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.