Jane Austen: A Life (by Claire Tomalin)

This book caused me to jaunt over to my Amazon wish list and add three more books about Jane Austen. Not a perfect book ala an Antonia Fraser biography, because Tomalin makes a few too many assumptions, some of which seem like stretches of the imagination.

Also did not answer my burning question about Jane Austen, which is, how did she name her characters? (Perhaps, given how little we know of her, this is not known.) Jane Fairfax and Jane Bennet both (obviously) share her first name, and both are looked up to by the other characters in the book. She had two Fannys in her family, and in the books are Fanny Price (goody two-shoes) and Fanny Dashwood (evil). There is her cousin Eliza and Eliza Bennet, any connection? And then there's the fact that her beloved sister was named Cassandra, and she didn't name anyone Cassandra. It just makes me curious about the overlaps and omissions. Such a minor thing, but... I always wonder.

Um, that's really beside the point. Anyway, it's good, and I did learn a lot about Austen that I didn't know. I'm hoping to visit the Jane Austen sites in England this summer, so it's a good time to read up on her!

A Monstrous Regiment of Women (by Laurie R. King)*

The second book in the Mary Russell series, and what a strange book. I loved half of it (the relationship between Russell and Holmes), and hated the other half (the Temple plot). I will elaborate between spoiler tags!

Ramping up the sexual tension was just awesome, and I loved the tension, the resolution, the thole thing. I also loved her inheriting her money, and getting fancy clothes, a new apartment, having a kind of Cinderella moment. I mean who doesn't love that?

HOWEVER. The Temple plot was so bad. At first it just felt pointless, like, why the hell is Mary even involving herself in this clearly bizarre cult-like organization? Then it was boring, with long recountings of the "sermons" and arguments about the Bible, and it was like, oh my god I DO NOT CARE JUST FUCK SHERLOCK ALREADY.

Then the mystery part started, and it got much better. I liked the denouement, Annie Mudd, the resolution, all that stuff. What I DID NOT ENJOY was ALL THAT NEEDLE BUSINESS. I have a PHOBIA vis a vis injections, which made a plotline ALL ABOUT INJECTIONS (mostly involuntary ones) incredibly disturbing. Since I was listening to it, I couldn't exactly skip paragraphs. I would turn the volume all the way down and turn it back up when I thought I was safe only to hear "syringe" or "plunger" or "under the skin" or some other HORRIFYING PHRASE. At one point I almost thought I would have to take a Valium to avoid crashing my car. (You will be glad to know I didn't. I really don't take Valium very much at all, but I do enjoy the comfort of knowing it's there.) Anyway that is not Laurie R. King's fault, but it WAS A PROBLEM FOR ME.

I'm sure I'll download the next one, though. People who have read it can tell me if it gets better and less needly in book three.

The Beekeeper's Apprentice (by Laurie R. King)*

Delightful on audiobook, the first of a series about a young feminist who is taken under the wing of Sherlock Holmes. And either there is some sexual tension there, or I have daddy issues. (I can hear Jenfu now, saying, "Or both!")

I think this has been recommended a few times to me since I do occasionally like mysteries, but all the ones I like have women as protagonists, and I'm also a huge Sherlock Holmes fan. Then Beth said the audiobook was good, and I was sold. Indeed, the audio version is great; I love the narrator, Jenny Stirlin.

It's a little meandering at points (the momentum slows way down during an interlude in Jerusalem, for example) but I love the characters, love the relationship between Holmes and Mary Russell, and overall loved the feel of the book. So glad there's more than one in the series; I've already downloaded the next one!

The Savage Detectives (by Roberto Bolaño)

Thank god this is done. Our book club book, 650 pages long, and it felt neverending. It's broken into three parts, and the first and the last are narrated by this 17-year-old boy. Then the middle is narrated by something like 50 people over the course of 30 years.

I had two main issues with it, both relating to the long central section narrated by a bunch of different characters. The narrative thread that links it all together is the story of these two guys, Ulises Lima and Arturo Bolano, founders of the "visceral realist" poetry movement. Tons of other characters are either heard from or introduced, just name after name after name. But these are the two main ones.

My first issue is that in spite of 650 pages ostensibly about these two guys, I never got a real feel for their characters. Perhaps that was the point--all these people interact with them in different circumstances, so their characters shift. But it was difficult to care about them, because they're ciphers. And the one character you really do care about after the beginning, the narrator of the first and last section, isn't mentioned in the middle part. I think maybe there's one reference to him at the end.

Also it's unclear who the middle stories are being told to--at one point it's clearly Belano, but then elsewhere Belano is being referred to in the third person. Of course now that I think about it, I bet it's Garcia Madero, the character who disappears from the first part. I feel like I ruled that out at some point though. I'll have to see what my book club thought. Anyway. Issue one: I don't get a clear sense of these characters.

Issue two is that some of the stories in the middle section are legitimately gripping and moving and interesting, and Bolaño does a great job of getting us to care about them, but they mostly all disappear. So again, it's hard to invest emotion in the stories when we know they will likely never be heard from again, and they're only important in how they illuminate the two central characters, who we don't care about...

The more I write about this the more I think Roberto Bolaño knew exactly what he was doing. I guess I just wish it had been edited down by about 200 pages. It was a big investment of time, that central section. But I liked the payoff; I liked the ambiguity of the ending, and I felt like enough mysteries were solved in the end for me to be overall happy with it. But in the middle, trying to keep track of something like 50 characters who disappear and sometimes reappear but mostly disappear... it was frustrating.

Game Change (by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin)*

Oh, I remember the days of the 2008 presidential campaign, when I was refreshing FiveThirtyEight obsessively all day long and couldn't stop reading campaign news. But I didn't know most of what was in this book, a behind-the-scenes look at the Clinton, Edwards, McCain, and Obama campaigns (with a little Giuliani thrown in for fun).

We listened to this on the drive to and from L.A. and we were just riveted. It made the drive home, in particular, go by like nothing. So much juicy gossip and campaign details, so much fun to read. And the narration was pretty good too!

My one pet peeve is that the narrator kept mispronouncing words, most notably (and repeatedly) calling Caroline Kennedy "Carolyn" and pronouncing the Latin word cum in the porn way instead of in the summa cum laude way. My sister's name, as you may know, is "Caroline" and so that "Carolyn" thing drives me extra crazy. THOSE ARE DIFFERENT NAMES, AUDIOBOOK NARRATOR.

Other than that, completely highly recommended for political junkies or lovers of political gossip. I'll never look at any of the candidates quite the same way again.

Oh, and also, I continue to hate, loathe, and despise Joe Leiberman.

Blue Shoes and Happiness (by Alexander McCall Smith)*

I have to give a shoutout to Lisette Lecat, the audiobook narrator of all the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency books, who does such a terrific job with the voices. This is the seventh book in the series, and it continues to be charming.

That's really the best word for these books: charming. They aren't fast-paced, a lot of the action happens off-screen, there's a lot of plots and subplots that come and go, and things are sometimes resolved super quickly. In this one especially, it felt like it could have been more cohesive.

But the characters are charming, the narration is charming, and the slice-of-life in Botswana is charming. Definitely worth it on audio. I've probably already said this ten million times, haven't I?

The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank (by Willy Lindwer)

I finished this a few days ago, strangely, on the day Miep Gies died.

These are the stories of a group of women who met Anne (and Margot and Edith) Frank at Westerbork, Auschwitz, and/or Bergen-Belsen. You get immersed in how their stories touched hers--so briefly--but also in each individual story and different perspective. (I particularly was moved by Bloeme's story; she's a psychologist and has a unique take on the psychology of what happened to her.)

I always get caught up in the same Catch-22 when I read about Anne Frank. I desperately wish she could have survived, but it's her death that made her diary possible, and it's the waste of her potential and her life that brings home the senseless tragedy of the Holocaust. The fact that it was silenced is part of what makes her voice so powerful.

Actually had I read this book before I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau, I could have visited the barracks where Anne and Margot were kept. Then again, I don't think anything could have made that visit more deeply affecting. Anyway. The book is troubling, and gripping.

The Year of Yes (by Maria Dahvana Headley)

Another "do blah-di-blah for a year and then write about it" book, but I can't help it; these fluffy little books go faster than the giant tomes I am concurrently reading.

At first I was put off by this book a little. The writer is very self-conscious and self-indulgent--her acknowledgments are three pages long, each chapter has a heading and a subheading, and there is tons of literary name dropping. There are also some embarrassingly torturous metaphors. You can tell she wants to be taken seriously as a Writer, when I wish she would just tell her story. From page two, to give you an example:

The noises of NYC had ceased to metamorphose into the hopeful bird trills and tender love songs I'd imagined when I'd first arrived, a year before, and instead sounded like what they were: garbage trucks, honking horns, and the occasional cockroach scuttle. Granted, my last doomed relationship had been significantly more crow than canary, and more Nirvana than Sinatra.

She also name-drops, within the first two pages, Sartre, Kierkegaard, Aeschylus, Wagner, and Dorothy Parker. It is quite frankly exhausting.

When she settles into it (or when I got used to it) I was able to enjoy the story for what it was--an honest and interesting memoir about a year spent saying yes to anyone and everyone who asked her on a date. And ultimately she did seem like a cool, risk-taker type person, who has a good heart, but maybe needs to dial down the Writerly Affectation a little. So I did like it okay in the end. But I have to say I liked Julie & Julia better.

Dear American Airlines (by Jonathan Miles)

I do so enjoy a good novella--Shopgirl and Last Night at the Lobster come to mind. I think it's the slimness of the volume that makes me conscious not to read it too fast, which in turn makes me slow down and savor the words. I'm currently also reading The Savage Detectives (650 pages) and War and Peace (1300 pages) so I appreciate your brevity, Jonathan Miles!

So in case you haven't heard of this one, it's essentially this guy's life story in the form of a complaint letter to American Airlines. His flight has been delayed (for many hours) and he spends the time writing about how much he had riding on this one flight--to get to the wedding of his estranged daughter. (This information comes early on; not a spoiler.)

Very charming, touching, funny, delightful little book, has more depth than you might expect. Thumbs up!

Julie & Julia (by Julie Powell)

We saw the movie, I visited the blog, I read the reviews of Cleaving, and I got the book for Christmas. And I read it! Um, obviously.

It's impossible to read this without a consciousness of the New Julie Powell--we all know she goes on to cheat on Eric and work at a butcher shop, and that her new memoir lacks the self-awareness that it needs to make sense of these events. (And yet I still want to read it.)

And so this version of Julie, the Old Julie Powell, seems a little unhinged when viewed through that lens. She throws a lot of temper tantrums, and seems snobby about "trailer trash" and the mentally ill. Her writing struck me initially as trying too hard at times to be witty. But I liked the book, ultimately--couldn't put it down--and am making my way through her blog archives and finding myself charmed and entertained. I like her willingness to be honest, even to a fault, about her own flaws.

So, I don't know. Somehow between the blog and the book, I ended up liking Julie Powell a lot. Maybe it's because she's a Buffy fan?

The Death of the Heart (by Elizabeth Bowen)

Book #50, and a really good one. Definitely adding it to at least the honorable mentions category of my favorite books of the year.

It's a modernist psychological novel about a 16-year-old orphan living with her half-brother and sister-in-law in London, and it reminds me (very oddly) of National Velvet in terms of feeling very specific and real and strange and un-formulaic. I don't know how to explain the mood or ambiguity of the novel... just that I liked it.

Probably the more relevant comparison is Henry James. It does feel like Washington Square in terms of its subtlety. It's a coming of age story, but an unorthodox one. I definitely recommend it.

In the Company of Cheerful Ladies (by Alexander McCall Smith)*

Book #49! And the sixth book in the charming No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series. I'm totally committed to seeing this series through on audiobook; the narrator is wonderful.

I don't have much to say about the book itself. Feels like a series of sketches (as do many of these books) with not much actual detectiving at all, but it is pleasant to spend time with the characters. I love the new character Mr. Polopetsi who comes to work in the garage, and I wish we'd gotten to know Puti Radi-Puti a little better before the happy ending (I have no idea if I'm spelling these names right, since it's an audiobook).

But I'm already downloading the next one!

Year-End Book Wrapup '09

I'm doing the year-end wrapup post a little early this year, but I figure I can always do a postscript-type-post if I finish any of the books I'm currently reading. (I'm listening to In the Company of Cheerful Ladies, another No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency book, which I will almost certainly finish; I'm also reading The Death of the Heart, which I'll also probably finish, and I started War and Peace, which it is very unlikely that I will finish! I also have Netherland and The Savage Detectives on my reading pile. Yay, holidays!)

And now, onto the wrapup! Another year of books! Ah, books. How I love you.

This was a weird year, reading-wise. I finished 48 books [actually 50] this year, and the first 20 were all by women. I wanted to finish the Time 100 Booklist this year, but then I got laid off and hired by a second college and the last part of the year was just me commuting all the time and too busy to read, except audiobooks during my commute. (And on audio, you really can't listen to overly complex works, I've found.) And in between Vaginapalooza and the Audiobookathon was Infinite Summer. Like I said: a weird year.

Here is last year's list. I see that I read more books this year, which surprises the hell out of me! 33 by women, 15 by men, kind of the opposite of last year in terms of gender breakdown. [Actually 34 by women and 16 by men.] (Then again, 10 of them were the Princess Diaries books.) I read 10 booklist books, one of which was Infinite Jest. 33 more to go on the Time list, and I guess the last big hurdle is Gravity's Rainbow. I bet I can do it this year! At least, I hope it doesn't take me three more years to finish.

I already know before I start typing this that coming up with a top five is going to be difficult. I read a lot of great books this year. But that's what honorable mentions are for, right? Right! Onward!

Top five books of the year:

1. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Every year there's the one book I read and then get excited about and evangelize about to everyone I know; this is the one this year, although White Teeth is a close second. I mean it was a close second in that I got very excited about it, but in hindsight, Never Let Me Go is the book of the year, hands down. Haunting, restrained, masterful, moving. An unbelievable book. GO READ IT IMMEDIATELY.

2. White Teeth by Zadie Smith
I hated On Beauty, which makes me doubt how much I loved White Teeth in retrospect, but I really did love it and relate to it. I enjoyed the characters, I enjoyed the unpredictability of the plot, and I think Smith is really an uber-talent with a unique voice.

3. The Princess Diariesseries by Meg Cabot
I read this as "research" for my own (bad) young adult novel, and really loved it, especially the final book. More sophisticated and nervy than I was expecting, more honest about sex, cleverly pop culturiffic, way better than the movie.

4. The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith and The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (tie)
I read both of these fairly early in the year, so it's difficult for me to choose between them. I remember The Price of Salt just having a terrific moodiness, and The Blind Assassin having magical language and an intricate plot that I loved. I really enjoyed them both.

5. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
I can't leave this off, even though parts of it were frustrating as hell. But I find myself talking about this book kind of a lot. "This reminds me of Infinite Jest"... I have said many a time, either in reference to depression or drug addiction or suicide or literary innovation or other novels. It left its mark on me, that's for sure.

Honorable mentions: The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen, Under the Net by Iris Murdoch, Columbine by Dave Cullen, the awesome graphic novel Watchmen, Lynda Barry's Cruddy... it was a good year.


Bottom five books of the year:

1. A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul
The only reason I finished this was because it was on the Time 100 list. Now, that list is pretty good (3.5 of my top 5 books of the year are on it, after all) but sometimes there's a book that I just hate hate hate, and this was the one. The main character was so awful that I had zero empathy for him, and the book was just painful. Blech. Stupid post-colonial literature.

2. It Sucked and Then I Cried by Heather B. Armstrong
Disappointing, because I think Armstrong is in general a better writer than this book demonstrates. I think I said "glib" in the original review and I'm sticking with it. It is glib, and a book about postpartum depression shouldn't be glib. It is also strangely histrionic in an unearned way, once it's done with the glib. Not bad, more like aggressively mediocre.

3. March by Geraldine Brooks (audiobook)
I hated the audiobook narrator, I hated what Brooks did to Alcott's characters, and the new characters I found to be largely unrealistic. Plus, the main character is really portrayed as a self-righteous moron most of the time. I have no idea how this book won a Pulitzer or whatever it was. No. BZZZZ. Pass.

4. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson (audiobook)
I was going to put The Lost Symbol here (because make no mistake, it is a bad book) but then I had to admit it kept me more entertained than Dragon Tattoo and I would totally read Dan Brown's next insanely contrived, badly written book, but I have no desire to read the other books in the Larsson trilogy. So even though it's probably a better book, I liked it less. So here it is. I probably would have liked it more if I could have skimmed the boring crap at the beginning and the end, but on audio, you can't skim. More's the pity.

5. On Beauty by Zadie Smith
Totally disappointing after White Teeth, with main characters that make no sense and are irritating. If they are going to be irritating, they should at least be irritating in a way that feels real. These characters don't, and it torpedoed the book for me.

Honorable mentions: Shopaholic Ties the Knot and (especially) the dangerous rapey message in How to Ditch Your Fairy.

March (by Geraldine Brooks)*

As I alluded to in my last entry, I hated hated hated the narrator of this audiobook (Richard Easton). He sounds as if he is spitting into his microphone and his tone is just angry the whole time. I would have switched to the print copy of the book if I'd had any time at all, but I was curious enough in the story to keep reading.

I love Little Women and have read it ten million times. So I was intrigued by the idea of a story from Mr. March's point of view. But it just left me feeling unsatisfied. I didn't find the character of March likeable at all, nor did I find him compatible with Louisa May Alcott's vision--he seems ridiculously self-centered and he does some amazingly stupid things. And then there's the character of Grace Clement, who is not only a contrived character, but way too saintly and good to be true. Ironic, since Marmee is portrayed as kind of a beyotch. (It's a very interesting characterization but could have been done a little more subtly. That being said, the part of the book told from her perspective is by far the best.)

The part that I most disliked was at the very end, when he finally sees his daughters again. It's a scene that resonates in the original text, when he tells his daughters how they've changed in a year... in this version, Mr. March is looking at his daughters and thinking of other people, and just giving mechanical answers to their questions. Like, I was left without a sense that he loves his daughters, and the March marriage seems pretty much destroyed by the end. (Also, he calls her "Marmee" in this--as if it's her first name. I thought it was the girls' way of saying "Mommy"--am I wrong?) This doesn't go into the events of Good Wives or Little Men... but maybe Brooks should have considered how the Marches evolve in those books.

That being said, the language here is great. Brooks based a lot of this on the journals of Bronson Alcott, which seems appropriate, but she seems to have done this at the expense of Louisa's original intentions for the character. Also, my favorite thing in the whole book, a poem written by a dead soldier, was an actual poem written by a dead soldier that Louisa May Alcott found when she was working in a Civil War Hospital.

To sum up: maybe with a different narrator I could have enjoyed this more. (I wish the Jaws guy were reading it!) I wanted to find out how it ends, but having finished it, I just think it frustrated me. I know it won a Pulitzer and all; maybe I'm just too attached to the original.

Jaws (by Peter Benchley)*

I've actually read this book many times, but there's a new audiobook version, and my library (which has MP3 CDs of audiobooks, which is just fantastic, since it's an entire novel on one CD) had it. I think the narrator (Eric Steele) does a terrific job. (Although for some reason, he made me hate Harry Meadows. The voice he did for Meadows was just annooooyyyyiinnngg. Not in a bad way though.) (In contrast, I'm now listening to March and I'm into the story but I cannot stand the narrator, who sounds like he's spitting all his words into the microphone.)

Anyway.... as many times as I've read this novel, a lot of stuff really comes to life in the audio version, particularly the gore and tension of the shark attacks (which you can't really skim over in an audio version), what an asshole Brody is at the dinner party, and a couple of really clunky lines by Benchley, who is once again a Dude Who Does Not Understand Women's Sexual Responses. It is a really fun listen, though, and diverges from the movie (which is also, of course, amazing) in some interesting ways. So, this is just a thumbs up from me to you, audiobook fans!

You Don't Love Me Yet (by Jonathan Lethem)

Read for my book club! It was a very fast read (I breezed through it in a few hours yesterday) and has some original elements, particularly all the conceptual art stuff. But the characters don't really come alive very well, one character in particular. I won't spoil it, but the ending makes absolutely no sense with That One Character completely undeveloped. Also, when a man tries to write about women having sex, it can sometimes be really embarrassing. And this was embarrassing in that sense. Dude, you have no clue.

Anyway, I recommended it to the book club, so I hate that it was so disappointing. Sorry, book club!

Storm Front (by Jim Butcher)*

Elizabeth sent me this one because it's narrated by James "Spike" Marsters. It's Sam Spade meets Harry Potter in the form of Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden, a wizard who gets involved in trying to solve supernatural crime.

The best thing about this book is Marsters, who does a great job with the wry, ironic tone of the character. It's hard to believe it's him (the one British accent he does is more of a Gilesy accent) but funny to hear him talk about a (very minor) character named Spike, or say "hell's bells" a lot. I definitely want to read the next one in the series... as long as it's narrated by Marsters, of course!

Love the One You're With (by Emily Giffin)

A chicklit book for sure. I brought this along with me on a recent trip when I forgot to pack any books. I was bereft without a fluffy paperback! Not nearly as good as Guernsey (see below) and really not as good as the other Giffin books I've read. Her characters and settings are a little two-dimensional here. Basically the central conflict is a woman named Ellen trying to decide if she should cheat on her husband with an old flame.

On the one hand, I get the feeling that Giffin is trying to make sure Ellen remains sympathetic by stacking the deck against her so the cheating would be "understandable." On the other hand, you just want Ellen to make a damned decision already, either way, rather than agonizing through 90% of the book.

As an exploration of marriage, it made me think warm loving thoughts about my husband, but then, earlier today I was reading the love sonnets of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and those were arguably even more effective. So skip this, and go read some EBB! You won't be sorry.

Sonnet 21 by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Say over again, and yet once over again,
That thou dost love me. Though the word repeated
Should seem a “cuckoo-song,” as thou dost treat it.
Remember, never to the hill or plain,
Valley and wood, without her cuckoo-strain
Comes the fresh Spring in all her green completed.
Beloved, I, amid the darkness greeted
By a doubtful spirit-voice, in that doubt’s pain
Cry, “Speak once more—thou lovest!” Who can fear
Too many stars, though each in heaven shall roll,
Too many flowers, though each shall crown the year?
Say thou dost love me, love me, love me—toll
The silver iterance!—only minding, Dear,
To love me also in silence with thy soul.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows)*

I'm not sure if this is a really good book or just a really good audiobook. It's an epistolary novel set right after the end of World War II, covering the correspondence between an author living in London and the inhabitants of Guernsey, in the Channel Islands. It confronts some of the horrors of war, but is ultimately a lighthearted? is that the word? book. Without glossing over or minimizing things, it is ultimately not a depressing read.

I can recommend this 100% if you listen to your books. The audiobook is read by something like four or five people. They're almost perfect; the one guy who has to do an American accent is clearly no Hugh Laurie, because his accent sucks--then again, the authors have this "American" using adjectives like "bloody" so it's not exactly spot-on either way. But mostly, the voice actors are terrific.

I was really sad every time I put in a new CD, thinking it was one disk closer to being over! The book creates a delightful world peopled with delightful characters, and I wanted to stay in it longer. Thumbs up!

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (by Steig Larsson)*

My friend Elizabeth burned this audiobook for me, and my friend Sony loves it also, and a lot of people love it; I'm sorry to say I do not love it.

It starts with like three CDs worth of boring Swedish financier business, and then it gets into a plot that's interesting (if completely implausible and slightly predictable and maybe gratuitously focused on sexual violence against women) and then it ends... and then... there are three more CDs worth of boring Swedish financier business.

I can't help but think if Steig Larsson had lived, maybe people would have dared to tell him that hey, your plots need to go somewhere, and maybe it would be great if you didn't bore people to tears at the beginning and the ending of your book. And if your characters were just a tiny bit more realistic, that would be grand.

I do enjoy the Swedish touches like the crazy sandwiches everyone eats all the time (lingonberry and liverwurst and dill pickle, anyone?) and how people are just like "yeah, we're swingers!" and it is all okay and Swedish. But it left me with no desire to listen to the next book in the series. Which is a bad sign, considering that I voluntarily listened to Dan Brown.

The Guinea Pig Diaries (by A.J. Jacobs)*

Another audiobook, this one read by Jacobs himself, which is very fun, because I love his slightly nerdy voice. It's a little bit of a hodgepodge, because he's collecting experiments he's done over the years, and not quite in chronological order, so there's no real throughline as there is with his other two books, where he spent a year doing each project.

But the experiments themselves are awesome. I seriously spent the whole chapter on outsourcing fantasizing about what I might be able to outsource. Grading? Blog entries? Writing my young adult novel? I did recently save myself a lot of pain by outsourcing the painting of our house. That went well.

Anyway, the book. It definitely left me wanting more, and I enjoyed listening to it. And now I have to go back to grading, because I haven't yet outsourced it, and I'm going to stop typing...

Never Let Me Go (by Kazuo Ishiguro)

This is a novel on the Time 100 booklist that I have heard people rave about for years, and which I borrowed from a friend in my book group. I started it before bed, then stayed up late finishing it and I already want to re-read it. Melancholy, haunting, strange, compelling. I feel like I'll break the spell if I say too much--you're better off not knowing anything at all going into it. But it's just as good as The Remains of the Day and that's really saying something. It's just good in a completely different way. But I think it's another one, like Remains, that will stick with me.

Teen Idol (by Meg Cabot)*

Another audiobook checked out from the library, a fluffy read for my drive that touches on some of the same themes as my own YA novel in progress, and very fun. (Meg Cabot also wrote The Princess Diaries series, which I love and adore.)

The narrator is a lispy teenager who sounds like she has braces; I looked on the cover and it said she also played Zoey Bartlett on The West Wing, but I had no idea that Zoey was played by.... Elisabeth Moss from Mad Men! All cute and teenagery!

Anyway, I don't have anything profound to say about the book, except that it was very fun and very Cabot-esque and I enjoyed the characters and it kept me entertained during my commute this week. Next up, either Jonathan Lethem's new book (which I downloaded from the library onto my new iPod, so I have to see if it will play in my car, which has a funky build-in iPod dock...) or A.J. Jacobs's new book, which is my backup!

On Beauty (by Zadie Smith)

Read for book club. I loved White Teeth but was incredibly disappointed in On Beauty. All the characters (even the American ones) talk like they're British, and Howard is so unbelievably unsympathetic a man-child that the "moment of redemption" at the end feels like a total cheat. I did like the characters of the kids, especially Zora(although Jerome is really barely even explored), but why did Howard and Kiki even get married? They seem to have zero in common. And why would his rival even be a Rembrandt scholar in the first place? It all feels very contrived. Blech. Disappointing.

The Lost Symbol (by Dan Brown)

I will seriously never read one of Dan Brown's books except in audiobook, because somehow when it's in audio and I'm not 100% paying attention, I really enjoy the hell out of his books.

Now that I've finished it (and gotten through the ridiculous ending, oh my god), I'm enjoying reading the Amazon reviews complaining about the plot holes. (I noticed a lot of the plot holes myself; there are a lot of really stupid things happening in this book.) However, it kept me entertained, and there was one twist at the end that made me gasp. (Then again, The Sixth Sense fooled me too--I'm a sucker for twist endings.)

Really, even though I had to scribble everything down while driving, I kept a list of things that make no sense, mostly involving the characters--who are supposedly brilliant--being alternately stupid, dense, or extra stupid and dense. But it was a great driving book.

My next audiobook is On Beauty, which I'm reading for book club. It's definitely not a brain candy book like the last two, so here's hoping I can still manage to listen while driving!

Finger Lickin' Fifteen (by Janet Evanovich)*

That little asterisk means "audiobook" and I'm betting you'll see a lot of those between now and the end of the year. I'm commuting between two and three hours a day until December, and I've decided I need to start making better use of that time, so audiobooks it is!

I bought this one just to kick start the process, although I'm going to be getting more from friends and the library and so forth. I think I've read all the other books in the Stephanie Plum series, although it's difficult to tell, since they seem to be all the same. In this one, Stephanie's broken up with Morelli for no good reason, and then doesn't even bother to sleep with Ranger even though she's basically living at his house and is supposedly attracted, what the hell. WHAT IS THE POINT OF THE WHOLE MORELLI BREAKUP, THEN? Plus, men are always kissing her in various places, as if she has no agency, and it's annoying.

This one is so formulaic it even features a cross-dressing dude and a bunch of fart jokes. It is reasonably diverting and I like the BBQ contest premise and subplot, but I seriously think Evanovich should reconsider her "give the people what they want!" philosophy if that means zero character growth or development or change, ever, for anyone.

Also, I don't know if this is the audio format talking (it probably is) but I noticed two tics that really bugged me. By the time I started counting them, I was already annoyed, so I'm sure it's more than this, but I counted at least seven instances of variations on "I blew out a sigh" instead of simply "I sighed" and seven "He cut his eyes to me" instead of "he glanced at me." I don't know why Evanovich enjoys "blew out a sigh" and "cutting eyes to" so much, but it got really irritating, by the end.

Twelfth Night, by William Shakespeare

What the hell, let's say plays count! Especially since I just read this one for the first time, and just finished teaching this. We had a lot of fun in class, and even watched some snippets of the film starring Imogen Stubbs, who played Lucy in Sense and Sensibility. (There are rumors of a film version starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Parminder Nagra. BE STILL MY HEART.) I also love (and posted to Livejournal and Facebook) Viola's speech about the constancy of women vs. the fickleness of men: "And with a green and yellow melancholy / she sat like Patience on a monument / smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?"

On the one hand, we read it really fast, mostly because my students wanted to "find out how it ends" so we squeezed it into the syllabus. We talked about the gender issues, the conventions of Shakespearean comedy, the way Shakespeare uses blank verse vs. prose, and the whole Lord of Misrule, Twelfth Night thing. Oh, and the role of the Fool, of course. But I feel like there's so much we didn't delve into. I also felt like I wanted more emotional meat--I mean, I'm not convinced by any of the love stories, for various reasons, except that I buy Viola's love for Orsino. (And Antonio's for Sebastian.) (Okay, and Toby's for Maria...)

I didn't fall in love with the play yet, as much as I fell in love with, say, Henry V or The Tempest or Midsummer, when I read them. But hey, it's Shakespeare. You can't really go wrong.

Watchmen (by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons)

As soon as I said I probably wasn't going to read much for the rest of the year, I picked up Ian's copy of Watchmen and read it in like 24 hours. It was just so good!

I'm not a comic book reader or a graphic novel reader, in general--I leave that stuff to my friend Michael. I mean, I haven't even read all of Maus. But this was on the Time 100 list so I gave it a chance, and I got really sucked in. Unlike Lucky Jim, which I just read a paragraph at a time, I found myself unable to put Watchmen down, and stayed up late last night to finish "just one more" episode.

I could have done without the comic-within-the-comic (just because it was mostly a distraction from the main characters) and some of the overlapping-dialogue stuff got a little stale, and the ending was kind of crazy, but for the most part, I was won over by the moral ambiguity/complexity, the way the book immerses you in an alternate version of history, and the compelling, not quite sympathetic characters (loved Dr. Manhattan and Rorschach, especially). I also enjoyed the artwork, and definitely would give another graphic novel a chance, if you know of any good ones!

Lucky Jim (by Kingsley Amis)

I doubt I'll get through very many more books by December, given my school schedule, but I actually did manage to finish this one! It's a tiny book that's taken me weeks, though, so, not a promising pace. This is another one from the Time 100 booklist, a satire of academia that is not half as successful as Pale Fire (yes, I am biased). However, it is amusing and was fun to read. I have a feeling I would have been laughing more if I'd read it all the way through rather than a paragraph at a time!

I'm not sure why it's on the Time list, though, quite. I mean, it's clever and all, but it didn't blow my mind or anything. In fact, I've run out of things to say about it already.

Infinite Jest (by David Foster Wallace)

Yep, I finished it! I finished it early, both because it really picked up steam for me in the last third, and because I doubt I'm going to have much time to read much of anything once school really gets underway, and I wanted to finish it!

It's a book that one has to digest, I think. I'm reading the Infinite Summer forums and will continue to read and enjoy the posts that show up on the blog. But my first reaction to the ending was... ...that I felt a little cheated. Through the whole book I'm wondering what happened to Hal? Is it the DMZ or the Entertainment or pot withdrawal or what? How does he meet Gately and why do they dig up JOI's head and do they find the Entertainment or an antidote? And so but then, you don't find out anything, it's just a big puzzle.

It's somewhat fun to go back and analyze all the clues that are scattered throughout the text, and to think about the reasons why DFW didn't necessarily want to wrap everything up in a bow. Like, will Joelle relapse? We don't know, because it's "one day at a time." Is she hideously beautiful or hideously deformed? As someone pointed out on the forums, the Medusa and the Odalisque shows that it doesn't matter, since the end result is the same. But still and all, I was really disappointed that we didn't get to see anything of that Poor Yorick graveyard scene, since I was waiting for it eagerly for, oh, almost 1000 pages.

And Gately! I mean, I love Gately, but what the hell is up with the ending? If he ends up in a Canadian cemetery with Hal, we know he makes it. But why then is the ending the way it is? It seems like a random flashback, almost, that doesn't resonate enough. Ditto the final footnote; I mean, that's how you want to end it? Anyway, I don't know. My reactions as I read ranged from complete emotional engagement to intense annoyance--at the lack of the female POV, or the pharmaceutical footnotes with no point, or the word "like" everywhere, or the BAD THINGS HAPPENING TO ANIMALS, or the cartoonish/unbelievable nature of some of the events. But I did fall in love with a lot of the characters (Gately, Steeply, Hal, Mario, Joelle). I don't know that it moved me, because there seems to be this sheen of intellectual distance/irony over everything. But it interested and engaged me.

Ultimately, I'm glad I read it this summer, as part of the Infinite Summer project. It seems like almost everyone psychotically loves it, and some people defend any criticism against it with this like borderline condescension. But there's also been so many interesting and erudite discussions about it, it's added about 1000% to my enjoyment of the reading project.

So that's it, for now. It's done, whew. I'm going to check the #infsum Twitter feed again...

A House for Mr. Biswas (by V.S. Naipaul)

Augh, I hated this book. It's on the Time 100 list and one of the few (so far) complete misses for me. I spent half an hour ranting to Ian about post-colonial literature and how annoying it is. I mean, one of my favorite classes in college was History of the British Empire; I love the history part, I am not unsympathetic to the issues of colonization. But the fiction can blow me, because IT IS BORING OH MY GOD. (See: Passage to India, A, My Hatred For.)

But why, you might ask, did it annoy me so much? The main character, Mr. Biswas, I found completely unsympathetic. Towards the very end, I caught glimpses of a sympathetic character. He was actually not a complete asshole to his wife on like page 460. (Or at least she was nice to him. They had a Moment, finally.) I understand that the point of the book is that his life was mostly a waste and whatnot, and it's supposed to be... comedic, I guess? And an incisive commentary on post-colonial Trinidad? What it is, in fact, is an irritating book about an annoying asshole.

So, so, so, so glad to be done with this one. (The only good thing about it was that Ian kept calling it "Mr. Dishwash." Hee.)

Infinite Summer

My reading of Infinite Jest continues; I just finished up to page 394, which is right about on target (the deadline coming up on Monday is page 390, I think). Before I started reading, people were saying you really get sucked in at around page 200 or page 250, but I am finding it mostly a slog. And sometimes really gross (Lyle, It, all the scatalogical stuff, and c.) Last night I was trying to get through the chapter on the game Eschaton, and I was so bored. I'm sorry, DFW fans.

On the plus side, I did finally find a chapter on tennis that I liked (the one about the competition that they go to) and there continue to be magical parts. For instance, anything to do with Joelle, the phone conversations between Orin and Hal, and the whole Orin's crush on Helen thing, which is hilarious. Oh, and Found Drama! Another part that had me laughing. The Statue of Liberty. And then the whole chapter about Joelle in that bathroom was amazing. So there are tons of bright spots. (On the flip side, I may never get that Raquel Welch thing out of my head, satirical or not, oh my god, sweet jesus.)

I like that things are starting to come together. I keep referring back to the filmography (the infamous footnote 24) and things are beginning to be clarified there. And characters from all over the place are converging on each other. So that's a plus.

I started to get the sense in this section that Hal is the book's narrator. I've been trying to figure it out because of the "like" tic, which has begun to drive me completely crazy. I think it's overused. For instance, on page 195, it is used three times: ("twisting hands and bulging eyes at like dawn," "they were watching, at like 0630h.," "and then within like three hours"). At first, I could handle it, as a conversational way to establish tone. BUT IT IS EVERYWHERE. And it is beginning to grate on me. Now it jumps out at me, and I spend like a minute deciding if it could have been deleted or not. (See what I did there?)

So there you go. Some pros, some cons. I'm interested to see where it goes next. And if anyone can figure out a rationale for the "like" thing, I'm all ears.