Appleseed, the American hero who may actually have been bringing the gift of alcohol to the frontiersmen. Along the way, he also discovers how big (apple) business has whittled down a consumers' choices down to just a few types of apples - out of all the millions of possible varities, since apple seeds produce independent trees that don't resemble their parents - and how this narrowness might actually endanger the apple's future.

In Tulip, my second-favorite section, Pollan mostly talked about how, for a short period of time in 19th-century Holland, a tulip became the most valuable thing in the world. In Marijuana - which was actually my least-favorite part, despite the promises - Pollan remembers his own short-lived attempt to grow his own crop while also investigating the motives behind the U.S. drug war, how the purpose of gardens has changed over time, and maybe even how great creativity and the world's great religions have sprung from this sort of intoxication. (Summarizing it, this section sounds fascinating, but for some reason, I just got bogged down here.)

The last section - the most fascinating and the scariest - was devoted to the potato. Pollan looks at the ordinary spud from two perspectives, from the Irish potato famine and the new genetically engineered crop. How is this scary, you ask? Monoculture, or the farming of a single crop. In both situations, monoculture - whether from necessity or corporate pressure - leads to a situation where one event (be it a bug infestation or frost) can kill the entire yield. In Ireland, an eighth of the population died because they relied on a single type of potato. Today, farmers generally either grow a single type of potato for the McDonalds crowd and flood their fields with pesticides or they opt for the predator-resistant NewLeafs, whose true cost in the end may be much higher than their value. I found this section so interesting that I've already repeated the details to someone - and I just finished the book yesterday.

There's no way I'll be able to remember all of the factoids and anecdotes, since The Botany of Desire is just chock full of them. So the main lesson I'll take away is this: Plant your own food. (And if that fails, eat organic.)

As Michael Pollan writes, at the end of the book: “The NewLeaf marks an evolutionary turn that may or may not take us somewhere we want to be. Just in case it doesn’t, though, we’d be wise to follow Chapman’s example, to save and seed all manner of plant genes: the wild, the unpatentable, even the seemingly useless, patently ugly, and just plain strange. Next year in place of the NewLeaf I plan to plant a great many different Old Leafs; instead of one perfect potato, I’ll make Chapman’s bet on the field. To shrink the sheer diversity of life, as the grafters and monoculturists and genetic engineers would do, is to shrink evolution’s possibilities, which is to say, the future open to all of us.”

#5: Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict, Laurie Viera Rigler

I have mixed feelings on Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict. On the one hand, it's well-written and pleasant and I looked forward to getting back to it whenever I had a chance. On the other, nothing happened; the book never really moved past the set-up into a space where the narrator could act on what she'd learned. So it was good but I wish it had moved into the story it had spent nearly 300 pages developing.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict is the story of Jane Mansfield, a young woman in Regency England who wakes up one morning after bumping her noggin to find herself in modern-day Los Angeles, where everyone thinks she is someone called Courtney Stone. (According to the Internet, Rigler's first novel, the equally lengthy titled Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict, deals with Courtney Stone's sudden arrival in Regency England, plopped down there in Jane Mansfield's life.) Jane is understandably confused and essentially spends the novel trying to figure out what has happened - and how to work all the newfangled devices that 21st-century L.A. provides. Jane soon learns that Courtney's life is a mess - Courtney-now-Jane hates her job, is swimming in debt, has just broken off an engagement with a suave but seedy guy, and fears that her best guy friend has betrayed her trust.

The book was funny and charming but I never felt like Jane learned anything of significance. All of the major actions she took were decisions of chance - because when she made the decisions, mostly at the very beginning of the book, she didn't know what she was doing or what it meant. She's ostensibly supposed to learn something about both herself and Courtney and then make better decisions for the both of them - or so says the magic fortune teller - but I frankly couldn't see what she had learned or how she applied it.

#4: The Swan Thieves, Elizabeth Kostova

Oh, The Swan Thieves, how I wanted to love you after the strange joy that was The Historian. But I just couldn't. More than anything, I thought the book was boring. It's not badly written but it just didn't have the oomph to carry this reader along. I had to force myself to read more than five pages at a time - especially when the library wanted its book back. Stop here if you don't want to know what happens!

The Swan Thieves combines two stories in two different eras, much like the wonderfully fantastic Possession. In the present day, artist Robert Oliver attempts to stab the (fictional) painting Leda at the National Gallery and after he's subdued, he's committed to an institution - where his psychiatrist, Andrew Marlow, spends the book trying to puzzle out his motives. About a hundred years before that, fledgling artist Beatrice de Clerval begins a love affair with her husband's older uncle. As the story moves on, we find out that Robert is obsessed with the mysterious Beatrice, dead long before his birth, and Marlow himself becomes obsessed with figuring out why.

I think the main problem with The Swan Thieves was that none of the modern-day characters were terribly likeable. Robert is portrayed as both a narcissist and a genius, and I think that we're supposed to root for his recovery so he can go on being a genius, but he was so self-absorbed - and treated all his loved ones like crap - that I really didn't care what happened to him. I found everyone else to be kind of pathetic - Robert's loves, Kate and Mary, were so damaged by him and Marlow was so overeager that it seemed perhaps he needed a little professional help himself. I found Beatrice's conundrum and narration to be a lot more interesting but unfortunately, she just wasn't in the book as much.

I also didn't care much for the ending, mostly because Robert's story wasn't actually resolved. I feel like Kostova focused so much on Beatrice's ending - which was well-written and poignant - that she forgot that Robert's illness had to actually be resolved, instead of just dismissed. Marlow's solving of the mystery shouldn't make the mute Robert better, but that's essentially what happens - Marlow figures out why he was trying to stab a painting and poof, Robert's better. But the problem is, Marlow never actually addresses what sort of disturbance has made Robert resort to such an action - we may all think the fictional Gilbert Thomas is a cheat but I daresay most of us wouldn't try to stab a portrait of him, if given the chance. And this is the mania in Robert that's never solved...and yet somehow, he's fixed. Ah, the wonders of fiction.

Well, I'm on to the next book, the lighthearted Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict.

#3: Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel

I really don't understand how Wolf Hall won this year's Booker Prize because the novel is awful. Although I finished the book weeks ago, I put off blogging about it - I just wanted to forget about it, Wolf Hall was that bad. (It amazes me that most professional reviewers and about half the Amazon reviewers thought it was brilliant...why?)

My biggest issue with the book was the vague use of pronouns. There are nearly 100 characters listed at the front and most of them are men. When they show up on the page, they're often identified simply as "he." In conversations, "he" is talking and it's up to the reader to puzzle out the speaker's identity (which is frankly too much work). In addition, Mantel often doesn't start new paragraphs when the action/speech switches to another character, so it became very difficult to figure out who was doing what. Good writing embraces and loves language and I don't understand how a book that misuses its main tool won a major prize. *Head. Thunk.*

So, as mentioned above, there are 96 characters listed at the front of the book - and most of them have, like, three names (family name, landowning title, professional title, etc) - so the book abounds with people. And, frankly, it seemed like there was very little to distinguish them. Aside from Cromwell and his mentor, Cardinal Wolsey, the characters just flitted in and out of the pages in a one-dimensional funk. The only people I found to be at all interesting besides the aforementioned were Jane Seymour, of all people, and Mary Boleyn - and sadly, they didn't appear much in the novel.

Lastly, I didn't quite understand the arc of the story, which interestingly is the same criticism I had about another (quasi-) Tudor novel, The White Queen. I know Cromwell's story and yet I still had no idea where Wolf Hall was going. And in the end, I would argue, it didn't really go anywhere. The novel ends with the death of Thomas More, which I didn't at all understand. He and Cromwell weren't really enemies, just men with different viewpoints, so it's not like there was a big power struggle or showdown, at least in the novel. My only guess is that Mantel ends the story at this random point to preserve something for the rumored sequel? I guess I just think that a story about a man's rise naturally moves to said man's fall - and yet, Wolf Hall ends years before that. Heck, it even ends before Anne Boleyn's downfall. It just ends, so randomly.

So yeah, Wolf Hall - to get through it, I basically just gave up on it. I stopped caring whether or not I understood who was speaking or what they were talking about and just kept turning the pages. Which is kind of pathetic, really.

An Aside: The Lacuna in photos

And now for a pictoral trip through Barbara Kingsolver's new novel, The Lacuna. One of the reasons I'd picked the book up is because I'd had such a great time in Mexico City - it's really an amazing town and undeserving of its negative reputation!

We saw this cleansing ceremony taking place on a Sunday morning behind the Cathedral. At the beginning of the book, Harrison's mother drags him along with her as she visits a shaman in the jungle and Kingsolver's description reminded me of the one we'd seen:

The next photo shows the entry to the Casa Azul (no photos allowed inside the house). This was the house that Frida Kahlo grew up in and one of the houses that she and Diego lived in. We never made it to the house in San Angel or Anahuacalli, the weird Aztec temple-house that Harrison mentions in The Lacuna. We were in Mexico City just after Dia de los Muertos and there was a large table set up outside with mementos to Frida and Diego, like this one:

We also went to Leon Trotsky's house, which is only a few blocks from the Casa Azul. The house has such a cloud of sadness hanging over it...I really do think Trotsky has the most tragic story of the 20th century. The first photo is of Trotsky's study where he was murdered by ice pick in 1940. The second photo is of Trotsky's office, where someone like Harrison Shepherd would have worked:

We tried to go see the Rivera murals at the Palacio Nacional but for whatever reason, it was closed that day. So instead, we later went to the Palacio de Bellas Artes and saw some of the other Rivera murals, including Man at the Crossroads, mentioned in The Lacuna. This is the mural that Rivera recreated in 1934 after the Rockefellers tore down the commissioned original in New York City because they didn't like its themes. In the first photo, you can see Lenin between the wings on the right. In the second photo, the man with the white hair is Trotsky.

And then last but not least, a photo of Teotihuacan. In the background you can see the Temple of the Sun. In the book, Frida takes Harrison here to visit her archaeologist friend. During his picnic lunch on the riverbank with Frida, Harrison finds an Aztec figurine of a man.

#2: The Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver

This was my first Barbara Kingsolver book and I liked The Lacuna well enough, but didn't love it. Still, I'm interested in reading more of her work because she conjures some amazing images with her prose - it's just that in this one, I didn't find the protagonist captivating enough.

The Lacuna centers around Harrison Shepherd, a gay writer who grows up with dual identities as a Mexican and an American. The book begins in his childhood, when his vain mother uproots him to follow her lover to Isla Pixol, Mexico. Harrison feels isolated on the tiny island but soon discovers the joys of snorkeling - and an opening in the coral, the titular lacuna, that leads to an archaeological ruin in a cenote. After a brief stint at a military boarding school in the States, he returns to Mexico and reconnects with artist Diego Rivera, whom he'd formerly mixed plaster for. In the most interesting part of the book, Harrison's fictional life becomes entwined with the real lives around him, those of Rivera, his wife Frida Kahlo, and their friend Leon Trotsky. But after things go horribly wrong, Harrison returns to the United States and settles in Asheville, North Carolina, where he becomes a famous writer...until McCarthy enters history. Harrison struggles with this until the end of the novel, when Kingsolver returns to the beginnings of the book with a poignant weaving together of the original pieces. The ending was incredible, although the images were perhaps a little overexplained (for readers who wouldn't get it?).

The book is 400-plus pages so it has a number of themes running through it, but I'd say it's primarily about the search for home and identity...and yet, Harrison Shepherd never finds his. He's a shadow figure when he's supposed to be the star of his own life; he never really comes to term with being gay, being an artist, or even being an American and/or a Mexican. Even though he becomes successful in his own right, it's like he never grows out of the feeling that he's just a servant or assistant. Harrison is completely defined by the people around him - and so is the book. Thus, The Lacuna is interesting when the people around him are interesting - his mother and her affairs, Leon Trotsky (who has perhaps the 20th-century's saddest story). But then when his companions, like Violet Brown, are meek or situations, like with Bulls-Eye, are implied, the book's momentum really slowed.

But still, it's a worthy read. Most interesting, I thought, were the parallels Kingsolver drew (intentionally, I think) between McCarthy's Communist witchhunts in the 1950s and the political landscape of today. Harrison Shepherd is ostracized because it's deemed that he's not American enough and those scenes really reminded me of the "un-American" rhetoric used in the last election by the Republic party, and specifically Sarah Palin.

As I mentioned up top, I found Kingsolver to be an incredible writer. I only wish someday I can conjure up half the wondrous images she does. Perhaps my favorite passage, from page 18:

“The hacienda had heavy doors and thick walls that stayed cool all day, and windows that let in the sound of the sea all night: hush, hush, like a heartbeat. He would grow thin as bones here, and when the books were all finished, he would starve. But no, now he would not. The notebook from the tobacco stand was the beginning of hope: a prisoner’s plan for escape. Its empty pages would be the book of everything, miraculous and unending like the sea at night, a heartbeat that never stops.”

Last but not least, I went to Mexico City in 2008 and visited a good number of the places mentioned in the book. Click here for the next post, featuring a small gallery of photos .

#1: Three Cups of Tea, Mortenson and Relin

On the bright side, I'm pleased to announce - after 2009's dismal list - that I've already finished a book this year! (Yes, I realize this is nothing much to brag about, but I'm just coming off the heels of blogging about my failures.) But, on the shadier side of the street, I'm sad to say that I didn't love Three Cups of Tea. I liked the idea of it but I just didn't think the book lived up to its promise or intentions - much like the similarly themed A Mighty Heart.

For those who have escaped its all-encompassing hold on the bestseller list (I had to go to a second bookstore to buy it before Christmas; the first was totally sold out), Three Cups of Tea is the story of mountaineer Greg Mortenson. After a failed effort to climb K2, he stumbles off the mountain, loses his way, and ends up in a random Pakistani village called Korphe. The people there take him in and get him back on his feet and Mortenson decides he wants to do something for them, to repay their kindness. So he builds them a bridge and a school and the effort sets him on a new life path, building schools for other impoverished villages throughout the country.

I think the book could have ended there and it would have been wonderful...it's really interesting how Mortenson navigated his personal demons, virtual bankruptcy, and Pakistan's unique ins-and-outs to successfully build a bunch of schools and make a difference. But Three Cups of Tea just sort of went on and on. After the first couple of schools, it was the same story over and over again, but without the drama, since he'd pretty much already conquered it.

But more than anything, by the end of the book, I felt like I was reading a public-relations manifesto...and I started to distrust it. The format of the book is incredibly strange - is it an autobiography? a biography? a really long magazine profile? On the surface, Three Cups of Tea is presented as an autobiography, written by Mortenson with help from journalist David Oliver Relin. But it's not, not really, because it's not written in the first person, with Mortenson's voice -- rather, it's written like a magazine article, in third person with scene-setting and interviews and quotes. Which is an interesting way to go, and I quite liked the format, until I started to realize that Three Cups of Tea lacks one basic tenet of journalism: objectivity.

Mortenson is presented almost as a god -- and granted, he seems like a genuinely good person -- but in the last 100 pages or so, Relin starts using these ridiculously fawning quotes, which struck me as overkill. Mortenson's actions stand for themselves, and it seemed a little over-the-top to have people like Mary Bono and Parade's editor-in-chief falling all over themselves to call him a "real American hero." Added to that, I think the book glossed over the difficult parts - at one point, some of the board members leave Mortenson's Central Asia Institute because they don't agree with his management style, and the whole thing only gets two paragraphs. I felt like everyone was afraid to let Mortenson be real on the page. Which just seems weird -- can't he still be a good person and still have some flaws?

Anyway...I'm onto book #2 now, The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver. So far, so good...

2010 Books

So here we are, in 2010 with a clean slate. I can do better this year, seriously. Last year, I made a list of the books I'd like to tackle, but in the end, my reading choices mostly took me to other places. Still, I'd like to start 2010 with a few ideas...

So at the top of my list this year, we have: Wolf Hall, Waiter Rant, The Children's Book, Cast Member Confidential (about working at Disney), Shakespeare's Henry VIII, The Constant Gardener, The Subtle Knife (because there seems to be no movie forthcoming), Persuasion, Outliers, Ovid's Metamorphosis, Villette, The Lacuna, and Three Cups of Tea (which, success, I've already finished). That's nowhere near 30 books, but still a good list to start with.

On another note, I'm starting to see that there are a good number of people who read far more books a year than I do. Stephen King, in his Entertainment Weekly column, said that he read 100 BOOKS last year. How is that possible? Does the man do anything but read and write? All I can say is: wow. Oh, and we both really admire Revolutionary Road.

Then, yesterday, on Goodreads, I came across a little blurb for book challenges. I always thought 30 books a year was impressive, but silly me. One group plans to read 144 BOOKS this year. That's 12 a month. Wow. I glanced through a couple of profiles and some people have opted to go the romance/mystery route - and I suppose I could also handle 144 if I stuck to quick reads like Sue Grafton and Robert B. Parker (whom I love, don't get me wrong). But one entrant has already read Wolf Hall, in addition to four other books. Again, wow. Another Goodreads group plans to go for just a measly 50. Slackers. :)

2009 Tally - It's an F+

I'm embarrassed for two reasons: I only read 23 books in 2009 (the lowest tally since 2005's 22 books) and it's taken me 13 days of the new year to get around to blogging about it. Pathetic!

I have no idea what happened and no excuses to offer. Alas. Better luck next year?