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.