#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.