Wait, what?

Breakfast of Champions  - Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Dell, 1973)

Last night, the Stanford Prison Experiment came up in conversation, which led me to the Milgram experiment, the Third Wave, and the blue eyed/brown eyed exercise.  These all dated to the 1960s and early 1970s, which led me to wonder what exactly was going on in the air those days.

(I mean, I sort of know the answer, but seriously...)

Which leads me to Vonnegut. It's been a long time since I've read him, and I guess maybe I had forgotten how eccentric his writing could be.

The novel is the lead up to a momentous meeting between a crazy old science fiction writer and a prosperous businessman that ends with the businessman going postal and eventually (after the action of the novel) the author achieving acclaim and winning a Nobel Prize for Medicine.

Oh, and a huge supporting cast. Including Vonnegut himself, in town to watch his creations on their collision course.

The important part: every character matters and has a real story. No minor character should be treated as minor. In fact, "so many Americans [were] treated by their government as though their lives were disposable [...] because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales." None of this for Vonnegut. Which makes for a whole lot of story. And also illustrations, and commentary, and a matter-of-fact telling of some of the less attractive parts of American culture and history, the way someone in hundreds of years might explain it to a child, or to an alien visitor.

Seems a reasonable way to ring out 2013, I suppose.

All good things...

Allegiant - Veronica Roth (Katherine Tegen Books, 2013)

I feel like I had heard this book had a rather controversial ending. I get it - I mean, how can you [REDACTED] and not expect people to be upset? I'll admit, my suspicions ran in a different direction. As a result, I felt okay about Roth's decisions, although I suppose I will have to go look around for some press where she talks more about it.

Throughout the series, the motivating force is the desire for agency as it comes into conflict with a world that wants to use the characters as puppets. And the circles just keep expanding. Here we go outside the only world Tris has ever known, and discover that what has seemed high stakes has pretty much been child's play. Again, they have been tools in someone's grander scheme.

I find myself at a bit of loss for what else to say. I'm frustrated by the YA staple of 16 year olds being placed in positions of great authority. Um, no. (Maybe this is why it's a dystopia? :P) I wonder about the relationships, and how they would look if they were being nurtured by less apocalyptic times. And how the film will adapt the major plotlines. And what on earth was going on behind the science, which generally just made my head hurt. But it was a really fun ride, especially Divergent. I look forward to the alternative world trilogy in which the stakes stay a little smaller, and people carve out what it means to have agency and be human without overthrowing regime after regime after regime.

Undiscovered County

The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America - Bill Bryson (Perennial, 1989)

This was my other travel book, although I didn't get to it until the plane ride home. But it was nice to "return" to America with Bryson and his journey from the center of the country out to the edges and back again.

This isn't my favorite of the books I've read - the humor seems a little meaner somehow - but it was fascinating to live vicariously as he drove down little roads and got lost. His search for the perfect small town was marred by bland, homogenous motels and diners as well as by crassly commercial tourist traps. And yet he regularly came across beautiful and interesting sites.

Coming from California, I have to remind myself (if I bother) that there's a whole rest of the country that sees my state as pretty much a foreign land. And this was likely even more the case a quarter century ago. So I'm glad for Bryson's reminder that there's a pretty fascinating (and boring, or fascinatingly boring) land out there between the coasts.

Lad lit!

The Calligrapher - Edward Docx (Houghton Mifflin, 2003)

Vacation reading. In fact, I was on a cruise line resort "in" Haiti when I finished this book. And I made everyone else in my cabana (#firstworldproblems) listen to my wtf explanations when I got to the last page and realized that there was no next chapter.

But if I complain too much, I'll probably give away too much, and I'm sure plenty of people will be perfectly satisfied with this ending anyway.

Jasper is this suave superior London calligrapher, who is working on a series of John Donne love poems. Along the way, his philandering ruins one relationship and sets him on a collision course with his sexy new neighbor. He pulls out all the stops to win her over, but will his past misdeeds catch up with him?

I saw the plot twists coming, and didn't find Jasper particularly sympathetic, but yet was perfectly happy to come along for the ride. Jasper was a prick, but an interesting storyteller, and you reached the point where you'd be fine seeing him either weasel his way to victory or receive a humiliating comeuppance. Either way. I saw the plot twists coming from pretty far away (and perhaps that was the intention) but they were still nicely delivered. In the end I was willing to accept that Docx's ending was probably better than the one I was waiting for. Or the other one I was waiting for. Or the third.

Two lives, interwoven

Earthly Powers - Anthony Burgess (Simon and Schuster, 1980)

Backstory: for my 21st birthday, I got a collection of things from my birth year -- a bottle of port (still unopened), a VHS copy of Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (foreign language Academy Award winner), and a first edition of this novel, shortlisted for the Man Booker.

Cut to now, when I finally decided that while just having the book was nice and all, I really ought to read it. And at over 600 pages, it was a slog. (Especially with YA dystopias and engagements and colds and holidays and such to distract me.) And my description was probably less than glowing: "It's about a gay writer in the 20th century and his brother-in-law the Pope."

This is more or less accurate. It's about two intertwined families throughout the century, as narrated by the aging homosexual novelist. His brother was a comedian, his sister best described (for the moment) as the wife of an Italian musician. Said musician had one brother a businessman in Chicago, another a priest, and a sister who was a nun. Toomey (the author's) family came from British and French Catholic stock, and so faith (and sexuality) are interwoven throughout the novel.

We know from the start that Carlo the priest will eventually ascend to the head of the Church. But the path there is convoluted for them all. And because I read in small doses, Toomey's recollections from 1918 to roughly the early 1970s seemed to take almost the 50 years they spanned. Which is not to say the writing wasn't sharp and interesting, it was just dense. And heavy. It's an accomplished and successful family, but also a somewhat cursed one, and people's seemingly small and benevolent actions consistently have violent and dreadful ramifications that could not be foreseen. It gets a little rough.

But all in all still fascinating. And a lovely birthday gift, even all these years later.

I'm going to be throwing a huge party

A Practical Wedding: Creative Ideas for Planning a Beautiful, Affordable, and Meaningful Celebration - Meg Keene (Da Capo Press, 2012)

Offbeat Bride: Creative Alternatives for Independent Brides - Ariel Meadow Stallings (Seal Press, 2010)

Ladies, thank you for helping save my sanity (so far). The blogs A Practical Wedding and Offbeat Bride came across my radar pretty quickly after I succumbed and created a (private) wedding Pinterest board. They seemed chill, and interested in bumping up the parts of a wedding that I cared about, and savvy about how to help you downplay the parts that weren't important to me. (And also really awesome about the fact that everyone's going to have their individual lists of what is and isn't important.)

But there are also books! Stallings's book (well, the first edition) predated the blog, and Keene's came out of her blog. And I tried to get them both from the library, but when OB proved hard to get, I went to the store. And after reading my library copy of APW, I was back at the store to get my very own.

[Note to the universe: would LOVE LOVE LOVE more independent bookstores in my area]

I'm going to suck at reviewing these, and perhaps the most important reviews will come after the Big Event, but both were complementarily (a word?) so helpful. Keene's book made me weepy pretty much once a chapter, while Stallings was more likely to make me giggle. Both are filled with history and examples and ideas about how to navigate the path from getting engaged to getting hitched (or not). And both offered hugely practical advice. (Keene: cross out almost everything on those other sites' "to do" lists, which reminds me, the Offbeat Bride checklist has made me really really happy, even if still overwhelmed. Stallings: consider all the aspects about who will be your best wedding party members, if you have a wedding party.) There's tons of overlap, although Stallings is geared toward a decided more eclectic crowd.

I've set the books aside, as my December is filled up with non-wedding stuff, but you had better believe that come January, these babies will get all sorts of use.

Post 500! (also, manipulating children)

Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card (Starscape, 1977, 2002)

So, Card's a little controversial. But if I knocked every author off the list for having views I find abhorrent (ahem, Tolstoy) I'd have a reading list of approximately zero. What really interested me in this book is how many of my male friends have told me this was the book that made them like reading. (Awww!) And yet, without the movie coming out, I might never have gotten around to reading it.

In brief, Ender is a genius. He's been monitored for much of his young life to see if he is The One who will help them win the ongoing war against alien creatures called Buggers. (Ugh, that name.) So he's chosen and gets sent to Battle School with a bunch of other similar kids, and there's training and strategy and armies and creepy psychological games, etc. These are interspersed with conversations between Colonel Graff, Ender's champion, and various other military figures. Oh, and along the way we digress for a whole crazy side plot involving Ender's two siblings (also geniuses) and their attempts to shape world policy by becoming (what would now be known as) Internet intellectual personalities.

And the games get harder and the psychological toll more brutal, with each step more trying than the last. It was hard to read, especially as you keep remembering that Ender is a child - his classmates too. He is six at the start of the book, and twelve (if I remember right) at the end of the main action. Genius or not, it's too much.

That said, it's delightful reading Ender's analyses and strategies. He's definitely clever and unorthodox. It's much easier to stay in the games themselves than to journey outside them, to the hard stuff. And then the end of the book, post-climax, goes off in all sorts of crazy directions. (In my opinion, the film handled this much better.)

To conclude, I'm glad I read this, and I understand why it meant so much to so many young readers, but it was a challenging book in many of the wrong ways. I need something that makes me despair a little less.

Shifting allegiances

Insurgent - Veronica Roth (Katherine Tegen Books, 2012)

So, maybe it was the fact that I read Divergent twice in one weekend, but while that book remains vivid in my mind, this one has largely flitted away in the 10 (?) days since I finished it. It was good - not as good as the first one but still - and yet I find myself unable to really write about it.

In all fairness, this may not be the book's fault. Since finishing it, I got engaged (!!!!!) and suddenly almost all my brainpower is devoted to wedding planning. I never expected to be this kind of bride ("oh, I knew you would be," says the fiancé) but here I am so I suppose it's to be expected that this book would get a little lost. Why didn't I write about it sooner?

Moving on. Tris remains pretty awesome, but she's frustrating and difficult in this novel. Maybe I'm overly attached to Four, but (spoiler alert?) a lot of the quieter drama here revolves around how poorly they communicate, and to me it seems like it's almost always her fault. We should cut her some slack though - not only is she a teenager feeling her way into a first relationship, but she's also near the epicenter of the upending of their entire society.

People (both individuals and groups) seem to switch sides pretty often, and villains get complicated. (I approve of this.) I also approve of the continued lack of love triangle, although the cheeseball in me found myself rooting for one. (I like Tris, but I also like antiheroes, and I had a whole thing happening in my head.)

I can't figure out how exactly the last one will turn out, but it's sitting on my coffee table, so if I ever manage to get off the wedding blogs, I guess I will find out.

Choosing a tribe

Divergent - Veronica Roth (Katherine Tegen Books, 2011)

I could NOT put this book down. I'm not sure whether those will prove to be empty calories, but I just wanted to be reading all the time. The day after I finished, after talking myself out of going down to the bookstore to buy Insurgent, I started it again. Lovely.

Blah blah YA dystopia. And love story. Young woman discovering she is stronger and more important than she ever imagined. So this world is a future Chicago, and society is split among five factions. At age sixteen, young people take a test that will tell them to which faction they are inclined, and then they get to choose one. That choice, determines the rest of their lives.

"Decades ago, our ancestors [...] divided into factions that sought to eradicate those qualities they believed responsible for the world's disarray. [...] Those who blamed aggression formed Amity. [...] Those who blamed ignorance became the Erudite. [...] Those who blamed duplicity created Candor. [...] Those who blamed selfishness made Abnegation. [...] And those who blamed cowardice were the Dauntless."

Beatrice, raised in Abnegation, has her test results covered up: she is what they call Divergent, with equal inclination toward more than one faction. (Or, you know, what we call being normal and human.) This is dangerous, and she must keep it a secret. And then she chooses her faction, and ... well, you know the drill. Exciting stuff happens.

But since I'm already doing a bad job of making this book sound as compelling as I found it, let me switch to why I found it so philosophically interesting. The end matter includes an interview with the author, where she mentions that she hadn't meant to create a dystopia, and makes the (obvious but sometimes overlooked) point that dystopias arise from the utopian systems put in place to make a better world. And her utopia is a little like the world she's created here. And I get it, because how cool to be trained to really amp up your natural inclination toward friendliness, knowledge, selflessness, straight-forwardness, and courage. Except the division seems so much like the way our current society is self-segregating by politics and socioeconomic status. The latter has always been a problem, but the way we congregate so much with those who share our world view... it's dangerous. And then suddenly I was tweaking Roth's creation, and imagining a world where you rotate through the "factions," honing your abilities in each one and creating a more well-rounded personality, and interacting with people much different from you.

And since our main character is Divergent, maybe that's sort of what we'll see happen in the next two books.

BTW, I am definitely Amity, with a strong undercurrent of Erudite. Which is to say, almost exactly Beatrice's opposite.

Decluttering never stops

Throw Out Fifty Things: Clear the Clutter, Find Your Life - Gail Blanke (Springboard Press, 2009)

Over the summer I went through a fairly massive uncluttering project. There were a bunch of boxes that I packed up when I moved out of my 1 BR and had sat in a garage for almost 3 years. And if you are like me, you know that at some point in the packing process, things start getting a little jumbled up -- office supplies, decorations, sentimental knick knacks, etc. I did a pretty decent job at getting rid of things, including letting go of some harder things, like gifts that I appreciated but knew I would never use.

But I didn't feel done, and when I heard about Blanke's book, the concept of an assignment (50 things, seems like a SMART goal to me - aside: I prefer action-oriented for A) really appealed to me. I needed someone to walk me through my house and force me to make a list. (List!) So while decluttering phase one was about trying to weed out some of the boxes of stuff, this phase was going to be about going through all of the unpacked items.

So far, so good. What I really needed was a reminder that holding on to something because of its history isn't a good idea if it comes along with too many (or any really) negative associations. There were items that I realized were too linked to times and people from which/whom I wanted to move on. Some of them I kept, but several I let go. Or at least tried to gather in a single place so there would just be one box of yucky memories. This was great. But my list had trouble, because I had already tossed so much stuff just a few months ago. And for a variety of reasons, I wasn't willing to deal with clothes in this go-round.

So I lost momentum. And then I got to the second half of the book, which is about letting go of the mental clutter and discovering your empowered self. None of this was bad, especially, and if you sit and journal and count each piece of defeatist self-talk that you promise to let go of as a thing, you can get to 50 much more quickly. But I found myself a little unmoved. I don't want to say it wasn't valuable, but I think it didn't come at the right time for me.

And that's really the thing about books like this (well, and most books, probably): they need to show up at the right time. If they appear when you need them, they are amazing. If you're not ready for them, they won't penetrate. So I'll take the good parts and let go of the parts that didn't work for me. And maybe I'll come back to this later and it will be a totally different part of the book that speaks to me.

Ideas that kill

Trotsky in Exile - Peter Weiss (trans. Geoffrey Skelton, Pocket Books, 1973)

I'm not sure how widespread this school of thought actually is, but I know that studying Soviet Russia in my youth, there was a strain of counterfactual imagination that wistfully contemplated how different things would have been had Trotsky outmaneuvered Stalin in the years following Lenin's death. In this world, we might have seen a kinder, gentler communism.

Ugh. While sure, the only thing we can really know is that Trotsky's USSR (and the rest of the world around it) would not have looked like Stalin's, it's certainly difficult to believe he would have ushered in some sort of socialist utopia. Trotsky was just as violent, just as conniving, and by a long shot more dedicated to the worldwide part of the worldwide proletarian revolution.

To me, Weiss's Trotsky is of the "man, if only it could have been him" ilk. We visit him in set pieces that travel around in space and time, Trotsky exiled from Soviet Russia at the same time he re-lives moments from his life in prison and exile from tsarist Russia, his intellectual debates and disagreements with Lenin, the chaos of revolution, and the show trials that cemented Stalin's consolidation of power.

I have to keep reminding myself that this play was written during the Cold War, during the Brezhnev Era and just a year after the Prague Spring. (The play dates to 1969, later published in English.) And not only that, it was written by a naturalized Swede of German and Jewish origin. I have the luxury of both a chronological and emotional remove. But still, I don't know how I was supposed to feel about Trotsky, as an intellectual or a revolutionary. Or certainly as a husband or father.

Or maybe I just don't get plays.

And it really felt like 27 years

History of the Peloponnesian War - Thucydides, trans. Rex Warner (Penguin Books, 1972 sorta)

Ten years ago, in my first week of grad school as a doctoral student in history, I was assigned both Thucydides and the Histories of Herodotus. For one class. Maybe I could have done that by the following semester, but it was essentially a non-starter. I got some ways into Thucydides, realized I could either finish it or start Herodotus, and so switched over.

And just like Sparta and Athens took a break of about eight years in the middle of their war, I took a nice long break before coming back to it. (And of course, re-starting from the beginning.)

This book is a beast. In short, starting in 431 B.C. the Greeks had their own World War. The Athenian and Spartan "empires" went at each other, often using proxy armies and invading/fomenting revolution in various other cities. They "laid waste the land" pretty much all the time. And there were lots of pretty speeches laying out reasons for and against various actions.

Eventually, Athens loses their upper hand by deciding it's a bang-up idea to go invade Sicily. This turns out to be a very bad idea, and eventually (although the work is unfinished and actually ends with an Athenian victory at sea) they fall entirely. But lots of detail in between.

Thucydides wrote essentially contemporaneously, although over the course of 27 years he had time to clean things up and insert additional information. Fortunately, his goal was to write an enduring work, so he really took time in crafting it (and hopefully in getting the details correct).

There are so many cities and politicians and generals and most of the time I couldn't remember who was on which side. Which makes for poor work in really understanding the ins and outs of the war, but was fine for providing a general arc of the brutal and complicated war and the set of shifting allegiances that brought Athens down. It took forever to read -- and required lots of stops and desires for lighter fare (I actually picked up Breaking Dawn last night) -- but I'm glad I finally did it. Now onto the next challenge.

Surveys!

Wife 22 - Melanie Gideon (Ballantine Books, 2012)

Another example of a book that got on my list somehow. I was at the library, trying to find something (unwarlike) for a weekend plane ride. And this was what was on the shelves. Of course, then I stuck to Thucydides on the plane, so got to this almost a week after I got back.

But then I blew through it. I didn't want to put it down.

Wife 22 is Alice, a Bay Area woman approaching a mid-life crisis. At the same time, her husband and children are having crises of their own. In her free-wheeling state of wondering what comes next, she finds an invitation in her spam folder to participate in a marriage study. The questions are open-ended (the researcher assigned to her case compares his job to what they do to songs at Pandora) and cover the past, the present, and the future. And as she goes through, her interactions with the researcher get increasingly personal.

Chapters are usually short, and the plot is presented in a variety of forms: first-person narrative, texts, emails, survey responses (without the questions!), and playwritten scenes. It's a difficult gimmick to pull off without feeling gimmicky, but I felt like it worked here, even when some of the social media facts felt un-true.

Don't want to give much more away, but I was enraptured by this tale of how a life and a love look from outside and from within.  

When the weather gets hot...

True Confessions - Rachel Gibson (Avon 2001)

...I start craving books about the rural Mountain West. Or the South. I'm kind of easy to please that way. What I do not crave is a 2500 year old text about the Peloponnesian War. So I'm still plugging along on that.

This was my break from that about 2-3 weeks ago. Hope takes refuge in an idyllic Idaho town to get her groove back in her tabloid stories. But it turns out the sexy sheriff also has ties to Los Angeles. And when they meet, sparks fly. In all sorts of directions.

Can I write the back covers for romance novels? Please? I'll keep practicing and getting better at it.

No fake marriages, but plenty of love under false pretenses.

Last gasp

Dead Ever After - Charlaine Harris (Ace Books, 2013)

I feel vindicated. The series wrapped up more or less exactly how I thought it would. (See previous entries here.) Which isn't particularly the arc I would have chosen, but I'm too colored by the actors playing various characters to have any real objectivity there.

(PS - what on earth is going on in HBO's Bon Temps?! I haven't seen this past season yet, but reading about it online makes it sound insane.)

But anyway, Sookie. Characters return from the past to seek revenge, and the repercussions of her use of the cluviel dor in the last book continue to ripple. With the usual amount of insanity - jail, murder attempts, etc etc etc - eventually things tie themselves in a neat enough bow. Sookie ends up not exactly back where she started, but somewhere near there. And with some promise that even if she doesn't get a happily ever after, the era of the constant threats to live and limb is coming to a close.

Fake marriage! Amnesia! Huzzah!

Tempting the Bride - Sherry Thomas (Berkley Sensation, 2012)

End trilogy. (Parts 1 & 2 here and here.) In the first book, one driving motive in the plot is keeping Baby Sis away from an affair with a married man. In the second, you get a bit more of that. So here in the third, Helena is frustrated like mad. In large part because her family got to her lover and now he's staying away (hmph) but also because her brother's best friend is continuing his role as "bane of Helena's existence."

And like any young boy on a playground, this is of course because he's madly in love. But of course Helena somehow is fooled by his caustic comments, and troubled by the twinge of attraction.

Fortunately, FAKE MARRIAGE! Helena almost gets caught in a compromising position, but Lord Hastings (ever the protector) makes sure she is caught with him instead of her lover. So they have to elope to save her reputation. (Natch.) And then, for good measure, she ends up losing her memory in a crazy accident, giving them the chance to start over in their relationship.

Cute, but.... I get the reasoning behind the accident. And it works. But the dramatic hum of energy that comes from watching them antagonize each other is more fun. I would have rather watched him win her over from that state.

And so I move on to Thucydides. Seriously. Which means that while I'm plodding through the Peloponnesian War, expect plenty more lighthearted distractions.

Murder most foul

A Great Deliverance - Elizabeth George (Bantam Dell, 1988)

Shortly after I moved to Orange County, three different people recommended Elizabeth George to me. It may have been partly coincidence, or it may have had something to do with the fact that she was an Orange County resident writing British mysteries. At any rate, she's been on my to-do list for awhile, until finally a copy of her first Inspector Lynley book made its way to me.

There's a rather huge cast of characters and the book visits all of them. The two inspectors, several people in some way near the crime - a farmer beheaded, his daughter confessed to the killing, but clearly something is off - and a few others who are more peripherally involved in the world of Scotland Yard. It gets a bit confusing, but allows for all sorts of red herrings.

Lynley and Havers find the whole situation ominous and unsettling from the start, but it took awhile for me to understand why, and while the climax made sense, I didn't see it coming. I found the relationship between them more interesting, as each battles his or her own inner demons. I suppose that is more how mysteries are supposed to work anyway.

A writer's writer

All That Is - James Salter (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013)

I've heard Salter described as a "writer's writer" and judging from the author names on the blurbs (John Banville, Tim O'Brien, Julian Barnes, Edmund White, John Irving) it seems it must be so. What I have read of these authors makes me lump them together as beautiful constructors of prose, but too masculine in some ways for my sensibilities (to grossly oversimplify, since A Prayer for Owen Meany made me bawl more than I think any book ever has). And it's almost too bad I went into the novel with that preconception, since the book pretty much fit right into it.

Salter is a gorgeous writer. I was struck again and again by the beauty of the sentences. It kept me reading. And I was interested in the characters too, I swear. But I felt like I was watching them from some remove. I never particularly cared, I just wanted to see how prettily they could be written about. And that's fine, but it's different from what I normally care to read. Maybe it's what has to happen when your characters are roughly Mad Men-era.

Some of the lovely lines I noted:

When Bowman first falls in love, almost blindly: "When you love you see a future according to your dreams."

About another character's girlfriend's ex: "He was destined to be a father who would never disappear because of the way he did."

The next woman Bowman loves: "The truth is, with some women you are never sure. They had traveled for ten days and he felt he knew her [...] but you could not know someone else all of the time, their thoughts, about which is was useless to ask."

Bowman's mother, reflecting on the afterlife: "I think that whatever you believe will happen is what happens." A reflection that Bowman comes back to at least once in the remainder of the novel.

Anyway, a step outside of my comfort zone, and one I'm glad I took.

I can't help myself, part 2

The Earl is Mine - Kieran Kramer (St. Martin's Paperbacks, 2013)

...and so we move on to the man named Brady, and the three boys of his own. Marcia got herself settled, so now it's Greg's turn. This time, the love interest is an old childhood friend, his godfather's niece. But he's pulled back from her and everyone else after learning a dreadful secret on his mother's deathbed. Oh, and she's off to follow her dreams, at least the ones that aren't him. Are you surprised that this leads to her running off and cross-dressing and much hijinks?

Like most romance novelists that I've come across (and the sample size is admittedly small), Kramer seems to care a lot about portraying women that are independent and willing to follow their dreams, and having that spark be what makes men love them. But she also plays around quite a bit with questions of legitimacy and parentage. It makes you wonder what's in store for the rest of the Bradys.

How we go on

Tell the Wolves I'm Home - Carol Rifka Brunt (The Dial Press, 2012)

Some books seem to drain you completely, drawing out all sorts of emotional and psychic energy and replacing it with a sort of melancholic emptiness. And of course they tend to be beautiful, because I don't think that trick would work if there wasn't beauty.

It's the mid-1980s, and AIDS is a mysterious and terrifying scourge. And adolescence - as in pretty much every time people - is mysterious and terrifying. So June has it rough, and enters into a relationship with the only person who could possibly have loved her lost uncle as much as she did.

Except what makes the book work is that it's about a whole host of other relationships too. June and her uncle, sure, in flashbacks to the moments before he knew he was sick, or before she knew, or before the end came. And June and Toby, of course. But siblings are maybe more important - June and her sister, and June's mother and uncle. Growing up and changing puts more pressure on those relationships than perhaps any others.

All of which is a weak description of some of the forces that left me so wrung out. Not in a crying way, although it probably would have helped to weep, but in the way that stresses how much more beautiful are the souls that were cracked and broken, and then stitched and glued back together.

I can't help myself

Loving Lady Marcia - Kieran Kramer (St. Martin's Paperbacks, 2012)

I am sorry, but I'm not sure how you resist a romance novel series starring the Bradys, three sons and three daughters, brought together when their parents married and somehow formed a family... you get the idea. It's been probably 25 years since I've seen The Brady Bunch, so I'm sure there were allusions all over the place that I missed. (I barely noticed Alice.)

Anyway, that's pretty much the most important thing to say about the book. This one's about Marcia, unlucky in love as a girl, and now trying to prove her independence, except for this guy who keeps getting in the way. The rest of the siblings still to come...

Paris, with a stench

Nana - Emile Zola (trans. George Holden) (Penguin Books, 1972 [1880])

Once upon a time (college) a friend recommended this novel. She was a great reader of classic literature, and while I forget the details, this was among her very favorite.

Nana is a courtesan. Or more than a courtesan, rather a force of nature. She takes Paris by storm, attracting lovers and riches. And spending both just as freely. And around her, constellations of other courtesans and the well-born men who keep them, constantly trading places in some whirling dance. And anyone who ascends from the gutter to rise as high as Nana does... can her end come with anything other than a fall?

This novel is highly readable. It's well-paced and rarely bogs the reader. I confess that a lot of French literature makes me very sleepy - this did not. On the other hand, I can't tell if Zola hated women, or just hated sex. Nana is less a person than a creature, almost like an exquisite tiger kept by a prince. She acts according to her whims, pouting and smiling and changing moods on a dime. She gives up her body for money, or for laughs, or out of pity, or... Zola's descriptions often verge on the grotesque. And the sights and (especially) smells of anywhere that women gather... those go well past the tipping point.

These two qualities made for an unsettling reading experience. I enjoyed reading, and I was curious about the fates of the characters, and yet I found them all reprehensible (Zola's intent) and found Zola himself fairly repugnant. Why so hateful?

Good intentions

The Road to Wellville - T. Coraghessan Boyle (Penguin Books, 1993)

I have a fairly sensitive digestive tract, so the idea of a whole novel dedicated to Kellogg's Sanitarium, where the wealthy went to be indoctrinated with vegetarian ideals and all manners of enemas and the like.... well, it didn't strike me as the best plan.

But T.C. Boyle is a pleasure, and so I survived the icky parts that made me uncomfortable. Here we go -- we're at the turn of the last century, when Kellogg and Post and the like were making up new cereals and pills and everyone was a health nut looking for the key to living healthfully (and forever). Sound familiar? [Actually, one of the funniest things to me about reading this was how half of Kellogg's meals had major amounts of gluten.]

John Harvey Kellogg is a major character, as self-righteous and awful as you'd probably expect. Will Lightbody is one of his patients, dragged to the Sanitarium by his wife, who throws herself wholeheartedly into whatever quack strikes her fancy. Charles Ossining has also come to Michigan to make his fortune in the health industry, except he finds that staying afloat in a glutted market is more difficult than he may have imagined.

And the games begin. A whole feast of minor (and mid-major) characters flood the stage, and an awful lot happens in a year. And each character appears on a roller coaster of ups and downs, suffering wild setbacks and imagining massive victories. Which is particularly exciting, since they are essentially all working at odds.

On a side note, was struck by Goodloe Bender, the confidence man. It is probably coincidence that he shares a last name with Ilf & Petrov's Ostap Bender, the comic con man of the early Soviet era. But I thought of him throughout. And since I've also been working on a project to organize my Russian books, now I want more than ever to go back and see that Bender in action.

And *there's* the love triangle

Prodigy - Marie Lu (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2013)

Not just one triangle, but two. Or maybe more. It gets kind of complicated. But sort of more fun. Because when it's a bunch of teenagers running a rebellion against one (or more?) totalitarian regimes, you need something to remind you that they are kids and have hormones and stuff.

Day & June are recruited by the rebel Patriots, but June isn't sure that the Republic isn't trying to change from within. And then there are the Colonies, which is some sort of capitalism-gone-wild state. And the two protagonists aren't sure who they can trust, particularly whether they can trust one another.

Which is all to say: blow it all up. Let's the children take over. Easy. Done.

So what happens in the next installment?

The fabrication of causal connections

The Pleasure of My Company - Steve Martin (Hyperion, 2003)

A novella, set in early 2000s Santa Monica, about a young man with fairly debilitating OCD. And the ways in which his compulsions block him from the world, and how he tries to find a way back in.

There are parts of this novel that are truly lovely. Daniel is a sweet kid, albeit a strange one, and as narrator connects pretty well with the reader. I sympathized each time the OCD led to behavior that disconnected him from other people. Oh, and thank goodness for a portrayal of the disorder that isn't about compulsive neatness and handwashing. Daniel can only cross the street at perfectly aligned driveways (no curbs) and must always have lights on with a combined wattage (?) totaling 1125. He can tell you the day of the week for any given date (this is a trait I've always associated with autism, and in generally I wonder about the comorbidity of the two) and is generally amazing with numbers and letters.

I'd here like to go off on a tangent about the role of rituals to ward off anxiety. If the lights always add up to 1125 then... what? Or what is comforting about the compulsive need to check and check and check again that the door is locked? And how much do we play these games on a broader social scale? Where is the dividing line where what is socially acceptable (or even desirable) becomes disordered?

But enough of that, because my thoughts are inchoate. Back to the book. Daniel slowly negotiates new relationships with his most debilitating compulsions mostly by putting himself in a situation where he has no choice. And most especially by taking care of a small child. Then everything wraps up in an ending that is way too pat, but still sweet, for all that.

One woman's 20th century

Personal History - Katharine Graham (Vintage Books, 1998)

If some scholar from the far off future wanted a single source for understanding 20th century America, he or she could do far worse than Graham's memoir. Born in 1917 and writing on the cusp of her 80th birthday, Graham was a player - or next to the players - in many of the most dramatic moments of the century. Daughter of two luminaries, wife to a man who took to advising Kennedy & Johnson as a side gig, publisher of The Washington Post during Watergate.... the list goes on and on.

This thing is a brick, and chock full of detail. She begins with her parents' histories, and how they met. She both does and doesn't hold back - there is plenty Graham leaves off the page, but she is also pretty direct about the failings of those around her. For instance, I found myself wondering if the reader will end up believing that her relationship with her mother was actually more fraught than it really was. And I saw complaints on Goodreads about all the name dropping. And yes, the names are really EVERYWHERE. You do occasionally wonder if there were ever moments in her life without other famous people around. And this sometimes seems to hide how much she doesn't tell. There is lots of "and we spent many dinners/vacations/whatevers quite pleasantly together," and plenty of pointing out rumors of her romances with various beaux. I have to believe that some of the rumors here and there may have been founded, although she doesn't say much. But the line "and I can attest to his virility," tossed off about some luminary, left me almost desperate to find out more.

There's plenty about life in the Washington elite, and about being a young wife during World War II. And about her mother's, father's, and husband's various political activities. In all honesty, up almost to the point of her husband's death, the "Kay Graham" character in the memoir has little agency. I can't tell whether this was truly the case, or whether it's how she perceived her own life, but it does mean that the book picks up quite a bit of speed after the mid-1960s.

For one thing, there's Watergate. Information about the newspaper - how it was acquired, what the business was like, how it grew, etc. - is all throughout the book, but once she takes over, you get all of the excitement of politicians' hostility to Post coverage and how that culminated in Watergate. And then the chapter on Watergate ends and you immediately move into a huge labor crisis. I didn't find Graham a wholly reliable narrator on this matter, but her treatment of it was fascinating.

Historians of feminism could find much to consider in this memoir too. Graham broke glass ceilings, but consciously reflects back upon what it meant to be a woman throughout the decades, and ways in which it changed over time. She speaks for a specific race and class, but it's enlightening all the same.

Reading this was an undertaking, and I'm sincerely glad to have it behind me. But it was a fascinating read, and I'm looking forward to trying to find the book the right new home.

"Old timey" hockey is BS

Icebreaker - Deirdre Martin (Berkley Sensation, 2011)

At first, I couldn't figure out what made me so cranky about this book. It follows a formula that has worked well enough for me in the past: urban career woman ends up working for/with a hockey team [other sports acceptable] and is drawn to the no-nonsense, driven captain.

In this case, Sinead O'Brien is defending Adam Perry against trumped up assault charges stemming for a fairly brutal (albeit not uncommon) hit on another team's player. Obviously, the assault charge thing is absurd, fine. But it raises an entire plotline that posits Adam as the heroic defending of traditional hockey, against suits that are trying to sissify the game. While I'm as eager as the next girl to see Gary Bettman hilariously skewered as a greasy, greedy, union-busting lawyer, this plot rankles. Big time.

I'm sorry, but even in 2011 (especially in 2011) the issue of headshots in professional hockey was too big to dismiss so blithely. It also happened to be the year my very favorite player - the reason I became a hockey fan in the first place - finally retired, because doctors told him continuing to play was far too risky given his history of concussions. What Martin does - probably without intending to, or maybe she just disagrees with me - is glorify a style of play that became increasingly dangerous, that takes headshots, concussions, and brain damage as an acceptable price to pay. I'm sorry, but I can't get on board with that, and as a result, I could only celebrate the idea that Adam Perry retired, allowing the "evil suits" on the Board of Governors to really push the kinds of rule changes that would make hockey more about skills and less about trying to injure your opponent in the name of sport.

Legend - Marie Lu (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2011)

Eventually I will burn out on the YA dystopia novels. But until then....

This one is set in LA! Well, some sad future version of LA with giant lakes (from flooding) and plagues and such. And of course this is the Republic of America, fighting against the Patriots and others to the east who are making claims about how the whole land was once one united country and such.

But anyway, there are people! You've got a whole Romeo & Juliet thing. Death, lies, love, etc! All very exciting, and half of the people have crazy names.

This is pretty much the worst and most snarky sales pitch ever, but I did sincerely enjoy this book. Waiting for the next one.

P.D. James tries fanfic

Death Comes to Pemberley - P.D. James (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011)

I had heard some fairly negative buzz about this novel - a murder mystery set in the world of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, some years after its happy ending. But that rarely stops me when it comes to P&P takeoffs, so here I am.

And while it was not perhaps the strongest of novels, and the whodunit seemed weird at best, I then looked at James' bio and discovered that she was over 90 when the book was published. And all was forgiven. Damn, if I am around at 90 (and I hope I am) I want to be clever enough to put together this novel.

Plot summary: Elizabeth & Darcy are happily wed, and happily estranged from Lydia & Wickham. Until Lydia shows up screaming bloody murder, and then end up ensconced in a murder trial. I think I've been ruined by too much media that has to have thrilling climaxes, because for all that there's a murder and a trial and verdicts and much excitement, it all seems rather calm and (spoiler alert, I guess) neither Elizabeth nor Darcy find themselves in a showdown with the real killer, waiting for some deux ex machina rescue. Which, in retrospect, was rather nice.

James also plays homage to other Austen novels, namechecking characters from at least two other novels. If there were others, I missed them and want very much to have them brought to my attention. That was cute, although sorta silly. And I didn't much take to her renditions of some beloved characters, although I suppose her visions of them are just as likely to be accurate as my own.

All in all, it made for pleasant, if somewhat incongruous, poolside reading.

What Gatsby?

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald (Scribner, 1925, 1995)

First off, this is a re-read. Once upon a time (high school) I read this book and was profoundly moved to indifference tinged with distaste. (This was typical of the books I read for my American literature class, which may say quite a bit about my teacher.) I couldn't quite figure out what to do with that when I got to college and got interested in the Jazz Age, and when I was enchanted by Tender is the Night. (On the other hand, I was totally unmoved by This Side of Paradise.) When I found a cheap copy, I bought it, figuring that eventually I would give Fitzgerald another try, this time giving him the benefit of how much I wanted to like him.

And here the assist goes to Baz Luhrmann. The story seems right up his alley, and while I haven't particularly liked  his other big films, I am newly fascinated by Leonardo DiCaprio, and have to go see this one. But I wanted to be back in the text first, even if that is likely to hurt my enjoyment of the film.

First and foremost, I was amazed at not only how short the novel is, clocking it at 189 pages, but how quick a read. I blew through it. The events of the novel take place over a single summer, and they pass as quickly as summer always seems to. Nick meets up with Daisy and Tom, meets Jordan, meets Tom's mistress, meets Gatsby, meets Gatsby's business associate, hears a variety of rumors and half-truths and straight up lies about Gatsby's origins and wealth, and watches as a series of love triangles collide. And then it mops up.

Weirdly, while I remembered lots of feelings about the book's characters (Nick is lame, Gatsby naive, Tom terrible, Daisy annoying -- and everyone made me feel vaguely uncomfortable) I had lost a lot of the plot. Like I knew the raw sketch of the climax, but not all the details. How did I lose those?

Oh, and here's what the LA Times had to say back in 1925. I'll approve, but how on earth does the reviewer get away with not only giving away the fate of the characters but what might also be one of the best lines in the whole book, when Nick realizes the truth about Tom and Daisy?

A Glittering Void

The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst (Bloomsbury, 2004)

...and the last in my trilogy of Sunday posts. This was the book I started reading first, and the one that I finally just finished this morning. And I can't decide what that says about the book itself.

First, let me set the scene. Nick is a young gay man in early 1980s London, an Oxbridge grad who is living with an upper-class friend's family. The father has just been elected to Parliament, right as Thatcher was re-elected (I think). "The Lady" is an enormous figure in the book, although she herself appears only briefly, and it was a (lucky?) coincidence that she died while I was reading the book, and I got to see why she loomed so controversially larger than life in the minds of Britons. Meanwhile, the inexperienced Nick gets his first taste of sex and reciprocated love, which spirals out of control in the way only the '80s really could.

The prose was beautiful. So lovely and readable. Once I picked up the book, I tended to read in great big chunks. But I wasn't compelled to sneak in reading time, which is how it lingered while I snuck in two (lesser) books.

Ashes ashes they all fall...

Reached - Ally Condie (Dutton Books, 2012)

Book One was just Cassia, Book Two introduced Ky's POV, so no surprise that in the final entry of the trilogy we get Cassia, Ky, and Xander. (As I was hoping for.)

Because I'm not in the mood for spoilers, there isn't a whole lot to share without giving away too much. But the rebellion against Society comes to a head, and things get out of control, and somehow -- like in all great revolutions -- three teenagers are the key to saving the world.

If you're really in it for the love triangle, which I'll admit I may have been, you may find yourself feeling a little unsatisfied. On the other hand, you get to face the exciting possibility that instead of Cassia being torn between two very different loves, both guys may decide on a future that moves on without her. [For Vampire Diaries watchers, this is akin to wanting Stefan to run off with Caroline and Damon to run off with ... well, someone, and Elena to sit around wondering how she somehow stopped being the center of attention. And don't we all kind of want that?]

Anyway, super propulsive read. I kept trying to find ways to sneak in chapters despite the fact that I spent the whole weekend running around doing other stuff. (And finishing up yet another book - post coming shortly....)

Computer reading

Strange Bedpersons - Jennifer Crusie (HQN, 1994, 2009)

Was playing around with ebooks and ended up downloading this to my computer, and then discovering that I couldn't transfer it to my iPhone. (Note to self: pay more attention to ebook downloading rules)

Anyway, adorable. Took my laptop to bed with me a few times so I could read this tale of a free-spirit teacher and a yuppie attorney finding love. Much cuteness, and a nice escape during a busy period. But be prepared for pretty much every romance stereotype under the sun.

The descent, and the struggle back

The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (Bantam Books, 1971)

One of the things that has made me nuts for years about this book was that I would see "bell jar" and think "bell curve" -- no matter what I did, I couldn't shake that immediate association, and who wants to read a book about depression while you're thinking about statistics and averages and such.

Welcome to my brain, ladies and gentlemen.

This paperback belonged to my mom, and apparently she bought it shortly before her 27th birthday. (It's weird to think of parents as being adults, but still younger than you are now.) None of this is particularly relevant to my review, but I did find myself wondering about the various eras of the book and how it was read... Plath's lightly fictionalized autobiography is about events in the early 1950s, was written mostly in the early '60s before her suicide in 1963, came out in 1971, and here I am reading it 30 years later. Our culture's relationship with mental illness has changed drastically over the past 60 years, and Plath's tale likely played some role in that. Would I have been her, or her alter ego heroine Esther, had I lived in a different time?

Which takes me to the point I wanted to make about this book all along. I was so struck by how much this book reminded me of The Catcher in the Rye. (Of course, I hated that book passionately, and quite liked this one.) Both seem to speak directly to young people, assuring them that others too feel that same sense of alienation from the world around them. (The list of artists and works that do this goes on and on, but for whatever reason, these two seemed perfectly paired.) Even more so, Esther Greenwood, like Holden Caulfield, has a strong (and to my mind unreasonable) abhorrence of hypocrisy and phoniness. This seems particularly strange coming from Esther, who plays the phony game so so well. But man does she judge other people harshly.

I'm babbling quite a bit. I'm glad I finally read The Bell Jar, and can more clearly consider its place in 20th century literature, and society more generally. I also wish I could know how my 16 y.o. self would have met it. Would she have had as little tolerance for Esther as she did Holden? Would she have any idea how much sympathy she would have for her a decade and a half later?

Boo...

Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society - Jean-Claude Schmitt, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (University of Chicago Press, 1998)

Why hello historical monograph. I carved out time to do a quick read (not quite a skim, but close) of this very scholarly work over the last few days. It exercised the muscles I developed in grad school the first time around, when I was reading at least 1000 pages weekly of history, philosophy, primary texts, etc. I was so good at reading for content and argument then. But in the intervening years, those skills have waned quite a bit.

But not so much that I couldn't get into the text. Schmitt is exploring the role of ghosts in medieval culture, primarily how they (or rather the way people talked about them) evolved. The church played a primary role, of course, but there was some amount of room for older traditions of the dead. Anyway, there was a lot of souls stuck in purgatory, asking those still living to do something (pray, make financial arrangements) to better their lot in the afterlife. And somehow there was a tie-in to the tradition of charivari, which was more typically related to marriages that threatened society in some way (widowers taking young wives, widows remarrying unexpectedly, cuckolding). But the point is clearly that ghosts exist because of the function they serve for the living.

As a fan of the social construction of pretty much everything, I am down with this. And it's convincing. And yet, as a believer in ghosts - or at my most skeptical, an agnostic - I find myself working facing a bit of a quandary. If ghosts manifest in response to social expectations and constructions, can they still have an objective reality? I vote yes, although I can't imagine Schmitt agrees with me.

Hiking the Appalachian Trail, pre-Mark Sanford

A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail - Bill Bryson (Broadway Books, 1998)

Thanks to a certain former South Carolina governor, I have a slightly confused relationship with the Appalachian Trail. And I also had no idea they stretched over 2000 miles of pretty much the entire East Coast. Enter, belatedly, Bill Bryson.

After spending something around two decades in England, Bryson - originally from Iowa - returned to America. And decides a good way to get back into the swing of things would be to hike the entire Appalachian Trail. He makes it sound like it was one of those decisions made mostly on a whim, and that he begin to regret pretty much as soon as he picked up a guidebook. I'm pretty sure it didn't happen quite like this, but anyway...

He and an old (desperately out of shape) childhood friend start out on the journey.

An aside: when I was 19, I found myself in Geneva for a weekend, visiting a friend who had a UN summer internship. (Fancy.) And I joined her and some friends for a daytrip to Gstaadt. As we picnicked, someone had the bright idea to go whitewater rafting. I vetoed this idea as too dangerous, but was talking into trying canyoning, "a nice little hike down to a lake with a waterfall." This was roughly in the same place and about 3 days before this happened. That afternoon was among the most grueling of my life, and I was miserable and cold and wet and scared the entire time. I was also intensely proud of myself for making it through.

This is pretty much how Bryson sounded talking about much of his hike. He definitely did not make me think that this is an adventure I should try. On the other hand, he did tell me a lot more about the geography of the area, the history and (mis)management of the National Park Service, and make me terribly envious of the type of person who would embark on such a challenge. Even more so, it reminded me how little I walk anymore, and how much I truly miss walking. (DC, I will always be grateful.)

Also, and perhaps more pertinently, Bryson is hilarious and witty and such a wonderful voice to spend time with. (As I discovered a couple years back as well.) So glad he exists.

I think I'm missing the point

Major Barbara - (George) Bernard Shaw (Penguin Books, 1913, 1951)

I am pretty sure I'm exactly the kind of fan GBS would not have wanted. I swoon over the witty dialogue and fast pace and the sort of ineffable charm that his plays possess. I also manage to read them as sort of skewed romantic comedies, or I least I did with Arms and the Man, which I am now once more desperate to see staged.

But if you read the plays and slog through the author's prefaces, you'll see what is so easily glossed over by the audience, which is that GBS is trying to make rather biting commentary about society and capitalism and the class structure and morality and and and. It's all rather exhausting.

When I'm feeling particularly bright, I like to think that it's the way that he packages the two things together - the comedy of manners and the sharp critique of someone who would enjoy such a thing (namely me) - that is what I admire in his work. But I fear that might be painting too rosy a picture.

Whatever. George Bernard Shaw knew exactly the kind of audience he was reaching, and I'm going to try not to feel guilty about liking the "wrong" things about his plays.

Oh, which reminds me that maybe I should tell you about Major Barbara. Said Major is a wealthy young lady who has joined the Salvation Army. Her estranged father is an arms manufacturer, her mother an aristocrat. Her mother calls her father back to town because the family needs more money - one daughter is marrying a doofus who won't come into money for a few more years, Barbara is doing her Salvation Army thing and marrying a (rather upwardly mobile, it turns out) Greek professor, and the son is fairly worthless as well. And what ensues is much banter, including a scene at the Army site, which involves dialogue with an accent so thick I had to read aloud to figure out what was being said. And in the end, well I suppose everyone is made to look the hypocrite. And it was delightful.

16 y.o. Erin's dream job

Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN - James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales (Little, Brown and Company, 2011)

When I was a teenager, I desperately wanted to work at ESPN. Statistics preferably, but whatever. I was completely enthralled by the world of sports, and how could I not want to work for the Worldwide Leader? There was this small thing about being located in Bristol, but I figured I could sort that out.

At any rate, I've always had a soft spot for the network, one that has survived despite their callous disregard for hockey in the years since they lost broadcasting rights. So this huge (roughly 750 page) oral history felt like it was right up my alley.

And in so many ways, it was. Different voices - often conflicting - tell the story of ESPN's genesis and rise to glory. It was a peek behind the scenes, and a helpful glimpse of the ways it was amazing, and the ways it really wasn't.

But still, I had such a time getting through this beast. I started it two months, and it languished often enough on my nightstand, because I craved narrative. I needed a story. And this wasn't the right book to give it to me. Which in no way is meant to disparage Miller's & Shales' work, which is incredible. But it just felt overwhelming, and endless, and sad.

That said, it was fun to hear about the first decade, the one I never knew. And then the 90s, when I discovered sports, and started setting my TV to turn on SportsCenter every morning as an alarm clock, and watched pretty much anything that was on, even (dread) boxing. And there was hockey on then! And then shows that I had all but forgotten, or whatever. To realize how many of these names I recognized without really noticing that I knew them.

I'm nothing but glad that I read this, but I'm also shockingly relieved that I'm finished.

Fate and such

You're (Not) the One - Alexandra Potter (Plume, 2010)

I am totally not sure what I thought of this book. Other than I think I need a break from romantic comedy-type fiction. Maybe. It's cute. Lucy moves to NYC from England, is like any good heroine in that she is messy and tends toward lateness, and has a perfectionist sister and a suitably wacky roommate. Also a crazy boss. And she's an arty type - specifically a once-aspiring artist who works in a gallery. Check, check, and check. But more importantly, she once kissed a young lover under the Bridge of Sighs at sunset, which should have bound her to him forever. Except they didn't work out, and Lucy can't help wondering what might have been.... until she runs into him again. Sparks fly like mad, but then it turns out that they've grown into two very different people, and opposites don't attract.

But Lucy & Nate can't get rid of each other, even though they would both very much like to. And even though she's met a new guy, one who is so much more like her. Which raises the question: if someone who is so completely unlike you is not the right match, is it really better to fall for a guy who explicitly reminds me of yourself?! I'm skeptical, but then I'm not the one writing the book. And Lucy has to end up with one of her two suitors, right?

Plus two other looks of what love and soul mates might look like, courtesy of the supporting cast. Charming, but not up to the expectations set by Charlotte Merryweather.

The perfect marriage gone perfectly wrong

Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn (Crown Publishers, 2012)

I don't think there is anything to be said about Gone Girl that hasn't already been said in the buzz of media attention it got last year. What I'm impressed about is that somehow I managed to miss all the spoilers. Or maybe I didn't, because as it happened, my initial suspicions about plot twists proved pretty spot on.

Has anyone missed the overview yet? Amy and Nick are celebrating ("celebrating") their fifth anniversary, except she goes missing the morning of. The novel alternates between Nick's first person narrative as Amy's disappearance is discovered and the investigation begins, and Amy's diary entries, ranging from when they met and through their marriage. That the marriage is troubled is immediately clear, and it's additionally clear that they both have secrets. But that's the thing about secrets - you can keep them hidden even from your reader. And boy is authorial reliability brought into question here.

It's much more than the tale of a disappearance, it's the story of a marriage, and even before that, the ways that childhood shapes (or misshapes) you in ways both seen and unseen.

And even though I guessed right about Amy's disappearance, I didn't actually trust that I was right, which made the turn almost as surprising. And even more to the point, I could not have predicted all of the twists and turns, and the flood of detail.

I'm not sure it's the ideal read for someone like me, whose relationship with anxiety is so fraught. I coiled up so tense that I am still trying to work myself out. And my dreams last night.... well, let's just say that Plants vs. Zombies and Gone Girl combine in bizarre and frightening ways.

Faux sincerity

How I Became a Famous Novelist - Steve Hely (Black Cat, 2009)

Large swaths of this book are hilarious, particularly early in the book. I kept laughing out loud, and reading passages to my boyfriend. Very quickly he resorted to the "nod and smile," and yet I just kept repeating the funny parts more loudly, in hopes that my sheer enthusiasm for the funny would rub off.

The conceit is simple: a highly-educated but seriously adrift young man (Pete) is bummed out by his job writing essays for rich students, and even more distressed when his ex-girlfriend announces her upcoming wedding. And then he comes across a couple profiles of hugely successful authors - and decides that not only is their writing crap, but that they know it is crap, and are cashing in on an ingeniously con. So he decides that by the time the ex's wedding comes along, he will be a best-selling author.

The satire of current best-selling authors is fantastic. And as much as I admire Jonathan Safran Foer, the description of the obvious JSF stand in made me just about cry I laughed so hard. It was all beautiful. And our antihero's description of the creative process was amazing too.

Then the book (The Tornado Ashes Club) comes out, and things lost a little steam. Pete discovers that making it up the best-seller list isn't just about hitting all the marks, and that the literary world is more complicated than he may have envisioned. Somehow, his hit novel doesn't make him the belle of the ball at his ex-girlfriend's wedding. And when he meets people who really do treat storytelling with sincere reverence, even he realizes the shortcomings of his snark.

But will he really learn any "lessons" from his experiences? What do you think?

And it gets a little more complicated

Crossed - Ally Condie (Dutton Books, 2011)

I think what I liked most about this sequel to Matched is that it adds narration by Ky. This allows us to track both teens as they try both to survive and to make their way back to the other, which occasionally is pretty cute, and also stressful. But more importantly, we get inside Ky's head and learn his secrets before Cassie does. Because in addition to everything else going on, there is trouble brewing for the couple. Cassie wants to be part of the Rising; Ky has his own reasons for avoiding it. (Erin thinks that parts of this sound quite a bit  like The Hunger Games.) And while Xander only makes a brief appearance in the book, his presence is enormous. Which leads me to believe that maybe if I ever manage to get a copy of Reached, we'll get some Xander-narration too. Very exciting.

Teens love a good romantic triangle

Matched - Ally Condie (Dutton Books, 2010)

Would it even be a young adult novel without a love triangle? Which reminds me of my first young venture into romance reading. When I was younger, there was a series of YA historical fiction that always had a young woman in some interesting time/place. And against the backdrop of History, said heroine had to choose between two suitors: one stable, the other exciting. While it seemed like Mr. Exciting usually won out, Mr. Dependable got the girl often enough too.

Anyway, before I get too bogged down in wondering about the elements of a good triangle (Who is Mr. Dependable in Twilight? Jacob? Edward? Um, no.) let me move back to Condie. Love story PLUS dystopian future. And believe me, if you go on Goodreads you will read no end of opinions about the various other dystopias that helped inform Condie's world. (People get cranky on Goodreads.)

Long story short. Cassia lives in a future where the Society plans everything out for optimal results - when and whom to marry, where to live, where to work and in what profession, and more. Crazy enough, she's "matched" with someone from her area, her best friend. Except on the little microcard with his info, another face appears - and yet another guy she knows. And, like any good 17 year old, she finds herself drawn to this second, false, match. Which leads her to question everything she's ever known.

This story had its ups and downs. I wasn't crazy about Cassia or the writing. But it had enough momentum to keep me going, and I requested the second book in a hurry.

(PS - The Society relies heavily on statistics. Which I have to admit, sounds a little awesome. But even I recognize that probabilities work exactly because they are only that: probabilities.)

Love and history

Overseas - Beatriz Williams (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2011)

Very early on in reading this novel, I described it as Fifty Shades of Grey meets The Time Traveler's Wife. Except then I realized that I haven't read Fifty Shades, and besides I wasn't talked about the kinky sex parts. I meant the deal with the superhot bazillionaire who is head-over-heels for a girl who sees herself as totally average. So perhaps the better comparison is Twilight meets Time Traveler's Wife. Okay.

That's it. End of review.

Except I guess I should flesh it out so that I can argue for why you should consider reading it. First of all, it's set mostly in 2008, on Wall Street. So you have a fun look at that world from the standpoint of junior analyst, both before and during the crash. (Well, during the crash she's living with her bazillionaire, so her perspective there is a little different.) And then when it's not in 2008, it's back in 1916, in France during the First World War. Kate ends up back there because she needs to stop the man she loves from .... well, it's complicated.

Time travel stories can create fun conundrums (conundra?) but this one does a pretty good job of dancing around how the characters' actions could change history, even if the characters act almost blindly in that regard. On the other hand, that meant that I sort of saw the shape of the story pretty early on. But that's okay, because what makes for a beautiful love story often isn't the plot twist.

Stereotypes are weird

Bad Girls Don't - Cathie Linz (Berkley Sensation, 2006)

Bad girls don't fall in love. And they don't go for authority figures. They do like yoga, belly dancing, and being totally loving and friendly. Or something.

This is the follow-up to Good Girls Do, where proper librarian Julia falls for a guy on a motorcycle. Here, Julia's half-sister Skye runs up against a cop. Sparks fly. And the phrase "wicked awesome" drops once or twice a page. (Skye grew up mostly on the West Coast, which explains her Bostonesque slang. Really, the more appropriate phrase would have been "hella cool.")

I'm really not sure why this charming little book didn't do more for me. I'm sure it deserves a nicer write-up than this one.

What happens when the story takes over

The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon, trans. Lucia Graves (Penguin Books, 2004)

The word that keeps coming to mind is "virtuoso" - this novel is pretty stunningly crafted. It's got plenty of melodrama, plot twists, hints of something just shy of magical realism. It's the sort of thing where you sort of think to yourself: well, of course it was written in Spanish. Whatever I mean by that.

There is a boy, Daniel. He is the son of a bookseller. He gets captivated by a book. But the book has enemies - someone is trying to destroy every book written by the author. And as he grows older, what seems like a cascade of sinister events start occurring, and they all seem caught up in the uncertain fate of the novel's author, Julian Carax. And as Daniel and a cast of other characters interact, each bringing together some threads of the story, you start to wonder if Daniel is actually living out Julian's fate. And if so, that is bad bad news for them both.

If that's a poor synopsis, that is at least in part because this isn't the kind of work that lends itself to synopsis. The beauty is in the lushness of the details and the longing in the voices of the characters.

As much as anything, this portrait of postwar Barcelona made me want to revisit the films of Pedro Almodovar and Julio Medem. Perhaps another project for one of these days...

2012 Reading in Review

As promised, a quick look back at what I read in 2012, based on what this blog seems to say, as well as my own memories.

Books read: 50 (not bad)
Of those, how many were:
*Romance novels: approx. 11, depending on your definitions (hmmm...)
*Owned by me: 19 (!!!!! This constitutes balance for me, since usually my borrowed percentage is much higher)

*Written by female authors:  35 (i.e. 70% - wow)

*Non-fiction: 8 (perhaps a little low, but I clearly prefer fiction)

Books still on my "to read" bookshelf next to my bed: somewhere around 50 (improvement)

Books on my "ready to give to a new home" shelf: 9 (time for someone to have a book swap party!)

Fave reads:
The Night Circus (probably my all-out favorite of the year)
Queen Margot
Sarah's Key
We Need to Talk about Kevin (probably the book I've thought about the most since finishing)
A Visit From the Goon Squad
Enchantments
The Other Guy's Bride (the one that made me smile the most)
The Count of Monte Cristo

Which is to say, I liked a lot of books written by women plus a couple by Dumas.

Goals for 2013: I'm not really sure. I'm going to keep plugging away at my bookshelf and my "to read" lists. I'm also going to make more of an effort at non-fiction - let's aim for 10 NF books, and at least two of them history. I miss you, history. (Thank goodness for historical fiction!)