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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sisterhood Everlasting: Break Out the Kleenex (#27)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nefertiti and Outliers in Brief (#17, 18)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading Michelle Moran: Madame Tussaud (#13)

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

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

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

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

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

The Bible as Literature (#12)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not-So-Sweet Valley Confidential (#10)

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

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

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

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

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

An Aside: Stealing Athena in photos

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

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

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)

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?

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

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

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!