Pie Not Included

Casanova's Chinese Restaurant: Book Five of A Dance to the Music of Time (by Anthony Powell)

2012-01-30T12:30:00.000-08:00

Love the title of this one. (They do indeed go to the eponymous restaurant at the beginning of the novel and have a discussion about professional seducers that was really rather funny.)

Continuing to work my way through this series. I really enjoyed this installment. The backdrop is the Spanish Civil War as well as rumblings heading towards World War II, but the focus is still on high society. The main character has married into a large family of ten children, and we get to know a little bit more about them. (The eldest son is an eccentric named Erridge, and he apparently was based in part on George Orwell.)

It's an interesting mix of explicit and implied--there's a discussion about the terms "abortion" and "miscarriage" (characters in this series have had both) and there are a lot of gay and lesbian characters, some of whom are shown living together. There's even a guy who is totally this one lady's gay BFF--he even does her interior decorating! But the main character's marriage and the character of his wife remain misty because the narrator says almost nothing about them. There are still seven volumes to go, so perhaps we'll find out more!

This volume jumps back in time a little to introduce a new character named Moreland and a bunch of his compatriots(this series has a ton of characters, y'all) but it's worth it just for the setpiece of this big party after the debut of one of Moreland's symphonies, a tragicomedy where the alcoholic Charles Stringham shows up and where Lord Huntercombe spends the evening breaking into cabinets to examine the hostess's fine china. But there's also this air of foreshadowy gloom hanging over everything--it's no accident that one character commits suicide by "gassing himself," and the novel ends with a metaphor about a "Ghost Railway" ride hurtling towards an unknown, dark destination.

"The notable thing about professional seducers," said Maclintick... "is the rot they talk when they are doing their seducing. There is not a single cliche they leave unsaid."

"Although by definition the most egotistical of men," said Moreland, "they naturally have to develop a certain anonymity of style to make themselves acceptable to all women. It is the case of the lowest common factor - or is it the highest common denominator? If you hope to rise to the top class in seducing, you must appeal to the majority. As the majority are not very intelligent, you must conceal your own intelligence - if you have the misfortune to possess such a thing - in order not to frighten the girls off."

Year End Book Wrap-Up '11

2012-01-24T15:48:00.000-08:00

Here is last year's book wrapup. And this year we have much less to talk about, since I only read 21 books. Only six are on the Time 100 list (and three of those are parts of a 12-novel cycle), which means I still have 22 (I think, I keep mis-counting) of the Time 100 books to go. Eight of the books I read this year were by women, 13 were by men.

Obviously I read much less because I had a baby (though the early middle-of-the-night feedings were pretty good for reading on the Kindle). I feel like I'm getting back into the swing of it now, though. Anyway, here is my very abbreviated list of the best and worst books of the year.

Top three books:

1. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
I loved both this one and The Marriage Plot, but I'm going to give this one the edge for its larger scope and for the way the characters stuck in my head. I am always torn when making these lists, because I love to re-read things and I'm sure if I re-read Goon Squad and Marriage Plot, I could be far more definitive. (I never blog re-reads. It would just be endless entries all "I just finished In This House of Brede for the seven millionth time.") Maybe after I'm done with all my reading lists, I can make a re-reading list. I just got Cloud Atlas back and I'm going to re-read that one immediately. Then Brideshead Revisited again. Then Catch-22 again. Wait, what was I saying? Egan's book. Not perfect, but I liked it! And I want to re-read it, I think is where I was going.

2. The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
This sticks in my mind like The Corrections does: as a meaty, intelligent, entertaining work of lit fic. A lot of the classics that I slog through aren't really what I'd call "entertaining" (my recent read of Money notwithstanding) so I appreciate that this was a page turner, that I enjoyed the characters, and that the milieu of this world was recognizable. I liked it.

3. One of Our Thursdays Is Missing by Jasper Fforde
I have to give this one the edge just because I love Fforde and he always entertains me. This was fast-paced, fun, and funny. But it could just as easily be swapped out with any of the runners up, if only because it wasn't quite as good, for me, as First Among Sequels.

Runners up: An Object of Beauty, Persepolis, The Namesake, Will Grayson, Will Grayson, The Wave, A Question of Upbringing... I didn't read much this year, but I liked almost everything I read!

The worst:

1. Herzog
AKA Herzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzog. Speaking of boring-ass classics that are torture to get through. It was so endlessly dull. I know it supposedly is saying important things about the Jewish Experience. I know people love Saul Bellow and owe him a debt or whatever. But yawn. I'm even bored of trying to write this paragraph.

And that's it! I read some disposable stuff this year, but nothing that I actively disliked, other than Herzog. And next year this will be expanded once more, as I will no doubt read more than 21 books. Man.

The Assistant (Bernard Malamud)

2012-01-24T11:36:00.000-08:00

That's right, another book list book! Woo! Of course this is one of the shortest, and it was a really fast read, but still. Making progress.

The back cover says something about the book reading like a prose poem, and it really does. It's spare, heavily symbolic, with shifts in perspective sometimes within one paragraph. Without giving too much away, I'll say it's mostly about one character named Frank and his efforts to become a good person, under the influence of a Jewish grocer named Morris, who is both very good and very poor. There's also Morris's daughter Helen, who's a pretty great character, and who also influences Frank.

I want to talk in a slightly spoilery way about the Helen/Frank subplot, because I had some issues from a feminist point of view. I really liked the fact that this subplot evolved in a non-cliche way, that Helen had self-discipline and didn't just cave in to Frank, that she was not a virgin and didn't get punished for that in the usual "get pregnant, this ruins your life somehow" plot that has been the fate of female characters in literature forever. I also really liked that Frank didn't succeed in his plan to put her through college, that she valued education and was pursuing college of her own accord, albeit with his indirect help.

HOWEVER. It really really bothers me that this is framed as a redemption story and that the text privileges Frank's perspective at the end, after he RAPES HER IN THE PARK. We're supposed to let it go because 1) he is really really sorry, 2) he changes after that to be a genuinely good, self-sacrificing person who essentially saves the family from starving, and 3) Helen is a very strong character who rationalizes the rape to herself all, "well, I was going to sleep with him anyway" (!!!!) but still doesn't forgive him. But... dude, he's a RAPIST.

I'm interested to know what you guys think. We (the readers) are able to forgive Frank for being a thief. But I don't want to forgive him for being a rapist--perhaps because I'm uncomfortable with Malamud's choices here. At one point, Frank muses on the difficulty of being redeemed from one horrible act, but--and this is key--the rape is not presented as that one horrible act. It's presented as a little bit of backsliding on the road to redemption. When, in fact, as far as I'm concerned, it's the worst thing that Frank does. Phew! Long spoiler bar.

If the author clearly wants us to forgive a character, what happens when we have a hard time doing so? (This is all especially weird contrasted with Money, the last book I read, wherein John Self is a total antihero, way worse than Frank in many ways. He just 1) doesn't cross that line and 2) isn't portrayed quite the same way Frank is, in the end. Plus, the tone of the book is satirical, which makes a huge difference.

Anyway, I really liked reading this, and I was up for a while last night, thinking about it. If you don't mind spoilers or don't plan to ever read this, or have read it already, chime in and let me know how you felt about all of this.

"Whatever she read, he crept into her thoughts; in every book he haunted the words, a character in a plot somebody else had invented, as if all associations had only one end. He was, to begin with, everywhere. So, without speaking of it, they met again in the library. That they were meeting among books relieved her doubt, as if she believed, what possible wrong can I do among books, what possible harm can come to me here?" (p. 131)

Money (by Martin Amis)

2012-01-23T16:17:00.000-08:00

Y'all know how I feel about the unreliable narrator, right? Can't get enough of him! This unreliable narrator, John Self, is basically drunk through the entirety of this novel, which makes the narration hilarious, but also leaves holes in the text. He objectifies women to a horrifying degree, is slightly racist, is monstrously self-centered, and yet somehow is still funny and somehow sympathetic? In a weird way?

The novel has a lot going on, with super symbolic names (like "John Self") and with the author, Martin Amis, showing up as a character in the novel and apologizing for tormenting his characters (of course, while John Self is in the middle of being tormented by various events) and then not to give too much away, but at the end, as often happens with unreliable narrators, the reader finds out what's been going on between the lines of the book all along.

This book is laugh-out-loud funny, pretty dirty, brilliantly written, with some terrific observations about our consumer culture. And I bookmarked so many quotes I don't even know where to start. If you don't mind super-penisy novels (and I think you know where you fall on the penisy novel spectrum) this one really, really works.

Now the way I figured it I had six realistic options. I could sack out right away, with some scotch and a few Serafim. I could go back to the Happy Isles and see what little Moby was up to. I could call Doris Arthur. I could catch a live sex show around the corner, in bleeding Seventh Avenue. I could go out and get drunk. I could stay in and get drunk.

In the end I stayed in and got drunk. The trouble was, I did all the other things first. Sometimes I feel that life is passing me by, not slowly either, but with ropes of steam and spark-spattered wheels and a hoarse roar of power or terror. It's passing, yet I'm the one who is doing all the moving. I'm not the station, I'm not the stop: I'm the train. I'm the train.

At Lady Molly’s: Book Four of A Dance to the Music of Time (by Anthony Powell)

2012-01-18T08:37:00.000-08:00

I often go to check out Amazon reviews after I finish a book. There's one lone guy reviewing all of the books in this series, but I'm enjoying his thoughts on them. There's also a "popular highlights" feature for the Kindle edition, where you can see what other people highlighted on their Kindles. It's a little creepy that Amazon is tracking my highlights, but I do enjoy seeing what people decide to highlight. It's never the same stuff that I do. (Except this quote, for obvious reasons: "Women may show some discrimination about whom they sleep with, but they’ll marry anybody.")

I liked At Lady Molly's quite a bit. The beginning is slow, since yet more characters are introduced, but the narrator's observations of life continue to be witty and the characters are interesting (if perhaps somewhat too numerous and slightly difficult to keep track of at times). Strangely, in this book the narrator gets engaged, but there's almost nothing in there about the woman he's engaged to, or anything about their courtship at all. It's strange because in the previous book, there's a lot of detail about his love affair with another character. But maybe we'll get to spend more time with her in the next volume.

The other quibble I have is that it's getting to be way too coincidental for the narrator to happen to show up at almost every significant event or bump into all the main characters continuously or have seemingly every character divulge deep dark secrets to him. It's really the secrets thing that's the most glaring, since in a couple of cases towards the end of this book (Jeavons and Conyers) there's really no reason for them to have these explicit conversations with Nick, of all people. But the conversations themselves are interesting, so there you go.

"Would it be too explicit, too exaggerated, to say that when I set eyes on Isobel Tolland, I knew at once that I should marry her? Something like that is the truth; certainly nearer the truth than merely to record those vague, inchoate sentiments of interest which I was so immediately conscious. It was as if I had known her for many years already; enjoyed happiness with her and suffered sadness. I was conscious of that, as of another life, nostalgically remembered."

Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust (by Nathanael West)

2012-01-09T16:22:00.000-08:00

I just realized I never did my year-end book post! I'll have to put that up soon. (It was not a busy reading year, I'll say that much.) In the meantime, The Day of the Locust is on the Time 100 list, and it came in a volume with two short novellas, that one and Miss Lonelyhearts.

Lonelyhearts is a series of bleak vignettes about a man who answers an advice column in the paper and basically becomes a sponge for all the world's despair. It's pretty poetic. But Locust is the one I really want to talk about (especially since it's the Time 100 pick.)

Locust is about people on the fringes of the movie industry in Hollywood, set during the Great Depression. It reminded me of Breakfast at Tiffany's, only it's set in L.A. instead of New York, and the "Fred" of the story isn't a vanilla narrator who is most probably gay, but instead is a screenwriter named Tod who likes to fantasize about raping Holly Golightly. Plus, it's super satirical. So maybe not that similar at all?

Not only is it satire, it's specific-to-Los-Angeles satire. Each one of the characters is a type (including the pathetic everyman "Homer Simpson"--the name might not be a coincidence). For example, it's hard not to read the clash between a cowboy and a Mexican guy over the sexual favors of the desirable aspiring starlet Faye as anything but a metaphor for the settling of California. (Plus, Faye, who represents the specifically Californian American dream, descends into prostitution at one point. Come on, that is so totally the film industry!) West reportedly admired Hemingway--it's very The Sun Also Rises in terms of the sexual metaphor. But it ends with a full-on riot and descent into madness at, of course, a film premiere.

If you like satire, or the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles, where the line between actress and prostitute is wafer-thin and where dreams go to die--this is the novella for you!

"Throwing away his cigarette, he went through the swinging doors of the saloon. There was no back to the building and he found himself in a Paris street. He followed it to its end, coming out in a Romanesque courtyard... on a lawn of fiber, a group of men and women in riding costume were picnicking. They were eating cardboard food in front of a cellophane waterfall."

The Marriage Plot (by Jeffrey Eugenides)

2011-11-25T14:09:00.000-08:00

Reading this book, I didn't know about all the David Foster Wallace controversy (to what extent is the character of Leonard based on him, and is it a mean-spirited portrayal, even if it is?) I also have not read Middlesex. So it is from a particularly ignorant point of view that I say I deeply enjoyed this novel.

Digging into it was like digging into Visit from the Goon Squad, just really good, really enjoyable literary fiction. I loved the characters, as annoying as each of then were at times. (Yes, Leonard felt most annoying of all.) I adored the ending. Just a great, juicy, enjoyable read. Is Middlesex this good? I'd better get to it.

(I really wanted to highlight or dog-ear a number of passages in the book, but I was borrowing a copy. I'll have to re-read it so I can pull out my favorite quotes.)

The Acceptance World: Book Three of A Dance to the Music of Time (by Anthony Powell)

2011-11-07T12:42:00.000-08:00

For some reason, this volume didn't grab me as much as the first two, and thus it took me a while to finish it. I also saw some reviews (which I guess only show up on your Kindle, not on the Amazon site) talking about how Powell is clearly satirizing his friends like George Orwell and all these other people. Reading that I realized how much of the satire I'm probably missing in these books! But I'm enjoying them anyway. This one less so. Still overall, an interesting world is beginning to develop. Plus, the narrator is having a hot and heavy affair with a married woman who at one point answers the door naked. So how bad can it be?

"There is always a real and an imaginary person you are in love with; sometimes you love one best, sometimes the other."

I Don't Know How She Does It (by Allison Pearson)

2011-09-30T08:41:00.001-07:00

Bought to pass the time while we waited six hours for our plane. There's nothing like chicklit when you're exhausted and on a plane!

The trailer for this movie is hideous, but everything I read about it said the book was better. I did really enjoy the book! As a new mom about to go back to work, the musings on balancing motherhood and career and having an identity all hit very close to home. There are some smart observations here!

Two disappoitments. One is that there are a couple of gratuitous fat references (the main character, Kate, meets a receptionist who is described as very fat, and Kate spends some time wondering why the receptionist is so unhappy that she has to eat so much--the character is never seen or mentioned again). The second thing is (major spoiler alert) the ending involves her giving up her job, which she talks about throughout the whole book as loving and being very good at. I felt like there should have been a compromise, and the message shouldn't have boiled down to: working moms, quit your jobs! Your babies need you! Does the movie end the same way?

Anyway: perfect fluffy reading for a plane, and definitely smarter than the average chick lit.

A Buyer's Market: Book Two of A Dance to the Music of Time (by Anthony Powell)

2011-09-14T20:39:00.000-07:00

I'm still enjoying this series of novels, and already on to number three!

Usually I like to read through the Amazon reviews after I've finished a book, but this book doesn't even have Amazon reviews. It's like living IN THE DARK AGES.

(They do have a list of "popular highlights," of which my favorite is this one: "For reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected; so that, before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity.")

In this novel, the protagonist has a job of some sort in an art book publishing house, but the novel barely touches on his job at all, more about the people who drift in and out of his life. I'm starting to get a feel for him as a slightly unreliable narrator; in the scene where he loses his virginity, he says something like "and there may have been an embrace," either downplaying the sex, or (perhaps) putting a fissure in that layer of trust between the reader and the narrator. It makes the narrative voice that much more interesting. (One of the characters also gets an illegal abortion, which is presented more clearly, and one of them makes some kinky remark about tying up "bad girls," so I don't think it's prudishness in general happening here.)

I was less interested in the characters introduced here (primarily Deacon and Gypsy Jones) than the ones introduced in the previous volume who come back in this one (Jean and Widmerpool), though Barnby has potential. I have to say I love the character names in general here: Widmerpool, Stringham, Mrs. Ardglass, Magnus Donners.

I know this writeup is pretty confused; it's late and I'm sleepy. But I did want to say something before I lose track of what happened in Book Two vs. Book Three, which I'm reading now!

"Barnby used to say that he knew a bill-broker, scarcely aware even how pictures are produced, who could at the same time enter any gallery and pick out the most expensively priced work there 'from Masaccio to Matisse', simply through the mystic power of his own respect for money."

A Question of Upbringing: Book One of A Dance to the Music of Time (by Anthony Powell)

2011-08-29T13:09:00.001-07:00

So I was taking a look at ye olde Time 100 book list to see if I had any prayer of finishing the list before the end of the year. I only ("only") have 21 books left, but it turns out that in addition to Gravity's Rainbow, which I know is very long, and The Sot-Weed Factor, which I started but misplaced in the move (bad since it's a library book), which is also long, The Recognitions is also almost 1000 pages long. (It sounds absolutely amazing, though; apparently it was a huge influence on Catch-22.)

So I learn all of this and think, well maybe, and then I get to A Dance to the Music of Time, which it turns out is not one but twelve novels. Twelve! So, yeah. Finishing the list this year might be a challenge.

Anyway, I bought this first book on my Kindle. It was only $6, but still, buying all twelve books won't be cheap, so I'd better look into library lending for the later volumes. (If I can learn not to lose books.) It also was a quick read; 223 pages for the paperback version. I also love love loved it. It's more of a British novel of manners, not a whole lot of action, more human observation, but the writing is just fabulous, with a lot of wit, and I loved the characters and the details of this world (aristocratic England in the 1920s). I'm not sorry at all there are 12 books in the cycle, because I have a feeling I'll enjoy them. How great is this quote?:

"I thought, at first, that he worked far harder than most of the men I knew. Later I came to doubt this, finding that Quiggin's work was something to be discussed rather than tackled, and that what he really enjoyed was drinking cups of coffee at odd times of day."

Herzog (by Saul Bellow)

2011-08-20T14:28:00.000-07:00

Another one of those books on my reading list that was a slog to get through. I'd call it a "novel of ideas," but only because it doesn't have much of a plot. (There are hundreds of pages of random stream of consciousness letters.) It deals with the idea of modernity and what it means, and in a way is a rejoinder to the idea of the modern world as a Wasteland. But I would much rather have a conversation about that or read a really good postmodern poem. This novel isn't postmodernist, although it's a 1960s novel, and this makes it feel kind of stale. Basically, it feels like the poor man's Ulysses, and I don't even love Ulysses.

"He noted with distaste his own trick of appealing for sympathy. A personality had its own ways. A mind might observe them without approval. Herzog did not care for his own personality, and at the moment there was apparently nothing he could do about its impulses." (p. 20)

Will Grayson, Will Grayson (by John Green and David Levithan)

2011-06-19T12:51:00.000-07:00

YA on the Kindle is a bad idea; one night of breastfeeding and this book was done! I enjoy John Green, so I knew I would enjoy this, about two guys named Will Grayson. I liked the focus on gay teenage boys (only one of the Wills is gay, but there are a number of gay characters that feature heavily in the plot).

I wish the depression stuff had been handled with more depth; I think the issue is that Green's half is better written than Levithan's half, and it's Levithan's Will who is depressed. There is some discussion of how depression is a real thing and often misunderstood by teenagers, but it's underexplored, I think.

Overall, worth reading if you like YA (especially John Green's stuff).

The Imperfectionists (by Tom Rachman)

2011-06-11T17:53:00.000-07:00

Recommended by Jenfu after I enjoyed Goon Squad and damn, books go fast on my Kindle app while I'm nursing. (I also re-read Persuasion in between Goon Squad and this). I need some recommendations for longer books, because otherwise I'm going to go broke! Or someone needs to explain how to borrow friends' books on my Kindle. That's a real thing, right?

Anyway, another novel from multiple perspectives, set at an English-language newspaper in Rome. Very similar in feel to Goon Squad, although less "literary" feeling. I really enjoyed it with one caveat, which is (spoiler) Something Bad Happens to an Animal. I can't really handle that at the best of times, not to mention when I'm hormonal. But otherwise, a really good (and sadly very fast) read!

A Visit from the Goon Squad (by Jennifer Egan)

2011-06-08T12:33:00.000-07:00

Really engaging, with some terrific chapters and amazing characters. Loved the linkage between the stories (even if ultimately I wished the stories were a little less linked, ala David Mitchell, so I could get a Noreen chapter or a Rolph chapter instead of more Bennie and Sasha). But that's just me.

I really loved some of the chapters, like the safari chapter (which I read first in the New Yorker) and the Powerpoint chapter (which could have been gimmicky but had surprising depth). It edged towards cartoonish at moments for me (like the chapter about the General) and I would have also preferred more realism. Again, that feels like me projecting again!

So for what the book is as opposed to what I wanted it to be, it is a really great read. I actually am looking forward to re-reading it, picking up more of the links between the chapters and the characters.

The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean, by Susan Casey

2011-06-07T11:09:00.001-07:00

This one has been on my "to-read" list for a while and, again, a breezy non-fiction book seemed like a good option for reading while nursing. (Although literary fiction is turning out to be fine too; I'm almost done with A Visit from the Goon Squad.)

This book alternates between talking about big wave surfing and about the science of climate change, salvage operations in different parts of the ocean, and other ways that "rogue waves" are affecting the world. There's a lot of scary prediction about climate change causing more rogue waves, tsunamis, and earthquakes, and I didn't enjoy those parts as much because I prefer to be in denial about that stuff! (Actually, feeling there's nothing I can really do about it, and knowing that we're screwing up the planet, it's just incredibly frustrating.) But I wouldn't call it a flaw in the book, necessarily. You do get the idea after a while though.

The pacing is slightly off at points. For instance, when we're following the big wave surfers (which is totally my favorite part of the book, and takes up about half the narrative), one chapter ends with the surfers (and the author) all speeding to Mexico to catch a huge wave in, like, 2009. The next chapter begins, and suddenly we're in Alaska in the 1960s. Like, what happened to Mexico? I don't mind alternating the perspective, but there are instances where ending on a semi-cliffhanger throws off the flow of the book.

Anyway, overall, I really enjoyed it!

Forever Liesl (by Charmian Carr)

2011-05-31T10:05:00.000-07:00

I took the advice of a friend and downloaded a Kindle app for my Smartphone to read while nursing, and I've been doing just that the past few days. (I also have an actual Kindle, but the app is handier, since I also have a stopwatch on my phone that I use to time how long the baby is nursing.) I decided to start off with something super light, hence this memoir by The Sound of Music's Liesl.

Definitely a fun read if you're into the movie, and definitely a very light read. I wanted it to be better written and denser; for instance, I really don't get a good sense of the personalities of most of the "von Trapp kids," and I get the sense there's a lot of dirt she isn't dishing. (Come on, she and Christopher Plummer were relatively close in age and super hot. Tell me more, Liesl!) I also wanted more details about the movie itself. It just felt like there could have been more there there. Still worth a read if you're a fan.

On a completely tangential note, I saw Charmian Carr when we went to the Hollywood Bowl a few years ago for Singalong Sound of Music. She is still just as beautiful as she was when she played Liesl.

The Complete Persepolis (by Marjane Satrapi)

2011-05-01T10:15:00.000-07:00

The last book I taught in my World Literature course. Really a lot of fun to discuss; the graphic novel made a nice change of pace to round out the end of the semester, and the final papers were on the whole super smart. Again, it's been a while, so I'm trying to remember what we talked about. I know we talked about feminism in Iran; Marjane's character as a metaphor for the Iranian people; the importance of the "simple" visual style; the importance of the amount of "real estate" the graphics took up; the theme of art in general, and the subversiveness of the graphic novel form; the role of Western culture; the controversy over the book's portrayal of Islam; other interesting shit like that. An excellent teaching book.

Chocolate and Vicodin (by Jennette Fulda)

2011-04-29T10:11:00.000-07:00

I'm just randomly guessing on the date that I finished this book. I just forgot to blog about it! I remembered to Facebook about it though, which totally counts. A book by my friend Jennette about her headache that wouldn't go away. I really liked it, as I always do Jennette's writing. There's this kind of clean, straightforward, sensible tone to it that I always enjoy. I think I like the way she organizes information in her head. Anyway, it's always hard to "review" books by friends. Especially when you've had a baby since you finished reading it, and have forgotten most of the details. All I can say is, I'm proud of Jennette, and I super-liked the book!

Waiting (by Ha Jin)

2011-04-08T12:06:00.000-07:00

Another book for class! It was a'ight. I mean, a good book, but really suffered with comparison to Oscar Wao, which we'd just finished discussing. I liked it, I just wasn't crazy about it. And really right now, don't have anything exciting to say about it! (I really liked the ending though.)

One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (by Jasper Fforde)

2011-03-28T14:43:00.000-07:00

The latest Jasper Fforde book! It was the first thing I bought for my new Kindle (a birthday gift from Ian). I do love the Thursday Next series, and this one is really fun, and takes place almost entirely in the BookWorld (as opposed to the RealWorld). As funny and enjoyable as ever. Plus, there's a seventh one planned! Yay, Jasper Fforde!

I still have Shades of Grey on my "to read" pile, though. Gotta get to that one of these days.

The Namesake (by Jhumpa Lahiri)

2011-03-09T13:11:00.001-08:00

I just finished teaching this one too (now in the middle of Oscar Wao). I haven't read Interpreter of Maladies, but I absolutely loved The Namesake. Gorgeous prose, excellent story, good class discussion. Would teach again!

The Men Who Would Be King (by Nicole LaPorte)*

2011-02-09T13:32:00.000-08:00

Here's the subtitle of this book: An Almost Epic Tale of Moguls, Movies, and a Company Called DreamWorks. You can see why I kept it out of the post title.

So, this was another audiobook where the narrator drove me crazy. First of all, the book is by a woman, and she's a character in the book occasionally (as in, "when I met with so-and-so at the Ivy" or whatever). So it was irritating on general principle that the narrator was a man. ("It's a Hollywood story about dudes! We need a MAN VOICE.") But I could have gotten past that if I enjoyed his narration. I could nitpick about the words he mispronounced or the ones he pronounced annoyingly, but really the problem is that rather than speaking the words, he intoned them. Every sentence is... intoned. It's this inflated, stentorian, annoying voice that really bugged me from start to finish.

That being said, I still listened to the whole thing. It's a fun and insidery book full of Hollywood gossip. I could boil it down for you: DreamWorks was a series of dumb decisions, Spielberg is somewhat selfish, Katzenberg is a putz, Geffen is rich and pointless. There was never any unity among them. Hollywood is all about holding stupid grudges and being ridiculously greedy about money and awards. And about people with penises, who have all the power. Probably stuff we already knew, but still fun to read about, if you like that kind of thing. Just don't get the audiobook!

Red Harvest (by Dashiell Hammett)

2011-01-30T16:21:00.000-08:00

An entry on the Time 100 booklist, probably more for what it represents (Hammett's first book featuring the unnammed "Continental Op" narrator) than for the book as itself, although I did read an interesting idea that the story of a corrupt town turning on itself can be seen as a Lord of the Flies-esque meditation on human nature.

The narrator seems to stay a few steps of the reader and withholds a lot in terms of motivation, which makes it (for me) not quite as much fun to read. (I like unreliable narrators, but not needlessly recalcitrant ones.) There's also a little bit of scaffolding showing throughout--at times, the narrator does things that would almost certainly get him killed, except that Hammett needs him to keep narrating the book.

That being said, it was a fun and quick read, a nice way to dive back into the list. I think I have 20 books left, if I'm counting correctly. Those 20 are:

The Adventures of Augie March
American Pastoral
The Assistant
At Swim-Two-Birds
Blood Meridian
Call It Sleep
The Confessions of Nat Turner
A Dance to the Music of Time
The Day of the Locust
Deliverance
Dog Soldiers
Falconer
Gravity's Rainbow
Herzog
Loving
Money
The Power and the Glory
Ragtime
The Sheltering Sky
The Sot-Weed Factor

Graceland (by Chris Abani)

2011-01-28T17:22:00.000-08:00

I'm just finishing up teaching this novel, so I figured I should write about it! It was recommended by Aych, and worked out really well for the class, which is a World Lit class that's focusing on the issues each novel raises about the region in which it's set. This one is set in Lagos, Nigeria, and deals with issues like Western influence and postcolonialism, as well as poverty and the economy, native traditions and women's rights issues... there was a lot to talk about, and we had some good class discussions (at least the percentage of the class that did the reading).

That sounds kind of dry maybe, but the story is also pretty compelling in and of itself: it's the coming of age story of a young boy named Elvis (after Elvis Presley) who is a very likeable, if flawed, protagonist. It's set in Africa so a lot of terrible things happen, but it's nonetheless a great novel! Next up, The Namesake.

An Object of Beauty (by Steve Martin)

2011-01-05T14:38:00.000-08:00

I do love me some Steve Martin. I was so sad that this wasn't on audiobook with Steve Martin as the narrator, since I loved listening to his two previous novellas. But then I found out there are reproductions of artworks throughout the book, and I realized I wouldn't have wanted to miss those. (I would just have read it twice, though.)

So, this is a book about the New York art scene and about art, told as the story of an anti-heroine named Lacey Yeager. I really enjoyed everything about this book--the quietness of the plot (which is I think a Steve Martin signature) and the discussions of art from various places and eras.

I honestly don't know how successful Lacey is as a character (there is some male fantasy in there about female sexuality, where I think it's pretty clear a guy wrote it) but she was convincing enough for me to really, really enjoy this book. Write another one, Steve Martin! And read it on audiobook! Pretty please?

Year-End Book Wrapup '10

2011-01-03T14:05:00.000-08:00

The end of another year, time for another book wrapup!

I thought my tally of books would be very pitiful this year because I spent a lot of the year too nauseous to read, but I see that at 59 books, I read more than I did last year. 30 were by women, 29 were by men, a delightfully even gender split. [Edited to add: turns out I read 60 books, 31 by women, and forgot to write about one of them. Oops.]

The one sad thing is that I did not finish the Time 100 list. I read 9 books from the list, which I think means I have 24 to go. This was the reading project I really wanted to complete this year. Maybe next year! A girl can dream.

And now, the top and bottom books of the year. It's kind of fun to go through the list and see which books I've forgotten about and which have stayed with me, for better or worse. More hits than misses once again this year, I see!

Top five books of the year:

1. The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard
The big caveat about this book is that it takes place near Hiroshima after World War II, but focuses almost entirely on white Europeans. If you can get past that and take the novel on its own terms, in which war and disaster is merely a backdrop, it's marvelous. The language is sumptuous, and I just adored it. I'm surprised it isn't more famous. It's just so incredibly... good.

2. War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
This book alternately frustrated and fascinated me, and when I was done, I felt like I had gained some sort of greater understanding of Russian literature and history and culture and human nature. I don't know if this was the most enjoyable book of the year, which is why I almost put it lower down on the list. But I found myself relating all kinds of things in my life to War and Peace for weeks after I was done with it. And now I find myself wanting to read it again, in a different translation, just for fun. Ultimately, reading all 1300 pages was worth it, and it was definitely my must-read of the year.

3. Looking for Alaska by John Green
From a Russian masterpiece to a YA novel, why not? The thing is, this is a really, really terrific YA novel. It's got humor and honesty and heart, and the characters are compelling. I neither want to oversell it or give anything away, but if you're into YA at all, you should read this.

4. Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood
Oh, I just loved this series of loosely autobiographical stories, one of which was the basis for Cabaret, about Berlin in the 1930s. It's a world that I loved immersing myself in. After I finished it, we watched Cabaret (of course), Chris and Don: A Love Story (a documentary about Isherwood and his longtime partner), and A Single Man (the acclaimed Colin Firth movie also based on Isherwood's writing). One of my favorite tangents of the year: the Isherwood tangent! Highly recommended.

5. Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
After I read it I thought this book would surely be closer to number one, but then I taught it this year, along with my favorite book from last year, Never Let Me Go. While the Ishiguro really stood up to the test of the classroom (and my students loved it, across the board) the Bechdel worked less well, and I think it lessened my affection for it a little. I found that I didn't enjoy discussing it as much as I did Ishiguro. I almost kicked it off the list in favor of Joan Didion. That being said, I can't forget that it was this book I demanded everyone read this year, including my book club, and that I decided to teach it in the first place. So here it is at number five.

A few honorable mentions: Game Change (about the 2008 election), Netherland by Joseph O'Neill, The Help by Kathryn Stockett, Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles, Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, The Possessed by Elif Batuman, and the runner-up for this list, Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion.

Bottom five books of the year:

1. The Christmas Cookie Club by Ann Pearlman
Thought this would be a fun, fluffy audiobook, but it really is embarrassingly awful. My original review covers it pretty well.

2. Baby Proof by Emily Giffen
Most of the books on this list are less empirically terrible and more irritating or disappointing in some way. But in addition to being annoying, the writing itself here (very "tell, don't show") kinda sucks. On top of that, it has a promising premise and then blows it with a stupid ending. Approaching this book as a feminist just made me angry, and it's not very good anyway, hence it "wins" the dubious honor of being number two here.

3. A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
Oops, I see that I never even wrote about this book or added it to my booklist! Well, I'm sorry to say that after hearing all my friends rave about Lorrie Moore and reading this novel, I ended up violently hating it. After the first, oh, I don't know, five pages, I started keeping a list of all the utterly implausible things that characters say and do in this book. Nobody in this book behaves even remotely like a real human being. So while the writing itself is good, in terms of plausibility, it's a disaster. I wouldn't have bothered to finish it if it hadn't been our book club selection. I possibly would have run it over with my car instead. It annoyed me that much. Sorry, Lorrie Moore fans.

4. The Painted Bird, by Jerzy Kosinski
I can see the value of this book as an allegory for the horrors of war. However, it sticks in my mind as basically a book about animal (and occasional young boy) torture. Just unrelentingly awful. Like The Tin Drum, it created a world that I never want to enter into again, and thinking about it even now gives me the squicks.

5. Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins
I think the Hunger Games series is done a disservice by this book, which has a good chunk of action happen off-screen and disappointed me on many levels (which may or may not be fair, I've heard arguments on both sides). I read the entire trilogy very quickly and once Mockingjay had a chance to sink in, I guess I decided I didn't like it so much. I think there are worse books I read this year as books (although all the weird offscreen action and strange pacing is not very good) but it was a notable disappointment for me in terms of the trilogy, so it ends up here.

Honorable mentions go to One Day, which is 3/4 of a good book, and the book that made me give up on the Beekeeper's Apprentice series, A Letter of Mary. Also, my biggest disappointment was The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, by David Mitchell, which is not by any means a bad book; it's good. I just have the highest, highest standards for Mitchell, and I wanted to love and adore this book the way I love and adore everything else he's ever written, not just mildly like it.

And now, on to 2011!

The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America (by Michael Ruhlman)

2011-01-02T14:23:00.000-08:00

I've been going Top Chef crazy this season, so I picked up this book for hopefully a good insidery look at cheffing. I was a little disappointed because the author didn't actually go through the full training at CIA; he went in as a reporter, and dipped in and out of various classes. So you do get some good day-by-day insight into some of the classes, but not all of them. There's quite a lot in there about the tension between his reporter role and his desire to be a cook, which is to me the least interesting thing about the book.

My other minor issue with the book is that he doesn't always explain terms. I had to look up the definition of, say, "confit." I did learn a lot doing that, but I would have preferred a few more quick or slightly clearer explanations along the way. I guess I'd say it was a pretty good book that didn't wow me as much as it could have. Having just done my year-end wrapup, I can guarantee I won't remember much about it this time next year!

Freedom (by Jonathan Franzen)

2010-11-29T12:19:00.000-08:00

Ian gave me some great advice when beginning this book: don't think about all the arguments about whether Franzen is overrated or the Greatest Writer Ever, or whether the book is overpraised or underpraised or whatever. Just enjoy it as a page-turning novel. And I did: I started it yesterday and finished it yesterday, all 500+ pages, and it was a lovely way to spend the day.

(Part of the reason for my book binge is that I haven't read books in a while due to months of constant low-grade nausea making it impossible to concentrate; so now I'm making up for lost time.)

So, as a page-turner, I really enjoyed it. I don't think it's a particularly wondrous writing achievement, and here's one reason: there's a whole section that's supposed to be "written" by one of the characters, but it's the exact same writing style as the third-person narrator who narrates the rest of the novel. I mean, sorry Franzen, but David Mitchell would never! Also, I think he tries a little too hard to hammer the theme of "freedom," having multiple characters go on and on about how they're free or not free or what they think of freedom. Some thought-provoking passages, but on the whole, I think he's better when he's not trying so transparently to be profound.

I am a Corrections fan, and I'm a Franzen fan. It was a really fun read: not a masterpiece.

The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and People Who Read Them (by Elif Batuman)

2010-11-28T10:53:00.000-08:00

A book that's really hard to describe. Ian went to her book reading when she was in town and brought back signed copies for half the people he knows, so I finally decided to pick this up and read it for myself. It's less of a unified book and more of a series of disconnected stories or essays or meditations on various Russian (and Uzbek) writers and their works, as well as stories of, say, attending a conference on Tolstoy, touring the Petersburg ice palace, or spending a summer with a vaguely horrible woman in Uzbekistan.

It's incredibly erudite, well-written and not in the least overwritten, and both thought provoking and entertaining. I mean, it's really funny, and I did laugh out loud a lot while reading it. In spite of the complexity of the ideas (I found the discussion on mimetic theory super interesting) it's very readable; I tore through it in about two days. I wanted more on the novels that I have read--like War and Peace of course--and I wanted to read the novels that she talks about that I haven't gotten to yet--like Eugene Onegin.

I honestly don't know how to describe this book. If you like Russian novels, or even if you just like novels, you should give it a shot. Here's my favorite bit, about names in contemporary American writing:

The premium on conciseness and concreteness made proper names a great value – so they came flying at you as if out of a tennis-ball machine: Julia, Juliet, Viola, Violet, Rusty, Lefty, Carl, Carla, Carleton, Mamie, Sharee, Sharon, Rose of Sharon (a Native American), Hassan. Each name betrayed a secret calculation, a weighing of plausibility against precision: On the one hand, the cat called King Spanky; on the other, the cat called Cat. In either case, the result somehow seemed false, contrived – unlike Tolstoy’s double Alexeis, and unlike Chekhov’s characters, many of whom didn’t have names at all. In ‘Lady With Lapdog,’ Gurov’s wife, Anna’s husband, Gurov’s crony at the club, even the lapdog, are all nameless. No contemporary American short-story writer would have had the stamina not to name that lapdog.

Baby Proof (by Emily Giffen)*

2010-11-17T20:43:00.000-08:00

I enjoyed Something Borrowed and Something Blue, so I thought this might be a fun chicklit read. Actually, it was kind of irritating.

First is the plot itself. The main character, Claudia, marries her perfect husband, Ben, and they both agree they don't want kids. She has perfectly valid reasons for not wanting them. Then, he suddenly decides he desperately wants a kid. Without much discussion or therapy or anything else that would be reasonable in this situation, they split up. (This happens at the beginning of the book, so it's not a huge spoiler.) I basically hated this guy. I mean, he's not the one who has to give birth to a child, and he's the one who changed his mind after they'd already agreed on no kids.

Yet all the other characters tell Claudia that basically she should change her mind and have a baby to get him back because he's just so awesome. If he was even slightly awesome, he wouldn't have been so quick to run out the door just because he had changed his mind and she didn't want to change hers. You can't "compromise" on parenthood, as it is a lifelong commitment. SO HE IS OBVIOUSLY NOT AWESOME. HE SUCKS.

And apart from that, there's the way the story is told, which is basically in a series of expositiony passeges. At first I thought "oh, she's just giving us the setup, then we'll get into the actual book." But no, it's pretty much "I was sitting at my counter remembering the conversation I had with this other character, where she told me this story about her life. Blah blah exposition." "So-and-so called me and told me what had been going on with her, which was blah blah blah." I don't know how to explain it, except my friend Katie was talking about "narrative distance" and "scene-based writing" today, and I was like YES, this book I am listening to HAS THAT EXACT PROBLEM.

Anyway. Thumbs down.

The Thief (by Megan Whelan Turner)

2010-11-17T12:34:00.001-08:00

I forget where I heard this book talked up, but people told me it was amazing and that I should read it. Sorry, people who told me that, whoever you are, but I was completely underwhelmed.

I didn't get invested in the characters or the world. I didn't care about the political intrigues. The ending was good, but not nearly good enough. Mostly, I was just really bored. I definitely will not be reading the rest of the series. Maybe you have to be 12 to really appreciate this one?

Four Books (Cabot, Rebello, Krakauer, Griffin)

2010-10-13T12:23:00.000-07:00

Most of the reading I've been doing lately has been in the form of audiobooks, which three out of four of these books are:

How to Be Popular, by Meg Cabot*
Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, by Stephen Rebello
Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer*
Official Book Club Selection (Abridged) by Kathy Griffin*

I drove to and from Los Angeles last week, and listened to Into Thin Air for most of that trip. Now, I've read the book probably five times, but I've never listened to the audiobook, so I'm counting it as a "new" book. Krakauer reads it himself, and does a great job. It was the perfect read for that particular trip, (which was to go to a friend's funeral) since it is always engrossing, but I could allow my mind to wander and that was okay too.

After that I started Kathy Griffin's book, which I was hesitant about because I wasn't a huge Griffin fan, but I loved it, and now I want to rent her show on DVD. She is super open about everything from the disintegration of her marriage to her probably-pedophile brother, and she tells a lot of funny and charming stories about celebrities she's dated, fought with, worked with, and whatnot. I'm sad it is abridged, which I didn't notice until after I'd downloaded it. I want more, Kathy Griffin!

And (I'm so going out of order here) I also enjoyed Meg Cabot's "How to Be Popular," which is charmingly Cabot-esque YA, read by Kate Reinders. I was like "how do I know that name?" and then looked her up and realized I saw her play Glinda in Wicked in Chicago. (The last Cabot audiobook I listened to was read by a very young Elisabeth Moss. They do a great job picking narrators.)

Finally, I was going through a box of old books from my storage unit and found the Psycho book, which I don't think I'd ever actually read all the way through before. If you're a fan of the movie, it's a really fun book. The thing that sticks in my mind is the discussion of that shot where Marion rips up her piece of paper and flushes it down the toilet before she takes her shower. Seeing a toilet flush was supposed to be disconcerting for the viewer, according to Hitchcock. And it still is!

I've also been re-reading other stuff from that box: a volume of Sherlock Holmes stories, Hail, Hail Camp Timberwood and Remember Me to Harold Square and some old Babysitters-Club books. But I never count re-reads, so I'm leaving them off the list. They are, however, among the many reasons I haven't started Freedom or The Master yet.

Tea Time for the Traditionally Built (by Alexander McCall Smith)*

2010-09-30T13:31:00.000-07:00

I'm listening to audiobooks again on my commute and this was the first one: the latest in the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series. (Although I think I accidentally skipped one, because there were a lot of references to events that I never read about. Oops.)

These books are always sweet and low-key and charming, always more about hanging out with the characters and drinking Red Bush Tea in Botswana than about any sort of crime or investigation. That said, I enjoyed the plotlines in this one: the case was fun (though its resolution was really ridiculous), Mma Makutsi's love life plotline was cute, and I empathized with Mma Ramotswe's love for her tiny white van.

Just a really delightful entry in the series, exactly what I was in the mood for.

An Abundance of Katherines (by John Green)

2010-09-27T12:39:00.000-07:00

I loved Looking for Alaska and Paper Towns, so I wanted to read more John Green, and picked up this one. (I think the only one left is Will Grayson, Will Grayson, right?)

I admit I was resistant to this book because of the premise: a 17-year-old boy, who is fairly socially awkward, has dated 19 girls in a row, all named Katherine. I mean, come on. Three Katherines, sure. Five Katherines, okay. But NINETEEN? Maybe if the name were, like, Jennifer or Emma. But really, I've only known one Katherine in my entire life. I DON'T BUY IT.

Apart from that bit of UTTER IMPLAUSIBILITY, I found the book charming, if a bit familiar. Green likes to play around with the formula of slightly awkward boy, awesome best friend (Hassan is really awesome, and I love that he's Arabic) and almost-too-good-to-be-true super smart, super funny lead female character. But he does it in a way that keeps it fairly fresh from book to book.

Basically, a nice comforting YA book was exactly what I could handle reading this weekend. If you have any recommendations for Green-esque YA fiction, I'm all ears.

Repotting Harry Potter (by James W. Thomas)

2010-09-06T09:41:00.000-07:00

Playing Lego Harry Potter led me to re-read the series, which then led me to want to read about the series and order this book. I was looking for something like Graeme Davis's analysis, except as applied to the whole series. But it was really disappointing. Focused on puns to the exclusion of almost anything else, so desperate to sound "fun" that the writing is just annoying (worst offense: nicknaming Dubledore "Dumby," for the love of all that's holy), lots of typos, just in general a mess. I'm sure this guy's Harry Potter class at Pepperdine is fun and all, but this book was Not My Thing.

Can You Keep A Secret? (by Sophie Kinsella)*

2010-08-28T14:06:00.001-07:00

The first audiobook of the semester! (This reminds me that apparently Steve Martin has another book coming out in October. I love when he tells me stories.)

Anyway, this is a very cute romantic comedy, with a heroine that's far less pathological than that Shopaholic girl. (And there are some pleasantly feminist moments in the plot, which I enjoyed; the heroine of this book, Emma, is far more self-reliant than Becky Bloomwood, up until the very end.)

I don't enjoy Kinsella's writing quite as much as Meg Cabot's, but still, a pleasant enough way to get through my first week of commuting!

Catching Fire and Mockingjay (by Suzanne Collins)

2010-08-27T12:58:00.001-07:00

I hope I got her name right this time.

I read these books in one giant gulp, one right after another, the day after I finished Hunger Games. First was Catching Fire, which felt like a total retread until, suddenly, it didn't anymore. (And I loved the wheel-and-spokes design thing. I am trying to be vague so as not to spoil anything.) It also, in hindsight, feels like a lot of setup for the third book. I was disappointed we didn't get the scene of the immediate aftermath of book one, though. Instead it skipped forward quite a bit. But I enjoyed it just as much as Hunger Games, and was just as riveted.

I'm not sure quite how I feel about Mockingjay, though. There are so many elements about it I liked (and now I will do spoiler code; highlight to read). I liked the fact that the people who had been through the Games and the war were, to a large extent, irretrievably broken. I liked that District 13 was kind of a creepy place, far from a utopia.

The things I liked less: To the extent that I cared about the "love triangle" at all, I figured Katniss thought of Peeta as more like a brother, and Gale was her true love. When Gale's weapon killed Prim (which, I HATE YOU, SUZANNE COLLINS, FOR KILLING PRIM but the fact that Katniss would blame Gale for it and never forgive him made sense) I figured Katniss would end up alone. Which would have fit in with the message of the rest of the trilogy. Instead, she marries Pita (sorry, I can't help it) and then has some babies that he had to talk her into for years? Which, what? It was strange. I also thought it was strange that nobody even told her she was on trial, or talked to her at all, she was just... in this room by herself for months? And the trial happened offscreen? Very odd. And what she ends up doing with her life is BASICALLY SCRAPBOOKING. Katniss. SCRAPBOOKING. Does not compute.

So, I don't know. It probably means I liked Mockingjay the least of the three, but I still admire what Collins did with the trilogy. It's bold and tense and wonderfully dark. I'm glad I read it.

The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins)

2010-08-24T09:55:00.000-07:00

So, the blog Persnickity Snark recently compiled a list of the Top 100 YA Titles, as voted on by readers, authors, teachers, and more. I count 33 that I've read (oh, now 34), which I guess means I have another book list to dig into!*

The number one book on the list was The Hunger Games, and my Twitter friends assured me that I had to read it immediately. So I stopped by the bookstore near campus and bought it, so I'd have something to read while I had lunch. And holy crap, I could not put it down until I'd finished it.

It's the first book of a trilogy about this dystopian future where kids are selected from different districts to get in an arena and fight to the death. And it's all televised. I won't say any more about the plot except that it's almost unbearably tense, and gets slowly more horrifying as you realize (and I will spoiler code just in case) there isn't going to be some "nevermind! only kidding about all the death and killing!" deus ex machina at the end.

I love the fact that the heroine of this book is a girl, and one of the most kickass girls probably ever in literature. I would actually be tempted to teach this book. It would certainly get students' attention!

Anyway, obviously, I will now be reading the next two books in the series immediately. Because I have to know what happens next.

[*I would love some input about this list; do you think it's a good overview of the best YA books? And why the hell is Pride and Prejudice listed as YA? Elizabeth Bennet is 20, and in those days, that was practically middle aged! I'm just suspicious that it's like, oh, it's a lady book, let's call it YA.]

Boy Meets Girl (by Meg Cabot)

2010-08-21T14:36:00.000-07:00

Oh, I love Meg Cabot. Just a cute, quick read told through a series of emails, IM conversations, scribbled notes, and so on. I wish it were three times as long, that's my only complaint, because I read it in a couple of hours. Apparently it's a semi-sequel to The Boy Next Door, which I'll clearly have to read soon.

The only weird thing is that the novel is from the POV of the female lead, so why isn't the title "Girl Meets Boy"? Hmm. Anyway, predictable of course, but cute, fluffy, fun, witty chicklit. I might have to read everything Meg Cabot has ever written, huh?

Sensible Kate (by Doris Gates)

2010-08-20T14:01:00.000-07:00

This is technically a re-read, as it's a children's book that I remembered from when I was a kid. I couldn't remember the title, just that the girl on the cover was a redhead with pigtails, and that someone painted her portrait. And then one of those "what is that book??" websites came up with the title! So I ordered it! And then read it!

Re-reading it, it's kind of funny what an Anne of Green Gables ripoff it is. Redheaded, freckled orphan who thinks she's "homely" leaves a home where she's made to do housework and take care of babies, and moves in with a nice older couple. But it's set in a more modern time period, and takes some twists that you wouldn't necessarily expect. Also, California, not Canada, so--totes different. It was fun to revisit this little nostalgic book from my childhood.

The Man Who Loved Children (by Christina Stead)

2010-08-14T12:19:00.000-07:00

This book, the story of a bitterly unhappy family (unhappy in their own way, as Tolstoy would say) was a bit of a slog for me to get through, since it's over 500 pages long. It's also pretty relentless: the main characters are aggressively realistic and aggressively hateful and aggressively unsympathetic. Henny, the wife, goes on vicious tirade after vicious tirade. Sam, the husband, talks in a super-irritating baby talk to all of his kids, and just basically does all he can to annoy and undermine them. There's very little in the way of any kind of respect or compassion. So it's not a world that you necessarily enjoy being in, for all those pages. And my first thought on finishing it was that it would be better if it were 100 pages shorter.

I liked it more when I was done than while I was reading it, partly because the last 80 or so pages are really the best part of the book. Then I went back and read the introduction by Randal Jarrell, who acknowledges that the book's main flaw is that there's too much in it, but also concedes that novels, by definition, are flawed works---and that the specificity of the Pollit family with all its flaws makes the novel a true masterpiece.

There's a Jonathan Franzen blurb on the cover, and I can see why---The Corrections is also a big, overstuffed novel about a fairly unsympathetic family. I loved The Corrections, though, and I didn't love The Man Who Loved Children. I can appreciate those who appreciate it, but I wouldn't want to live through it again.

The Great Fire (by Shirley Hazzard)

2010-08-08T13:40:00.000-07:00

This is our next book club book, and I loved it. L-O-V-E-D loved it. One of the blurbs on the back talks about how Hazzard's psychological subtlety reminds them of the writing of Henry James, and I think that's dead on. Except the prose is easier than James's convoluted sentences. In fact, it's just gorgeous prose. I didn't just read this book, I savored it.

The Great Fire refers to a few different things, mostly the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which provides a backdrop for the novel (but is really not emphasized) and of course, human emotion. The characters are, broadly speaking, people stumbling through a post-war Wasteland, trying to find something to live for, and forging connections with each other.

The reviews for the novel are fairly mixed; people have issues with one of the central relationships and some people found it hard to read. I wonder if there will be some debate at book club. But I think it's an amazing, classic book--deserves to be in the canon, absolutely. A definite contender for my favorite book of the year so far.

Oh, and P.S.--one of the best last lines of a novel, ever.

"I'd come from the land of the single hope attained. One thing didn't lead to another, but was the sole consummation. People longed for a house and garden, or they pitched it all on a sight of the cliffs of Dover. The women longed to be married, come what might. The evidence achieved, you could die happy." -Page 120

Another wonderful quote, but kind of a spoiler:

"The man, instead, went to his own room and to his table--to those papers where the ruined continents and cultures and existences that had consumed his mind and body for years had given place to her story and his. He could not consider this a reduction -- the one theme having embroiled the century and the world, and the other recasting his single fleeting miraculous life." -Page 188

One Day (by David Nicholls)

2010-08-03T13:47:00.000-07:00

Entertainment Weekly went crazy over this book, so when I needed an audiobook for a drive to L.A. and back, I downloaded it. And I was really really loving it, for the most part, until about 2/3 of the way through it.

The premise is that the author dips into the lives of two characters, Emma and Dexter, every July 15th over the course of 20 or so years. The characters are vivid and believable (even the supporting characters) and there is some great detail and very solid writing. It's like really good chicklit (though written by a dude, so we call that "literary fiction" I guess, feh.) But then came the 2/3 mark, which I'll get to in a minute.

One criticism I've read is that when the chapters begin, the author doesn't give us enough background about what has happened in the intervening year, and expects us to fill in the blanks. Well I actually had the opposite issue--I thought the author filled in the blanks a little too much, and should have included important information more subtly, instead of in large chunks of exposition. That would have been, to me, part of the fun of the book's conceit--picking out the little clues that tell us what's happened.

I also thought that it got a little ridiculous how many important events in the lives and relationships of these characters happened to fall on July 15th. It felt like every July 15th had some kind of critical importance, and again, this seemed to lack subtlety. Then I got to one day that seemed like it would just be an average day, and I was like, well, I guess as long as we're done with the Major Events always happening on this day, I can---oh my god, ARE YOU EFFING KIDDING ME? Because there came another Major Event, and this was one that seemed really calculated to be manipulative. I don't want to spoil it for anyone, but it really kind of ruined the book for me on several levels (including the "suspension of disbelief" level). And then came the long, long, long final 1/3, wherein I no longer really cared about the characters at all.

This sucks, you know, because I was really loving the book and would have been endorsing it enthusiastically. But not so much, when all was said and done. Still, a lot of people love love love this book, and it's been enthusiastically reviewed. So your mileage may vary.

Little Brother (by Cory Doctorow)

2010-08-02T16:34:00.000-07:00

A YA book that should have worked for me, but didn't. It's a book I've been hearing about for years (mostly via John Scalzi, because I think they shared some award nominations) so I was eager to pick it up. I also used to be way into hacking subculture, believe it or not--I read 2600 constantly when I was a teenager, thanks to a best friend who was way way way into hacking and crypto back in the Internet Dark Ages.

Anyway, I just want to make it clear that it wasn't that it is "too techy" or anything like that. My problem is that it's just too didactic. The narrative frequently stops for lectures or info dumps from the narrator, his teacher, and other characters. And the torture stuff and political stuff is way over the top--the bad guys are just Evil (even his classmate is ridiculously over the top; he's practically Lord Voldemort by the third act), with no nuance; the good guys are just Good. And the message is so loud and clear that it left me seriously wanting some subtlety. About something.

It's super political, and I'm as big an Obama fan as the next person, but the concepts that the reader is being lectured on and the developments we're expected to buy into are just ridiculous (a 17-year-old getting waterboarded? So we really understand that Torture Is Wrong? Even though he's already been tortured earlier in the book?. It feels like satire that doesn't know it's satire, or something.

As a result of all this, the characters never feel real, and I found myself disappointed. It's not a terrible book--I can see why many people love it, especially teens who don't know a ton about civil liberties or hacking or whatnot. And I do agree with its message. And he gets the Bay Area right on; tons of details and descriptions that were fun to read, as a Bay Area person myself. But I wanted real characters I could care about, and situations that didn't feel like complete contrivances. I've read a ton of excellent, excellent YA lately (thank you John Green), and Little Brother was just a letdown.

Paper Towns (by John Green)

2010-07-28T15:40:00.000-07:00

Given how much I loved Looking for Alaska, and how much my friends love his other books, I'm going to work my way through Green's ouvre. So this one is Paper Towns and it's also awesome. It's got an Alaska-ish character named Margo and a Miles-ish main character named Quentin, but it also has fun characters and unique situations and surprising depth for a YA book. I particularly loved the crucial role played by Walt Whitman. Gotta love it.

Anyway, Green is awesome. If you like YA, give him a shot.

The Help (by Kathryn Stockett)

2010-07-19T14:13:00.000-07:00

I picked up this book as an airplane read, but then got stuck on De Zoet and didn't get to it. But I picked it up a couple of days ago and I have to say, it's a page-turner! Just as advertised. So I stayed up late last night finishing it.

So, the author is a white woman, and she writes in the voices of three different characters, two black maids and one white woman. So the book opens up with some heavy dialect like "Her legs is so spindly she look like she done growed em last week." And it kind of makes you go, hmm, is this problematic? However, it also made me think of the discussions about white authors writing characters of color and the inherent issues of privilege that come into play. Ultimately the takeaway was: it's better to try, even if you aren't 100% successful, than not to try at all. Especially if you are an established writer, including people of color in your work is better than omitting them.

So maybe I wished this book was by a writer of color. But given that Stockett was a white writer drawing from her own experiences of growing up in Mississippi and her relationship with her own maid, what were her alternatives? To write her whole book from the POV of white people would negate her whole point. And not to try and all would be a shame, because the characters and the story are compelling and--yes--the dialect ends up feeling appropriate to the characters, time and place. She also acknowledges some of the issues in her afterword: of feeling like it wasn't her place to presume to tell the story.

But ultimately, it is a really well-told story with great characters and a compelling plot. I would recommend giving it a chance. And I'd love to hear other points of view on the whole issue of white privilege, too, because I think it's important to think about.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet (by David Mitchell)

2010-07-16T12:12:00.000-07:00

David Mitchell is one of my favorite living writers; Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green are both masterpieces. So I had to pick up his newest book, about a Dutch trading post off the coast of Nagasaki, in old-timey imperialist days. Plus: Dutch people!

(One disappointment is that there really wasn't much Dutch language in it at all. 99% of the Dutch conversation is rendered in English.)

It's fully realized and epic in scope, great characters (especially the main character, Jacob, and the translater, Ogawa Uzaemon) but it was a bit of a slog. At least that's how I felt until I got to the ending, which is amazing. The final few chapters are just pitch perfect. (There's even one that is a long passage of rhymes, ending gorgeously.) And it made me feel the Mitchell magic for the first time.

I admit I like his postmodern stuff better, on the whole, and I wasn't as fired up about this one as I was about Cloud Atlas. But Mitchell writes a hell of an historical epic, with a lot of depth. I mean, of course he does.

(P.S. Here's a great interview with Mitchell about the book.)

Vacation Reading: Time 100

2010-07-12T15:21:00.000-07:00

I was hoping to finish the Time 100 list this year--which would be less of a problem if Gravity's Rainbow weren't on that list. I was up to 67 at the beginning of the year, but I'd only read a couple more before I left on vacation. So, when I decided to order a bunch of used books from Powell's before my trip, I figured it would be a great opportunity to get some of these out of the way. And it was! Here's what I thought about the six books I read on vaycay:

Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion (finished June 15)

My favorite of these six books, and also the first book I read on my first flight out of town. I'd never read any Didion (no, not even Magical Thinking) and this makes me realize what a gap that is in my reading! It's a terrific book--a blackly comic (but tragic), economical, atmospheric book set mostly in 1960s Hollywood. Please feel free to recommend more Didion, because I loved this one!

The Spy Who Came In from the Cold by John LeCarre (finished June 17th)

The anti-James Bond. I wanted a little more "inside baseball" on the spying--a trip to the D.C. spy museum was way more interesting than this novel in terms of the nuts and bolts of the spy trade, which was disappointing. I did enjoy the suspense and the boldness of the ending. But I also didn't find the main character to be smart or savvy enough for it to be wholly satisfying. I guess I just wanted to be inside Leamas's head a little more.

The Sportswriter by Richard Ford (finished June 23th)

I took this novel along with me to a series of Irish pubs, where I read some of it every night over a pint. So I have fond associations with this book! Still, I really liked it--to my surprise, because Ian hated it and we usually have the same taste in books. Interesting ideas and a super banal unreliable narrator. I enjoyed his banality and his unsympatheticness! But according to the book cover, this is supposed to be a portrait of "humane decency" which makes me nervous. I liked him in a way, but he's kind of an awful person--did I miss the point?

I did scrawl down this quote, which I loved, from page 97: "What is friendship's realest measure? I'll tell you. The amount of precious time you'll squander on someone else's calamities and fuck-ups."

The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski (finished June 27th)

Well, Bad Things Happen To Animals, A LOT, so you know I wasn't going to like this book much. I did find it interesting on an allegorical level--the suffering of animals makes sense when it is dealing allegorically with the Holocaust. But it's pretty relentlessly brutal and awful, and paints an unpleasant pictures of the "ordinary people" who allowed the Jews to suffer and die with glee, while basically raping, murdering, and torturing each other on the sidelines. Interesting to find a lot of controversy as to how autobiographical it is--I thought the allegorical nature of it was obvious and would never have considered it autobiographical. But the author comes across poorly in all the controversy, and I'll be glad never to open this book again anyway. Shudder.

Ubik by Phillip K. Dick (finished July 4th)

Inventive and interesting (I loved Joe Chip and his front door) but I had some issues with it, which I will now enumerate:

1. Runciter seems like a complete asshole at the outset, so the loyalty to him was confusing.
2. The pace is super fast, and I would have liked it to slow down a little bit so the inertials could have pieced a few more things together. I also loved all the details of the world, so more would have been nice!
3. And related to that, I felt the characters were not set up enough or distinct enough (like, Wendy's relationship with Chip would have been nice to explore), and there's really no scenes of the characters doing their jobs, which seems like a weird omission.
4. The clothes jokes were overused. The book didn't have enough of anything, except clothes jokes!
5. I felt it lacked internal logic, and the "rules" of the world never quite made sense or hung together.
6. Sexist! Like, there's this whole futuristic world, but the bosses are men, the secretaries are women, and women are still automatically taking their husband's last names? And also, the female characters are immediately plotted on a fuckability scale as soon as they appear. Very irritating.
7. Joe Chip is a super passive character--I thought he should have figured out more or explained more or done more.

All that being said, and I know those are a lot of criticisms, I kinda liked it! Chris, if you're reading this, maybe you can rebut some of my points and/or suggest one of his other books that I might enjoy more. I did love the crazy world he created, and ultimately several of my criticism are just that I wanted even more of them.

Neuromancer by William Gibson (finished July 6th)

Speaking of sci-fi, the final book I read was Neuromancer. And immediately I thought, "Snow Crash is like this, only about 100 times better, but I have a feeling there would be no Snow Crash if it weren't for Neuromancer." Sometimes books end up on the list because they are groundbreaking, and I think this is one of those. (In looking at the list again, I see Snow Crash is also on there, yay.) (The Time list really is a very good book list, overall.) And I did read up on Gibson and discover that, among other things, he coined the term "cyberspace." So I was right about him being a groundbreaker!

I thought this book erred a little bit on the side of being confusing. I don't need everything spelled out, but a tiny bit more explication at points would have been helpful. I found myself hunting for nonexistent explanations of things more than once, and I'm usually fine with just going with the flow of an invented world or language. I just thought it was a shade too opaque. I also found it ooky that the only characters of color were Rastas. And at the end, I found that I didn't really get what had happened, and I also didn't care to think about it too hard and figure it out. So, there you go.

And those were the books I read on vacation! Now I just have to finish The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, and I guess go out and buy Gravity's Rainbow...

Vacation Reading: Other

2010-07-10T08:09:00.000-07:00

I toyed with the idea of getting a Kindle for my three-week trip, but ultimately decided I couldn't afford it. So instead, I ordered a pile of used books from Powells and figured I could just read the books and leave them behind in hotels and B&Bs as I went, which is exactly what I did.

I'm going to have to break this into a couple of posts, since I read a dozen books on the trip (listed below). I'll do one for the Time 100 books, which are bolded in the list below, and one for "other," which are the unbolded books. The list:

1. Play It As It Lays, by Joan Didion
2. Avalon High, by Meg Cabot
3. The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, by John LeCarre
4. Dubliners, by James Joyce
5. The Sportswriter, by Richard Ford
6. Out Stealing Horses, by Per Petterson
7. The Painted Bird, Jerzy Kosiński
8. By Strange Paths, by a Benedictine of Kylemore Abbey
9. Looking for Alaska, by John Green
10. Ubik, by Phillip K. Dick
11. Neuromancer, by William Gibson
12. All We Ever Wanted Was Everything, by Jannelle Brown

Aych asked me what I'd read on the trip and what I'd liked the most. The ones I liked the most were Play It As It Lays and Looking for Alaska. I'll get to Play It As It Lays next time, but as for Alaska, I actually didn't pick up the next book for a couple of days because I wanted to stay in the world of that novel a little longer. So it was my favorite of the "other" books. Runner up was probably Dubliners. Here are all the books, in chronological order, and my thoughts on them...

Avalon High by Meg Cabot (finished June 16th)

A YA retelling of Arthurian legend, very fun and charming, as all of Cabot's stuff is, but also very fluffy, especially when compared to the other YA I read, which had a lot more depth. A fun, light read. I actually think it would have been a fun audiobook.

Dubliners by James Joyce (finished June 19th)

I ordered a terrible edition of this (they used QUOTATION MARKS, which Joyce abhorred) but I still got a kick out of reading Dubliners in Dublin. (And the introduction by Brenda Maddox is really good.) My favorite stories were "An Encounter," "Clay," "A Painful Case," "A Mother," and obviously "The Dead," which I've read (and taught) before. In my notes it says, "Makes me want to re-read Ulysses, as many of the characters recur there. What an amazing, cynical, unblinking collection of stories!" Also when I stayed in Ennistymon, which is not a touristy town, I met a lot of drunken Irishmen who seemed like they'd stumbled straight out of the pages of Joyce. I had a real Joycean time in Ireland: arrived on Bloomsday, went to Davy Byrne's on my last day in town, and couldn't get Joyce's work out of my head. Dubliners made me a real fan. Terrific.

Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson (finished June 25th)

This is our book club book, so I won't say too much about it. Turning to my notes: "Was expecting a little more at the end--a revelation, maybe something to do with [redacted]? And there is a lot of scenery description, which makes it pretty slow-paced. But it has depth--I feel like it's a re-reader, and that I'd get more out of it the second time. I also really liked the main character and his dog (great dog descriptions! Very real) and I enjoyed living there in the cabin in the forest." I also enjoyed the subtlety of the ending, and probably upon a re-read, would enjoy the subtlety of the book as a whole. Am interested to see what the rest of the book club thinks!

By Strange Paths by a Benedictine of Kylemore Abbey (finished June 28th)

One of my favorite books of all time is In This House of Brede by Rumer Godden, which is about a Benedictine monastery full of nuns. So I'm driving through Ireland and I see this and I stop (because hello, I have to take some pictures of it) only to find out that it's full of Benedictine nuns! And I got to hear them sing the Divine Office! And it was SO EXCITING! So anyway, at the bookstore was this book by one of the nuns who died in the 1950s, mostly about her experiences in WWI and how she got to Kylemore, so I bought it. And I wrote: "Nun book! She was so happy to be a nun--wanted more details of the nunning, but it was like a long, charming letter and very enjoyable." I also bought a vase made by nuns. It was all very exciting for a nun fan like me.

Looking for Alaska by John Green (finished July 1st)

So, as I said, this one was my favorite. Really terrific YA with a ton of depth. It's forthright about sexuality, sophisticated in its themes, very honest. It might be to a certain extent autobiographical, in fact. It's about a boy who goes to boarding school and meets a girl named Alaska who changes his life. But the characters are well-drawn and it tackles some of the Big Questions in life. It's not perfect, so I feel like I'm overselling it. But I really loved it. And so did Eliza!

All We Ever Wanted Was Everything by Jannelle Brown (finished July 7th)

I can't decide if this is really good chick lit or really fluffy literary fiction, which means it hits the sweet spot right in the middle of both. I couldn't put it down; I actually did stay up until 2am finishing it. She is great with little details that strongly evoke character or place. I actually didn't leave this book behind because I wanted to take a look at her use of details again and maybe try to learn something I can incorporate into my own YA novel in progress. Anyway it's set in the Bay Area, the story of a mother and her two daughters, told in shifting perspective. The characters all seem real (and very flawed) and their problems don't have easy solutions. A lot of fun sex and drugs and stuff, but there are some bigger themes about materialism and feminism and class embedded in here too. Recommended by my colleague and friend Katie.

Phew! That's it! Stay tuned for part two: the Time 100 list books.

War and Peace (by Leo Tolstoy)

2010-06-08T13:06:00.000-07:00

As Andy Bernard would say, maybe you've heard of it?

My friend Brad is a huge fan of Russian literature, and I'd never read War and Peace but loved Anna Karenina, so we kept saying we should form a War and Peace book club (of two people). And so we did; we've been reading this book probably for six months or so? Every week I go into the coffee shop where he works to talk about the book. (Actually, he's also a big Lost fan, and Lost was way more confusing than Tolstoy for a while there, so we talked a lot about Lost instead.)

War and Peace reminds me of Les Miserables a lot--both super long, epic books, with a backdrop of war, and involving Napoleon! Although the themes are different and obviously the latter is very French, while the former is very very very Russian. Not in the usual way* but it emphasizes Russian values and the strength of peasants and the value of the Russian language and critiques the aristocracy and points ahead to the Decembrist revolution and all that stuff.

*Brad: "Well, there are three names on the back cover, and this is a Russian novel, so one of them is going to die, one's going to get brain fever, and one's getting shipped off to Siberia."

So, the strengths of the book: compelling characters, sweeping in scope but also very detailed and intimate, without being difficult to read. Tolstoy is able to zoom in and zoom out--describe a scene as if from a distance, and then zoom in on one particular character's experiences and thoughts. Especially in the war sequences, this works brilliantly, and the pacing is mostly perfect. The characters are well-drawn: I loved the flighty Natasha, the flawed Pierre, the devout Marya, the impetuous Petya--even when they aren't sympathetic, they're very real.

The weaknesses: that damned second epilogue is a mess! It's essentially a first cause argument, except that rather than one pointed paragraph, it's twelve chapters of analogies that really don't hold together logically. Plus, it repeats points he's been making throughout the text about history and free will and all of that. He does get a little too didactic elsewhere too, and seemingly doesn't trust the reader to understand the point the first (or fifth, or tenth) time he makes it. Like, I get that you hate Napoleon, and I get that the Russian Spirit is awesome, and that you're basically a Kutuzov apologist, can we possibly move along?

Also, the characterization of Pierre becomes a little problematic, Boris kind of disappears (unless I missed something), Bagration's fate is decided off-screen, and there really isn't enough explanation of the fate of the French army--I had to supplement the book with Wikipedia! And man, does poor Sonya get the shaft, or what?

Ultimately, I'm really glad I read it. I especially recommend it to anyone who's interested in Russian history. I also enjoyed this essay about someone else's experiences with the book. I guess now Brad and I have to find something else to read! Gravity's Rainbow, maybe?

Service Included (by Phoebe Damrosch)

2010-05-11T12:12:00.000-07:00

I picked this up at Elliott Bay Bookstore in Seattle to read on the flight home. And indeed, I read most of it on the flight home! It's the memoir of a server at Per Se, Thomas Keller's French Laundry equivalent in New York. And since I've eaten at the French Laundry, I was interested in a behind-the-scenes look at how a restaurant like that works.

I went back and forth on the narrator. At times she seems a little smug or didactic, at other times, oblivious, at other times, tone-deaf (I'm as liberal as the next person, but did she really need to go off on Republicans in the middle of a paragraph when it wasn't relevant to at all?). For the most part I liked her, but it was a Julie Powell kind of like. You like her, but... there's that "but."

The problem with this memoir is that it's half-good. The first half delves into the restaurant being set up and all the little details that go into the service there, and it's terrific. The second half focuses a lot on her relationship, and it lacks resolution. The guy seems to be clearly a shady character, but I guess we're supposed to assume, at the end, that he isn't? Or more like she wanted a happy ending for her book.

Also, I hate the disingenuousness that comes into play when the author is clearly working a job to write a book about it and pretends she isn't. The opening of the book is like "I had to stop pretending I was a writer... clearly I was just using writing as an excuse for waiting tables." Well no, not when you've GONE AHEAD AND WRITTEN A BOOK ABOUT IT THAT I AM READING RIGHT NOW. Gah! I hate that!

Stealing Buddha's Dinner (by Bich Minh Nguyen)

2010-05-11T11:52:00.000-07:00

I taught this memoir this semester on the advice of a colleague, and I'm so glad I did! It's the story of a Vietnamese immigrant growing up in Grand Rapids, told through rich metaphors about food. A meditation on American pop culture, what it means to be "American," and the complexity of family and identity.

I related to this book a lot as the daughter of Dutch immigrants, which is actually kind of ironic, since Nguyen is growing up living among people in Grand Rapids who are mostly third-plus generation Dutch, and it's a very "normal," "American" community. (I only met my great grandfather once, when he was 96 years old and in a nursing home in Rotterdam, but he talked about moving to Grand Rapids in the 1920s.)

Anyway, I related way more to having that weird family that eats strange foods and buys off-brand soda than to the Dutch kids with Wonder Bread sandwiches. My favorite chapter was 10, with an extended meditation on nascent adolescent sexuality. I also loved the chapter on books, since she grew up loving the same books I did, and turning to reading the way I did, too.

The class agreed that the ending is a little strange--she skips entirely over her junior high and high school years, suddenly jumping ahead to college, and then ends the book without telling us what became of many of the people we've been reading about and are interested in. I tried to find interviews with answers to some of my students' questions, but didn't get anywhere--so I sent her a Facebook friend request.

Netherland, by Joseph O'Neill

2010-05-04T21:43:00.000-07:00

This was our latest book club pick. The story itself didn't grab me, particularly, but everything came together beautifully at the end, and on an intellectual level, it is a truly interesting book. I mean, it feels like literature, something that would reward rereading and studying and teaching. We had one of our best book club discussions ever about it!

It's about a Dutch guy (yay! there is some Dutch!) living in New York after 9/11, playing cricket with other immigrants. It's definitely the best "post-911" book I've read; it handles it in a subtle, pitch-perfect way.

We talked, in our book club meeting, about parenthood, about displacement, we discussed similarities to Martin Dressler and The Great Gatsby, and we debated the (very well drawn, we agreed) characters of Chuck and Hans and Rachel. Also some of the individual images and metaphors that were just gorgeous.

A Great American Novel for sure, and one I didn't love until I got to the end--but I recommend it!

Going in Circles (by Pamela Ribon)

2010-05-02T18:12:00.000-07:00

Definitely her best work yet! I tore through this one, thought the characters were interesting (like the unsympathetic mom and her insta-BFF Francesca) and the descriptions of roller derby were done extremely well. Something I noticed (because an editor told me I wasn't doing it in my own manuscript) is how good she is at establishing a character with a few concrete visual details. Francesca and her fingernails, or Matthew with the smudges on his glasses. It grounds the whole story and was, from a writery POV, impressive.

I did wonder (based on the author's interview at the end) if Matthew was less sympathetic than he was intended to be. The Italy thing and busting up her miniatures especially, but overall, I didn't get many sympathetic beats from that character, so it was difficult to understand why Charlotte didn't just move on. Of course, "this is harder than it looks" is kind of the theme of the book, and some of those emotional descriptions rang very very true.

Also, my friend Trixie Biscuit is in the acknowledgments, so that was exciting. Yay, Pam!

Fun Home (by Alison Bechdel)

2010-04-23T09:35:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine is teaching Fun Home this semester, and after flipping through her copy, I immediately went out and bought my own. I admit I would have been sold just on this blurb from Ms.: "If Vladimir Nabokov had ben a lesbian feminist graphic novelist, he might have produced something like this witty, erudite memoir."

I'm excited because my friend is lecturing on the final chapter next week, and I'm curious to see how it works in a classroom setting. Some of the references were things I was unfamiliar with (I've read Ulysses, but not Proust or Colette) and I imagine they're even more unfamiliar to most undergraduates. I think this would be a great novel to teach in my lit class next semester, but I'm curious to see how it all works.

Anyway, the point is, it's absolutely terrific. Dense and smart and emotional and sexy. It's Bechdel's memoir of her relationship with her father--she is a lesbian; her father has secrets of his own. Five stars, I can't imagine leaving this off my "best of" list at the end of the year.

The Moviegoer (by Walker Percy)

2010-03-30T13:40:00.001-07:00

Here's something I just read about the novel: "The Moviegoer, published in 1961, introduces Percy's concept of the 'malaise', the angst of the lucid man in a world without gods. Through every line of Percy's works live the alienated seeking certitude... Both Binx and his distant cousin Kate (the beauty he's more involved than he'd like to be with) are self-aware characters in a world of actors, the only ones to realize the inherent falseness, the clichés, in all things."

I'm not ashamed to say I didn't quite get this book, at the end. I read that it's based on the existentialist philosophy of Kierkegaard, so maybe I need to go read some Kierkegaard to really understand it. It's on both the Time 100 list and the Modern Library's list. The basic story is one of alienation and despair, and it's not difficult to grasp, really, and I love his musings at the beginning, I was really into the book as a whole--but then at the end, when the movies are suddenly unimportant and the chronology gets confusing and the way Kate's plot is resolved... I don't know, I wasn't sure what to make of it. The more I read about it, the more I appreciate it, though. I may need to seek out some criticism and then read it again.

“What is the nature of the search? You ask. Really, it is very simple, at least for a fellow like me; so simple that it is easily overlooked. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were sunk in the everydayness of his own life. This morning, for example, I felt as if I had come to myself on a strange island. And what does such a castaway do? Why, he pokes around the neighborhood and he doesn’t miss a trick.

To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair. The movies are onto the search, but they screw it up. The search always ends in despair. They like to show a fellow coming to himself in a strange place – but what does he do? He takes up with the local librarian, sets about proving to the local children what a nice fellow he is, and settles down with a vengeance. In two weeks time he is so sunk in everydayness that he might just as well be dead.” (page 17-18)

Fool Moon (by Jim Butcher)*

2010-03-24T13:37:00.000-07:00

My dear Elizabeth sent me the next two Dresden books on CD, and it was great fun to get back to Harry, especially as performed by James Marsters. As I said before, he does a terrific job, and it's fun to hear him bitch about mopey vampires, talk about a character named Spike, or point out that a platform is "five by five" feet. It's the little things in life. He does sometimes misread sentences a bit, but you can mostly figure out what's intended, so I'm cool with it. the character of Harry is just so great, and his cynical, yet warm sarcasm is perfect.

In this one, Harry fights a bunch of different types of wolves, and there's pretty much constant tension. I think my favorite elements of the Dresden books are the potions and Bob the talking skull, so it was great to have them back. On the other hand, I hated having Dresden on the outs with Murphy for so much of the book, as I do love their relationship. The payoff was great, though. (And on the romance tip, I like Susan and all, but I have to believe Dresden/Murphy is the end game here, right?)

I've already started listening to the next one, Grave Peril, and I think it's about ghosts this time! Which is awesome, because werewolves aren't that exciting to me, but ghosts! That's gonna be fun. Anyway, if you like mysteries, the supernatural, or supernatural mysteries with a little bit of sarcasm and a little bit of gore and a great lead character, try the Dresden Files on for size. It's like the Anita Blake books only minus the porn and plus some wit. And a much much better protagonist.

(P.S. His name is Harry Blackstone Copperfield, and though I figured out Blackston and Copperfield, I totally didn't get the Harry Houdini reference until he explains it in this book. I just made an immediate Harry Potter association because, "yer a wizard, Harry!" Duh.)

The Christmas Cookie Club (by Ann Pearlman)*

2010-03-17T12:35:00.001-07:00

This book is just embarrassing. I found it while I was going through my stuff, and since I was out of audiobooks, I figured I'd listen to it. It seemed like a fluffy read: twelve women have a cookie exchange club and talk about their lives. And it definitely is brisk and fluffy. However...

First of all, in every chapter the narrative often stops dead so that the narrator can give cookie recipes (which are at least relevant, I'll give them that) or a brief history of cookie ingredients like ginger or salt. A history of cookie ingredients when you have 12 characters to juggle?

That's the main problem, the characters. 12 characters is too much; I would often forget who somebody was or what their story was. To be fair, there are a few characters that remain clear (such as Charlene). But many of them blend together. And no wonder: I counted at least six of the 12 main women who are blonde. 11 of the 12 are white (as far as I could tell) and all of them are heterosexual. And almost every single character has a problem with her love or sex life, and/or child-rearing. Just a complete lack of diversity and a really narrow view of "women's problems." With 12 women, can't one of them have a career or artistic crisis or something? Anything?

And amid the sameness there is one black character, but this brings us to another problem. The dialogue. Listening to the book on audio makes you realize how awkward the dialogue is in general. For instance, nobody would actually say a sentence like: "But you know my father. Always the salesman. Always wooing his force into a mentorship of adoration." There are tons of sentences like this. I mean "mentorship of adoration"? But of course the one African-American character, Sissy, doesn't talk like that. She says things like: "You think that be enough. But that little man get something in his mind he don't let go." That's right, she talks in an awkward "black" dialect. And she's got dreadlocks. And her son is a rapper who was in prison. No wonder Pearlman doesn't write diverse characters when this one is so embarrassing.

I do admit it was fun after a while. She would introduce another character and I'd be all, let me guess! Blonde, white, hetero, with man problems! And I was mostly right.

Berlin Stories (by Christopher Isherwood)

2010-03-10T15:09:00.000-08:00

I'm finally back to reading books from the Time 100 list, although I'm way off pace for the year. (I'm halfway finished with The Moviegoer though, so that's something. It's the ongoing War and Peace project that's really slowing me down.) Anyway, this one is fabulous. Who knew that Cabaret was based on a story by Christopher Isherwood? Not me!

This whole book is a semi-autobiographical collection of stories about a gay man living in Berlin in the 30s just before Hiter's rise to power. I enjoyed not only the story titled Sally Bowles, but many of the other stories. One strange thing is that the stories weren't really in chronological order--characters and events recur, but sometimes out of order. Still, I really enjoyed being immersed in the world of 1930s Berlin, and the characters are memorable, and the writing's terrific. Really enjoyed it. This is from the intro (which he wrote about returning to Berlin after the war):

"The street where I used to live is behind the Nollendorfplatz... Even before the war, this was a decayed and forbidding district; but when I saw it again I was really awestruck. The fronts of the buildings were pitted with shrapnel and eaten by rot and weather, so that they had that curiously blurred, sightless look you see on the face of the Sphinx.

Only a very young and frivolous foreigner, I thought, could have lived in such a place and found it amusing. Hadn't there been something youthfully heartless in my enjoyment of the spectacle of Berlin in the early thirties, with its poverty, its political hatred and its despair?"

Frekonomics (by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner)

2010-03-10T14:57:00.000-08:00

I read this on an airplane, and it actually wasn't a great airplane read in that it went really, really, really fast. (Luckily I had another book or two waiting in the wings.) It was entertaining, though! I'd heard about the whole abortion and crime rate connection back when the book first came out, but I enjoyed reading the whole thing. I kind of wanted a little more detail and depth, but for what it was, it was entertaining. Shrug.

A Letter of Mary (by Laurie R. King)*

2010-03-01T20:54:00.000-08:00

I decided to give the third book in the Mary Russell series a chance, and actually at some point in the middle of the book I really understood the complaints that Mary Russell is kind of a Mary Sue. It was when she suddenly was an expert horseback rider. It was a very Nancy Drew/Kay Scarpetta moment.

I wish the plot hung together better; there are all these red herrings and entire plotlines (such as the letter of the title) that never go anywhere. I did enjoy Mary's undercover disguise, but the way that resolves in the end is ridiculous. Plus, not enough Holmes! What's the point of the whole Mary Sue enterprise if we don't get more sexy Holmes? I might need to take a break from this series for a while.

I'm also itching to get back to my booklist; I'm reading The Moviegoer, Berlin Stories, and War and Peace right now. I just need a good audiobook to add to the mix.

The Second City Unscripted (by Mike Thomas)

2010-02-20T14:29:00.000-08:00

This seriously could have been so much better. It's in the same style (interview snippets) as the wonderful Live from New York about SNL, but it suffers in comparison.

The biggest problem is that a lot of things are never explained. For instance, they don't even outline what constitutes a "revue" or what the rules for improv are in their shows. I would have loved some nitty gritty talk about how a show is written and put together, but it's all just vague.

Also, they almost never talk about cast members leaving or why, so you don't get a clear sense of when people came and went (which is something else the SNL book does really well) or how the cast and their comedy styles evolved. They don't talk to a lot of key people (I don't recall anything from Steve Carell or Andrea Martin or Nancy Walls or Catherine O'Hara, for instance, just to name a few).

Some of the people they do talk to are just underused--I would love to hear more from the trio of Amy Sedaris, Paul Dinello, and Stephen Colbert, for just one example. You get these frustrating tidbits, and not enough depth. I would love more specifics about the shows and what they included--I'm familiar with SCTV of course, and some of the offshoots of Second City (like many SNL performers and sketches, or Strangers with Candy) but a lot of it goes unsaid.

I got really annoyed when I saw the afterword, where the author talks about how much he cut out of the final edit. Um, maybe some of that stuff would have helped your book NOT BE SO ANNOYING, Mr. Thomas. Thumbs, sadly, down.

U is for Undertow (by Sue Grafton)*

2010-02-16T11:21:00.001-08:00

I used to read the alphabet novels religiously and repeatedly, but I skipped a couple that looked dumb and got bad reviews. I decided to read this one because the reviews were pretty good, and I thought I'd take a chance on the audiobook.

The book itself, I did like. I would rather stick with Kinsey's point of view for the whole book rather than jumping around, but the other sections were well done and even when I didn't know how they were going to connect with the final mystery, were interesting on their own. Vaguely annoying: Grafton always uses at least one name that starts with whatever letter the book is. In this case, a family had the last name of Unruh. That name was so unlikely as to be annoying! A nitpick, I know. But the mystery itself was good, and Kinsey as the heroine continues to satisfy.

(I do have to say that there is quite a bit of filler, and some random sidebars that didn't really seem to fit in. But it was entertaining enough for the most part.)

My big complaint? I didn't like the narrator, Judy Kaye. She sounded like a really bitter Ellen Degeneres. The real problem was that every phrase seemed to be dripping with sarcasm. Even innocuous phrases like "Chapter 17." So it made Kinsey (and many of the other characters) less likeable than they should have been. I had to keep reminding myself, Kinsey isn't being bitchy and sarcastic to everyone she meets; it's the narrator's tone! So I was kind of sorry I hadn't just waited for the paperback.

Also on audiobook, you notice how unlikely some of the dialogue is. Like three characters use "net" as a verb, even though in real life, I don't think I've ever heard anyone use it. One character says "my proverbial ass is grass" in the middle of an argument. "My proverbial ass"! Someone else says, "I don't think the admonition applies if there's a serious crime involved.." and someone else constructs a sentence that starts something like: "Your plan, we can implement when..." On audio, you really notice clunky dialogue that probably would read fine on the page.

Anyway, these are nitpicks. Like I said, I don't recommend the audiobook, but the mystery itself was a fine return to form for Grafton.

Jane Austen: A Life (by Claire Tomalin)

2010-02-07T12:11:00.000-08:00

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)*

2010-02-04T13:02:00.000-08:00

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)*

2010-01-27T15:07:00.000-08:00

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)

2010-01-24T14:39:00.000-08:00

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)*

2010-01-20T18:15:00.000-08:00

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)*

2010-01-20T18:10:00.000-08:00

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)

2010-01-14T18:33:00.000-08:00

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)

2010-01-11T17:43:00.000-08:00

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)

2010-01-07T16:07:00.000-08:00

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)

2010-01-05T13:45:00.000-08:00

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)

2009-12-30T13:42:00.000-08:00

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)*

2009-12-23T13:36:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-21T13:03:00.000-08:00

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)*

2009-11-20T13:19:00.000-08:00

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)*

2009-11-16T18:07:00.001-08:00

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)

2009-11-15T16:27:00.001-08:00

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)*

2009-11-09T16:35:00.000-08:00

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)

2009-11-03T19:46:00.000-08:00

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)*

2009-11-03T19:36:00.000-08:00

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)*

2009-10-29T14:49:00.000-07:00

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)*

2009-10-12T14:45:00.000-07:00

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)

2009-10-07T08:41:00.000-07:00

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)*

2009-10-06T18:17:00.000-07:00

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)

2009-10-04T15:37:00.000-07:00

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)

2009-10-01T16:38:00.000-07:00

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)*

2009-09-21T19:52:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-18T13:19:00.000-07:00

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)

2009-09-06T12:43:00.001-07:00

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)

2009-09-04T15:53:00.000-07:00

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)

2009-08-22T16:02:00.000-07:00

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)

2009-07-30T17:26:00.001-07:00

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

2009-07-24T14:57:00.000-07:00

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.

Columbine (by Dave Cullen)

2009-07-20T08:30:00.000-07:00

I had been curious about this book because Entertainment Weekly gave it an A and a friend of mine read it and confirmed that it was excellent. But it did not exactly sound like a laugh riot or even much of a page turner.

Then I was at my sister's house and she pushed the book across the coffee table to me. "Have you read this? Just read the intro." And I was completely hooked. I couldn't put it down. I stole it from her so I could finish it on the plane ride home, even. Riveting, page-turning stuff. You probably already know if you have any interest in this book or not, I will just add my voice to the chorus: it's a really good book on the truth and the myths behind the Columbine massacre.

Many Books About Princesses (by Meg Cabot)

2009-07-13T13:54:00.000-07:00

While on vacation and immediately after I got home, I read the final four books in the Princess Diaries series: Party Princess, Princess on the Brink, Princess Mia, and Forever Princess. I love this series so much. Can you tell I love this series so much? I would never tell anyone to inflict Shopaholic on themselves, but I think everyone should read the Princess Diaries; so much fun.

I can no longer quite remember what happens in which book, as there are many cliffhangers. Nor do I want to spoil the ending of the series. But Mia's maturing and dealing with sex is handled well, and characters develop plausibly. There are a couple of really ridiculous plot developments, of course. (I will spoiler code: the parchment being in the portrait, because why would the portrait get sent to Mia anyway, for one thing; and of course the publishing contract she magically gets offered at the end of the series, which seems like a stretch.) And I still hate Lilly, right up until the end. But oh, the ending was satisfying, and so much made me laugh, and I can't imagine a more satisfying ending to the series than the last book.

Under the Net (by Iris Murdoch)

2009-07-11T11:41:00.000-07:00

The first of a pile of books (mostly about princesses) that I read on vacation, and one of the books on the Time list. And the first time I've read a book by Iris Murdoch! That's a lot of firsts.

Here's another: during the first half of the book, I was mentally preparing to praise this book to the skies and insist that all of you run out and read it immediately. A terrific and convincing unreliable narrator, a surrealist-comedy-noir plot, it sucks you right in and is delightful from the beginning. But I'm not quite going to insist that you buy it. I still give it a thumbs up, don't get me wrong, but the tonal shift towards the end of the book disappointed me a little. I didn't have any problem with the ambiguity, the circular plot, or the ending, and I don't even have any problem with the tone changing, but it felt abrupt and strange to me. I can't quite put my finger on it.

That said, I would love to read more Iris Murdoch. I have a feeling she's another of those underrated female authors; this book is really terrific.

Infinite Summer

2009-06-29T15:50:00.000-07:00

I am participating in Infinite Summer this year, a project where a bunch of people have decided to spend the summer reading Infinite Jest. We're up to page 93, I think, at the end of today.

You may recall that I've been reading this book off and on this year, but I got bogged down in footnote 24 (the filmography) and put it aside at around page 65. I could have skipped the footnote, of course, but I consider that cheating. Especially if a book is on my reading list, I don't think it "counts" unless I read every word. I even read every word of Finnegans Wake (and no, I will never ever stop bragging about finishing that book, I'm sorry).

At this point it feels like DFW is throwing a bunch of balls in the air--setting up characters and storylines that will come together down the road. But many of the vignettes are enjoyable to read all on their own (like the "professional conversationalist" chapter or the guy sitting around waiting for his pot dealer to come over) even without the larger context, and some are even terribly poignant (Kate telling the doctor about her depression, which of course is what killed DFW himself). Even the filmography that undid me the first time is pretty entertaining as a standalone.

I'm not taking any fancy notes or anything, since the website has some great resources. At this point I am just taking it as it comes.