30GreatBooks

Wrapping Up 2011: A Look Back

2012-01-01T14:16:00.002-06:00

Happy New Year, everyone!

I am pleased to report that after the miserable reading years of 2009 and 2010, when I read only 23 and 24 books respectively, I came back strong to finish with 36 books for 2011. Hooray, go me. But really, it's mostly about life (which I suppose you can say for most things) - I moved to an non-English speaking country in the middle of this year and as a result, I read an awful lot of books as I was getting settled. I find this is always the case when I am far from home; in fact, I started this list the year that I was studying abroad in South America.

Looking back, the best books I read in 2011 were probably Daphne Kalotay's Russian Winter; Michelle Moran's Madame Tussaud, Ann Brashares' Sisterhood Everlasting; and Ann Patchett's State of Wonder. Interestingly, all books by women, all books featuring women, and three out of four set in a distinctly different time or place. And, perhaps most importantly, all four of these books have stayed with me in some way; while there were a number of other books this year that I quite enjoyed, I can't say I've ever really thought of them again.

As for the books I most disliked? Aside from the obvious - Francine Pascal's horrendous Sweet Valley Confidential - I'd have to go with Veronica Roth's Divergent; Paula McLain's The Paris Wife; Vendela Vida's The Lovers; Rhoda Janzen's Mennonite in a Little Black Dress; and Caitlin Kelly's Malled. While I also read a number of blah books this year (and admittedly, I am picky as hell - the longer I work as an editor, the worse it gets), these ones took the cake because, aside from Divergent, they all had pretensions of being some kind of great work, which I didn't think they lived up to. These were all books that I actively disliked and seriously considered stopping reading in the middle.

But I hate stopping in the middle. It's a little silly since life is short and you can only read so many books, and admittedly, it's partially about the list. (I mean, if I only read half of a bunch of books, I'll never make it to 30). That said, there are a few books that I quit in the middle this year. And funny enough, I didn't hate any of them - in the case of Tea Obreht's The Tiger's Wife (which I know was nominated everywhere for best book of the year), Michelle Moran's Cleopatra's Daughter, and Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra, they just failed to fully grab my attention. With David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, I meant to go back and check it out from the library again, but it just never happened. It was good but wasn't good enough. And then, at the end of the year, I started War and Peace, which I quite liked though for no discernable reason, but found I didn't have the time to read it right now.

The reason I quit War and Peace is actually because I just started a new, time-consuming job. I could have kept going but it probably would have taken me six months to read it at the pace I was going. So it's put-off for another time. Same thing happened some years ago with The Brothers Karamazov, alas.

Anyway, next post...looking ahead to 2012!

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

2011-12-27T13:59:00.001-06:00

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 experiental 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 disappointment because it could have been and should have been better.

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

2011-11-14T03:40:00.001-06:00

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)

2011-11-12T11:38:00.001-06:00

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 and I think we all know what's going to happen.

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 the book 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 didn't marry Captain Wentworth when she had the chance (though 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 is where the novel starts. Anne is the middle 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 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 her 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

2011-11-11T12:01:00.000-06:00

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)

2011-11-11T10:05:00.000-06:00

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...

2011-11-10T09:15:00.000-06:00

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)

2011-11-10T08:24:00.000-06:00

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?

2011-11-03T09:09:00.001-05:00

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!

2011-11-03T08:14:00.001-05:00

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)

2011-10-26T10:33:00.002-05:00

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)

2011-10-24T08:59:00.000-05:00

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)

2011-10-24T07:46:00.001-05:00

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)

2011-10-12T17:00:00.000-05:00

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)

2011-10-12T03:00:00.000-05:00

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)

2011-10-11T17:00:00.000-05:00

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)

2011-10-11T08:17:00.000-05:00

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 a 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

2011-10-11T05:54:00.000-05:00

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)

2011-10-11T05:53:00.003-05:00

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)

2011-08-11T08:01:00.003-05:00

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)

2011-08-10T04:24:00.005-05:00

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)

2011-08-04T07:20:00.003-05:00

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)

2011-08-04T06:17:00.005-05:00

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.

An Aside: Stealing Athena in photos

2011-06-05T23:32:00.025-05:00

In photos and going chronologically, Karen Essex's Stealing Athena is a novel about the Parthenon and two women who had a major impact on its state of being.

[My photo of the Parthenon in 2004]

Perikles began building on the Athenian Acropolis in 447 BC.

[Roman copy of Pericles bust, from The Elgin Marbles by B.F. Cook]

He put the sculptor Pheidias in charge of artistic decisions and according to the book, Pheidias decided to use Perikles' mistress and Stealing Athena's protagonist Aspasia as his model for his glorious statue of Athena, known as Athena Parthenos. (Pheidias was also accused of hiding portraits of himself and Perikles in the massive statue.) Although the original statue no longer survives, today you can see Alan LeQuire's replica (based on historical writings and artifacts) in Nashville's full-scale Parthenon. (Why Nashville has a full-scale replica of the Parthenon I do not know.)

[The photo of Athena comes from the city of Nashville's website.]

Fast-forward about 2,200 years to first years of the 19th century. There was a man named Lord Elgin. He loved the Parthenon more than he loved his wife, the heiress Mary Nisbet and the other protagonist of Stealing Athena.

The photo of Lord Elgin, attributed to a 1795 drawing by G.P. Harding, also comes from Cook's book. The drawing of Mary Nesbit, Countess of Elgin, is found on the cover of Susan Nagel's awesome biography, Mistress of the Elgin Marbles.]

But by that time, the Acropolis had been used and abused. After the fall of the Greek gods, the Parthenon had been turned into a church; when the Turks arrived, they turned into a mosque. Later, they used it to store gunpowder and half the building exploded during a Venetian siege in 1687. So Elgin made it his life's mission to cart what he could back to England, thus beginning one of the art world's biggest controversies. Since he didn't have much money of his own, he used his wife's fortune. Ironically, saving the Acropolis marbles from further ruin helped destroy his own marriage. In the wake of a scandalous divorce, he was forced to sell his beloved marbles to the British Museum in 1816.

According to the British Museum, about half of the marble sculptures from the Parthenon survive. They have a good chunk of what's left, including about 60 percent of the remaining frieze and "much" of what remains of the East Pediment.

[My 2004 photos of the Duveen Gallery (top) and East Pediment (bottom)]

Now we're going beyond Stealing Athena, but the rest of the remaining frieze is in Athens. When I was there, in 2004, it was housed in the old, small Acropolis museum that was on top of the hill. (As I recall, the overflow was kept in storage.) The British Museum refuses to give them back to Athens and for a long time, one of the arguments was that Greece didn't have a proper facility in which to house them. Although the spectacular new Acropolis Museum opened in 2009 (alas, I haven't yet been), the B.M. still isn't budging - and I imagine they never will.

This subject of location is highly controversial and while I've tried to keep my own opinions out of this post, the one thing that sticks out in my mind from my trips to Athens and London is the difference in the marbles' condition from one location to the next. Say what you will but Elgin's actions led to a better preservation in the long-run - and it's obvious in pictures:

[My 2004 photos of a frieze section in Athens (top) and a metope in London (bottom)]

Anyway...that would be the end (and I am reminded once again of why I hate trying to input photos into Blogger...)

#9: Stealing Athena, Karen Essex

2011-06-05T22:14:00.005-05:00

As you can see, I skipped number eight, which was Shakespeare's Henry IV. While not my favorite of his plays, I recognize the genius to say I liked it well enough. But since I discussed it ad nauseum with my students, I'm done with it - and thus moving on to number 9...

...Karen Essex's Stealing Athena. I had high hopes for this book since it features one of history's most interesting ladies - the indomitable Mary Nisbit, Countess of Elgin - but unfortunately I had a hard time getting into it. The novel actually centers on the Parthenon and weaves together two tales - that of Aspasia, Perikles' lover, who was alive when the Parthenon was built and may have posed for the its Athena statue, and that of Lady Elgin, who funded her husband's removal of the sculptures when he was ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. The text shifts back and forth between the two tales and what they have in common, besides the building itself, is both women have these spirited, overcome-it-all personalities.

I think the problem was that while the two female protagonists were strong, the secondary characters (i.e. everyone else) were pretty flimsy. In Aspasia's story - which constituted most of the second half of the book - it didn't matter all that much because it was really about her...navigating her tenuous relationship with Perikles, achieving success as a philosopher, and later defending herself in court against the establishment who felt she'd overstepped her bounds. But Mary's tale is different because it has everything to do with her husband - and he was such a thinly painted ass in Stealing Athena that it was hard to see why she put up with him.

Historically, Mary and Lord Elgin marry in 1799 - they may or may not have been in love, but she was endowed with an enormous fortune and said to be quite charming, while he had a title and was thought to have a great career ahead of him. They immediately head off to his new post in Istanbul/Constantinople and while there, they convince their hosts - who had ruled Greece since the 1400s - to let them take the Parthenon marbles back to England. [The Turks don't care for the wonders of Ancient Greece and had let the Acropolis buildings fall into ruin.] This becomes Elgin's great passion but he doesn't have the money, so Mary's fortune ends up funding the lengthy and complicated endeavor. But then the tides shift, Elgin becomes a political prisoner in France and Mary spends a lot of years on her own, and it eventually leads them to a very scandalous divorce.

It's a fascinating story - much more complicated than my abridged version - but I didn't feel like Stealing Athena did it justice. The history was all there, but it was hard to get sucked into it because Essex relied on action more than emotion. As a result, I had a hard time figuring out for most of the novel whether or not Elgin was supposed to be the good guy or bad guy - was he a noble collector or a thief of both Mary's fortune and the Parthenon? Was he a loving father and husband or a mean and spiteful man without a nose? (Seriously, he loses his nose.) I found it hard to empathize with Mary's plight because I couldn't get a grip on how I was supposed to feel about Elgin, since his characterization shifted back and forth. So overall, I found Susan Nagel's Mistress of the Elgin Marbles (which Essex mentioned in the acknowledgements) to be much more captivating.

So as you can probably tell, I am a wee bit obsessed with the Elgin Marbles and so the next post is a photo gallery...

Something Borrowed movie adaptation

2011-05-01T16:49:00.007-05:00

Something Borrowed, an adaptation of Emily Giffin's fabulous and bestselling novel, comes out this Friday - but I can't decide if I'm enthused. I like this book so much that I've read it twice. But I can't figure out my feelings toward this movie (and I was spot on with my Eat, Pray, Love assessment). Watch the trailer and then we'll discuss:

As seen, Something Borrowed is the tale of the love triangle between mousy lawyer Rachel (Ginnifer Goodwin), her best friend Darcy (ugh, Kate Hudson), and the man they both want, Dex (Colin Egglesfield). The trailer implies that the movie stays true to the book's events except in one major regard: Ethan. In the book, the action pretty much revolves around Rachel, Darcy, and Dex, which makes sense (the triangle is perfection in art, no?) and keeps things focused. I realize promoting Ethan to a major force here was a chance for the filmmakers to cast another hot young actor, the always hilarious John Krasinki, and appeal to the ladies. But it strikes me as a distraction, this fourth big character - and sort of effs up the sequel, when Darcy has to flee to him at his home in London. (And no, it ain't London, Connecticut.)

Thoughts?

Update on 6/5: So I've seen the movie now. It wasn't the greatest movie ever made but probably didn't deserve the critical thrashing either. But in regards to Ethan, I think they forced it - they moved him eventually but it felt forced.

#6 and #7: Room and Mennonite in a Little Black Dress (meh)

2011-05-01T15:54:00.008-05:00

I read Emma Donoghue's Room and Rhoda Janzen's Mennonite in a Little Black Dress back-to-back in February. Both books had gotten good word of mouth but personally, I wasn't really into either of them (which is perhaps why I put off blogging about them). Warning: A few spoilers in the next paragraph.

Room is the story of a little boy named Jack and his mom, who if I recall correctly never gets a name. Jack is this really happy-go-lucky little kid with boundless enthusiasm for the world - except that he doesn't realize the "world" is a little room, because Jack's mom was kidnapped by a guy they call Old Nick, who keeps them prisoner in a garden shed. To five-year-old Jack, his world is amazing, which we hear as he (torturously) baby-talks his narration; his mom just wants to escape. And eventually they do (too easily, I thought) and Jack and his mother go through all kinds of readjustment issues. And I know I was supposed to think it profound, the contrast in perception and happiness and fear, but I just didn't feel it. (Apparently most Amazon readers did - it has 475 five-star reviews.) Which was too bad - I really enjoyed Donoghue's Slammerkin, a novel that could not be more different in subject or tone, which I read in 2008.

I started Mennonite in a Little Black Dress back in November and put it down probably six times to read other things. In theory, the memoir is about the author's discovery that her husband is gay, quickly followed by a terrible car wreck, which causes her to flee for her parents' home to recuperate. Except that she grew up Mennonite, so she has to go from being big-city sinful back to innocence-ish religious ways - which is supposed to provide much comic fodder and the heart of the book. But in truth, I never really caught onto the storyline because it really jumped around (and admittedly, my lack of attention didn't help) - it was hard to keep up with the chronology and minor characters, like the brothers and sisters-in-law, who weren't well fleshed out. Despite the premise, I don't think I learned anything significant about the Mennonites - in fact, I'm not sure what the book was really about. In the end, it seemed to be more about relating individual witty anecdotes (which were individually funny) but as a whole, I don't think the memoir came together. It simply lacked an overarching story.

So that was my February reading, fairly disappointing...which is perhaps why I didn't finish another book until the beginning of April. :(

Three Cups of Tea: True or False?

2011-04-27T22:15:00.004-05:00

I've been pretty fascinated by the brouhaha over Three Cups of Tea since the controvery hit about 10 days ago but I've resisted posting because I don't know what to believe. Anyone else with me on this? But I'm starting to doubt Greg Mortenson's intentions, mostly because his new explanations aren't holding up either - and if that turns out to be the case, I'm angling for my $10 back, to spend it on a piece of fiction that actually says fiction. [Full disclosure: I personally know all the Outside people mentioned herein as I used to work at the magazine.]

In a nutshell, author Jon Krakauer and 60 Minutes go after Greg Mortenson on two main points: that he fabricated significant events in Three Cups and that he has mismanaged his charity's funds, both refusing to document expenses and using the charity's dime to promote his books and then pocketing the proceeds. The first charge, that he made up events - including the origin story of how he wandered into the Pakistani village of Korphe and discovered his life's mission - appears to be true. In an interview with Outside editor Alex Heard, Mortenson blames his co-author David Oliver Relin, saying that he synthesized events to create a stronger narrative and no one cared when Mortenson complained. To the second charge, Mortenson acknowledges in the same Outside interview that he did use charity funds to charter a jet for the sake of time management, that people are misreading the charity's tax records, and that an independent law firm has established that they've done nothing wrong.

I think I've fairly synthesized both sides of the argument...and it's still hard to know what to believe. In a lot of ways, it's a he-said-she-said involving a very remote part of the world. Add in a heap of commentary from everybody from the New York Times to your ordinary blogger (hello, world!) and the water just keeps getting muddier and muddier. Interestingly though, Mortenson's side has remained mostly quiet in the face of some pretty damning financial evidence. (If you read Alex Heard's interview, you'll see on pages 4 and 5 that Mortenson doesn't deny using the charity's funds or refute Krakauer's main argument; rather, he justifies it in the way that many of his Internet defenders have, that the ends justify the means.)

I think it's fair to say that Greg Mortenson had good intentions to change the world but he lost them in the hustle-and-bustle along the way. The mismanagement of the charity seems pretty well documented. Whether he absentmindedly misplaced those intentions when things got too big or discarded them when he became a millionaire remains to be seen.

Personally, I'm leaning toward the "changed by fame" interpretation - but then, I was never a big fan of Three Cups of Tea. As I said at the time, the text struck me as manipulative, like a very long PR manifesto. But the biggest issue now, it seems, is that Mortenson's new and improved explanations don't seem to hold water which in my opinion is the thing that makes him look the most guilty.

Take the debate of the origin story, how he got to Korphe and how long he stayed there. In the greater scheme of things, it's probably irrelevant if Relin condensed the incident. But the fact remains, as the 60 Minutes mash-up (start at minute 1:30) adequately proved, that Mortenson repeats Relin's version of the story on tour as truth. Now, he blames Relin for the inaccuracy and says he voiced concerns - but if that's true, why keep repeating an inaccurate tale? (Interestingly, in an interview with the University of Oregon's Etude in 2008, Relin gives a remarkably different account of how he and Mortenson came to work together, compared to Mortenson's version in the Outside interview.) But now it seems that the revised version of the Korphe tale - which Mortenson provided to Outside - isn't plausibly true either. A second Outside article posits that geographically, the facts don't line up.

What can I say, I have a hard time having faith in someone whose story keeps being disproved. I don't know what the truth is, but it's not looking good for Mortenson.

#5: Russian Winter, Daphne Kalotay

2011-02-26T11:32:00.004-06:00

I read Russian Winter in January, just as Natalie Portman won the Golden Globe for her performance in Black Swan; for awhile there, I felt surrounded by mentally unstable ballerinas with starring roles in Swan Lake. The two stories dovetailed quite nicely and I enjoyed a month filled with visions of tutus and sugar plums dancing in my head.

Like Possession and the Lauren Willeg novels, Russian Winter features lonely modern-day scholars try to figure out mysterious historical happenings who in doing so heal their own psychological wounds. In this one, professor and adoptee Grigori Solodin is trying to figure out who his parents are; before the novel opens, he has contacted the now-elderly prima ballerina Nina Revskaya, and although we don't know exactly why, she suddenly decides to auction off all of her jewelry. This jumpstarts Russian Winter's plot and brings in Drew Brooks, a recently divorced young woman who works at the auction house and is trying to unearth Nina Revskaya's biography, in order to firm up the auction catalogue. The novel moves back and forth between the present day, when Drew and Grigori start working together, to Nina's memories in Moscow before she defected. Interestingly, the present-day action is written in past tense, while Nina's memories happen in present tense, flipping perspective on "reality" and importance.

At first, I couldn't get into it. Grigori's only clue to his birth parents is a purse that contains some photos, letters, and an amber pendant. He's sure that the letters were written by Nina's husband, Viktor Elsin, and Nina has launched the auction after hearing from him - so it seemed pretty obvious, despite the book's mystery, that they are his biological parents. But then I realized that was way too easy and figured out who his parents really were - and suprisingly that got me into Russian Winter, because I knew it was going to take some serious drama to make that happen and I was looking forward to the where and the when. And then the end came and I found out I was totally wrong - the real answer was totally out of left field (but a believable left field) and I was really impressed by the actual ending, the believable surprise. It seems like a difficult feat to pull off but Kalotay managed it well.

Russian Winter also reminded me, interestingly, of Atonement and The Joy Luck Club, with the introduction of the subtle idea that the telling of stories can heal wounds, and the release of depressing/scary/embarrassing family stories (ie the truth) can free you from emotional burden. As a writer, I really connect with that message - it seems like one of literature's main purposes and the result is beautiful and powerful when done well.

At the end of the novel, Nina says, "'Who else, after I die, will even remember these people? They were real people.' It sounded silly to say it that way, not what she meant at all. What she meant was that it seemed a crime that their thoughts, their lives -- the very fact of their lives, the truth of their lives -- were lost along with them. No one to preserve the truth of who they were. Who they had been." (p. 427)

An Aside: Great Gatsby video game

2011-02-24T19:15:00.006-06:00

Yes, there's a Great Gatsby video game that you can play on the Internet! In this supposedly original Nintendo game (Mediabistro doubts the "I found it at a yard sale" origin story), you take on the persona of Nick Carraway navigating his way through the world. The game starts out at one of Gatsby's parties, where Nick's goal is to dodge waiters (or take them out with his flying hat weapon) in an attempt to locate Gatsby.

A random Level Two, the Valley of Ashes, takes place on top of a train. I'm not quite sure what the ultimate point of The Great Gatsby game is - I couldn't get past the laser-shooting T.J. Eckleburg eyes to find out - but the game is quietly addicting, despite the annoying soundtrack.

Clearly I'm not the only one who feels this way. The game has garnered 126, 000 Facebook likes and 5,000+ tweets!

#4: The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan

2011-02-24T19:07:00.002-06:00

For the record, I finished Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club for the second time at the end of January. I assigned it to my students because it oddly treads some similar ground as The Odyssey and King Arthur, but from a female/minority perspective. I really do love this novel but after three weeks of discussing it, a quiz examining it, and an exam reviewing it, I just can't be bothered to blog about it. I hope you understand.

#3: The Red Queen, Philippa Gregory

2011-02-24T18:13:00.002-06:00

The Red Queen is book two of the Cousins' War series; I read the first book, the aptly titled The White Queen, at the end of December 2009. The first two books portray more or less the same time period, but from opposite sides, during England's War of the Roses in the 1400s. The narrators of both books are the scheming wives of powerful men: The White Queen featured Elizabeth Woodville who married the Yorkist King Edward IV whereas The Red Queen centers on Margaret Beaufort, heir to the House of Lancaster. They're both desperately trying to put their own heirs on the throne (although god knows why, they're technically all part of one family...hooray for incest!).

About halfway through both Queen books, the stories merge together; I assumed book three would focus on the ultimate outcome (the two rivals becoming grandmothers to the same future king) but Philippa Gregory's website says that the next book, The Rivers Woman out fall 2011, will focus on Elizabeth's mother, Jacquetta, a rumored witch. But I digress...

I didn't enjoy this book as much as the first, possibly because Margaret Beaufort might be one of the most annoying characters working in fiction today. As a child, she believes that she has divine visions of Joan of Arc and believes she is just as chosen, making for a lot of sanctimonious selfishness. It is slightly amusing when she utters clueless things like, "I care nothing for his good looks as I am devoid of vanity and lust, but the rightness of being his wife and becoming Queen of England haunts me like a lost love" (p. 212). But then, passage after passage, I was reminded of how much I hate people like this...because mon dieu, if you gotta let everyone know just how devout you are, you're in it for the wrong reasons.

Besides drinking the Jesus juice, Margaret harbors some serious jealous toward Elizabeth Woodville for marrying Edward IV, a mate that would have made Margaret queen. And Margaret deserved to be queen, dontcha know? "The plans were formed by a woman who thought herself the mother of a king, who could not be satisfied to be an ordinary woman," Margaret says on page 301, speaking of Elizabeth though she easily could be describing herself. "The fault of the enterprise lay in the vanity of a woman who would be queen, and who would overturn the peace of the country for her own selfish desire." She says this, of course, after she's failed to overthrow King Richard III when trying to put her own kid on the throne.

So after all this, you expect (nay, pray!) she'll get the comeuppance she so rightly deserves. The book ends before the saga concludes but historically, you know it's not going to happen. Her kid is Henry Tudor, i.e. Henry VII. She gets exactly what she wants and becomes a very powerful figure at court, far more powerful than her rival's daughter, Elizabeth of York, who ends up bearing her a grandchild. Margaret deserves a swift kick in the ass but alas, it never arrives. And that ends up being a real shame after putting up with this woman for 400 pages.

An Aside: Casting The Hunger Games

2011-02-23T23:55:00.005-06:00

From what I've seen on the interwebs, there's a lot of speculation surrounding The Hunger Games casting but no actual news to report. (In December, the L.A. Times quoted producer Nina Jacobsen as saying they have no front-runners since they're still looking over the millions of young actors no doubt salivating for the star-making roles. That last part, of course, is mine; she just said they were still looking for someone who could capture Katniss' complexity.)

So, I offer a suggestion. Not for Katniss, but for the role of Panem president Coriolanus Snow. As I was reading Mockingjay, a book which prominently features President Snow and his white hair, a vision hit me. He should be played by this man:

Yes, Karl Lagerfeld. That is all.

#2: Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins

2011-02-23T23:23:00.005-06:00

Thank god, Mockingjay took the plot in a new direction. Don't get me wrong, I quite enjoyed The Hunger Games - just not twice. But this last installment had serious "what's going to happen" momentum and I consumed Mockingjay in about 24 hours.

In the third and final book, the rebellion has taken center stage. Mockingjay starts with Katniss walking around the ashes of her home, District 12, which was blown to bits by the government forces after she was pulled out of the Quarter Quell arena in a massive plot by the rebels of District 13 - where she now lives with her mother, sister, and remaining survivors. Katniss is very conflicted about taking over the role of the Mockingjay, the symbolic heart of the revolution, because it will result in death and she hasn't resolved her guilt about causing death to her fellow tributes to secure her own life. The book isn't terribly complicated or filled with any surprises but it's remarkable for this - the emotional wounding of Katnisss Everdeen.

The main characters in the other two wildly popular teen series, Harry Potter and Twilight, on the other hand exhibit an utter lack of growth, which is what I came to hate about the books. I mean, the characters go through all kinds of crazy shit but at the end, they emerge unscathed and ridiculously cheerful like they've spent their respective series sunbathing on Bora Bora. How does that work? (Conversely, the emotional fallout is what I respect in works like The Lord of the Rings, Atonement, and even The Odyssey. Being good, or trying to be good, is a lot harder than being bad. If heroism was easy, everyone would be heroic. The point of these books is, the hero suffers and keeps going, despite personal consequence...making him/her a hero. Sheesh.)

Without giving away the plot, I'll just say that unlike Bella Swan, Katniss Everdeen doesn't get everything she wants wrapped up in a neat little bow at the end. She succeeds and completes her heroic journey - which I think was obvious from the outset and not actually giving anything away - but not without loss and change. And that journey - both emotional and physical - was what made for an incredible series.

An Aside: Mystery and Maxfield Parrish's Daybreak

2011-02-23T23:00:00.005-06:00

As I mentioned in my last post, there are 22 art prints strewn throughout Steve Martin's most recent novel, An Object of Beauty. I loved these unexpected delights and yet....I found them a little confusing. I could never figure out if the print was the actual piece mentioned in the text or just a work by that particular artist meant to enhance the reading experience. (Or perhaps I am just way over-thinking this?)

The one that really stumped me though was the appearance of Maxfield Parrish's Daybreak, as the Parrish print in the text is the novel's smoking gun. This is what the gorgeous print looks like:

But then the text describes the scene differently: Lacey points to the painting and tells the narrator Daniel that her grandmother was a woman named Kitty Owen, who "was eighteen when she took off all her clothes for him and posed." Which then means that the "grandmother" has to be the figure standing up, since the figure lying down is clothed. She goes on to say that the now 92-year-old no longer has the red hair and the narrator Daniel writes, "I looked at the slender, pale girl on the cover of the book, who looked like a faun standing over an idyllic pool trimmed in iridescent tiles." From all that, I deduced that the unnamed painting in the book was just made-up since the standing figure isn't pale with red hair or standing over a pool or even "arching up, and facing the twilight" as the chapter ends with. And fine, this is a work of fiction; I accept this. But, but...then I found out Kitty Owen was a real woman who posed for Maxfield Parrish. So shouldn't it be a description of the painting featured in the book? I am confused.

And apparently, I am the only person confused. I tried googling this, but the only thing that popped up was middling reviews for this book (though interestingly, an Object of Beauty has 44 five-star reviews on Amazon, compared to a combined 30 one- and two-star reviews.) So, yup, perhaps I am way over-thinking this...though if anyone has a thought, I'm all ears.

#1: An Object of Beauty, Steve Martin

2011-02-23T21:59:00.003-06:00

I feel conflicted about An Object of Beauty. I absolutely adore Steve Martin (and should I ever win an Oscar, I fantasize that he will be the one to hand it over) and found this novel to be a quick read on a flight home from Europe. But I didn't actually like it - I kept waiting for the action to start but it never really did...and then it ended with a dull deus en machina event. As usual, I will do a little spoiling, but only a very little bit.

An Object of Beauty tells the sordid tale of a young woman named Lacey Yeager who is determined to take Manhattan by storm, by any means possible. So it's all sex and schemes and it seems to work even though she's kinda despicable. The telling of all this comes by an old friend, narrator Daniel Franks, who documents her high-powered career in the art world in order to try to figure out her allure and her tricks. As he says in the first line, "I am tired, so very tired of thinking about Lacey Yeager, yet I worry that unless I write her story down, I will be unable to ever write about anything else." Writing this now, I sort of see a parallel with Nick Carraway and The Great Gastsby - it's another book where a passive narrator is trying to figure out why selfish people are doing bad things and why, for a time, he participates. And yet, An Object of Beauty is no Great Gatsby.

I think the main reason (and the biggest problem with the book) was that the pivotal moment - when Lacey acquires a large sum of money through devious means - comes very quietly. So quietly, in fact, that only in retrospect did I see that it was the do-or-die moment for Lacey, the moment that the entire novel hinged on. It was also the turning point for the narrator. I guess the incident was to remain as a question stuck in my mind, but it was so undramatic that I forgot about it. Which is the problem with having an emotionally distant narrator - he didn't seem to care that much about it, so why would I?

The most interesting thing about An Object of Beauty was the 22 color art prints scattered throughout the book. I was shocked when the first one appeared on page 14 (though perhaps I should have just read the book jacket more carefully). Oh, and I learned that Steve Martin and I have wildly different versions of what constitutes "sex." His descriptions and the use of the word sex didn't seem to match up in the conventional definition - and I think that might actually, randomly be my biggest takeaway. So take from that what you will.

2011's Books: Better, Much Better

2011-01-16T13:32:00.002-06:00

Let's forget the failures of the past, shall we? Yes. We. Are. Forgetting. Now.

Here's what I'm hoping to read this year, while also recognizing that this list invariably changes as new books come out and I get distracted by shiny things:

Ancient Classics (and helpers): Metamorphosis, The Aeneid, The Iliad, The War That Killed Achilles, It's All Greek to Me

Classics: Persuasion, Villette

Biography/Autobiography: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Cleopatra, The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century, The Talented Miss Highsmith, Kitchen Confidential

Non-Fiction Travel Tales: Unlikely Destinations: The Lonely Planet Story, All Over the Map

Other Non-Fiction: Unbroken, Outliers

Fiction: An Object of Beauty, Mockingjay, Russian Winter, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Room, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Brightest Star in the Sky

Historical People, Fictionalized: The Red Queen, Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky, The Birth of Venus, Leonardo's Swans, Stealing Athena

For School: The Joy Luck Club, Shakespeare's Henry IV, Persepolis

All I can say is, wow, my taste in books has really changed in the last 10 years.

2010's Final Tally: Pathetic

2011-01-16T13:29:00.003-06:00

And so that's where 2010 ended...at #24 with King Arthur. It is, in a word, pathetic. Especially since I am writing this post on January 16. But onto better and brighter things...really...because 2011 will be better and brighter. I hope.

#24: King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, Roger Lancelyn Green

2011-01-16T13:09:00.004-06:00

After The Odyssey, my students tackled about half of this King Arthur book. I think they liked it better, simply because they could understand it. It had been awhile since I had read any King Arthur, so I ended up reading the whole thing - it seemed like it would be hard to choose stories if I didn't know what the stories were, you know?

I don't much feel like delving into King Arthur - it is what it is, chivalry, damsels, evil knights, etc - but I will say that I didn't particularly enjoy this edition. Although the introduction makes it clear that these are in fact separate stories and that Green relied on different sources, the book as set up seems to be one continuous narrative. And as a result, the main characters switch personalities at the drop of a hat. In Book One, Arthur is the young king who leads England to its destined glory; he's nearly absent from Books Two and Three and then suddenly in Book Four, he's been transformed into an impotent monarch blindsided by his wife's infidelity. Lancelot flip-flops between faithful and faithless, sickened and set upon his path, depending on the story. And then Mordred - in one chapter, he's ashamed of his deviousness, but then later, he's described as being evil as his nature.

In addition, I didn't understand some of the story choices. Morgana le Fay, Arthur's usual nemesis, barely appears in this version. And then, even stranger, Green identifies Mordred as her son, instead of the commonly accepted son of Arthur and his half sister Morgawse (which then adds an interesting motivation, that of a bastard son fighting his father for his birthright). It was just weird.

#23: The Odyssey, Homer

2011-01-16T12:28:00.004-06:00

Speaking of classics, I re-tackled this one in October. I hadn't read The Odyssey since ninth grade but since I was teaching it to ninth graders this year (ahhh, the circle of life), I needed to read it again. I remember liking it the first go-round but this time, I really recognized what a masterwork it is.

So, The Odyssey is an epic poem likely written between 800 B.C. and 700 B.C. about a Trojan War hero named Odysseus. He's brave, strong, and crafty, but he's also an Everyman, representing any individual's ability to be a hero should he/she so choose. Odysseus masterminds the Greeks' victory when he comes up with the idea for the Trojan Horse, but then the winning side pisses off the gods (lesson #1: Don't fuck with Athena) and the victors find that they're all doomed in their journeys home. Odysseus then makes several more mistakes in judgment, landing himself on Poseidon's bad side when he blinds his son, Polyphemus (lesson #2: Don't mess with a sea god when you have to sail home). As a result, Odysseus and his fleet get tossed around by the waves and as they go from port to port, either Odysseus or the crewmen make more mistakes until everyone is dead but Odysseus. Finally, ten years later and worn and torn, and with extensive help from a now-fond Athena, Odysseus makes it home to Ithaca only to find that he's presumed dead and all the eligible bachelors in the area have lodged themselves in his palace in an attempt to woo his wife and become king. Having learned from all of his rash mistakes, Odysseus bides his time and plots with his son until the book culminates in a Quentin Tarantino-style bloodbath in chapter 22. But then, happy ending, the family is reunited and the hero is restored to his rightful place. Fun!

There are so many thousands of things one could talk about with this book but most interesting, I thought, was the lingering question of whether or not Odysseus was truly a hero. For one, he's awfully whiny, especially when we first see him crying on Calypso's island. He also makes some morally questionable decisions and causes a lot of carnage (which perhaps the ancient Greeks didn't find so questionable) - is Odysseus really a hero if nearly everyone who meets him ends up dead? And perhaps most importantly, is Odysseus really a hero if he never has an original thought and takes all his direction from Athena and Zeus? In the end, he doesn't "win" by his own skill - the most important gods just like him better. I think you can see where I come down on this; my co-worker, on the other hand, argues that Odysseus is a hero simply because he keeps going. He's faced with seemingly insurmountable odds and death at every turn but the man keeps on trucking anyway. And I guess that's what makes him an Everyman and an inspiration.

It's even inspired me to read some of the classic classics this year. The Greek plays (ahem, Sophocles) killed my enthusiasm for these sorts of works in tenth grade, but I realize I may have left the canon a little abruptly. So at some point in 2011, I'm aiming to read The Iliad, Charlotte Higgins' It's All Greek to Me, and with some luck Metamorphosis and The Aeneid.

Oprah Chooses Dickens

2010-12-31T06:46:00.006-06:00

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

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

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

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

2010-12-31T06:13:00.003-06:00

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

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

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

#20: The Best of Friends, Mariana Pasternak

2010-12-31T04:02:00.003-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

2010-12-31T03:11:00.003-06:00

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

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

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

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

#18: The Passage, Justin Cronin

2010-10-25T18:53:00.004-05:00

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

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

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

#17: Pompeii, Robert Harris

2010-10-25T17:51:00.003-05:00

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

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

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

#16: Good in Bed, Jennifer Weiner

2010-10-25T17:22:00.005-05:00

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

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

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

Predictable: Oprah Picks Franzen

2010-09-18T22:26:00.005-05:00

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

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

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

Um, yeah.

#12-15: Books in Review

2010-07-05T10:21:00.003-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#11: The Constant Gardener, John Le Carre

2010-05-29T12:54:00.003-05:00

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

2010-05-29T12:28:00.005-05:00

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

2010-05-15T15:36:00.006-05:00

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

2010-05-15T13:45:00.004-05:00

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

2010-05-15T12:27:00.004-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#6: The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan

2010-04-11T13:26:00.005-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2010-04-11T12:47:00.005-05:00

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

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

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

#4: The Swan Thieves, Elizabeth Kostova

2010-03-07T16:39:00.004-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

#3: Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel

2010-03-07T15:34:00.004-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

An Aside: The Lacuna in photos

2010-01-25T16:36:00.011-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

#2: The Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver

2010-01-25T15:30:00.007-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#1: Three Cups of Tea, Mortenson and Relin

2010-01-13T20:11:00.003-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

2010 Books

2010-01-13T13:41:00.004-06:00

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

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

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

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

2009 Tally - It's an F+

2010-01-13T13:38:00.004-06:00

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

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

#23: The White Queen, Phillippa Gregory

2009-12-14T12:15:00.008-06:00

The White Queen was great, and is perhaps my favorite Philippa Gregory book of the three I've now read. While I enjoyed The Other Boleyn Girl, I think it was titillating more than anything, like a Harlequin romance with real people. This one, though, seemed a little more grounded in events (and be warned, SPOILERS AHEAD).

The story focuses on Elizabeth Grey (née Woodville), who secretly married King Edward IV, even though she was a Lancastrian and he a Yorkist. Edward manages to bring a decent amount of peace to the realm, after keeping the Lancastrian king Henry VI away from the throne and fighting off the surrounding rebellions, but nothing lasts forever...and the book ends with (historically) two young princes locked up in the Tower of London, where they mysteriously vanish, their fate still unknown today. There's actually so much intrigue in this time period that I'm kind of surprised that this saga isn't nearly as popular as the Tudors. (Especially since these people are totally entwined with the Tudors - Elizabeth and Edward's daughter is Henry VIII's mother. This is the true beginning to that story.)

Which brings me to my only real criticism - I think Gregory ended The White Queen too early. Elizabeth's mother practices witchcraft and teaches her daughter some tricks - and at the end of the book, as Elizabeth and her children are taking sanctuary in Westminister Abbey, she and her eldest daughter put a curse on the person responsible for the (presumed) murder of her sons, that the murderer's son should die, and then his grandson, and his line end. The idea is that they'll watch and see what happens to the people around them, and by the curse, figure it out. King Richard III, a potential pepetrator, warns her about cursing people - that basically, once unleashed, you can't stop it, and you never know how it may come back to you (a sentiment echoed by her mother earlier on in the book).

Knowing how the history lesson ends, I was anticipating a bittersweet ending to this book - but The White Queen doesn't take it all the way there, and to its detriment, I think. Because in the book, Richard III's son dies and the implication, sort of, is that he is the murderer, though he has the least motive (which Gregory later says in the Author's Note). The likeliest historical perpetrators are the Tudors, the future Henry VII and his uncle Jasper, who have everything to gain by offing co-claimants. And I really thought that's where the book was going since Henry VII's line dies out within two generations (and both firstborn sons die before age 20) AND in the end, Elizabeth should regret cursing this man's progeny, since she's effectively just cursed her daughter, who ends up marrying him. She's desperate to regain the throne for her family, whom she sees as the rightful heirs, and she (fictionally) kills them off. It's satisfying and it sucks. (Though perhaps Gregory is saving it for the next book? The Author's Note says this is the first in a series about the Plantagenets...though I can't imagine Richard III and Henry VII duking it out can make an entire book.)

Anyway...my only other (minor) criticism is that Gregory doesn't label the kings (for example, Edward is just called Edward, not Edward IV), and it took me awhile to orient them historically. Which brings me to names - did the English only have like four names available to them? Everyone in this book is named Edward, Richard, Henry, or Elizabeth. Confusion!

#22: In a Sunburned Country, Bill Bryson

2009-12-14T11:59:00.006-06:00

It took me forever to read this book. I started it in May, read about 70 pages, barely picked it up all summer, and then finished it right before Thanksgiving. So it might surprise you to know that I quite liked In a Sunburned Country. There's no plot to speak of - Bill Bryson comments on his various travels around Australia - but the book was lighthearted and funny.

Which came as a huge relief. I'd tried to read The Lost Continent a couple of years ago, but put it down about 100 pages in - the "humor" came in making fun of small-town America, with mean little observations masquerading as wit. Not cool, Bryson, not cool.

So In a Sunburned Country was a nice surprise. My goal was to read the travelogue before going to Australia, but alas, I read the bulk of it after returning. Which I actually think made the book more enjoyable - I barely went anywhere that Bryson went, but at the same time, I knew what he was talking about. Sadly, at this point, I can barely remember anything I learned from the book (it was chock full of tidbits) but I can say this: Australia rocks! Which has nothing to do with the book, but still...

#21: Her Fearful Symmetry, Audrey Niffenegger

2009-11-11T12:53:00.005-06:00

Eh, another book I didn't love. The Time Traveler's Wife is one of my top 5 favorite books ever, so I really wanted to fall in love with this one too. But it just didn't grab me. Niffenegger is a truly talented writer, and so full of original ideas, but I didn't feel like Her Fearful Symmetry came together convincingly. (And according to Entertainment Weekly, she received a $5 million advance for this book. $5 million, yowza!)

First off, I'm generally not into twin books. With the exception of Sweet Valley High, it seems like twins are always portrayed in literature as freaks...like in The 13th Tale, Flowers in the Attic, and even, if I remember correctly, The Shining. I'm not a twin so it's not a personal thing, but I dislike the use over and over again of twins as strange little beings with co-dependent love/hate relationships. (Clearly that last sentence doesn't apply to The Shining - but those little freaky kid ghosts that the boy sees are twins, right?)

With that off my chest...Her Fearful Symmetry is about two sets of twins, Elspeth and Edie, and Edie's daughters, Julia and Valentina. When Elspeth dies of cancer, she leaves her apartment - across from Highgate Cemetery in London - and a good wad of cash to the younger, American twins, with the stipulation that they live in the flat for a year before they can sell it. Their parents are also not allowed to enter the apartment. Julia and Valentina are both inseperable but also fighting for their own identities, which ends up creating a lot of conflict. Valentina, the meeker twin, ends up getting involved with Robert, who lives downstairs and was Elspeth's longtime companion. Which Elspeth doesn't like - she's come back as a ghost who's trapped in the apartment with the girls. And off it goes...

The thing is, while the story is interesting in its retelling, I felt as though the events in Her Fearful Symmetry happened at a distance, like we were held apart from it. You saw the characters but you didn’t know really them. And while I think it's a valid style choice, and I'm guessing one made to make the plot turns a surprise, I didn't connect with Julia or Valentina or any of the rest of them.

Maybe it was a style choice, but I felt that Niffenegger broke an essential style rule, that of "show, don't tell." I think we were often told about the characters' personality traits, instead of seeing them on display – and so it was not always believable. Elspeth is probably the best example: For 300 pages, she’s a friendly ghost figure who never expresses any sort of meanness. Then one day, Robert says she’s manipulative: “Elspeth isn’t nice. Even when she was alive she wasn’t very – she was witty and beautiful and fantastically original in – certain ways, but now that she’s dead she seems to have lost some essential quality – compassion, or empathy, some human thing – I don’t think you should trust her, Valentina.” (p.303) I read that passage and I was like, what? As it turns out, Elspeth is manipulative but I don’t think one sentence here and there can create a believable shift when the previous 300 pages have shown otherwise. The same thing happens with Valentina – she's the Mouse throughout the book and then all of a sudden she does something so ridiculously absurd and bold. I just don’t think her characterization backed it up.

At the end, I found Her Fearful Symmetry to be kinda vague. Like, what happened with Julia and Martin on that last night? There’s an implication, but… And who was Elspeth, really? Was she devious and she allowed the mist to disperse – or was she really not able to fix it? The text is unclear and I found that to be annoying. Again, it's a style choice, but I've never liked having to guess at the unanswered questions.

Still, Niffenegger is so good at evoking beauty in the midst of pain, which I think is the true strength of The Time Traveler's Wife. My favorite passage in this book, Her Fearful Symmetry, comes on page 50: “As each night passed he found it more difficult to evoke Marijke precisely. He panicked and pinned up dozens of photographs of her all over the flat. Somehow this only made things worse. His actual memories began to be replaced by the images; his wife, a whole human being, was turning into a collection of dyes on small white rectangles of paper. Even the photographs were not as intensely colourful as they had once been, he could see that. Washing them didn’t help. Marijke was bleaching out of his memory. The harder he tried to keep her the faster she seemed to vanish.”

I also find her to be so ridiculously creative. In both books, she's come up with original plots, which I think is a hard feat these days. Probably my favorite scene in Her Fearful Symmetry is Martin's dream about sitting on the Tube and realizing the women across from him are squirrels. How awesome is that?

#20: Julie and Julia, Julie Powell

2009-11-05T15:34:00.006-06:00

Julie and Julia is another book that I liked fine enough, but didn't love. I suppose I feel sort of ambivalent about it, as I don't care to spend much time blogging about it. The writing is good - the kind of good where you don't notice the writing - but I just never got sucked into the story. (As always, I was curious to see what Amazon reviewers thought - more people hated it than loved it, and wow, the haters really hated it.)

Perhaps it was partly because I don't cook and I knew almost nothing about Julia Child. (The only thing I knew, actually, besides the fact that she was a cook, was that she served in the OSS. I didn't know the name of her famous cookbook, which I'm sure Julie Powell would find ridiculous. And actually, I realized that when I "think" of Julia Child, I somehow see her as Dr. Ruth. Go figure.) So I wasn't locked into the concept. On top of that, I'm a notoriously picky eater so I couldn't identify with cooking hardships, like boiling lobsters alive. (Hell, I don't think I'd touch a single recipe in that book.) So, in short, loving Julie and Julia for the cooking was out.

But really, it all, er, boils down to this: I just didn't connect with Powell. (Which is sort of funny because we have a lot in common, like our home state and alma mater and rabid affection for Civilization.) We clearly don't have the same sense of humor, so I didn't find most of the jokes funny. But more than anything, I felt like Powell skipped the hard stuff. The narrative was pretty jumpy and I often felt that she ended scenarios before discussing the fall-out or the resulting emotions. As a result, I had a hard time feeling her situation and empathizing with her, which I think is essential in a memoir like this. More than once, I was surprised by an emotional revelation - like when she and her husband were going through a rough patch - because she would mention it for a sentence or two and then not delve into it again for another 50 pages.

There are two other, similar books that I sprang to mind as I read Julie and Julia: A.J. Jacobs' The Know-It-All and Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love - and they're both, hilariously, mentioned in some form in the credits. I have to say, I far preferred these other two memoirs. The Know-It-All was just awesomely funny (and, for those who don't know, about a guy's quest to read the encyclopedia from A to Z). But to the earlier point, with Eat, Pray, Love, I totally respected that Gilbert put all her emotions - good, bad, and ugly - out there on the table. She was neurotic, yes, but I totally understood what she was doing and why. But as much as I loved that book, there are legions of smart women who hated it, for that very same reason - so in closing, I'll just say, perhaps Julie and Julia is for them?

Next up: Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger. With not so many weeks until the New Year, I am trying to read quick in order to reach the blessed 30!

#19: Skinny Bitch, Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin

2009-10-15T13:14:00.007-05:00

My best advice? RUN FROM THIS BOOK. My friend recommended this book to me - she said I would never look at food the same way again. And that may be true, but Skinny Bitch is, at its core, filled with untrustworthy information written by two women who are not qualified to be prescribing such advice.

At its most basic, Skinny Bitch is deceitful. This is a book promoting a vegan diet and while I have no personal problem with that, I wasn't interested in reading a manifesto on the subject. Veganism is not mentioned anywhere on the front cover or the back cover blurb. The authors (and perhaps marketing people) have done this purposely, in order to ambush the reader – thinking, and probably rightly so, that a book on veganism is not going to sell as well as one that’s billed as “a no-nonsense, tough-love guide for savvy girls who want to quit eating crap and start looking fabulous!” It’s kind of amazing then that Freedman and Barnouin manage to take everyone else – the FDA, the USDA, the dairy people, the beef people, Johnson & Johnson – to task for being sneaky in order to sell a product when it's exactly what they've done here.

Despite the fact that Skinny Bitch directly says that doctors are underqualified (p. 60), neither of these women are qualified to be dispensing what is essentially medical advice. Let me say it again: THEY ARE NOT QUALIFIED. Rory Freedman is billed as a former model's agent and a self-taught know-it-all. Kim Barnouin, a former model, holds an MS in Holistic Nutrition that she earned online from the Clayton College of Natural Health. According to the New York Times, she did most of her research online - don't worry, I will get to the problems with that.

The biggest flaw in this book is that the authors don’t acknowledge that there are different schools of thought, that people can have differing but still valid opinions, and that there are data sets to support just about everything. Everyone else, in the writers' unqualified opinion, is wrong – every other scientist, dietician, everyone. (Unless of course, they agree with them.) Their book is like listening to Sarah Palin speak – it’s just so hateful and doesn’t recognize that anyone else’s expertise/opinion can be equally valid. To Sarah Palin, you’re “un-American” if you don’t agree with her. And to these women, disagreement makes you a “fucking moron” or a “selfish whore.” I don’t even understand why these words are acceptable. It’s not tough love, it's abuse, and as the writers themselves say, “There is nothing uglier than a pretty woman who’s nasty.”

I am not a qualified medical professional, but some of Skinny Bitch's conclusions rang false to me. Since I don't want to go on here forever, I'll leave it at that. HOWEVER, I did work as a magazine fact-checker for a number of years, and I feel absolutely qualified to discuss the authenticity of one's sources. At the back of the book, Skinny Bitch lists a number of sources - some are from nutrition books, but the majority are from websites and online articles. The thing is, newspaper articles are not considered a primary sources and neither is the Internet - and that's because neither outlet is fact-checked. I am astounded that the majority of this book was written and then published based on such flimsy sources.

I took a look at 10 of the links provided (out of perhaps 30). Three of them no longer exist. One was a newspaper in India and another was what looked like a reputable newsmagazine. Truthaboutsplenda.com used research to back up its claims, but is funded by the Sugar Association, which represents the (conflicting) interests of the American sugarcane farmer. One had an advisory board with doctors, but was ultimately there to sell products; another's mission was aiding the spiritual evolution of the human race and unveiling conspiracy theories. Holisticmed.com, used multiple times, does not list an author (so you don't know who's writing this information) and says clearly on page one that the information is not intended as medical advice. And lastly, the last website had a well-known, if self-styled author, who was the center of controversy in 2002 after other vegans accused him of making false claims and distorting the (already bad) truth. They also relied quite a bit on information from PETA, which is a respectable but biased organization. In short, none of these are valid sources and would not pass muster at any major magazine. They could all be starting points, sure, but from the citations, it doesn't appear that the writers followed them up to find more concrete facts.

There's nothing wrong with veganism and I'm sure it has a good amount of science to support it. I just hope that anyone considering such a radical dietary change will find out about the pros and cons by reading a book written by legitimate experts.

#18: The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown

2009-10-15T12:20:00.008-05:00

I'd probably have to give The Lost Symbol - the biggest book release of the year - 2.5 stars. It wasn't awful, but it's also no match for The Da Vinci Code or my personal favorite, Angels & Demons. Simply put, it just wasn't as enthralling as the other two - there was never a point where I felt absolutely compelled to keep reading.

So, The Lost Symbol is the third Robert Langdon novel, with our hero being lured to the Capitol under false pretenses. When he gets there, he finds out he's not there to give a speech; instead, greeted by his friend's severed hand, he learns that he must uncover the Mason's long-buried Lost Word to appease a lone madman. Over the course of the night, Langdon teams up with the victim's sister, Katherine, and runs all over D.C. trying to solve the mystery and avoid the CIA.

Part of the problem, I think, is that The Lost Symbol doesn't stand on its own - its format is VERY similar to The Da Vinci Code and towards the end, there's some thematic overlap with Angels & Demons. It didn't totally feel like its own book, although I think he made a smart choice in this one by not attempting to deliver the secrets of the Masons. In The Da Vinci Code, he comes up with an answer for the modern location of the Holy Grail, which requires a large suspension of disbelief; here, instead, he manages to wrap up the book without having to make something up, to the book's benefit. (It's the same sort of choice that Junot Diaz makes in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, with the Mongoose's secret message.)

I also think, perhaps, that for me, the Freemasons are just not as compelling as the history of Christianity or science versus faith at the Vatican. I don't really know anything about the Masons or the conspiracy theories surrounding them, so I didn't really have any preconceived notions to be stripped of.

In the end, I did learn something about the Masons (and feel like there are some places in D.C. that I'd like to re-see). But more than anything, I learned - or rather, remembered - that wow, it's really easy to manipulate people. Obviously this is a work of fiction but I was struck time and time again by how the villian managed to fairly believable gain entrance to places simply by acting with confidence.

People generally give Dan Brown shit, but I like him. I don't think he's setting out to write great literature - his purpose seems to be to write a good thriller. And I think he accomplishes that for the most part here. It's not The Da Vinci Code, but that's probably an unrealistic standard to hold him too. (And hey, Dan, if you're feeling somewhat down about the mushy reviews, have a listen to Elizabeth Gilbert talk about the expectations that come with blockbuster success.) So I totally have to give Dan Brown props for poking fun of himself:

On page 355, he writes, “In a flash, Langdon understood the meaning of Galloway’s last request. Tell Peter this: The Masonic Pyramid has always kept her secret…sincerely. The words had seemed strange at the time, but now Langdon understood that Dean Galloway was sending Peter a code. Ironically, this same code had been a plot twist in a mediocre thriller Langdon had read years ago.”

The name of that mediocre thriller? Digital Fortress, Dan Brown's first book.

#17: My Sister's Keeper, Jodi Picoult

2009-10-14T21:54:00.006-05:00

Ugg, I seriously hated this book. And interestingly, the friend who gave it to me loved it. Although I have no idea why. (Spoilers ahead, by the way)

The idea is interesting: A family conceives a baby that will be, with the help of science, a perfect genetic match for their dying daughter, Kate. But as a young teenager, Anna is tired of being noticed only when her body parts are needed and decides to sue for medical emancipation. But My Sister's Keeper just didn't captivate me. The characters were pretty one-dimensional, with the rebellious son, hero father, and callous lawyer; the mother was so awful that it was hard to see her point of view. With the trial, the novel could have had a lot of tension, but it just kind of plodded along. Partially it was the language - my friend liked its reliance on dialogue, but I felt that Picoult relied too much on allusion and metaphor to make "grand" points that weren't terribly insightful. So I was already disliking the book...and then I got to the end. Oh, the end.

What I really, truly hated about this book was the enormous cop-out ending. I felt like Picoult chose this subject - genetically engineered children, medical rights - to be controversial, which of course would stir up interest in the book upon publication. But then, there's nothing to back it up - Picoult doesn't take a stand and she doesn't offer any sort of meditation on the subject.

In the Readers Club Guide at the back of the book, Picoult says of the ending, "...this isn't an easy book, and you know from the first page that there are no easy answers." But I really felt that she took the easy road. At the end, Kate is at death's door. She needs the kidney that her sister doesn't want to donate, but she probably isn't going to make it, regardless - enough so that her doctor is actually against transplant. Even though Anna wins her case and gets to make her own decisions, she will presumably still be at the mercy of her mother's wishes for her to donate. It's not that Anna's not going to do it; it's more that, at the end, she's won the right to make her own choice. And here we are, at the big question: Should Anna feel obligated to save the sister she loves, even if it may not work and be bad for her own long-term health? The real crux of My Sister's Keeper is how can you balance the equally deserving but opposing needs of two children that you desperately love.

Guess what the answer is? That's right; there is no answer. Instead, Anna is killed in a car wreck immediately following the conclusion of the trial. Her kidney is given to her sister who, miraculously, recovers from leukemia and goes on to live a healthy life. Seriously? It annoyed me that Picoult never tried to answer the hard questions - I don't think there was a perfect ending that would have satisfied all readers, but I think she should have tried for something. But it really bugged me that she purposely chose a controversial topic and never did anything with it. (And no surprise, rebellious brother gets fixed and the scummy lawyer - who ran from his high school girlfriend over a seizure disorder, again, seriously? - gets the girl back anyway.)

Do yourself the favor of staying away from My Sister's Keeper. You will thank me, really.

#16: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson

2009-10-14T21:29:00.006-05:00

I ended up picking this book up by chance. I was traveling and had finished the two books I brought with me - The Sex Lives of Cannibals and Air Babylon - and wanted to trade them in for something else. But I just couldn't find anything decent, until I discovered The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in a spirituality focused used-book store in a small beach town. I only picked it up, actually, because a guy at Borders had just told me it was one of the best books he'd recently read. The point is, I hadn't intended to read it, but it came into my life anyway.

For the most part, I liked it, although not enough to read the next book, The Girl Who Played with Fire, in the trilogy. On the one hand, I was pretty into the book until the last 100 pages or so, and couldn't wait to dive back into it; on the other hand, I was absolutely shocked by the sexual violence in the book, which the jacket doesn't mention.

The book seems to be about disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist, who's both trying to solve the mystery of what happened to 16-year-old Harriet Vanger in 1966 and get revenge on industralist Hans-Erik Wennerstrom. But I think the book, on a deeper level, is really about violence perpetrated against women. (Each section starts with some kind of statistic, after all.) And it's fine as a topic, but I wish I'd known beforehand that that's what the book is really about, because I'm not sure I would have picked it.

But otherwise, the book is pretty well-written, although I think Larsson (in the form of Blomkvist) took a few unbelievable leaps in solving the mystery. The writing is a little stiff - though that may be about the translation - and, as a side note, has a surprising amount of techy details (like an exhausted list of Mac laptop specs) which I found amusing for some reason. I would argue that the last 100 pages - which resolve the Wennerstrom thread after the Harriet mystery has been solved - could have been eliminated, but that's personal preference.

So, all in all, I liked it but I didn't love it. :)

#15: Air Babylon, Imogen Edwards-Jones

2009-10-14T20:58:00.007-05:00

Hmm, I'm kinda surprised at myself that I've read another one of these Babylon books. While I quite enjoyed Fashion Babylon, and learned a lot, I found Beach Babylon to be amusing but lacking plot. Sadly, Air Babylon seems to fall into the second category as well.

Having said that, I didn't expect much and the books aren't marketed as high literature. They're good for a quick, amusing read and I liked this book enough to pass it on to a friend.

My only issue, really, is with the plot...or lack of plot. Air Babylon is about a day in the life of a British airport supervisor (at Heathrow, as I recall). It's more or less supposed to be an ordinary day, except at the end of it, a couple of the employees - including the narrator - are flying to Dubai to celebrate a birthday. Also, the supervisor has a crush on one of the flight attendents who's going to be traveling with the group. That's kinda where the plot ends - the book is really constructed around the anecdotes, and everything happens to link the anecdotes together. And in order to use the most hilarious/awful/shocking stories she discovered over the course of her research, Edwards-Jones always makes the worst thing happen. It made the book feel predictable and repetitive because you knew every new scenario was going to involve a crisis and there was no surprise when it indeed arrived.

Oh, and for the first ten pages, I assumed the narrator was a woman, I think because the cover shows a flight attendant. So it was a big shock to find out it was a man, and have to rearrange all my mental images I'd come up with.

As a side note, I can't say whether or not the anecdotes are at all true. The friend that I gave the book to spent a summer working as a flight attendant, and didn't think they sounded too outrageous. So, interestingly, an Amazon reviewer feels pretty strongly that Air Babylon is insulting exaggerated. But who knows...

#14: The Sex Lives of Cannibals, J. Maarten Troost

2009-10-14T20:44:00.004-05:00

I read this book about a month ago, mostly while stuck in an airport, and I'm a little fuzzy on the details...but I actually had the same thought the moment I finished the book. What actually happened? There's not a plot to speak of; the author moves to Tarawa, an atoll in the Republic of Kiribati, with his employed girlfriend and he mostly writes about the ridiculous culture shock he experienced. (And it is ridiculous - I was in Kiribati ten years ago, though for a far shorter period of time, and Troost is not exaggerating in the slightest.)

So yeah, I can't really tell you what happened - he swam, he fished, he made a journey by boat - but oddly enough, it's not really a criticism. I quite liked The Sex Lives of Cannibals - it was an easy read (thus, good for traveling) and totally light-hearted and amusing. So, two thumbs up. Heck, he gets a thumb just for the title.

#13: Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates

2009-06-03T16:42:00.007-05:00

I'm not totally sure if I liked Revolutionary Road. In a weird way, it reminds me of my feelings on Wuthering Heights: On one hand, I hated it because the characters were despicable, but on the other, there's no denying that the author knew what he/she was doing. So I guess my verdict on this one is interesting. It's an interesting, infuriating book and be warned, I am going to SPOIL, SPOIL, SPOIL ahead.

I have to give serious props to Yates, though; I think Revolutionary Road is one of the most well-crafted books I've ever read. The story is about Frank and April Wheeler, a young couple that lives out in the 'burbs on the titular street in the 1950s. They're out there doing what they think they're supposed to be doing - raising kids, mowing the lawn, being prosperous - but they feel unfulfilled. And the main reason for that is they feel they're extraordinary people, destined for great things, better things that the mindless routine that everyone else is participating in. Eventually April comes up with an intricate plan to move to Europe so that Frank can "find" himself and his calling, and they can live a life of culture in Paris. But for all his talk, it turns out that Frank's afraid - of change, of himself. He starts quietly sabotaging the plan until a gift arrives in his lap: April's pregnant. He pushes her and manipulates her until she agrees to stay on Revolutionary Road and stick with the status quo, but never realizes that he's pushed her too far until it's too late. And the book ends just as it started, as a hot depressing mess.

In looking at the Amazon reviews, some people blamed April for the Wheelers' problems, calling her stuck-up and pushy. More people saw them as equally responsible, both holding unrealistic and over-inflated visions of who they were. But as I read the book, I realized that we really have no idea who April is, because she doesn't get to represent herself until the very end of the book, 40 pages from the end, when she commits her terrible deed. She's always seen through the eyes of other people and even with dialogue, the episodes are recounted from the other person's point of view. She's literally the last character who gets to direct the scene from her point of view; even her children get a turn first. During scenes with Frank, April's generally seen as mean because he both hates her and is afraid of her; during Shep-the-neighbor's turn at the wheel, April comes across as haughty, but yet he's also frustrated by his fixation with her. Once I realized this, it really made me question what was real with April and what was being put upon her by her suitors.

For example, one of Frank's great fixations is how April may be incapable of love (because he can't accept that she just might not love him), and he's disturbed by something she once said to him. The quote from the book is: "'I love you when you're nice,' she'd told him once, before they were married, and it had made him furious.'" (p. 49) But the thing I realized is, we don't actually hear her say it. Frank says that she said it. And we know that Frank is both an embellisher and a liar. He's very good at transforming situations into stories that work for his personal narrative, and we see that throughout Revolutionary Road. The most obvious example comes during his lunch meeting with Bart Pollock. Frank works for the same company that his father did and he's particularly haunted by a city lunch he had as a kid with him and a man named Oat Fields. So when Pollock takes him out to lunch, he's reminded of it - and then he turns the story into something that he sees as better. "He couldn't be sure - there were several hotels of this size and kind in the neighborhood - but the possibility was strong enough to please his sense of ironic coincidence. 'Isn't that the damndest thing?' he would demand of April tonight. 'Exactly the same room Same potted palms, same little bowls of oyster crackers - Jesus, it was like something in a dream. I sat there feeling ten years old." (p. 206) As a result of incidents like this, I think you have to question what was actually said and what Frank has decided what April has said. And thus, start to wonder if April is really this person we've been lead to believe she is.

So yeah, I really started to question whether April was actually as mean and withholding as she came across. (I doubt it.) And that feeling, more that anything, really made me see her as trapped. Frustratingly, depressingly trapped. I kinda knew that something drastic was coming at the end, because it seemed fairly obvious that she had to snap, and I have to admit, I really, really wanted her to poison him. Isn't that awful? But I seriously just wanted her to do him in and escape. Alas, it was not to be...

I can't end this though with talking about Frank, her horrible, manipulative little husband. He is truly awful because he was just obsessed with impressions, control, and his manhood (or, more correctly, how other people saw him as a man). He also uses the most deluded logic to make decisions, and there were moments in the book where I wanted to reach in and smack him. Like, for example, he takes a boring job at Knox Business Machines because he doesn't want to get sucked into an interesting job that he won't be able to leave when his life takes off. As a result, he spends years doing nothing at a job he hates. Huh? But the worst is his explanation near the beginning of the book of why he decided to marry his pregnant girlfriend, April. He doesn't actually want a baby but when she wants to get an abortion, his manhood feels threatened. So he manipulates her and guilts her into having it, because he simply can't bear the idea that she doesn't want to carry his seed. Which is what leads him to getting the job at Knox.

Frank is one of those people who is just all bullshit. Near the end of the book, when April wants to terminate her third pregnancy, he fashions himself to be a psychologist like Freud and tells her she has penis-envy. Of course, he knows zero about it but eventually convinces her that she needs to start seeing a psychiatrist because she has deep mental issues. And it's just so ridiculous because he manages to convince her that she's crazy - and she's not. Arguably, he is the one that's crazy. He doesn't want another baby; he just wants an excuse to stay in his comfy life and get out of going to Paris. Instead of being honest about his feelings, he concocts all this bullshit so he can still feel like the man. Okay, I need to breathe - can you tell that this book made me angry?

In the end - and this really is the end - people start to see beneath the veneer. John the crazy man realizes and confronts Frank about his cowardice in a painfully awkward social setting. In the last few pages, Shep realizes that Frank drove April to her demise because he was always playing a game. But I sort of had to wonder if it mattered, because April was still dead and Frank deposited his kids with relatives, allowing him to start playing the sad but worldly widower.

And the thing is, I think Yates intended all of these things. You're supposed to see Frank as this delusional idiot and I think you're supposed to see April as trapped in an image. In that respect, Revolutionary Road is genius. It just also happens to be as depressing as all hell.

#11 and #12: Something Borrowed and Something Blue, Emily Giffin

2009-05-23T17:21:00.006-05:00

When I saw Something Borrowed and Something Blue on the "Buy 1, Get 1 Half Price" shelf at Borders a few weeks ago, I immediately snapped them up. I really enjoyed both of these books when I read them a few years ago. While they're firmly entrenched in the Chick Lit camp, Giffin skipped a lot of the standard cliches (as I recalled anyway).

Something Borrowed was just as good as I remembered. I think I read it in less than 36 hours, despite already knowing how it would end. The story is about two childhood best friends, Rachel and Darcy, who are now adults and living in New York City. Darcy's always had a charmed life and when the novel starts, she's engaged to a handsome banker named Dex. Rachel, on the other hand, is more of a hardworking wallflower. But, on the night of Rachel's 30th birthday, she gets drunk and sleeps with Dex and drama ensues. (I'm not giving anything away, by the way - this is all on the back cover of the book.) As a reader, you certainly like Rachel from the start and root for her, but I thought Giffin did a good job of giving Darcy some appealing qualities, so that she's not a one-dimensional villain. Giffin also does a good job of revealing the story layer by layer - it's not quite what it seems to be on page one and while it's not over-the-top, I don't think you can really guess what's going to happen, either.

Something Blue, on the other hand, isn't quite as good and I think that's because it relies too much on its predecessor. The second book is Darcy's story and what happens to her after she loses Dex (sorry, it's a spoiler, but it's on the back of this book's cover!). As established in Book One, Darcy is a selfish, self-absorbed girl who occasionally stuck up for her best friend. Those qualities work in Something Borrowed because Darcy's supposed to lose. But then, in Book Two, when she's the heroine you're supposed to care about, it doesn't quite work. And it takes her 210 pages to figure out that she's the most shallow person ever. I think you keep reading through Darcy's selfishness because you want to know what happens to Rachel and Dex, but is that really enough for a book to stand on its own? In contrast to Something Borrowed, Something Blue also has much more of a conventional Chick Lit ending - meaning that everthing gets tied up into neat little bows. It's not terribly cheesy for the genre but still makes it a fluffier book than the first.

On a final note, I noticed a continuity error between Books One and Two. In Something Borrowed, Darcy's father's name is Hugo Rhone, as seen on the wedding invitations (page 242). However, in Book Two, he apparently changed his name to Hugh (page 112). Oops!

Next up: I've started reading Water for Elephants. I'm not terribly captivated at this point (this point being Chapter Three) but since people seem to love it, I'm still keeping on. However, I might start reading Revolutionary Road as I've only got it out of the library until June 3.

Eat, Pray, Love the movie

2009-05-23T17:05:00.003-05:00

So, yeah, they're turning the book into a movie starring Julia Roberts. Both parts of that sentence seem equally strange to me. Although I like Julia Roberts (especially in America's Sweethearts, call me a dork), I don't see her as Elizabeth Gilbert in the slightest. They just seem to have completely different vibes. (Although when I saw Gilbert at a reading, she said that she felt like she had no involvement in the movie whatsoever and felt like she had to let the work go and let it become the filmmaker's work...if I am remembering that correctly.) Buzz Sugar however recently reported that Richard Jenkins was recently cast as Richard from Texas, which seems absolutely appropriate.

But I also just don't see Eat, Pray, Love as a movie, as much as I love it. Because the thing is, nothing really happens. Yes, she travels to Italy, India, and Indonesia, but so much of the book happens in her head. It's about how she feels and what she's working out internally. And for God's sake, she spends most of her time in India in meditation - and frankly, I don't see more than five minutes of that on film being compelling.

Interestingly, a man is writing and directing the film, due out in 2011. It's Ryan Murphy, who I'd never heard of before but obviously should have, as he's the creator of Nip/Tuck, Glee, and the writer/director of Running with Scissors. (Funny enough, I haven't seen any of these, though I've heard good things about all.) I read a story recently that said he's still working on the EPL screenplay, though I can't seem to find it again on the Interwebs. It'll be interesting to see how it turns out.

#10: Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert

2009-05-23T16:40:00.008-05:00

So upon a second read, I can still say that I love this book. I don't understand why people hate it so vehemently but my theory is that it involves the ugliest of emotions, jealousy. People are jealous that Elizabeth Gilbert got paid to write what seems like an easy book about living in Italy, India, and Indonesia over a period of a year following a nasty divorce.

But yeah...writing a book, even about your own life, isn't easy. More than anything, I really admire Gilbert's willingness to be honest. Over the course of 334 pages, she's happy, depressed, selfish, giving, and self-absorbed, just to name a few characteristics, and she doesn't seem to skimp on any of it. She doesn't hide it and she doesn't sanitize it. And sure, there were some parts I found annoying - reading about anyone's spiritual enlightment always comes across as a little false - but it's all there, no holds barred. I feel like if she had toned down her emotions, then the haters would be griping about dishonesty, or something like that. I guess you can never please some people. :)

Having said that, upon this second read, I have been persuaded to investigate meditation. Spefically, Ketut Liyer's "sit and smile" meditation, which I didn't specifically recall from the go-around. I'm not sure I'm really the Hindu mantra type, but still could use some calm feeling in m life, and I liked the idea of a meditation where you just try to emanate positiveness. I'm not terriby good at it yet, but I guess you've got to start somewhere... Like Bali, perhaps? Yeah, still hoping to go because Eat, Pray, Love makes it just seem strange, convoluted, and fantastic.

#9: The Reader, Bernhard Schlink

2009-04-29T19:31:00.008-05:00

I seriously disliked this book, but I'm not terribly surprised - I avoid Oprah's choices like the plague. But it was our book club selection this month, so I read The Reader anyway. It infuriated me so much that upon completion, I searched the Web for other people's reviews - I just couldn't believe that everyone else loved this book. (It turns out, they didn't - popular reviews on sites like Amazon and Good Reads are mixed.) Oh, and by the way, serious spoilers ahead.

In a nutshell, The Reader is a first-person narrative by a German man named Michael Berg. At age 15, he contracts hepatitis and when he falls ill on the street, he meets an older woman named Hanna. They begin an affair. In between the nookie, Michael reads to her (hence, the title of the book). But Hanna always remains mysterious and refuses to talk about her past. Eventually, Michael grows up and grows out of the affair, and it coincides with Hanna's sudden flight from the town. Less than ten years later, Michael discovers all of Hanna's secrets when, as a law student, he attends the trial of five women accused of being Nazi concentration camp guards. Michael figures out that Hanna can't read and because of it, she's accepted more blame than she's due; although Michael considers telling the judge, he chickens out in the end. Hanna is sentenced to prison for life. I won't ruin the rest of the book; these details are enough to talk about what I want to discuss.

Michael's conclusion at the end of the book is meant to represent the "truth," and that's mostly what I object to...this ridiculous, one-sided, bullshit "truth." I did read a couple of reviews that suggested that perhaps Schlink intends the reader to see Michael's own culpability but after thinking that over, I have to dismiss it. It's always hard to tell where the line between writer and narrator ends, but Michael never has a moment of clarity, not a second of doubt. He's still blaming Hanna on the last pages. And since this is sort of Schlink's fictionalized autobiography, it also makes me think that he's presenting here his own meditation and conclusion on the question of German guilt.

Basically, in trying to figure out how - as part of the first generation of post-war Germans - to see the Holocaust, Michael settles on blame. He blames everyone: the generation before his, his parents, Hanna. And he's ultimately unsatisfied because no one seems as sorry as he thinks they ought to be. He's so self-righteous - and mid-book, clearly enjoys playing the martyr - that he never sees how he's contributed to the situation.

At the trial, when the other defendents realize that Hanna's digging herself into a hole with her honesty, they gang up on her and turn her into the scapegoat. The book implies, I think, that Hanna fell into her role as a guard (because she was running away from a situation where she'd have to admit her illiteracy) whereas these other defendents are actually bad people at heart (because they're still acting rotten, trying to evade responsibility). The big moral question, supposedly, is how we deal with our kind feelings toward Hanna, who admittedly worked as a guard at Auschwitz. But why aren't we ever asked to judge Michael's actions? He vacillates for pages about whether or not to go to the judge with this inside information, and finally does, saying: "I did go to the presiding judge after all. I couldn't make myself visit Hanna. But neither could I endure doing nothing." There's such a self-congratulatory tone to the sentences. The only problem? He doesn't actually tell the judge about Hanna. He goes there, sure, but he does NOTHING, because he's afraid to rock the boat and jeopardize his own situation. And that makes him no different than the millions of Germans during World War II who did nothing in resistance because they were afraid of the potential consequences to themselves. You could say Michael's dilemma is minor in comparison, but he was never presented with the big question in his lifetime - this is his moral test and he fails. Actually, he fails it every time. And in the context of the trial, it actually does have some consequence - Hanna gets a life sentence and the other women, who deserved more, only get a few years. Michael helps them get away with murder, in all senses of the phrase.

Instead, Michael wallows in this pseudo-guilt, agonizing over whether he's a bad person because he loves a bad person. Seriously? It's just so overwrought and melodramatic. Which is sort of amazing in a book that uses almost no description. Rather, The Reader is a book filled with vague, contradictory prose that intends to ask these big questions, but kinda just meanders around them instead. Since I've already written an epic, I'll let someone else's review take over...I laughed out loud when I found it, since clearly she and I folded down the exact same pages with the intent of making the point. So, for more on The Reader's stilted prose, click here: http://www.caribousmom.com/2008/08/16/the-reader-book-review/

Anyway, moving on: I'm about halfway through my second trip through Eat, Pray, Love. I've been reading it with a more critical eye, just to try and see it through the haters' eyes, but what can I say, I still love it.

#8: In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Ondaatje

2009-04-29T19:28:00.004-05:00

Yes, I've read this book before - multiple times, in fact. It's interesting to me because certain scenes always stick out, even now I can recount them, but then there are other details that I consistently forget. In the Skin of a Lion is a weird, strange, lovely book. And since I've blogged about it recently, I won't go into it again. Mostly I'm just adding this entry as a record of book #8. Alright then, moving on...

The Sisterhood of Mean Girls

2009-03-29T20:30:00.005-05:00

So, as I was Googling to try and verify that the Sisterhood girls did indeed go to different schools in the first book, I came across a very disturbing story about how Ann Brashares came to write The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Although I first read the account on Wikipedia, it seems to be well substantiated in outlets I trust, like Gawker and The New York Observer (although the link no longer exists).

According to these sources, a young woman named Jodi Anderson used to work at Alloy Media + Marketing, a company which connects products to a targeted audience...and the audience seems to be teen girls. (I'd always wondered why the company published books and sold clothes, and now I know!) Anyway, in the book division, Alloy works as a packager, coming up with marketable ideas and outlines and then hiring a writer to produce an actual book. Anderson apparently came up with the Pants concept, based on her own experiences of sharing a pair of pants with her college girlfriends, and she thought she was going to be chosen to write the book, since it was her idea and all - but Brashares, co-president of the company, decided to write it instead. Anderson has since written her own book (actually multiple books), but none have been anywhere near as successful as The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series. She apparently has also not commented on the matter.

This makes me ill. I'm always amazed at what people are willing to do to one another. No doubt Anderson's employment contract stated that Alloy owned any and all ideas and could do what they wanted with them, but I don't think it excuses it. No matter what the legalese says, you're still building your success on somebody else's inspiration. The contract is a way of making everyone who profited feel better. My old boss essentially tried to do the same thing, although I had already left the job so there was no contract to bind - but he had been a crafty litttle devil when he'd signed his, and owned every new concept, no matter which staffer came up with it. He said to my face that he was claiming ownership over everything with an implied and what are you going to do about it? Thankfully, I was smart enough to tell him to shove it.

Anyway, I found all this Alloy information by way of articles and blogs about Kaavya Viswanathan, the high-schooler-turned-Harvard-student whose first novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life was a bestseller containing a great deal of plagarism. Viswanathan also worked with Alloy publishing and according to Slate (via The New York Times), her original novel involved Irish history - not the un-dorking of an Indian girl trying to get into Harvard (which is kinda-sorta Viswanathan's personal tale). No one really seems to blame book packaging for the plagarism; I think it's more frustration, seeing people write best-sellers and earn themselves fame and fortune in the process, only to find out there's unhandedness involved (because I think we could all write bestsellers if given a concept and someone else's book to lift from). As one of the literary agents involved said, per the Boston Globe: "We had all recognized that Kaavya had the craftsmanship, she's beautiful and charming, she just needed to find the right novel that would speak to her generation and to people beyond her years as well." Her original concept wasn't good enough, so they gave her a new one. OMG, and apparently she got half a million dollars for it, too. Kill me now. (Even worse, the Amazon reviewers mostly trash it, controversy aside.)

This blogger talks mostly about Opal Mehta but also briefly about Ann Brashares:
http://avastconspiracy.blogspot.com/2006/05/dirty-chick-lit-secret-exposed-in.html

Ann Hulbert on Kaavya Viswanathan:
http://www.slate.com/id/2140683/fr/rss/

The New York Times on book packaging:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/27/books/27pack.html?_r=1

#6 and #7: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Books 3 and 4

2009-03-29T19:58:00.002-05:00

So I finished books 3 and 4 - Girls in Pants and Forever in Blue - about two weeks ago, maybe more. I've forgotten the finer details, so I won't spend much time on this post. But I do know that out of all four books, I think I liked Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood the best, mostly because it was the only book that hadn't been pillaged for the movies. It was nice not to know what was going to happen. (Book Two wasn't bad in that respect, but the third was the only one that was truly Hollywood-free.) For the same reason, I wasn't quite as into Book 4, as the Sisterhood movie sequel basically followed right along. But overall, as easy reads, the series was pleasant and enjoyable, and even contained little nuggets of wisdom that I identified with.

There's only one thing that I really wanted to point out: At the beginning of Book 3, the girls all go to the senior party together, and I think it's pretty well implied that all four of them (plus Brian and Effie) go to the same high school. But I would be willing to bet good money that in Book 1, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, they go to different schools (though as I recall, two of them - maybe Carmen and Lena? - did go to the same school). I remember especially because I found it a little hard to believe that they would be able to remain best friends with all the distractions and new schoolmates that high school presents. Anyway...

At the moment I'm reading two books: Frida: A biography of Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herrera and In the Skin of a Lion. Frida's not bad, but it's slow, and I'm sort of wondering if I'm going to read all of it - in general, biographies aren't my genre (I generally find the nitpicky details, like dates and names of schools and neighbors, tedious). I'm not sure what I'd start otherwise, though - maybe a second run of Eat, Pray, Love?

#4 and #5: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Books 1 and 2

2009-03-12T13:58:00.004-05:00

I really love the movie version of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants so I decided to pick up the book. I'm kind of a sucker for teen movies and films because even though I'm no longer a teenager, I find that they generally contain the optimism and hope that I miss from being a teenager. You know, that your friends are going to be your friends forever and everything is destiny and your life will work out perfectly. (Don't get me wrong, I'm not an unhappy adult - I just miss that unabashed innocence of the uncomplicated years is all. There's something very powerful in that belief.) I was also under the mistaken impression that this was a book written during my teen years and I'd just missed it - but no, it was written in 2001 and I was in my 20s then.

Anyway, I wasn't so keen on the first book. And apparently the movie producers weren't either, since they changed almost every detail. (I tried to find an explanation for this on the Internet, but no go; almost every review said they remained mostly faithful to the book. Huh? Did we see the same movie?) The basics remained the same: It's a story about four best friends who find a pair of jeans that fits them all perfectly and they send the pants around to each other over the summer as a way of staying connected. Lena goes to Greece and falls in love; Carmen goes to South Carolina to visit her divorced, single father, only to discover he's found a new family; Bridget goes to soccer camp in Baja and falls for a coach; and Tibby stays home to work at a drugstore and she forms a friendship with a 12-year-old who has leukemia. But then after that, the book is pretty different - and strangely, I think the screenwriter did the better job. I recognize that I have a strong bias toward the movie, and perhaps I wasn't giving the book its own fair shot, but I just found it to be...meandering. The movie does a much better job of providing reasons and/or explanations - like why Bridget is so reckless, what happens with her and Eric on the beach, why Lena's in love with Kostos at the end of the summer...

But the characters are compelling, without a doubt, and quite similar to the live-action versions. So I decided to read Book 2, The Second Summer of the Sisterhood. I was totally curious as to how things turned out - I've seen the second version of the movie, but with the way Book 1 ended, it seemed impossible for the book version and the movie version to match up. And sure enough, they didn't, not really in the slightest. But that was okay - I quite liked Book 2. Even though it also suffered from some contrived situations, it was touching - and I felt genuinely bad for Lena and Bridget, especially. In the second book, the girls are still in high school; Lena stays home for the summer agonizing over Kostos, Carmen stays home and ruins her mother's relationship with a new boyfriend, Tibby goes to a filmmaking course in Virginia, and Bridget runs off to Alabama to reconnect with herself and her grandmother.

My only real gripe with the second book was the emphasis on appearance - which seems like a harmful thing in a book written for teen girls. Basically after the ambiguous thing that happens with soccer coach Eric in Mexico, Bridget slides into a funk. She quits soccer and dyes her trademark hair black - and god forbid, gains 15 pounds. And while I realize it's supposed to be a metaphor, I was mostly just left with the impression that weight = bad. I just wonder if young girls realize that Bridget re-finds herself because she confronted the truth - and not just because she went back to being that gorgeous, svelte girl that everyone loved.

Anyway, so I'm on to Book Three tomorrow. Yes, I've been sucked into this series. And I'm kinda hoping Lena is going to get the movie's fairy tale ending with Kostos. I don't think it's going to happen but having lived through a similar situation in real life, I know it sucks and you think about it forever, so I've got my fingers crossed for her.

And on a final note, as an added bonus, the very hilariously awesome clip of America Ferrera and Blake Lively promoting The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2. Yes, it's the one with the eye roll...

http://gawker.com/5041417/in-the-name-of-the-sisterhood-blake-lively-forgives-america-ferrera-her-eye+roll

My List of 30

2009-03-11T00:31:00.004-05:00

Alright, so thinking about that list of the 1001 Greatest Books EVER in the wee hours has led me to think about my list of 30 for the year. I'm not sure why I made a list, except that I was a bit frustrated that I didn't read some of the books I intended to last year - I skipped a lot of "serious" ones in favor of easy reads.

I also want to re-read some great books this year. While I don't especially like re-reading - there are just too many out there - it troubles me to have forgotten the intricacies of books I absolutely love.

Okay, so here it is. I have no doubt that at the end of the year, I will find that I've read a completely different list.

I've already read four: Beach Babylon, The Temptation of the Night Jasmine, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (as yet un-blogged)

The next 17 are previous un-read tomes I'd like to tackle:
5. The Second Summer of the Sisterhood
6. The Subtle Knife
7. The Canterbury Tales
8. Lolita
9. The Beautiful and the Damned
10. The Golden Notebook
11. Alfred and Emily
12. War and Peace
13. 1,000 Years of Solitude
14. Revolutionary Road
15. The Reader
16. Metamorphosis
17. The Bell Jar
18. Hayden Herrera's biography of Frida Kahlo
19. Joanna Denny's Anne Boleyn
20. Nicholas and Alexandra
21. Outliers

And the ones I've already read and would like to read again:
Eat Pray Love, An Italian Affair, The Great Gatsby, A Moveable Feast, In the Skin of a Lion, Villette, The Time Traveler's Wife, The Red Tent, House of the Spirits, Farenheit 451, Slaughterhouse 5, My Father's Glory, and My Mother's Castle

And actually, if memory serves, 11 of these books are on the list of 1001 from the last post. (And some, bizarrely aren't - like A Moveable Feast, Farenheit 451, or The Canterbury Tales. What's up with that?) Hmm, maybe I should register myself after all...

Yes, I like making lists. Because don't you know, making lists of what you ought to be doing helps you put off doing it?!? Yes, let's keep making lists...

The 1% Well Read Challenge

2009-03-10T23:31:00.003-05:00

Who'd have thunk it, but apparently there are reading challenges all over the Internet. Apparently there are also a heck of a lot of people blogging about their reading, just like me. I had no idea. I seriously need to spend more time surfing the web.

Anyway, I came across this website, http://1morechapter.com/, that presents the challenge to read 10 books in a year from 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. I've come across this hefty tome before in the library. And while I probably won't join the challenge, mostly because I've already made a list of my 30 books for this year (okay, so it's longer than 30 already, sue me), I was interested to see which of the 1001 books I've already read. The list has changed between editions, but I'll count both...I think I'm going to need all the help I can get.

Play along here: http://1morechapter.com/projects/1001-list/

Alright, so here goes:

1. The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri (hated it)
2. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon
3. Atonement, Ian McEwan
4. Life of Pi, Yann Martel
5. Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden
6. Felicia's Journey, William Trevor
7. The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields
8. The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje
9. Time's Arrow, Martin Amis
10. Amongst Women, John McGahern
11. Possession, A.S. Byatt (This one has been axed from the current 1001 version. A crime against literature and the awesomeness that is Possession if you ask me...)
12. Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
13. Like Water for Chocolate, Laura Esquivel
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving
15. The Swimming-Pool Library, Alan Hollinghurst
16. Beloved, Toni Morrison
17. An Artist of the Floating World, Kazuo Ishiguro
18. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marcia
19. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson
20. Less Than Zero, Bret Easton Ellis
21. The Handmaiden's Tale, Margaret Atwood
22. The Lover, Marguerite Duras
23. Empire of the Sun, J.G. Ballard
24. The Color Purple, Alice Walker
25. A Pale View of Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro
26. The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
27. The Shining, Stephen King
28. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
29. Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut
30. The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison

Okay, I'm only about 1/3 of the way through the 1001 and already have 30. Since I don't want this to go on forever, I'm switching format:

Slaughterhouse-Five (31); 2001: A Space Odyssey (32); God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (33); Cat's Cradle (34); One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (35); Franny and Zooey (36); To Kill a Mockingbird (37); Breakfast at Tiffany's (38); The Lord of the Rings (39); The Talented Mr. Ripley (40); The Old Man and the Sea (41); The Catcher in the Rye (42); 1984 (43); Cry, the Beloved Country (44); Animal Farm (45); The Little Prince (46); The Grapes of Wrath (47); Rebecca (48); The Hobbit (49); Tender is the Night (50); Brave New World (51); A Farewell to Arms (52); The Sound and the Fury (53); Orlando (54); The Sun Also Rises (55); The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (56); The Great Gatsby (57); A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (58); A Room with a View (59); Heart of Darkness (60); Dracula (61); The Kreutzer Sonata (62); The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (63); The Death of Ivan Ilyich (64); Return of the Native (65); Little Women (66); Crime and Punishment (67); Fathers and Sons (68); The Woman in White (69); Madame Bovary (70); Villette (71); The Scarlet Letter (72); Wuthering Heights (73); Jane Eyre (74); Le Pere Goriot (75); Last of the Mohicans (76); Frankenstein (77); Northanger Abbey (78); Pride and Prejudice (79); Gulliver's Travels (80)

Huh. I'm impressed with myself. I've read most of the stories in Borges' Labyrinths but didn't count it; I know I've also read some Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, but can't actually remember which ones I read and which ones I just saw the movie of. What can I say, it all happened within the same time period and it's not really my genre. But I figure if I can't remember, I can't guess-timate.

But midway through I also realized why I don't give lists like this much attention - because they're invariably filled with books you ought to read but feel like taking a bullet. There are a number on there I started and put down early, within 30 pages or so. But there were also a few that deserve a special shout-out because I stopped reading them almost at the end - and I never do that. Except when a book is killing me slowly, which is what happened with In Cold Blood, A Passage to India, Jude the Obscure, Vanity Fair, and The Count of Monte Cristo.

Oh me oh my, this was fun.

#3: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz

2009-03-09T16:22:00.004-05:00

While I completely understand why this book won the Pulitzer Prize, I'd have to rate it my feelings on it somewhere from fair to good. I did like it, I found some parts absolutely captivating, but I'd also like to sit down with Junot Diaz and get some answers.

In terms of tone, starting on page one, the novel kicks ass. You don't figure out who the narrator is until the middle of the book but that unknown voice is hilarious and irreverant, and peppers the beginning bits of the novel with these wise-ass footnotes where you learn all you ever wanted to know (and perhaps more) about the history of the Dominican Republic. I certainly didn't know much, just Porfirio Rubirosa and its reputation for beautiful beaches and a location on a small island with Haiti. Oh, and that they're losing the fight with Spain over which country holds the true remains of Christopher Columbus.

Seemingly the title gives the book away: On the face, it's a book about this fat Dominican sci-fi nerd called Oscar and his short life (not sure about wondrous, though). He's obsessed with Tolkien and girls and never really comes close to either one. If you believe in magic, the reason behind Oscar's bad luck is a fukú – or a family curse that's affected all of them because his grandfather dared oppose the infamous Dominican dictator Trujillo. If you don't believe, Oscar's troubles are his own fault because he never makes much attempt to change the situation. He knows he's a dork, and he's sad about being a dork, but he never makes peace with it or tries to change it. That's one of my main gripes about the book, his lack of agency. I believe in the idea of the fukú, but Oscar doesn't really know about it – so he can't blame it. He just wallows. And as a result, he becomes annoying and I never really came to see beyond it because he stays a pretty one-dimensional character. I just never cared that much about what happens to him in the end.

On the other hand, the story of his grandfather's demise and his mother's childhood and escape to America is fascinating – and reminds me of Latin American magical realism novels. Which I love. Because who doesn't need a little magic in their lives? I sure do. Anyway, the middle section of Oscar Wao is filled with the mysterious Caribbean, a brutal dictator, beautiful women, a magic Mongoose with golden eyes, a man without a face, and missing words...and reminds me of novels like Love in the Time of Cholera and The House of the Spirits.

My other gripe with the book is the use of slang – I would actually say overuse, although I couldn't find a reviewer that agreed with me. If I ever meet Junot Diaz, I'm going to ask him about it. While certainly the abundant usage of Dominican slang helps set the tone, I got annoyed with it pretty quickly. As a Spanish speaker, I didn't mind the general terms but there was quite a bit that wasn't even in the dictionary. New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani implies that it was enough to get a general sense of the meaning (she calls it, "a sort of streetwise brand of Spanglish that even the most monolingual reader can easily inhale"), but I disagree – a novel is a work of art created by words. And so if you can't grasp the intricacies of the words, doesn't that vague up the message? I don't know for sure, but it bugged me. None of my friends seem to mind it, although one said that it took her the entire book to figure out the meaning of tio, or uncle.

Oh, the other thing I would ask Junot Diaz? I would ask him what the Mongoose says at the end of the book. It gives Oscar a three-word message, but like all the "truths" in this novel, the words get swept away by the fukú, lost forever. And I'm totally curious if even Diaz knows what the Mongoose says – or if he can only guess at it.

Kakutani's review that contains way more details on the book's plot than you may want to know:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/04/books/04diaz.html

#2: The Temptation of the Night Jasmine, Lauren Willig

2009-03-07T21:26:00.006-06:00

I'm sad to come here today and report that this is the worst book in the series. The Secret History of the Pink Carnation was one of the wittiest books I've ever read and it's like this one, the fifth installment, wasn't even written by the same person. It really lacks the charm and cleverness of its predecessors – even the ones I didn't much like. And by the way: I'm going to discuss how the novel ends in the next paragraph so fair warning, SPOILER AHEAD.

But more importantly, nothing really happens. There are no genuine high points of drama, so the book just seems endless. Instead, The Temptation of the Night Jasmine is just a collection of little moments and a lot of hand-wringing over a ridiculous misunderstanding. Thinking about it now, I’m not sure what took nearly 400 pages to tell. The book is about two things: Robert’s plan of revenge and his occasional wooing of Charlotte. And in the end, he doesn’t even fulfill half his brief: His prey is murdered by someone else, and the murderer escapes into a carriage. Of course he gets Charlotte, but that part was easily predictable by page 14. That is, the page where the two characters make their first appearance. (And fair enough, it's a romance.)

The “tension” in the book, I'm guessing, is supposed to emerge from Robert’s about-face with cousin Charlotte. He romances her on a rooftop and then disappears; when he returns, he acts like his affection was a misunderstanding on her part. And that’s fine, but Willig hits us over the head so many times with Charlotte’s earnest confusion that it just becomes jokey, instead of suspenseful: “It would be too tempting to let herself believe that Robert had come because he couldn’t stay away, that the strange note in his voice had been a sign of repressed emotion, that his concern about Medmenham was a sign that he still wanted her for himself.” (p.202) Gee, as it turns out, the most convoluted explanation for Robert’s standoffish behavior was totally true! I have to roll my eyes over the beating that feminism just took with this paragraph.

Those are all plot and characterization issues, but sadly, language got an equal thrashing here. Willig has written some really incredible novels and I just don’t understand what happened with this one. One thing I noticed early on was the overuse of adverbs, which weighed down conversations that were intended to be light banter. As an example, the two page spread starting on page 28 uses 10 adverbs to describe the word “said” (or its equivalent). He/she said: gloomily, firmly, blandly, giddily, earnestly, thoughtfully, offhandedly, prosaically, ruefully, hopefully. The “said adverbly” set-up alternates with an equally plodding device, that of substituting more complicated verbs for “said.” On these two pages alone, she uses: asked, articulated, murmured, inquired, mimicked, commented, and grumbled. In dialogue, the word “said” blends in and the reader passes over it; other verbs tend to stop or slow the speech down. Obviously, you’re going to use adverbs; I certainly have in here. Same with more sophisticated verbs. The issue is overuse. And in the end, it amounts to dialogue that isn’t allowed to stand on its own. I think that is the biggest weakness in the novel, and reading it page after page just became tedious.

Alright, I’ve bashed this novel enough so I’ll leave well-enough alone. Sad to say, this was probably my last Pink Carnation novel. :(

#1: Beach Babylon, Imogen Edwards-Jones

2009-02-17T15:54:00.007-06:00

I knew it had been awhile since I'd blogged but wow, two months. Yikes! Sometimes I procrastinate and come to the blog with 4 or 5 books queued up, but today the news gets worse: I've only finished one book since New Years. Clearly I am going to have to read hard and heavy in the coming months to make up for this initial shortfall.

I didn't intend to immediately read another "Babylon" book - they're interesting but it feels a little like reading Danielle Steele (ie, like cotton candy for the brain = initially sweet but bad for long-term health). I started both Witch of Portobello (Paulo Coelho) and The Monsters of Templeton (Lauren Groff) but I couldn't get into either one. So I ended up on Beach Babylon. It wasn't great - it's really just a bunch of anecdotes (about life working at a luxury beach resort) strung together. And while they're individually interesting, every book needs a real plot, and this one just didn't have it. But having said that, it was a quick read and I clearly got through it. And that's really all I have to say about it...

Oh, except for the cover. I've made it a little larger than usual so you can see how this gorgeously tanned woman has the freakiest pale hand. It doesn't even look like it belongs to her. And it kinda creeps me out.

Next up: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I'm on page 20 or so, but so far it's fantastic. Which is why it won the Pulitzer Prize, I suppose. Since it's our current book club pick, I had to temporarily put down Lauren Willig's new novel, The Temptation of the Night Jasmine. I'm on page 100 or so of that, and so far, sadly, it's awful.

#30: Fashion Babylon, Imogen Edwards-Jones

2008-12-31T19:03:00.004-06:00

Yeeeeesssss! I have arrived at Book 30, just before the clock strikes the proverbial midnight. Thank god. I can't adequately express the relief I feel to have accomplished this goal for the first time in, like, five years. Five years! Seriously.

I found this book after reading a post on Jezebel.com about luxury brands. It was based on a New York Times story by Guy Trebay (link below), about how stores are discounting luxury goods by 70 percent because of the economy. Some of the Jezebel commentators were saying that when a label/store can sell a $2000 blazer for $300 and everyone still makes money, that shows you how these fashion goods are worth exhorbinant and arbitrary prices. (For the record, I would never pay anywhere near $2000 for an item of clothing.) Anyway, someone recommended Fashion Babylon as a good look at just how arbitrary it is.

Fashion Babylon uses true stories (according to the author) to flesh out the fictional tale of a fledging British fashion designer who wants to show at New York Fashion Week. For the most part, I liked the book. It was definitely a quick read -- I read it in a period of about 36 hours -- and at times, I felt like maybe the author had written it a little too quickly. The one thing that bugged me was that she relied on the same celebrity names (Kate Moss, Scarlett Johanssen) and movies (Munich) over and over again as throwaways, which tends to imply lazy writing. Also, as an American reader, I found the overwhelming usage of British slang frustrating, as there were lines here and there I just didn't understand (but which didn't contribute to the overall book in any meaningful way). Still, I learned lots of interesting things about fashion. Like how designers will blantantly copy vintage dresses (by another label) and no one seems to notice, or how a designer will go out and buy simple pieces, like a white shirt, from a regular store and then just replace the label with their own. Or how, after the initial development investment, perfume only costs about 50 cents a bottle to produce -- no matter the cost on the shelf. The main point, I thought, was how designers set their prices to establish a value for their brand; if you want to be a Dior, you set prices like Dior, and it has little to do with what your clothes are worth (which is basically nothing). Then you sell your loot to a store and if it's in the U.S., they mark it up by another 3 times what they paid, and that's how, all of a sudden, you have a $600 dress. All I can say is: Thank God I learned to sew.

Luxury link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/04/fashion/04SHOPPING.html?_r=2

#29: Sleeping Tiger, Rosamunde Pilcher

2008-12-31T18:50:00.014-06:00

I really love this book, and all of Rosamunde Pilcher's for that matter, although I've never gotten around to The Shell Seekers, her most famous. There's not much to them -- they are generally about a lonely person who gets surprised by love in an unusual place, but they're sweet and hopeful novels.

I hadn't read Sleeping Tiger since 1997 (the first year I started keeping a list of the books I'd read for the year), but saw it sitting there on the shelf beckoning to me. The book is about Selina Bruce, a 20-year-old orphan who's about to marry the wrong man. She's been brought up as a proper young English lady by her grandmother, who's recently died, and she's always done what's expected of her. And the plain girl is about to marry her grandmother's junior lawyer, mostly because she feels she has no other options. Until one day, her fiance gives her a book called Fiesta at Cala Fuerte. The author's photo on the back looks exactly like a photo she once saw of her father, who supposedly died in the war right before Selina was born. So the former wallflower runs off to the Spanish island of San Antonio to find her father and, not unexpectedly, she blossoms. I guess what I most like about it is the idea that you can escape to find yourself...and a glorious setting in the Mediterranean doesn't hurt.

Yeah, the Med. I got all excited to find my own San Antonio, which according to the book is located in the Balearics. But alas, a little Googling tells me it's a made-up island; the closest I could find was the club-land town of San Antonio on Ibiza. Still, there are five real Balearic islands -- perhaps peace and love could be found on Formentera or the one I'd never heard of, Cabrera?

In reading it again, I realize how much I've changed since I first read it (which was not 1997, btw). For one, I see now that the romance between Selina and George Dyer happens way too quickly and without much reason (which is okay, I still love the book). I also found all the vocabulary words I'd highlighted way back when -- words like acquiescence and aversion -- and it's hard to believe that I didn't know what they meant. But, most funny, I also now know that some of the Spanish phrases used in the book are incorrect, like when the Spanish police officer tells her "No hablo Inglese" (umm, "inglés") or when George tells Selina that ella should be pronounced "elya" (as opposed to "a-ya").

Most interesting, at the end of the book, on the inside of the back cover, I found a name and address written in my own handwriting. Problem is, I have no idea who this girl is, where I might have met her, or why I wrote her address down. Hmm.

#28: Mademoiselle Boleyn, Robin Maxwell

2008-12-17T20:53:00.005-06:00

I found this book to be, for the most part, poorly written, historically inaccurate, and boring –and if this wasn't Book 28 just two weeks from the beginning of the new year, I would have chucked it through the window somewhere in the middle. So I'm a little bit pissed at Mademoiselle Boleyn because I felt like I had to keep reading it, and I was terribly impatient to just be done with it.

When I started this book, I asked myself, Why do I keep reading these Tudor histories? I love the Tudors, am obsessed to be honest, but the same thing keeps happening over and over again – which it should, considering the events are historical record. But it makes for repititious reading; the historical details are scarce, especially when it comes to Henry's wives, so I find that even the tone and the scenarios tend to be the same from book to book. Over time, it gets to be boring...which is probably why I haven't read a book on the Tudors in, like, 9 months.

So at first, I got excited by Mademoiselle Boleyn – something different! The book focuses on Anne's upbringing in foreign courts, and ends where the other books generally start. But my enthusiasm dimmed when I realized why writers don't write about Anne's upbringing: We know little about it. Robin Maxwell essentially made this book up – she took a real person, put her in the correct location (Francois I's court), and then went hog wild on the details. And that really bugged me – I know that this is a novel, but still, I think history owes Anne Boleyn more than that. She was a real person and she deserves our respect – she certainly deserves more than the author's lewd imaginings where, for example, Anne catches her sister in an orgy.

But the book really lost my interest when Maxwell decided to make Anne Boleyn and Leonardo da Vinci the best of friends. It's not just unlikely; it's stupid. In the Readers Guide, Maxwell writes in her defense: "This is a perfect literary amalgam of a period that is chock-full of holes, an extrapolation of known facts, and a leap of imagination. I reasoned that the friendship could have happened, and there is no evidence against it." Sure, Francois' sister Marguerite never wrote in her diary, "Oh, mon dieu, I can hardly believe that Anne and Leonardo haven't struck up a friendship! Why ever not?" But generally speaking, you don't often find "evidence" against things that never happened. People don't tend to dwell on the thousands of things that could have been, but weren't.

In terms of historical accuracy, I'd have to give this book a big fail. While of course Anne is the protagonist, and thus is the focus of the book, I felt that Maxwell inaccurately enlarged Anne's importance at the French court. In truth, Anne was a minor personage until she caught Henry VIII's eye. I guess I don't see the point of making her the star of the French court when she wasn't; historical fiction is still supposed to have some basis in history. In order to increase the tension of the book, Maxwell has everything come together at the Field of Cloth of Gold, a two-plus-week extravaganza where Henry and Francois meet in friendship in 1520. Here, in the book, Anne meets her true love Henry Percy and Mary Boleyn catches Henry VIII's eye; about 20 pages later, the book ends with Anne's return to England, and she catches Henry VIII's eye on Dover Beach. While all of these events did indeed happen, none of them happened at these places or points in time. They've been bunched together to help the novel out. There's not that much of a historical record, but I don't see the point of distorting what there is. If you want to create the secret life of Anne Boleyn based on your wild imaginings, fine, but don't claim that your work is a researched piece of likely history (which is what the Readers Guide is all about). It seriously just bugged.

Anyway, I'm done venting. I've moved on to the next book, Sleeping Tiger by Rosamunde Pilcher. I've read it multiple times but not for several years; I've lately been thinking about going abroad for an extended period of time, so a book about escaping abroad seemed appropriate. :)

#27: The Westing Game, Ellen Raskin

2008-12-04T14:05:00.005-06:00

Woo hoo, number 27 done and we're just barely into December. My 30 books are within sight. :)

So, I just finished The Westing Game. I never would have picked this up in a million years, but I'm in a book club and it's the December choice. It's a children's book and it reads like a children's book, and after running through the Twilight series, I have a serious hankering for adult fiction. The basic premise of The Westing Game is that 16 people have been selected to live in an apartment building called Sunset Towers, although they don't realize that they've specifically been brought together until they find out they're all the supposed heirs of eccentric millionaire Samuel W. Westing. The will pairs them up into 8 groups and whichever group figures out who murdered Westing wins the fortune. You're supposed to play along and figure it out for yourself, too. Personally, I couldn't be bothered (although I managed to keep up), but I can see how it would be fun if I was still 8-years-old. I loved Encyclopedia Brown, after all.

And that's that. I haven't totally decided on the last three books but I'm thinking Paolo Coelho's The Witch of Portobelllo, Lauren Groff's The Monsters of Templeton, and perhaps Lolita.

#26: Breaking Dawn, Stephenie Meyer

2008-11-28T00:06:00.007-06:00

Oh, Breaking Dawn, how you ruined Stephenie Meyer’s captivating series about vegetarian vampires and teen love. Your writing is erratic, you’re about 300 pages too long, your characters do things out of character, you introduce so many new characters in so little space that you needed to add a chart to keep them straight, you contain numerous detail errors that we won’t get into, and you forgot to include the dramatic plot point. It’s too bad. I really enjoyed the series and I feel like this one ruined it for me, leaving a sour taste in my mouth for the whole thing. If this had been the first book in the series, I would have skipped the rest. But I see now I’m not the only person who feels this way; countless readers and critics have wondered what the hell Meyer was thinking. I’ll do my best to keep this short.

On the most basic level, Breaking Dawn just didn’t hold my interest. The hardback copy I have is 754 pages long, and not surprisingly, it’s filled with a lot of rambling. For the most part, readers seem to realize that this series is not an example of good writing. It’s simple and Meyer relies on a lot of elementary adjectives and adverbs, instead of building unique prose. And that’s okay; the appeal of this series, I think, has always been the personal relationships: the love and tension between Bella and Edward; the confusion between Bella and Jacob; the competition between Jacob and Edward; the family dynamics between the Cullens and Bella. So then in Breaking Dawn, when Meyer abandons the relationships that have pushed the story forward, she creates a vacuum. In the fourth book, Edward is a fairly hollow character and there’s little interaction between him and Bella; Jacob and Edward are now buddies so there’s no rivalry; Jacob imprints on Renesmee early, so there’s no romantic tension left. Without these propelling winds that have kept the series going, Breaking Dawn just flounders on the rocks.

Personally, I was surprised that Bella became a vampire; I actually thought, at the end of the last book, that Edward would give her up and she would mate with Jacob. Oops. But she became a vampire and that’s Meyer’s choice and I don’t really object to it. But my issue here with Breaking Dawn was that in Bella’s conversion, basic vampire lore got thrown out the window. Obviously Meyer was already pushing the boundaries with the vegetarian Cullens, and that’s fine; she took a standard legend and transformed it into something original. The Cullens by nature want to drink human blood, and even though they resist, it’s a constant struggle – that’s transforming legend into your own. But it seems ludicrous to write a story about vampires and then ignore their basic characteristics, like she does with Bella post-transformation. Vampires drink human blood; that is what makes them vampires, by definition. But vampire Bella isn’t really interested in humans; she has super-duper control over her emotions (which is amazing, considering she was 100% emotionally driven as a mortal). Bella doesn’t struggle, and after three books of prepping us for her newborn struggle, it’s like what the hell? when nothing actually happens. As Edward tells her, “You shouldn’t be able to do any of this. You shouldn’t be so…so rational.” Wise words, Eddie. Unfortunately no one was listening.

I looked at Stephenie Meyer’s FAQs on her website, and I found the last sentences of the defense of the book interesting: “The surprise to me is that so many people do like my books. I wrote them for a very specific audience of one, and so there was no guarantee that any other person on the planet besides me would enjoy them.” I am pretty well convinced at this point that Meyer is living out a dream-fantasy, with herself as Bella, as she’s writing these books. As such, she doesn’t want to transform that into something horrific...which is where the unbelievable plot turns emerge from. Take away the vampires and the story becomes clear: A mousy girl moves to a strange new town where she suddenly becomes the most popular girl in school; the most gorgeous, amazing guy in the world falls in love with her and through this love, she transforms into the most beautiful, powerful woman the world has ever seen. I get that it’s a fantasy to have Bella emerge as the vampire with the strongest powers, who becomes the only one who can save the Cullens' way of life, after she’s been the weakest link…but this turn of events doesn’t really fit within the framework Meyer’s created over the last three books. And because Meyer knows this manuscript isn’t going to be sitting a drawer, for her own personal use, I do think she has a responsibility to the reader to stay on course. And Breaking Dawn just doesn’t do that. It veers. Oh, how it veers.

In the end, though, I have the same problem with this that I did with the last Harry Potter book: These final installments fail because their protagonists don’t learn anything. Both Harry and Bella go through an epic battle and yet they come out on the other side completely the same, as if nothing had ever happened. Look at The Lord of the Rings – Frodo dumps the ring in Mount Doom, yes, but he can't be the same. He won, but he lost, because he has to leave Middle Earth. He literally can't go back to his old way of life – and that’s what gives that book its heft. There are consequences, for both good and evil. But in the Harry Potter and Twilight series, risk means nothing because the enemy is vanquished and nothing of that struggle remains. Here in Twilight, you've been told over three books that there's supposed to be some struggle/conflict in becoming a vampire – some struggle in staying yourself – but in the end, Meyer skips it...because didn't you know, becoming a vampire is like, the most awesomest thing, way better than being who you were before? It comes out of left field and that, in the end, is what makes the series end flatly.