Malled: could've, should've been a lot better (#36)

When I went home over Thanksgiving, I checked out Caitlin Kelly's Malled from the library, even though it wasn't on my revised 2011 reading list. For some reason I'd really wanted to read this book - it was about a freelance journalist who ends up working at a mall when the global financial meltdown slows her business to a trickle, something I can relate to - but I didn't want to buy the e-book, mostly because the reviews on Amazon weren't kind. This might actually be the first time I've ever seen a book have more one-star reviews than five-star reviews. I probably should have listened.

Malled had so much potential (and apparently a lot of hype to go with it) but the result wasn't great – mostly because the author made a massive mistake in focusing the book on herself when it was supposed to be about the plight of the American retail worker or even the experience of working in a store. The more I think about it, the more I realize this book is a complete mess. It’s repetitive, contradictory, filled with ego and doesn’t seem to know what kind of book it is.

The author is clearly looking for validation, but interestingly, she only sees one level of it. In the book, Kelly talks about wanting to work in the mall, hoping that after her freelancing disappointments, she'll find people who appreciate her skills. This is an obviously stated purpose. (Though it doesn't happen, which seems to be her main gripe about retail.) But as you read, you also see that Kelly herself is looking for validation by writing this book, and she doesn't seem to be aware of it. She appears to be a woman with a massive chip on her shoulder, who thinks the world is against her - she often talks about her rich upbringing, the famous people she's interviewed (Queen Elizabeth, omg!), and her journalistic skills...but then there are also these moments when she tells about getting fired from her last job (for not being productive), that her former coworkers weren't interested in socializing with her, that people often find her cold and standoffish, or that she feels unappreciated (and then slighted) when she should be totally appreciated. It was hard to reconcile and as a result, I thought she was hard to like as a narrator. In this respect, in the disconnect between what someone says and what they seem to do, I thought this book resembled Marina Pasternak's The Best of Friends, the tell-all book about her longtime friendship with Martha Stewart.

Usually by this point in a review, I've already talked about the plot. But Malled really has no plot; I don't know what to say about it other than it's the tale of a 50-year-old woman outside of New York City who decides to go work at the North Face in an upscale mall. It's not one of those true-life experiential career books like Waiter Rant or Kitchen Confidential where you walk away with a good idea of what it's like to work in that profession - despite the subtitle "My Unintentional Career in Retail." I don't know anything more about the day-to-day work involved in retail after reading Malled. (And perhaps Kelly doesn't either, not really - she only worked one shift a week for a little over two years.) The book jacket (and the author's obnoxious Amazon biography, which I would bet good money she herself wrote) suggests Malled is going to be a little more hard-hitting, exposing the inner workings of the retail industry, but frankly, it's not that either. And that's because she relies on a lot of anecdotes, from maybe 30 fellow workers, to prove her "facts," but as a journalist, she should already know that anecdotes do not prove anything. With the millions of retail workers out there in America alone, you could pretty much find anyone to say anything. A lot of the anecdotes are sort of stupid, too – boiled down, it’s “retail is hard,” “the economy made professionals go into retail and they’re sad about it,” and “working for the right company can be great.” I've never worked in retail, and I think I already knew that.

I could keep going, detailing the many contradictions in this book, but I think I've trashed this book enough. It was most disappointing because it could have been and should have been better.

Divergent: Am I the only person who didn't like this book? (#35)

Spoilers, discussing the ENTIRE plot...

Veronica Roth's Divergent is supposed to be the next YA lit sensation - Summit Entertainment has already snapped the film rights up and it has 332 five-star Amazon reviews - but I thought it fell flat. I'm actually surprised that it has such an ardent fan base because I think has a couple of major flaws, including a lack of tension, a premise that doesn't hold up under scrutiny, and an inconsistent protagonist. It got to the point where I couldn't wait for the book to end, never a good sign.

The Divergent world is limited to a futuristic Chicago where society has broken itself up into five factions based on the members' personalities: There's Dauntless (courageous), Candor (honest), Amity (friendly), Erudite (learned), and Abnegation (selfless), which is the faction protagonist Beatrice Prior comes from. People without factions are homeless and live in the no-man's land between the faction areas. When children turn 16, they must take an aptitude test which tells them which faction they're meant for, and then at a ceremony, they can choose whichever faction they want to belong to. If they leave their own faction, they lose their family. When Beatrice takes her test, she gets a mixed result - she could be good in Dauntless, Abnegation, or Erudite - which makes her, egads, Divergent. It's so bad that her tester deletes her results and makes Beatrice swear she'll never tell anyone what happened.

When the choosing ceremony comes, Beatrice decides to betray her family and choose Dauntless. But it wasn't all that surprising and I think this was the first mistake in the book - Roth spends very little time describing Beatrice's life in Abnegation or her parents, so there's no attachment for the reader (which is absolutely essential at the end of the book). So when she chooses another faction, it's like who cares? All we really knew about Abnegation was that it was a place where you could only look in the mirror once every 90 days and children weren't to speak at the dinner table - and who wants to live like that? Beatrice's decision seems pretty easy, which leads to Divergent's second flaw...

Despite the interesting premise, the book lacked tension - and this was an utter failure in the set-up. In most books, the protagonist struggles against a force greater than themselves, and they are often shoved into this struggle without a choice. This always happens at the beginning, creating tension and epic, life-or-death struggle that sucks the reader in. In Harry Potter, Harry starts out ignorant but quickly finds out that he's survived an attack by the wizarding world's most powerful dark lord; in the Hunger Games, Katniss immediately sacrifices herself for her sister and must figure out how fight to the death to survive a regime that sacrifices teenagers; in Persuasion, Anne struggles from the get-go against society's preconceived notion that she's too old for love; even Twilight has it, presenting this idea of true-love-at-first-sight potentially doomed by unavoidable natural tendencies (i.e. wanting to suck your lover's blood). But Divergent completely lacks this kind of set-up as the conflict is introduced WAY too late in the novel; as a result, the novel meanders in terms of plot. Starting out the novel, it's unknown why the world came to this (or even whether the world is more than Chicago now) and there's no desire for renewal or return, so no conflict there. There's no real conflict with the apititude test; regardless of the results, teenagers can choose whichever faction they want, so no one's being forced into anything. Beatrice freely chooses Dauntless and even though initiation is tough and she has to get into the top 10, she never really regrets her choice. We don't know why being Divergent is bad until p. 154, that it's life or death, and despite a bit of displayed prejudice against Abnegation, we don't know that there's actually something happening against them until about page 200. This is out of 295 pages (on my Nook anyway).

Beatrice always gets to choose - and everything that happens to her in the first 240 pages or so emerges from her choices. There's no huge struggle - for the most part, until the factions start trying to kill each other at the end, it's a really simple story about a girl trying to fit in to a new environment. Most of Divergent could easily have been set in a high school, as new girl gets teased, struggles to make friends, and flirts with resident mysterious bad boy. That's a fine set-up for a story but it's not EPIC - but the creation of this dystopian world is promising epic. In the end, it's nice scenery that doesn't amount to much. Despite the tagline, Beatrice doesn't even change all that much, not really, internally.

That nice scenery barely holds up to scrutiny, too. I can suspend disbelief and accept the premise that people have mentally simplified enough (my assumption) so that easily fit into one of five categories and don't possess any of the other qualities. The problem is that Roth doesn't stick to this. All of Beatrice's initial friends in Dauntless are transfers from other factions and because they have grown up in other factions, they do indeed possess the quality of their original faction. It's mentioned several times that Dauntless characters are annoyed with or Beatrice is surprised by the Candor-transfers' honesty/sarcasm. So clearly people DO possess multiple qualities...which destroys the premise and the finale conflict, as it's hard to believe that only Divergents are immune from mind-control. (The mind-control thing really stretched credibility, omg.)

I could go on - discussing, for example, the unlikelihood that the virus controlling every mindless Dauntless solider is stored on only one computer, making it easily destroyed - but I won't. I'll just stop and forget I ever read this book.

Jane Austen's Persuasion: Hilariously antiquated, odd ending (#34)

Be forewarned: I'm going to discuss the entire plot. Having said that, I don't think it's giving anything away - Persuasion is a classic romance, which means there's very little in the way of surprise. People fall in love, hooray! But not all that shocking.

I've only read two other Jane Austen novels - Northanger Abbey and of course Pride and Prejudice - and while I enjoyed both, I can't say that I subscribe to that particular Austen frenzy which has launched countless movies, tribute books, etc. But I've wanted to read Persuasion ever since I saw the movie The Jane Austen Book Club (based on a book; see what I mean?). They never really get around to discussing Persuasion because of an unexpected death but at one point, one of the older characters says, to paraphrase, that it's her favorite Austen book because the older heroine gets a second shot at love with a former flame. And I really liked that idea, that of an emotionally healing once all seemed lost.

And then I actually read Persuasion and found out that that "older" heroine is in fact only 27. And because Anne Elliot is so very, very ancient and was "persuaded" not to marry Captain Wentworth when she had the chance (because at the time he lacked prospect), she is of course doomed to be a spinster. "No: the years which had destroyed her youth and bloom had only given him a more glowing, manly, open look..." (40). Again, SHE'S 27! From the perspective of 2011 and with sentences like this, it was a little hard to take Persuasion seriously.

So this tragic spinsterhood is where the novel starts. Anne is the second of three sisters and the daughter of a self-absorbed widowed spendthrift; according to the good family friend Lady Russell, she is the best of the lot. Her older (and gasp! still single) sister Elizabeth is too similar to their father while younger sister Mary, though married, is too flighty. Anne on the other hand is serious, thoughtful, and grounded. Because the family is living beyond its means, they're persuaded to rent out the manor and move to the English city of Bath. Their new tenants end up being Admiral Croft and his wife, and Mrs. Croft, by chance, is the sister of Captain Wentworth. This, in addition to a number of other coincidences, is how Wentworth and Anne end up in each other's lives again.

I generally found Persuasion to be a little underdeveloped; perhaps it's not fair to compare it to Pride and Prejudice, but I thought it lacked the latter's zing and wit. (Having said that, it was published after Austen's death, so perhaps she hadn't truly finished it.) The main reason is that Anne and Captain Wentworth, the players in the novel's major love story, spend very little time together on the page. Before the novel opens, they've loved and lost one another; it's briefly mentioned that he was a "remarkably fine young man, with a great deal of intelligence, spirit, and brilliancy" and she was an "extremely pretty girl, with gentleness, modesty, taste, and feeling" (16) and those qualities, combined with a boredom arising from country life, created love. We know that Anne still loves him and regrets being "persuaded" away from him, but we never really see why on the page. We never see the love or the kind of passion necessary to make their feelings last eight years, and it's weird.

Later, when life throws them together again, they still spend very little time interacting together, despite being together all the time. People love Pride and Prejudice because of the way Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy push and pull against each other, but Anne in Persuasion spends much more time in her head, regretting past decisions and convincing herself that Wentworth's feelings are long gone. There's very little spark on the page so it's hard to see why they love each other; you're just supposed to accept that they do because they say so.

The ending cracked me up, just because it was so totally random. While we know a number of characters are sailors - including Wentworth - it's sort of a minor detail. But then Austen ends on a total tangent; she says that Anne enjoys being a sailor's wife and then concludes that sailors' manners at home might be more valuable than their national defensive importance. I was like, what? So random. I mean, I know she's been making a social commentary throughout the novel, showing the sailors all as hard-working, upstanding, self-made citizens whose demeanor is in contrast to the remaining male characters, all self-important, lazy inheritors of fortune. But Persuasion is ultimately and mainly about the reuniting of Anne and Wentworth; theme is secondary (I hope).

Overall, I enjoyed Persuasion and once I got used to the language, found it to be a quick read. It could have been stronger but I still found it entertaining. Still, if you're new to Austen, I'd probably read Pride and Prejudice first - it's a classic for a reason.

Let's take the Entertainment Weekly book quiz

I subscribe to Entertainment Weekly's Shelf Life blog on Google Reader and I noticed earlier today that they seem to have started an occasional feature called the EW Book Quiz. A book quiz - what fun! From what I could tell, they've only done three installments, with Jackie Collins, then Mindy Kaling, and most recently Gregory Maguire. The questions have been similar but not always the exact same.

I love quizzes like this - Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire springs to mind - and I thought we could play along. Leave your answers in the comments!

EW Book Quiz (with questions compiled from the three interviews):


1. What was your favorite book as a child? This is a really hard one because I had so many favorite books as a kid. But I'll have to go with a couple of Madeleine L'Engle books. I absolutely loved the Wrinkle in Time series which was full of vocabulary words I didn't know and made me feel smarter (kid-level astrophysics, yo!) and A Ring of Endless Light which convinced me that I could communicate with dolphins if I tried hard enough (and I tried once at Sea World in Orlando and felt like I was just inches of brain power away from success). My current favorite book for children is the awesome Pirate Soup.

2. What’s a book you come back to over and over? I don't usually read books more than once but I've read The Great Gatsby, Sleeping Tiger, and Eat, Pray, Love twice each because they give me the warm and fuzzies. I'm also pretty passionate about Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist and even more, The Pilgrimage, and read them when I feel the need for some serious spiritual guidance and a jumpstarting of faith that everything will be alright.

3. Is there a book you’ve never read that, for whatever reason, you’ve pretended to have read? This hasn't happened since college when I was enrolled in a Russian lit class. We were reading Anna Karenina or War and Peace (can't even remember which) and my roommate stole my copy off my shelf and gave it to her best friend. When I went looking for it, she confessed but was pretty mean about it, saying that I wasn't using it so it was hers for the taking. So I had to pretend I was going to read it so that thieving bitch would give me my property back. Still haven't read either of them though War and Peace is on my revised list for the remainder of this year.

4. What’s a classic or much-hyped book that you’ve never quite understood the merits of? The Scarlet Letter, The Crucible, and The Stranger. Omg how I hate those books. Even worse, because I changed high schools, I had to read The Scarlet Letter twice and The Stranger three times, absolute torture. As for modern-day books, pretty much any Oprah selection fits the bill.

5. What is a book you would kill a bug with? Seems like Atlas Shrugged would be big enough to kill a mouse even.

6. What’s a favorite book that you’ve read for school? It's not a favorite per se but Julio Cortazar's freaky short story "Axolotl" has stayed with me since I read it in a college Spanish class. It's about a man who has a special moment with a salamander. I also gained a newfound appreciation for the merits of Dracula in a feminist Gothic lit class.

7. Which fictional character do you most identify with? I really have no answer for this; I don't usually connect with characteers this way. I like them often but I never feel like they're me - except maybe for Vicky Austen, the dolphin-loving heroine mentioned above.

Now it's your turn!

The Paris Wife: Another passive protagonist (#33)

I finished Paula McLain's The Paris Wife about three weeks ago but it was kind of a miracle as I was seriously tempted to put it down around page 120. And it makes me sad - I'm fairly passionate about Hemingway (I love the books that I love and absolutely detest the ones I detest = passion, no?) and I really wanted to love this book. But guess what? The protagonist is yet another f*ing wallflower! Pray tell, what is the sudden fascination with this kind of ho-hum character?

The protagonist is 28-year-old Hadley Richardson, a passive female well on her way to spinsterhood who ends up - miracle upon miracle! - catching the eye of  a young, charming Ernest Hemingway in Chicago. Even though he's only 20, he already seems to be pretty passionate - he has wild dreams of writerly success, unexpected and dramatic fallings-out with friends, and a bevy of female admirers - and even though a friend warns Hadley against the union, she marries him anyway. He soon sprits her off to Europe and she goes along for the ride - both literally and figuratively. As portrayed in The Paris Wife, Hadley has zero personality and zero ambitions for herself. I get that she's supposed to be the steady rock which allows him to climb to greatness during their six-year union but omg, if she doesn't make for fiction's most incredibly boring martyr.

This book has gotten a ton of buzz which I find a little surprising - especially because the reviews aren't unanimous in their praise. While The Paris Wife does currently have 162 five-star reviews on Amazon, it also has 70 reviews of varying stars that thrash it (plus another 78 four-star reviews which are decidedly mixed). The New York Times essentially made fun of it, calling Hadley a "stodgy bore" and calls McLain's use of research "confounding."

The Paris Wife was boring, and in my opinion, it had a lot to do with the author's style choices. Yes, Hadley herself was boring. But McLain amplified that in trying, I strongly suspect, to write like Hemingway in "short, declarative sentences." The biggest issue in the novel was that reactions were never described, making it really difficult to emotionally connect with any of the characters or the situations. For example, there are multiple instances when Ernest and Hadley find themselves at a bar in Europe with lively friends and acquaintances, a situation which always seemed to include a few lovely ladies. And invariably, Ernest would end up in close conversation with one of them, but nobody's facial expressions or tones of voice or reactions would be described. Isn't body language supposed to make up like 90 percent of communication? It made for a really hollow book - you never knew if Ernest was innocently flirting, having a serious conversation, or making a move; you never knew if Hadley felt betrayed or naively didn't notice. This happened throughout the novel, this lack of emotional explanation, and and as a result, it was really hard to become attached to either of them or what they would struggle with as their relationship changed.

State of Wonder: Oh, to be in the Amazon...

I finished Ann Patchett's State of Wonder at the beginning of October and while I was a little disappointed by the inconclusive ending, I thoroughly enjoyed the journey and would absolutely recommend this novel. I've never read anything by her before though I know people loved Bel Canto so it's yet another book I may have to add to my 2012 reading list. (The year hasn't started yet and already my book list is way, way too long...)

In order to talk about the ending, I'll have to thoroughly talk about the plot so don't read any further if you don't want to know what happens. In fact, if you're planning on reading the book, you should probably stop now - the discovery of what's happened and why is an important element of the book's emotional journey and I think it would lessen the book's "wonder" to know what will happen.

So, with that out of the way...State of Wonder is the story of Marina Singh, a failed OBGYN with daddy issues who now works as a laboratory researcher for a large pharmaceutical firm. She has a good working relationship with her lab partner, family man Anders Eckman, and is having an affair with the head of the company, Mr. Fox (who she always calls Mr. Fox up until the last third of the book, even though she hopes he's already kinda-sorta proposed). Like some other protagonists we've discussed in recent posts, Marina is pretty darn passive about her life at the outset of the novel. She’s a researcher at Vogel because of an accident in medical school (where she felt like she didn’t live up to her teacher’s expectations), her father abandoned her as a child and left her with nightmares, and of course she refers to her secret lover "mister." Marina is a waiter, someone waiting for something to happen in her life, and until then she's just going to plod along.

So we learn all this about Marina as Anders get sent to the Amazon to check up on an expensive but mysterious project that Vogel is funding. It turns out that Marina's former teacher, Dr. Annick Swenson, believes she has found a way to stop menopause, naturally extending a woman's fertility, but she's kind of a strongwilled rebel who demands total secrecy and no limitations on her research. When a letter arrives saying that Anders has unexpectedly died, Marina gets sent to Brazil – ostensibly to pick up where he left off but really to find out what happened to him for his wife and kids. In some ways, this is where the novel starts, but she doesn't find Dr. Swenson in Manaus until page 97 (on my Nook, anyway) - it was quite a delay but it was interesting and I felt like I was on the journey with Marina.

At this point, Annick takes Marina into the jungle to the research station, set among the Lakashi tribe, who it turns out is eating forest bark. She gradually becomes a part of the research group and eventually becomes Dr. Swenson's heir apparent. She's admitted to the circle of trust only to discover that altogether different things are going on - for Dr. Swenson, very little besides science matters and anything that gets in the way of that is worth covering up. As a result, Marina is faced with some difficult moral choices.


But there is where my disappointment set in. There are some really interesting questions posed - and a lot of time spent building up to them - but aside from deliberately rescuing Anders (and the trade-off that takes, plus the odd decision later that night), I didn't think it was clear what Marina would choose to do. It seems like she'd changed...but how? Would Marina return to Brazil to continue Dr. Swenson's work or rat her out? What would she do about Mr. Fox...and did she even love him anyway? I don't think there was even enough to make an educated guess, making it such a strange, unresolved book that needed much more at the end.

Many, many people have compared State of Wonder to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which obviously makes sense, but in the book, when Marina is at the glorious opera house in Manaus, she compares herself to Orpheus and Anders to Eurydice. And it's probably a more apt description - while Marina is going on her own internal journey to face her demons, she is primarily going to rescue Anders from death (by ostensibly finding out what happened to him) and only encounters her own demons along the way.

Personally, I thought the Amazon sounded amazing, deadly creatures and all, and have now resolved to move it higher on my travel wish list. Apparently Ann Patchett didn't feel the same - in an Amazon.com interview between her and Elizabeth Gilbert, she says that she kinda hated the Amazon when she went there to do research. "I absolutely loved the Amazon for four days. It was gorgeous and unfamiliar and deeply fascinating. Unfortunately, I stayed there for ten days. There are a lot of insects in the Amazon, a lot of mud, surprisingly few vegetables, too many snakes... I can see how great it would be for a very short visit, and how great it would be if you lived there and had figured out what was and wasn’t going to kill you, but the interim length of time isn’t great." I don't know why this cracks me up but it does - I guess I'm tickled she wrote an entire novel about the Amazon while hating the Amazon.

Painted Ladies: Alas, not Robert B. Parker's best (#31)

I've always enjoyed dipping into Robert B. Parker's crime novels - it's not usually my genre but I enjoy his humor, and over the years I've let the books find me. (Although I haven't read one since 2006; apparently the path can be long and twisty.) I noticed this one of the library's website and checked it out on a whim, intrigued by the premise - yet again - of an art mystery. It was kind of amazing how much this one mirrored Daniel Silva's The Rembrandt Affair, which I had read only two months before.

But I wasn't a big fan of Painted Ladies unfortunately - which seems disrespectful, considering that he died in January 2010 before this novel was published. (His last book, however, appears to be Sixkill.) Publishers Weekly called it "lackluster," which is an apt description. Painted Ladies was missing both Parker's usual zing and a complex and/or thrilling plot.

The plot centers around the death of art historian and professor Ashton Prince who Spenser agrees to protect during the recovery of a fictitious Dutch painting called "Lady with a Finch." But things go awry and Prince dies and the painting gets incinerated - which Spenser won't tolerate under his watch. So Spenser decides to figure it out, making it his own personal mission. And like the painting in The Rembrandt Affair, "Lady with a Finch" turns out to have a sordid history, having also been confiscated from a wealthy Dutch family during the Holocaust. (Even the families have similar names: Herzberg here and Herzfeld there.) In the present day, Spenser tries to charm - both successfully and unsuccessfully - a mother, daughter, and a mysterious art foundation.

But it never felt suspenseful; the links were just too easy. There was also one major inconsistency, which I was really surprised that the editor or copyeditor didn't catch: On p. 177, Winifred goes from being a certain someone's ex-girlfriend to being his ex-wife for the rest of the book. And while that seems minor, about 20 pages before, another character made a huge deal of the fact that they were never married, saying, "Fact is, for crissake, she was shacking up with some guy who had no intention of marrying her, and when she got knocked up, he left" (p. 152). It really stuck out to me.

So all in all, not my favorite of the four Robert B. Parker books that I've read. But as I was perusing the Amazon reviews (most people seemed to like Painted Ladies for sentimental reasons), I saw many mentions of his highly praised first novel The Godwulf Manuscript which I will add to my booklist for next year.

What is a book?

As I previously blogged about, I've already reached my goal of reading 30 books this year - or did I? I feel genuinely conflicted. If I count literally every book I finished, I'm currently on #34...but if I start getting picky, I'm only on #27.

The problem is those damn Sweet Valley High books that I read in June, that bubblegum for the brain. Should they count? That is the question. Obviously, they are actual books, as thin and shallow as they might be. But I feel guilty counting them, like I'm gaming the system - because if I just read books like that, I could probably read 300 books a year, at least. And in fairness, in other years, young-adult novels have pumped up my tally.

I also read Blake Snyder's awesome screenwriting book Save the Cat at the end of May (though I didn't blog about it - hence the missing #15). I counted that too - but should I? It was a real book but pretty focused on how-to. I also debated whether or not to count the Genesis and Exodus, which I read with my students - I decided not to include them individually but instead bundled them with Robert Alter's Genesis commentary, which I read every word of.

At the end of the day, this debate matters little as this list is only for me, myself and I. I don't begrudge others their 100 books a year and the junk lit it takes to get there - to each his own reading experience. But this has really made me think again about what I read and why I started keeping track in the first place. I guess to me, when I say I want to read 30 books, I mean I really want to read 30 pieces of literature. That's why I feel icky about the Sweet Valley High books and unsure about the Bible or Save the Cat. They're books (duh) but not the kind of books that I'm trying to motivate myself to read.

Author Laura Fraser tackled these same questions on her website; she said that writing down her books read has made her much more picky, as it brings home the truth that there are only so many books you can read in a lifetime. At the time when I read that (all of two weeks ago), I said that my list hasn't kept me from reading crap but I've been thinking about this quite a bit since then.

The truth is, I don't want to read Sweet Valley High and crappy chick-lit (though it can make for some fun posts!). So I've regrouped and really looked at what I'd like to read in the remaining weeks of the year. My original list had 18 books on it. After a good think, I narrowed it down to the following nine +, a goodly feat in itself: Persuasion, The Iliad, The War That Killed Achilles, Bossypants, Divergent, Brothers Karamazov or War and Peace, The Submission, A Farewell to Arms and the Game of Thrones series.

I also decided to split the difference on my book list and will consider the year a reading success at 35 books total. Which is pretty much a given at this point - huzzah! - since Persuasion is #34 and I'm about 30 pages from the end at the beginning of November.

This Charming Man: Otherwise known as book #30!

Yes, it's true...I have reached book 30 for the year. Huzzah! In fact, it happened at the end of August which should tell you something about my blogging efforts (though I've been getting better - have you noticed?).

I picked up This Charming Man, by Marian Keyes, when I was in Italy. Even though this particular edition was enormous, I still couldn't resist - her books are generally light and fluffy but loveable. I have been carrying around a soft spot for Angels for years. This Charming Man centers around popular Irish politican Paddy de Courcy and the four women who have been most affected by him. The novel starts with Lola, completely crushed as she learns that Paddy is getting married - because she's his girlfriend but not the fiancee. It then turns to Grace, a journalist, and Marnie, her alcoholic sister, who knew Paddy as teenagers. Lastly is Alicia, Paddy's surprise fiancee, who has an odd role as a wallflower (and as it turns out later, a backstabber). Each woman has her own section in the book as we see their life and Paddy's effect, either past or present on that, until they come together as a group near the end.

This book was a little darker than the other Keyes' books I've read. To the world, Paddy is a JFK-like figure but it turns out that he's conniving, selfish and abusive, and has done some serious psychic damage to these ladies. There's a really delicate balance that has to be made between chick-lit lightness and topical seriousness but overall, I thought she did it well, and I ended up giving the book to my mom to read.

People of the Book: Good but sorta passionless (#29)

Geraldine Brooks' People of the Book has a lot of promise: Rare book expert Hanna Heath travels Sarajevo in 1996 to inspect and stabilize the refound Sarajavo Haggadah, an illuminated Jewish codex that miraculously survives the ravages of time. The book actually exists and from what I remember of the plot, Brooks pretty closely follows the real Haggadah's history as is known but inserts fictional characters and develops plausible vignettes around them. I found People of the Book to be interesting, certainly, but I wasn't captivated by it - and what I most want from my books is to be swept up. Partially I think I just don't connect with Brooks' writing style as I had the same reaction to Year of Wonders, a novel about a plague that wrecks havoc on a small English town.

As the title implies, People of the Book is about the people whose (imagined) lives were touched by the Haggadah. Hanna is only the last of them and her story - along with her unresolved love issues, both with her domineering mother and a librarian she meets - bookends the novel. Which is fine and dandy - except that I found Hanna to be an incredibly frustrating character. She's good at her job but a wallflower in all other aspects of her life and yet again, I had a difficult time empathizing. She eventually gets it together and owns her identity but hot damn if it didn't take the entire book. (I know, I know, it's character arc but does she have to start out so passive?)

As Hanna does her inspection on the Haggadah, she finds tiny items in the book - a moth wing, a white hair, a wine stain - which then launch the vignettes, as we see how each of these items made its way there. The individual stories were interesting but also disconnecting  because Hanna herself never and cannot discover such historical detail - and I found it strange that the reader takes a journey that the protagonist has no clue about. As much as I disliked Hanna, it was still her story and I thought it an odd choice to effectively dump the protagonist in sections along the way. (I also thought it was weird that the stories went backwards in time - I get it intellectually but on paper it felt like a dismantling rather than a building up to something.) It was again emotionally separating and so while I liked the book, I never found that I cared all that much. You knew from the outset that this precious book was safe (or ostensibly anyway - there ends up being a last-minute mystery) so the connection has to be through Hanna...and for me, it just wasn't there.

Photos of the Haggadah's gorgeous illuminations, including the one I used at the top, can be found here: http://www.haggadah.ba/?x=2&y=1#. It now lives in Sarajevo's National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The Help: Surprising myself, I liked it (#28)

My mother had tried to pawn The Help off on me some time ago but I demurred - it seemed a little too Oprah-y for me and you know how I hate those Oprah selections. Or maybe it was the cover - what are those little birds doing there and what do they have to do with this novel? But then all the movie hype started and I for whatever reason, I decided to pick up this book - and then, surprise upon surprise, I actually liked it.

The Help is the story of the relationships between and among a group of white women and their black housekeepers in Jackson, Miss., in the 1960s. All of the white ladies are married and doing the society thing except for Skeeter, an aspiring writer who wants a different kind of life - and in searching for it, ends up convincing housekeepers Aibileen and Minny (and eventually others) to anonymously tell her their on-the-job anecdotes, both good and bad. Their project eventually becomes a book, riling many a temper in town, especially as people begin to suspect who is who. Overall, I thought it was a very sweet book - there's a lot of affection between the "good" characters which I thought was The Help's biggest strength.

There are a lot of people who love The Help, if 3,765 five-star Amazon reviews are anything to go by. But when the movie came out, for the first time I started hearing negative things about it as well. The main criticism seems to center on the fact that the protagonist is one of the white women and the book's subliminal suggestion that Aibileen and the other maids couldn't have accomplished anything without her. As Martha Southgate wrote in an Entertainment Weekly column, "Minny and Aibileen are heroines, but they didn't need Skeeter to guide them to the light. They fought their way out of the darkness on their own — and they brought the nation with them."

I can totally see Southgate's point though it doesn't dampen my enthusiam for the book. And that's because, from a literary standpoint, Skeeter is the protagonist. (You can argue that the protagonist should have been Aibileen but then maybe that's not Kathryn Stockett's book to write.) In this book, which is Stockett's fictionalized memoir-ish, Skeeter is the protagonist and the book doesn't work if the protagonist is not the hero. The Help is Skeeter's journey as she returns home from college and realizes she no longer fits in to her world, and thus has to find a new world for herself. The civil rights stuff, in the novel, is ultimately nothing but background and context for that journey.

But of course, the world is not one big English class and I'm not sure how much literary form matters here. If it was my personal history, I might be pretty pissed too. (Interestingly, a real woman named Ablene Cooper - who happens to be Stockett's brother's housekeeper - alledged that Stockett unlawfully used her name and likeness in the book, though the lawsuit was eventually thrown out because it exceeded the statute of limitations.) All in all, I think it's best to read The Help with the proverbial grain of salt: Enjoy it while keeping the criticism in mind.

Sisterhood Everlasting: Break Out the Kleenex (#27)

I was pleasantly surprised by Ann Brashares' Sisterhood Everlasting, the adult follow-up to her immensely popular series that started with the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. I assumed it would the shallowness of Sweet Valley Confidential but she really took this novel to a dark place which the publisher's write-up doesn't even begin to hint at. I'm not ashamed to say I spent most of this reading experience with a Kleenex wadded up in my hand.

The four Sisterhood books are about four girls - Lena, Carmen, Bridget, and Tibby - who have been best friends from birth. One summer in their teenage years, they discover a pair of jeans that fit them all, despite their wildly varying body types - and they decide these pants must be magic. (How could they not be, really?) But as they face their own individual challenges, like death, divorcing parents, and heartbreak, that summer and beyond, they start to drift apart - but they send the pants back and forth between them and it helps keep them linked together. In the last book, as in the second movie, the pants sink to somewhere at the bottom of the Aegean, alas, and they realize that they don't really need them, their friendship is stronger than a piece of fabric, etc.

Sisterhood Everlasting fast-forwards to about 10 years later, when the girls are in their 20s. At first, it's not all that surprising what they're doing: Carmen is a successful actress but due to her daddy issues is engaged to a self-absorbed jerk; Lena is an emotionally crippled art teacher in Rhode Island who's still afraid to take a risk on life; and Bridget is still a free spirit who, despite settling down with Eric in California, feels caged in such a domestic lifestyle. Only Tibby is the mystery - she moved to Australia with Brian but the girls have barely heard from her, effectively breaking their sisterhood. Then one day, Tibby sends them each a letter with a plane ticket to Greece, for a reunion similar to the one in book 4. But then the three girls arrive and Tibby isn't there...and that's all I say about the plot. Except get out the box of tissues. You'll definitely need the tissues.

The Rembrandt Affair: Like Shoving Politics Down Your Throat (#26)

In exciting news, this was my first e-book! Thank you kindly local library!

In less-exciting news, I wasn't terribly keen on Daniel Silva's The Rembrandt Affair and doubt that I will ever read another book by him again. Granted, thrillers aren't my usual genre but I picked this one up when I saw the plot hinged on a favorite subject of mine, looted art (and the controversies that often lie behind it). But in the end, I felt like this was just a poorly disguised politics masquerading as fiction - and if I wanted to read a one-sided view of the Middle East crisis, I would have picked up something that said it on the cover. Just say what it is, you know (ahem, Skinny Bitch)?

Apparently the hero of previous Silva thrillers, Gabriel Allon is a now-retired Israeli spy and assassin who is happily living in Cornwall, resting after whatever awful thing happened in the last book (something with Russian arms dealers, I gathered). However, as these things happen, he gets sucked into a new case when a sort-of former rival  is murdered, and Allon's friend, art dealer Julian Isherwood, confesses he's on the hook for $45 million after not insuring the Rembrandt painting that the murderer stole. So Allon goes looking for the painting, finding a Dutch Holocaust survivor whose father owned the painting, which leads him to the son of an SS officer in Argentina, which leads him to a grand conspiracy puppeteered by a noted humanitarian-financier in Switzerland.

None of it was very suspenseful, partially because Silva has this really weird narrative technique of reassuring the reader that everything will be fine before a big event. “She would never be told, however, they were the former and present chiefs of the Israeli secret intelligence service” (322) is one tiny example but in context, I knew at the outset that the "she" in question would survive her task and live to be debriefed...which seems to take away the thrilling aspect of the thriller. Silva used this calm, detached voice multiple times so I never questioned that everything would work out just fine. Come to think of it, I don't there were any casualties in this book, aside from the initial victim.

But mostly, this just felt like a PR tract about Israel, a very simplistic rendering of who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. I think the Author's Note at the back supports this interpretation; Silva harrangues the entire nations of Germany and Switzerland in this almost sarcastic voice. And I'm sorry, but it’s just not that easy - and frankly, I'm getting a little tired of these really simplistic renderings of a very complex issue that have infiltrated the general understanding. At his point in time, there are no clear-cut heroes or villians in the Middle East conflict; both sides have done some awful things. Whatever else you believe, this is a fact. I think it's fine for Silva to advocate for his point of view - it's essentially the tack Dan Brown has taken towards the Catholic Church - but this seemed less out in the open, and I resented it. With Dan Brown, I think you at least know what you're getting, and that's all I really ask.

Jamestown Residents Ate One Another (and other tidbits from The Shipwreck that Saved Jamestown, #25)

I read Lorri Glover and Daniel Blake Smith's account of Sea Venture shipwreck at Bermuda in 1609 and its effect on Jamestown at the end of June, and thoroughly enjoyed it. For the most part, The Shipwreck that Saved Jamestown is pretty readable - it's stuffed with facts but with the exception of a slightly slow first chapter, it rolls along well.

I read this book as part of a larger research project that I'm still working on, and feel like I could probably recite the details of every page for you - but I'll resist the temptation. The basic story is that in 1609, the Jamestown colony is floundering, and after a massive PR campaign, the Virginia company puts together nine ships filled with new colonists and supplies. During the trip, the ships get caught in a hurricane and the lead ship, the Sea Venture, gets separated and eventually hits upon Bermuda. Although it was known as the Isle of Devils, the passengers and crew soon discover that the uninhabited island can more than meet their needs. In the end, the shipwreck survivors manage to build two new ships and about a year, they reach Jamestown, much to everyone's shock, and find the settlement on the brink of devastation. Things had been so bad that during the previous winter, the colonists had resorting to eating their dead - hence the title of this post. Essentially, through a series of coincidences - or miracles, as the colonists believed - they survive and then manage to save the colony...which of course is very important for those of us later born in America. (OMG, without the shipwreck, I could be Italian! Or Dutch!)

But all kidding aside, The Shipwreck that Saved Jamestown is a pretty good book. It could totally give Cleopatra or Unbroken or The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the other historical non-fiction tomes I was planning to read this year (and haven't yet) a run for their money.

Remembering, Rereading Sweet Valley High (#19-24)

For a reason that now eludes me, probably (despite?) my recent foray into Sweet Valley Confidential, I was inspired to reread the beginnings of the Sweet Valley High series. I think I was curious to see if there was anything to the books or if I had just been a very confused 12-year-old in need of an older sister to properly explain the birds and the bees and what high school would be like and all that.

I read books one and two - Double Love and Secrets - again in 2008, and so I acquired books three through seven - Playing with Fire, Power Play, All Night Long, Dangerous Love, and Dear Sister -PLUS Perfect Summer, the Sweet Valley High Special Edition, though Amazon.com. Then I spent a few June afternoons lying in a pool chair devouring this inane goop - and it was awesome.

There's nothing much to say about these books except that oddly some of the book jacket copy misrepresents what the books are about. (The book seven jacket copy for Dear Sister, my personal favorite, says that Todd and Jessica are pondering life without Elizabeth as she lies in a coma but the book is mostly about her odd personality change once she wakes up. Sheesh.) But what I enjoyed was the experience, the trip down memory lane, and the reminder that summer is supposed to contain some element of fun. As adults, I think we get so lost in the hustle and bustle, and it was really great to spend a couple hours slowing down and remembering all those little, silly things that I liked to do as a kid. And for that, I give these preposterously awful, awesome books five stars.

Oh, by the way, Cracked has a completely awesome guide to ghostwriting Sweet Valley High books. You must click, yes, go on!

Nefertiti and Outliers in Brief (#17, 18)

Sorry, I lied when I said we were talking about Sweet Valley High next. I forgot about these two books, both of which I mostly enjoyed when I read them at the beginning of the summer but now am grasping to remember.

I read Michelle Moran's Nefertiti first, inspired to check out her other books after the fabulousness which was Madame Tussaud. I don't know why I chose this one, her first, of all her Ancient Egypt-set books though it may have been the only immediately available at the library. Nefertiti, as the name implies, is about the famous Egyptian queen and fictionally explores her cunning rise to power through the eyes of her younger sister Mutny. Nefertiti becomes a second wife to Pharaoh Akhenaten and then basically struggles to outwit and overcome Kiya, his first wife (and the presumed mother to King Tut), and keep Akhenaten's outrageous ideas under control; Mutny, on the other hand, would just like out of the palace intrigues and to live a peaceful life tending her garden. Although some Amazon reviews criticized it for having thin characters, I found Nefertiti entertaining enough for a summer read, though clearly Moran's writing style has, not suprisingly, significantly improved since this first book.

After Nefertiti, I tackled Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, which I'd had on my bookshelf for ages. I'd wanted to read it after my mom had told me about hearing him speak at a business conference; the topic had apparently been on the part of the book that explores the hours of practice (10,000) it takes to be successful in any given field. Based on that, I expected that the book's message would be about the link between hard work and success, but that's not really what it was about at all. It was more about how people are randomly, statistically chosen for success and it doesn't have all that much to do with talent. For example, if you want to be a successful hockey player, you'd better have been born in January because kids are filtered into gifted programs at an early age and the hockey cut-off is December 31 - meaning that the January kids are likely bigger (being older) and from there, the advantages of being in gifted programs accrue and once you're slated into a track, it's hard to get out of it.

I think the premise is supposed to be uplifting in that there's no such thing as extraordinary individuals (uplifting for those who are not) but rather success is a combination of various societal factors that you have no control over. But personally, I found the whole thing depressing. If success is based on uncontrollable random elements and things set in motion before you were born, why bother trying? While his theory may be true, I felt that it lacked personal responsibility, that duty to get up and do your best to do your thing every single day. Still though, the anecdotes were fascinating, and I've repeated one or two in conversation.

Admittedly though, I was hooked to Outliers from page one, mostly because of a random (!) personal connection. The first story is about immigrants from Roseto, which is the little town in southern Italy that my great-grandfather was from. In the book, Gladwell tells how a bunch of Rosetians moved to Pennsylvania, to a small town they appropriately named Roseto, and a couple of researchers discovered that in the 50s and 60s they had an abnormally low rate of heart disease, which ended up being because of strong community bonds. Unfortunately for my great-grandfather, he chose to emigrate to a different Pennsylvania town, Philadelphia - where he died of a heart attack in the mid-1950s. :(

An Aside: All Over the Map cover error and Laura Fraser's book lists

A good chunk of Laura Fraser's All Over the Map takes place in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, which is why I was surprised to see that the art director decided to go with a photograph of a different Mexican city on the cover. The top photo is bizarrely of the neighboring city of Guanajuato and the only reason that I know that is that I took a nearly identical photo when I was there a year and a half ago. Maybe the stock image was mislabeled? That's the only explanation I can come up with.

 

In other news, as I was browsing the web a moment ago, I discovered that Laura Fraser is a dork like me and also keeps lists of the books she's read. And apparently she's grappled with similar questions that I've had about my list and plan to blog about, which essentially distills down to this: Do all books make the list or are some not worthy? However, she says her list has made her pickier - "seeing the titles line-by-line brings home the realization that the number of books one can read in a lifetime — maybe 5000? — is finite" - while I'm still reading utter crap. Alas.

The Lovers and All Over the Map: F*ing depressing if you ask me (#14, 16)

I read Vendela Vida's The Lovers and Laura Fraser's All Over the Map just days apart all the way back at the beginning of June. I picked them up for different reasons - though I'd read several good reviews on The Lovers, it didn't seem like my cup of tea but was convinced to pick it up after I saw Vida was the screenwriter of Away We Go, the wonderful but alas underappreciated John Krasinski-Maya Rudolph film about an expectant couple looking for a new home. (To be honest, I was also inspired by the title of her other novel: Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. How awesome is that?) I went for All Over the Map after realizing there was a sequel to the wonderful An Italian Affair, Fraser's sweet memoir of finding love on an Italian island. I read them practically back-to-back simply because of library schedules and unfortunately, I left the experience fairly disappointed in both books (though highly amused by the All Over the Map cover photo).

Both works follow the trend in women's fiction of depicting the life of a disappointed woman in middle age trying to recover something of a lost self...and it's fucking depressing. I get that in the end, the protagonist will have some sort of epiphany that will free her from the bonds of being a woman in the Western world but I have never particularly enjoyed the journey of these books…it’s like hundreds of pages of melancholy and bad choices and quicksand which five pages of redemption at the end can hardly make up for.

Specifically, The Lovers is the fictional story of the recently widowed Yvonne, who decides to spend a week in a rented house on Turkey's Datca Peninsula, hoping to recapture some part of herself at her honeymoon spot. But then it turns out she wasn’t really happily married and her daughter has problems and she befriends a little kid named Ahmet and then there’s a tragic accident and blah blah blah. But there's an epiphany at the end, all is well! Ugh.

In fact, there was a passage on page 211 that I thought summed up the book nicely: “She had traveled to Turkey to regain something of what she had had with Peter decades earlier – and failing that, she had befriended a boy. A Turkish boy who spoke nothing of her language. And now he was gone, and she was again searching for some remnant of someone she had lost. Had she ever been so lost herself? She must have seemed – to Ozlem, to Ali, to Mustafa – profoundly so. A sad, aging woman with no anchor.” See what I mean? This book was hard to take, reminding me quite a bit of Anita Shreve novels.

I did like All Over the Map quite a bit better but like The Lovers, it seemed to have an excess of angst. The book starts out with an encounter with the Professor, the other half of her glorious Italian affair – she meets him in Oaxaca, Mexico, for her 40th birthday and he effectively dumps her, as he’s met someone else in Paris that he wants to settle down with. And Fraser feels pulled in two directions – she wants to be free and travel but then she also wants the love and stability of a relationship…and now that she’s turning 40, she sort of wonders if she’s missed the boat.

I found that I was continually frustrated with her, the narrator, and my overwhelming thought was how can you bitch about what you have (which seems like a lot, a career most travel writers would give their right arm for – or left, depending on which hand you write with) and keep actively creating what you have if you really want something else? She also really downplayed her career which I found annoying, probably because I am in the same field - magazines are sending her to Samoa, Mexico, Italy, etc., and she's published two books, but her career is not going well? I found that hard to believe and kept wondering why she was presenting herself as a sad sack (though I know self-image and how others see you can wildly differ). I mostly just wanted to reach through the pages and tell her to snap out of it.

On the bright side, you know what we're going to talk about next? Sweet Valley High, that mythical place in California where no one has even heard the word depression, all because I decided to take a trip down memory lane...

Reading Michelle Moran: Madame Tussaud (#13)

I found Michelle Moran's Madame Tussaud to be a fascinating read that I could barely put down. Which surprised me a bit because the faux-historic cover they chose implies that the book is going to be history-lite, like a trip to Epcot. And after reading it, I'm further surprised that this subject hadn't already produced a blockbuster book - because it features a strong female who's still famous 200 years later, who's thrust into the middle of a huge political upheaval, who knew all the big players of her day including the king and queen, and who has to fight for survival. It has all the makings of a great story - and this telling is especially well done.

I'm totally ignorant of this time period - that is, the French Revolution - except for the basic facts (which is especially pathetic considering I took nine years of French). Besides Les Miserables, the only strong image I have of it is Jacques-Louis David's painting Death of Marat which has freaked me out for many years.

But I'm pretty sure that Moran takes an unusual - though apparently true - perspective on the events by portraying Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette as victims instead of free-loving perpetrators. This is where Madame Tussaud - or Marie Grosholtz, as she was known then - comes in. She and her mother's companion run a well-regarded wax museum in Paris and one day, Marie is asked to tutor the king's sister in wax working. Through her family and the museum, she is already acquainted with some of the revolutionaries, including Robespierre, and from her tutoring, she gets to closely observe life at Versaille. Then Marie essentially gets caught in the middle; as the politically impotent king and queen fight to survive and the revolutionaries gain more power, a mob mentality begins to take over and the virtues of "liberte, egalite, fraternite" turn into a Reign of Terror. Her family becomes nervous because of their ties to the royal family and so when the mob starts bringing decapitated heads to the museum, they feel they have no choice but to preserve these "souvenirs." The book is really about the French Revolution - only at the end does Marie even meet Monsieur Tussaud but I think it was better for it.

In the end, what I really liked about this book is that it made me think beyond the text. I know what happened but I don't understand why, not really. How does a ragtag group of men manage to take over a government, and then how does essentially one man, Robespierre, freely institute ridiculous arrest warrants? These are the same questions I'm left with when I think about the Holocaust - how does this happen? I suppose if anyone had the answer to this, we could figure out world peace.

I haven't been to Madame Tussaud's in London in about a decade so I'm struggling to remember what's there. However, the Internet is telling me that they still have some of Marie's original wax pieces, including a number of the gruesome death masks she was forced to make.

The Bible as Literature (#12)

In my ever-ongoing quest to catch up this blog, we're yet again discussing a book I read months ago. Usually I've skipped blogging about the books I read with my ninth-grade English students, having already talked about them to death, but this concept of the Bible as literature has stayed with me and I am still kinda awed by what was in there.

Admittedly, I had dreaded reading Genesis with them - I am not at all religious (though raised Christian) and I just had no desire to wade into this pc minefield. I also just didn't know anything about it...what was I supposed to teach them? Some of the books I was able to choose this year but Genesis (with an Exodus option) was one of the three required texts, so there was no squirming out of it. So instead, I put it off as long as possible. :)

But in the end, I found it to be really incredible - and like The Odyssey, probably appreciated its brilliance far more than my students did. Because for a book written some 2,500 years ago, it's pretty darn sophisticated...and actually gets more sophisticated as the text goes on.

At the beginning, you can clearly see that Genesis was not written by one person and the text contains inconsistencies, as there are two different accounts right off the bat (chapters one and two) describing how God created an as-yet-unnamed man and woman. I know there are some people who believe that the Bible is literal truth (and have developed convoluted explanations dismissing these inconsistencies), but these issues don't bother me. Although Moses is traditionally credited with the authorship of the first five books of the Bible, scholars now usually attribute the writing of Genesis to three main different sources so discrepancies makes sense.

More than anything, what I was impressed with was the structure. The original book didn't have chapters and verses (those were inserted starting in the 1200s) and yet there's still a really clear order. Despite 50 chapters, there's only six main stories in Genesis - Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph (although I think you could argue that Isaac doesn't deserve star billing). And each of these sections is a mini-story, the rise and fall of the character/situation, and ends fairly clearly with a genealogy to wrap things up. It's really quite clever.

Then between these stories are a ton of parallels, for the most part establishing a character's worthiness. Because it's interesting - despite the fact that there are some 2 billion people theoretically being morally guided by this book, a lot of characters aren't terribly moral, at least by today's standards. Look at two of the three patriarchs - Isaac is an incredibly passive characters who seems to have a penchant for worldly pleasures in the few chapters he's alloted while Jacob swindles his brother out of his birthright to become patriarch. So instead, the writers use parallels to establish a character's worthiness. Despite his flaws, Isaac is worthy of being a patriarch simply because he is like his father Abraham, or so he is portrayed in chapter 26. In contrast, Lot is generally unworthy because when put in a similar situation as his uncle Abraham in chapters 18 and 19, he fails to make the same decisions. It just struck me as so sophisticated for a text so old (and I have to thank Robert Alter's Genesis for pointing a lot of things out).

I could go on and on...with the repitition of theme, the use of the turning point, and the tentacles Genesis has in our culture...but I'll stop boring you now. Sadly, my students weren't so lucky - I ended up liking this unit so much that I made them read the first half of Exodus and Moses' death in Deuteronomy too.

Still, I tried not to torture them too much. Should learning be all work and no play? During some classes, we looked at the awesomely fun Brick Testament, where this guy has built more than 4,500 Lego scenes to illustrate various books of the Bible. It's both an accurate telling and irreverant interpretation (occasionally involving naked Legos, ahem Er and Onan) and worth a look for the humor value alone.

The Accidental Billionaires just like The Social Network (#11)

I don't have much of an opinion on Ben Mezrich's The Accidental Billionaires because I read it about a week after seeing The Social Network on DVD and they're pretty darn similar. But I quite like Mezrich's work so I'll have to give him a pass on this one.

For those of you who've been living under a rock (not to be mean but I feel like I'm about to state the very obvious), the book/movie chronicles the rise of Facebook, focusing on Mark Zuckerberg's relationships with his original partner Eduardo Saverin and the Harvard guys who might have given him the idea, the Winklevoss twins and Divya Narendra, and how all that played out. The big question in both is did Mark Zuckerberg take advantage of others on his quest for success?

I preferred The Social Network, mostly because of the decision to intersperse the "present-day" courtroom scenes with the building of the website at Harvard and later California. I thought it added drama to the relationship between Mark and Eduardo - because they're best friends at Harvard, partners in crime, and yet obviously something is coming down the pike to pit them against one another. The Accidental Billionaires, on the other hand, presents events in chronological order so there was less intensity to the scenes.

The other significant difference, I thought, was in Mark's motivation. In The Social Network, it's seemingly about the girlfriend who dumped him and his need to both prove something to her and be liked. There's no girlfriend in The Accidental Billionaires. While he does seem to have have a need to be generally liked in there too, it seemed to me that as presented, Mark more than anything needed to prove how much better, how much smarter, he was than everyone else. And as a result, he becomes obsessed with creating Facebook and he seems more at home there, in front of the computer, than in the real world interacting with ordinary people. To me, he came across as a brilliant asshole. And after reading/watching both, I kinda wanted to cancel my Facebook account.

Not-So-Sweet Valley Confidential (#10)

I LOVED the Sweet Valley High books when I was a kid, mostly because they were about perfect California teenagers doing perfect California things. When I was 12, nothing seemed more exciting than that. So I was pretty darn thrilled when I heard Francine Pascal, the series' creator, was releasing a follow-up last March (um, yes, we are discussing a book I read four months ago). Doesn't everyone want to know how 25-year old Elizabeth, Jessica, and the gang turned out?!?

It turns out that life is not so perfect anymore (until they all kiss and make up at the end, anyway). Elizabeth turns out to be a reporter, no surprise after her high-school days as the superstar columnist at The Oracle, but she's devastated when she finds out that her sister and her formerly puppy-dog loyal boyfriend, Todd Wilkins, have been having an affair. They're, like, so in love. And Jessica, like, feels so bad about it...and yet also feels like her twin should understand. The rest of the book is basically backstory and apologizing while Elizabeth licks her wounds.

The sad truth is, no one should have let Francine Pascal near a Word document. After reading the drivel that is Sweet Valley Confidential, I now understand, very clearly, why ghostwriters wrote the entire SVH series. Because this book is outrageously terrible. I would have excused it and said that, like the series, it was written for pre-teens who don't know any better (like, ahem, Twilight) but I realized that's not even true - this book IS written for adults, the adults who nostalgically remember the 80s and the books they loved.

Numerous reviewers on Amazon have pointed out the factual inconsistencies between Sweet Valley Confidential and the series though I admittedly don't remember the books that well. For me, the worst part of this book was the very thin plot filled with inane dialogue and the most extreme of events that somehow took 300 pages to tell. Nothing normal happens in this book - everything is to extremes and, like, the worst thing EVER. Several characters have complete personality changes: The resident asshole's parents die and he turns into an angel; the sweet, bumbling nerd turns into an asshole and dies falling off a balcony; the protective older brother appears to be an serial adulterer until it turns out, omg, he's gay! It's laughably the worst.

Actually, I take that back. You want to know the worst part? This book was enough of a bestseller that St. Martin's has given the green light to a new series based on their adult lives, to reportedly be released starting next spring. According to the New York Times, it will be published online in installments and have the cliffhanger feel of the original series. To quote the NYT quoting St. Martin's publisher Dan Weiss, "It's really e-mass market." Let's just hope they decide to hire a new writer.