How we learn to be ourselves

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants - Ann Brashares (Delacorte Press, 2001)


The Second Summer of the Sisterhood - Ann Brashares (Delacorte Press, 2003)


Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood - Ann Brashares (Delacorte Press, 2005)


Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood - Ann Brashares (Delacorte Press, 2007)


Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares (Random House, 2011)


I've been moving! Which meant that I was very excited when a friend had a book swap and I was able to bring over all the books I had been saving up. It also meant that despite my best efforts, when I saw 3  of the Sisterhood novels, I picked them up. Years ago, a friend recommended them (or the movie?) and I had vaguely planned to read them. So in the midst of packing, I started reading the first one. Because really, what is better than YA as an escape from stress?

And then the second, and the third. And then I started looking online to see if there were more. All told, I think I read the five in about 4 weeks? Everyone already know the story, right? Four friends, and a pair of jeans that magically fits them all, and not just fits, but makes them look extra hot. The Pants become the way they "stay together" when summer takes them to different places. The Pants bear witness to their struggles to cope with change, and growing up, and love and loss. The first summer, the girls are a summer away from their 16th birthdays, by the third they are about to leave for college. The fourth finds them after their freshman years, and the last novel comes a decade later.

Reading them in the span of a month rather than over ten years, as they were written, it really jumps out at you how much the girls have to learn the same lessons over and over and over. How to be brave, how to be open to change and to forgive those who change around you, how to see past surfaces and accept the love that's offered, how to be vulnerable. And then to return to them, as young women about to turn 30, with years more of experience, the lessons are still there to be learned.

And that tore me up. It was an unexpected sucker punch. Maybe because it threw into such stark relief that fact that the lessons I have learned over the years need to be learned again and again and again. You don't just reach an epiphany and get to happily ever after. Or even to the next level, like some sort of video game. Or perhaps, to play with the video game analogy some more, you do, but you just repeat the same level again and again, in slightly different guise. You have to reach that epiphany, defeat the same boss, time and again. And that's a tough realization.

But no one reads the same book. We bring so much of ourselves - our past and especially our present - to what we read. I'm curious to know how others found Lena, Carmen, Tibby, and Bridget.

Falling in love under false pretenses, subcategory two

Beguiling the Beauty - Sherry Thomas (Berkley Sensation, 2012)


Second only to "pretending to be married" in my list of amusing romance scenarios that do. not. happen. is "pretending to be someone else." You could make an argument for those both falling under some broader category of "falling in love under false pretenses," but in one you're fooling outside observers and in the other, you're fooling the love interest.

And that's what happens here, when Venetia, 27 and twice widowed, finds herself hurt by public comments made by Lord Somethingorother and decides to make him fall in love with her, and then burst his bubble. (I'm not quite sure how this proves that she's not a Black Widow who uses her beauty to entrap men, but whatevs.) This plot, unbeknownst to her, has the added extra punch that he's been lusting after her from afar for years, since she was a young bride. Aww. So they seduce each other - did I mention she's wearing a veil, so he can't tell it's her? - and manage to fall in love.

Except they're both deceiving each other? How will it ever work out? :)

I'm snarking, which is unfair, because this was really rather charming. And humorous. They were likable characters, and up until the speedy denouement, I was totally down with them. I am pretty sure I made me "ZOMG SO CUTE" face after every chapter. Plus, it's always an added bonus when the heroine is into a "man's" subject like archeology. And Thomas cleverly laid the groundwork for the rest of the trilogy, which will settle the love lives of her younger (twins) sister & brother. In fact, she did such a thorough job that I really thought those were the B and C storylines and was confused that they were left unresolved. Which, of course, means I will have to read them...

Trying to mix great literature and sunshine

Swann's Way - Marcel Proust (trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff) (Dover Publications, 1913, 1922, 2002)


So, I finally started on In Search of Lost Time. Or, since it's the Moncrieff translation, maybe I should call it Remembrance of Things Past. This has been hovering around as a thing I should do for years now. But it was a slog. I started on or around Memorial Day, and finished sometime last week.

Why I had problems with the book: for starters, I kept getting sleepy. This was a fun vacation-y month, and the amount of mental power involved in parsing these long loooooooooong sentences was more than I could handle. (By the way, there should be a limit on the number of clauses allowed in a single sentence.) Also, I couldn't really get into the narrator. I kept pushing through, because eventually we were going to go back in time and find out about how Swann fell in love and ended up in this ill-advised (per the narrator's family) marriage. Except that wasn't really any better. Until it was. What does the reader find so reassuring about the idea that love was similar enough a century(ish) ago? Is it just that Proust does such a good job of showing how a lover can persist in reformulating a relationship in his head, again and again, to rationalize and justify staying in a position that grows ever more untenable? At any rate, it was sort of fascinating. And then we jump back to our narrator, as he falls for Swann's young daughter...

And it all made me think maybe I'd keep reading after all. Except I know that I'd just fall back into the part where I was grumping my way through the work. So what do I do? Stop after volume one?