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?

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.

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.

Did we meet in Capri?

The Overnight Socialite  - Bridie Clark (Weinstein Books, 2009)

So, the rain in Spain now falls mainly on the isle of Capri. Or something like that. The novel is billed as a modern retelling of Pygmalion, but it's really far more My Fair Lady, up to and including the moment where I expect our good Pygmalion to dance Eliza around the room.

Lucy is a wannabe designer from the heartland, and Wyatt is the best of Old Money New York as well as a promising anthropologist who never bothered to have a career. So when he breaks up with his It Girl girlfriend, he claims he can train anyone to be a blue blood socialite... and he'll write a book about the process. Lucy just happens to be nearby when he hits on this plan, and besides, she could use the connections to make inroads with the fashion industry.

And the plot is pretty obvious from there, but with some nice minor character plots as well. It's fun to get to know Wyatt's mom, and the "will he propose or won't he?" drama between Wyatt's best friend and his longtime girlfriend is probably the most interesting relationship question of the entire novel. Plus you get a whole bunch of aspirational brand name-dropping, even though the book is set against the collapse of the financial industry. All the chick lit Ts crossed and Is dotted.

And while we are adapting GB Shaw, can I get Arms and the Man?

Lad lit

Love & Other Recreational Sports - John Dearie (Plume, 2003)


Without bothering to do my background research, my understanding is that there's a lovely genre of British fiction that is the male equivalent to chick lit, and it's called lad lit. This includes stuff by writers like Nick Hornby.

I think that's what Dearie is doing here. Except I don't know that the genre really exists in America. It certainly doesn't look like that's how it was marketed.

Check out this cover. Does this look like it's being marketed toward men??? (Sorry for the mirror image problem.) Or are women the primary readers of lad lit?

These questions aside... well, actually I'm not sure I am able to place them aside, because they so strongly shaped my reading experience.

I'm battling through Proust (losing) and brought this along as lighter fare for a weekend out in the desert. So I sprawled in 100 degree shaded heat, and read about Jack and his adventures in (or avoiding) the Manhattan dating scene.

Let's compare Jack to a chick lit heroine. He is male, he is successful in the corporate world, he doesn't seem to get too excited about things. Hmm, not doing so well. And yet he has also been burned by a former lover, dresses well and enjoys the finer things, and gets his best advice from his friends and family. Wash.

And here is where I look at the back of the book and see that it was indeed marketed to women, claiming to provide insights into the mind of the dating male. Is this what Dearie had in mind when writing? I'm skeptical.

But I don't want it

This Beautiful Life - Helen Schulman (HarperCollins, 2011)


Meet the Bergamots. First Liz(zie), a trained art historian who became increasingly mom-first, and now, in NYC, mom-only. Then Richard, whose career in academia seems on an unstoppable upward trajectory. And Jake, the teen son. Finally Coco, the spirited kindergartener. They are transitioning, with varying degrees of success, from life in upstate Ithaca to Manhattan.

And then there's a night with two parties. Liz takes Coco to a sleepover at the Plaza, where she (and the other moms) get totally wasted. Yay. And Jake goes to a party with his friends, gets sad when he sees the object of his affection with her boyfriend, gets drunk, and draws the advances of the young hostess. He allows her attention, until he suddenly doesn't. And handles it like most boys would, which is to say like a jerk.

And there you have it. A Saturday morning with two hungover Bergamots. Except then Jake's make-out partner creates an awfully graphic web video to prove that she's old enough for him. And then all hell breaks loose.

Listening to Slate folks discuss it (here), I was intrigued by their final conversation, a debate over why and how the single click of the "forward" button untethered everything. It's hard to say for sure whether all the fissures of Liz's dissatisfaction and Richard's growing impatience would have been evident had the plot been presented in any other way. The first page (plus) is a description of the video, and it looms over everything that follows, leaving the reader waiting in some amount of anxiety. As a result, I saw how while nothing was broken, neither was it particularly strong. But that's just me.

I grew less enchanted with the book as it went on. The characters just kept so firmly to their established patterns, wearing out some weird groove that made me more and more frustrated. And then, suddenly, Schulman wraps up. She flashes forward several years, so we know what shakes down from the crisis. And ends with a coda chapter, the teen ingenue all grown up, or more grown up. But it's weird, because we've never really met her before. And now, we're not quite sure who she is, or what to think about what she unleashed when she hit record on her webcam.

Old New York, NOT Don Henley

The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton (Barnes & Noble Classics, 1920, 2004)


Despite not actually having the same name at all, I spent a lot of my time reading this book while humming along to the mental soundtrack of "The End of the Innocence." And any other Don Henley songs that came up in my head. Also, I saw the movie with Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer back when it came out. So I had a hard time displacing those characters from my head, even when they didn't feel quite right.

First off, the casting? I bought DDL as Newland Archer. Actually, that seems just about perfect. Pfeiffer I'm a little more meh about. And then there's Winona Ryder as May Archer (nee Welland). Wharton keeps stressing how Archer views her as being like the Goddess Diana. And I can't think of an actress who inspires that thought less in me. On the other hand, from what I remember, she nails the whole forced innocence thing.

But this isn't a movie review, and I really shouldn't be reviewing movies I saw almost twenty years ago, and when I was awfully young too. So, on to the book.

I'm not going to go into too much analysis, possibly because I'm lazy. Instead, going to be sorta solipsistic. First of all, there were ways in which this novel felt very Russian. Maybe just because most of the 19th-century novels I've read in the past several years (that were not Jane Austen) were Russian. (And yes, I know that this was actually written after WWI, so this may be a really weak point.) Or maybe it's that Mme Olenska reminded me of Anna Karenina. I'm not really sure. But more importantly, it was honestly such a pleasure to read this. I forgot how much I enjoyed the classics. I may be adding more of them to my list.

Story + story + story = novel?

A Visit from the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010)


This book won a bunch of awards. (Or a least the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer.) And I had been sitting on a Slate Audio Book Club podcast since last August. And fiiiiinally I got around to getting a copy.

Here's where it turns out that I had already read a bunch of the book. Probably a third or so. Damn New Yorker. About three stories in, I found myself really frustrated. None of this was really new. Sigh, grr, etc. But then, this is where the structure of the book kicked in and argued its case. For it's not just a collection of short stories. It's a collection of stories that tie together and interconnect. A character in one story reappears in another. And while it seems like the threads that connect them are weak and few in number, they build upon one another, and you realize that you're getting the rich backstory to a throwaway line from 150 pages earlier.

We start in what is roughly the present, then dive back, then way back, then hang out somewhere between the 70s and now for awhile, and eventually finish in the future. Each story uses its own devices - third person, first person, at least one tale told in the second-person you. Another is an article (of the DFW persuasion) detailing a celebrity interview we already know (from however many stories previous) ends badly. But then there's chapter 12, "Great Rock and Roll Pauses," written by an adolescent daughter of characters we knew before. It's essentially a PowerPoint presentation, and it's tremendously effective for all that it's gimmicky. I waxed poetic about this to my boyfriend, venturing out into a reverie on why all the white space is so meaningful in a story about pauses and what is left unsaid. And so he's taken the fall for you, who only have to know that I had lots to say - of varying coherence - on the topic.

And I love the idea that in the not-so-distant future, this is how I children will tell stories. That in its own way, the PowerPoint can be a surprisingly eloquent medium. And then I lost it in the final story, which takes place roughly in that same period(ish). It's a mildly dystopic future NYC that looks quite a bit like Shteyngart's, in which handheld devices have kinda taken over (with a bit of Brooklyn hipster resistance thrown in too). For whatever reason, this felt overdone. Or at the very least out of place with the rest of the book. Ends get tied together, sure. But I didn't need this final story to feel the heft and power of the whole.

(next post coming after I actually listen to the audio book club podcast, scheduled for tonight's drive home...)

I Was Told There'd Be Cake - Sloane Crosley (Riverhead Books, 2008)

Sloane Crosley has a new book out. Thus it seemed like an appropriate time to actually get around to reading the first collection of essays, which has been on my To Do list for awhile. (It also helped that I was at the library, weeding books just 2 aisles away from this one.)

I'm not feeling very review-y right now, but in short: very funny, slightly neurotic essays from a highly educated young woman, covering terrible jobs, bridezillas, sex and love, moving, friends, oh and that Oregon Trail game that we played computer-free in our fifth-grade classroom while everyone else in the world my age apparently played at home on ancient Apples.

I was utterly enchanted with Crosley's search for a legitimate one-night stand, as documented in the essay "One-Night Bounce." While waiting at the vet, I actually read most of the first several pages aloud to my mother, who was amused, but not nearly as much as I was. I kind of want to block quote the first three pages. I won't. But here's a peek:

The second I was old enough to know what sex was, I knew I wanted to have a one-night stand. [...] I wanted to do it immediately. Largely because I had no idea what it entailed. I figured a one-night stand happened when two people, one of whom was a woman, went to a man's apartment for martinis and stood on the bed the whole time, trying not to spill them.

And it goes on from there.

People who are about my age who are more fabulous than me can be depressing, and I wasn't completely immune to this with Crosley, but she's awfully disarming. So thumbs up.

The Post-College Years

A Fortunate Age - Joanna Smith Rakoff (Scribner, 2009)

No citations, but I heard lots of mixed reviews about this modern-day homage to Mary McCarthy's The Group (which I haven't read, but apparently if I had read it, I would have known pretty much the major plot points of this novel). Enough that I wasn't really interested in reading it for the longest time. I forget what made me decide to add it to my list.

Regardless, I'm glad I did. Because I found the characters often terrifyingly familiar. There's something about coming out of an elite college or university and then making your way in the real world that perhaps happens to us all. There's a weird juxtaposition between who we are able to be in college and who we must be outside, for better or worse. I'm just about the same age as the characters when the novel ends (well, a little younger, but not much) and I can't really say that my life looks like any of theirs. (The differences between 1994 and 2001 matter a lot too.) But there is something there that transcends that.

Anyway, the novel jumps around between the major characters, a group of friends from Oberlin who all congregate in New York (most of them being from the region anyway). Most of the really big life-changing events - except Lil's wedding, which opens the novel - take place off stage. You see the lead up to them, and then suddenly we've jumped and they've already occurred. It challenges the notion, to some extent, of what is truly important, what matters the most.

And what strikes me the most is how much of growing up is about letting go. And how difficult that can be.

Murder and strange times

Duplicate Keys - Jane Smiley (Fawcett Columbine, 1984)

I like Jane Smiley a lot. I haven't read all that much by her, but seeing her was pretty much always a highlight of the LA Times Festival of Books. So when I finished 2666 and needed something witty and lighter, I saw this on my bookshelf and grabbed it.

Then I read the back cover.

It's about the aftermath of a murder within a circle of friends in NYC, circa 1980. I thought to myself, this is probably not the right book for right now, but I read it anyway. So really, is it the book's fault that I didn't like it? Maybe, maybe not. I'm discovering that I don't like much of the fiction that I read from the 70s and early 80s. I can't identify with the period, and it just seems so foreign. So that's probably part of it.

Anyway, it's a pretty good mystery. Alice, a librarian (and I'm not sure what I think about the portrayal of the profession), finds two friends shot when she comes over to water the plants. While part of a tight-knit group of friends, she finds that the group's bonds have been stretched to (and past) the breaking point. And while she is trying to find her way through the aftermath of the killings, she also shows that she's essentially in love with her best friend, is still trying to recover from her divorce, likes or doesn't like the new guy she starts sleeping with, etc. I found Alice's mind difficult to keep up with - she was a big bundle of self-contradiction. Which would normally be fine, but it didn't work for me this time. Also? I totally knew who the killer was. Maybe it wasn't supposed to come as a surprise?

While Alice is being vaguely bipolar, she also has a lot (a LOT) of conversation with her friend Susan, the longtime partner of one of the dead men. And Susan has this to say:

But what if your self damages the other person? People look so discrete, as if they are a certain way. But obviously, a lot of the time that you're mad at them for being a certain way, it's actually you who's making them be that way.

Hmm. Food for thought. And now I have to go soak this book so I can document my efforts to dry it for a class assignment. Fun! :)

"Happinesses opted against" or, an iPod love affair

The Song is You - Arthur Phillips
New York: Random House, 2009

I was recently commenting that Phillips has written four very different novels, starting with the Eastern European ex-pat novel in Prague, and then an Egyptology mystery and a Victorian ghost story before this latest about the unlikely romance between a music fan and an up-and-coming singer-songwriter set in present-day New York City. Except that there are thematic similarities. I mentioned in one of those previous reviews that he likes to play with the subjectivities of reality as experienced by different people. That continues here, as Phillips layers actions and memories, such that you are constantly forced to re-conceive of what happened in the previous pages.

Plot brief: Julian is a somewhat-jaded tv commercial director who has lost his wife and son, his libido, and is struggling to hold onto memories of the power of song. Until he comes across Cait O'Dwyer, a young Irish musician who is about to make it big. Julian's estranged wife and Asperger-y brother are also lost and damaged, and so are the other men orbiting around Cait: her guitarist and collaborator, a policeman who much prefers Sinatra, and a washed-up rocker who grasps desperately at a chance to feel fame again. Phillips sets up a whole array of other storylines that could be, most of them freighted with a hint of impending menace. I read nervously, unsure when a misunderstanding - that subjective reality - would lead to disaster. Whatever disaster means.

The novel also contains some lovely musings on the power of music and the way certain songs elicit longing and evoke times and places. And how their power loses potency when called upon too often, or wrongly. It made me want to empty my iPod of all those podcasts and just trip down memory lane, one song at a time.

It's not really about cricket at all

Netherland - Joseph O'Neill
New York: Pantheon Books, 2008

Right before I started reading it, I found this Wonkette description of Netherland:

Recall last summer: it was the summer of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, the most important book liked by people wearing the most important-looking glasses. It seems O’Neill has journeyed from that wire-rimmed menagerie of the psyche to Politics & Prose, where all such odysseys of the soul must, and do, eventually terminate.

And I thought to myself, that sounds about how I remember the talk about this book. And while I generally don't wear glasses (current facebook profile pic aside), I figure that since I like the sort of books those people like, it's a good thing I've finally checked this out from the library. Oh, plus, it's a 9/11 book, and I'm kinda fascinated by those. (Like this one and this one.)

But just like it's not really about cricket, it's not really about 9/11. Except it's not not about them either. It's about love and loss and rediscovering oneself. And - and this is what makes it most about 9/11, for me - it is a love story about America, and NYC specifically. What is it about America that keeps pulling people toward it? Why are we a nation of immigrants?

I found Hans a lovely and thoughtful - albeit lost - narrator. It's as though he serves almost entirely as a mirror to hold up the world and the other characters he sees. But anyway, a few of the lovelier observations from Hans:

• Even my work, the largest of the pots and pans I'd placed under my life's leaking ceiling, had become too small to contain my misery.
  
• Who has the courage to set right those misperceptions that bring us love?
• I was possibly the only person contained by the apparent world who was unable to see through it.

And, finally, "my secret, almost shameful feeling is that I am out of New York - that New York interposed itself, once and for all, between me and all other places of origin." Which reminded me of nothing so much as E.M. Cioran:

All that is not Paris being equal in my eyes, I often regret that wars have spared it. [...] I shall never forgive Paris for having bound me to space, for making me from somewhere.

Which is a lot for a city to shoulder. But if any cities can, they are NYC and Paris. And what of my City of Angels? In what ways is it so much like and unlike the others? Could a different Netherland be set here?

Cue Anxiety

Anxiety is actually a pretty good topic for a chick lit novel, as it Aurelie Sheehan's The Anxiety of Everyday Objects, which is almost not quite chick lit. But still is. I mean, it's important for the protagonist to be lovably neurotic, right? And what says lovable neurosis better than anxiety? (This is what I tell myself.)

Anyhow, TAOEO is the title of Winona's movie project, which she dreams about while working as a legal secretary. This is what it means: "Do you ever look at a sign and you think it says something different than it really does? Like the sign says TURN AHEAD and you read it as TURN AROUND, and you feel as if it's a personal message just for you?" [... questions from love interest, including whether this is magical realism or surrealism] "It doesn't have a name. That's part of the anxiety."

I liked this theme, but I never thought it got played to its full potential. I also never really understood Winona's infatuation with new attorney Sandy, who is beautiful and takes Winona out for a facial and as a result is somehow magical. Or something.

Perhaps the best way to put it is that I wanted to like this book more than I did. Which isn't exactly to say that I didn't like it. Maybe I just wanted a little more.

I'm reading a new book

The Anxiety of Everyday Objects (Aurelie Sheehan)

It seemed appropriate.

Sometimes pretentious can be okay

I don't remember how I heard about Maynard & Jennica, by Rudolph Delson. Doesn't really matter - it ended up on my list so I requested it from the library. It's billed as a love story, with a lot of minor characters. In this it is perhaps like Beginner's Greek. But this is missing a lot of the sweet. You're not rooting against these lovers, but I'm not convinced that you like them very much.

I'm having trouble knowing what to say about the book, and perhaps that's because it is a very talky novel. It's a little like a written documentary - a series of (mostly) monologues by a variety of different characters, explaining what's happening from their point of view. And the characters include family, childhood friends, a kid on the subway, and a rap artist. Somehow this all makes sense. And they all have plenty to say, mainly about an ambitious California girl seeking an "illustrious" life in NYC, and a completely pretentious filmmaker who dresses like he's someone's grandpa. These are Jennica (aka Jenny) & Maynard (aka Arnie, aka Manny, aka Gogi). And these monologues are introduced like this: "Maynard Gogarty, in paradise, tells us something he isn't certain of." The uncertain thing, by the way, is whether Jennica knows he can be a jerk. Jennica follows up by being uncertain about whether or not he plans to propose.

Anyway, etc. etc. For just under 300 pages. Also there is September 11, and a really fantastic indictment of the way non-New Yorkers appropriated the city's grief. (I'm not entirely sure I agree, seeing as how I was not exactly innocent of the charge and seeing as how the attacks were on a nation, not just a city, but nonetheless...) And some very funny moments. Which is all to say... what? I liked it; I did. Maybe despite myself.

Bewitched by Beginner's Greek

It really is the best word I can think of - bewitched. I wasn't even sure I liked James Collins' novel while I was reading it, but I just could not put it down. He manipulated my emotions perfectly, so that I was utterly invested in the outcome of the novel.

Peter and Holly fall in love as seatmates on a cross-country flight, but Peter loses her number, killing the romance before it has a chance to flower. Until fate brings them back together, except now she's with his best friend. Cheesy, I know. Except it works. One thing that particularly pleased me as Collins laid out the scenario was that he skipped the re-encounter. We jump from a heart-stricken Peter looking desperately for the lost number, to him three years after Holly has returned to his life. The meeting happens in flashbacks. A lot of important moments in the novel happen in flashbacks. And we spend a lot of time in various characters' heads, seeing how they see themselves and the starcrossed couple. Holly though? We don't really meet her until page 280, by which point I'm ravenous for her to become more than a cipher onto which others attach their own aspirations.

The rarefied air in which the characters move can be a little annoying - um, why am I not that rich and clever? - but forgivable in the same while Jane Austen & Edith Wharton's settings are forgivable. And like Austen, Collins loves skewering self-interest and hypocrisy. But also like her, he is gentle about it. No one tends to fall very hard or very far.

In fact, therein lies a central theme of the story: "[...] here she was setting off to grab all the love and happiness she could get. He hoped she would succeed. Whenever good people who were weak and timid showed strength and got things that bad, arrogant people always had handed to them, Peter was moved." Indeed.

Coming of Age

To end the year, I read two books which aren't especially thematically related (read: have nothing in common) but that I am grouping under the loose tie that both involve boys who are becoming adults.

The first is Peter Cameron's Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, which I have delighted in describing as "Catcher in the Rye, if Catcher in the Rye had been good." (I had issues with CINR, most of which I now blame on my 11th grade English teacher.) Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Cameron is also the author of The City of Your Final Destination, a novel I read a few years ago about a young doctoral student who gets involved with the family of his research subject, somewhere in South America. James Sveck, of STPWBUTY, is also surrounded by a cast of eccentrics, these his upper-class New Yorker family. James, like Sveck, has a keen eye for the absurd and fake (but thankfully, whines less about it) and has devoted the summer before college to figuring out a plan to avoid going to college - which he doesn't think he will like very much - altogether.

I laughed out loud often while reading this, and agree with whatever reviewer noted that while classified as Young Adult fiction, this book can be a joy for readers of whatever age. (Well, not too young - some of the themes are a bit mature. Use discretion before buying for a niece or nephew.)

The other read of the week is one of Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody mysteries, which I continue to adore. Guardian of the Horizon was especially enjoyable, as it was written out of order and returns us to a lovestruck Ramses. Here he is 20, and kind of all over the place in terms of defining his adult relationship with his parents and their ward, and determining what is love and what is a proper course of action, etc etc. I'm stretching things a bit - mainly this is a typical Peabody book, where they end up on some fool adventure (this time a return to a lost oasis in the Sudan) and people are trying to kill them and they get captured and there are twists and turns and Emerson blusters and Amelia pretends togetherness and Ramses is, well, perfect.

And all that said, Happy New Year to all!

Growing Up Groovy and Clueless

...such is the subtitle of Susan Jane Gilman's Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress, a book swap find. Gilman is ridiculously quotable, and I came to the end of the book wondering why I hadn't marked some of my favorite quotes to share with you.

She embraces the big personality that so many of us have when we aren't too scared to show it. Or at least, she does enough of the time. And her experiences - so like what we've all been through (except the big breasts, I never had to deal with that) are poignant and ridiculous and very very real.

All of which is preface to the line that comes at the tail end of the book, where she writes of her first days sticking out like a sore thumb in Geneva: "No matter what I did, everything about me was quintessentially American. On the streets of Geneva, I was an enormous, star-spangled, overzealous puppy." And who hasn't felt like that?

Also of note is the blurb by Frank McCourt. Mainly b/c you eventually find that Gilman went to Stuyvesant. And if I remember correctly, McCourt taught there. Was she one of his students? Are any of my teachers off becoming famous? (If so, let me know.)

I'm pretty sure most women can relate to some part of Gilman's book. For me, it was mostly her childhood, growing up the daughter of hippies and also a drama queen. But one who also tried to escape the notice of her Mean Girl fellow students. For others, it may be the rock OBSESSIONS of her teenage years and the gossiping about every "romantic" encounter. College seemed pretty familiar to me. And I'm still young enough that I'm working on my 20s and early 30s. I hope it turns out well for me too... :)

Him Her Him Again The End (!) of Him

[Exclamation point mine]

It happens rarely enough that I'm always a little giddy when it does happen. It? you ask. It is one of my favorite reading experiences, namely reading something that makes me laugh or otherwise react aloud. This is particularly amusing (to me) in public.

Aside: the summer after I graduated from high school, I read War and Peace, because I am a big nerd. I was utterly in love with Prince Andrei - we had a deep emotional connection. Anyway, I am in the waiting room at Kaiser, accompanying my grandmother to one or another appointment, and I get to the part where Natasha betrays him. (I'm a little fuzzy on the specific plot point, but I remember a definite sense of betrayal.) How dare she! This is Prince Andrei! So I manage to recall that I'm in public, so my cry of "You hussy bitch!" turned into some sort of strangled grr. (And I still have very strong feelings about how Tolstoy used and discarded this dream man of mine.)

But I digress. On Sunday, after a trek to the Hollywood Farmers Market for reconnaissance (Festival coming up!) I stopped by Groundwork for some iced tea and started reading Him Her Him Again The End of Him by Patricia Marx. (Hmm, I wonder how you punctuate that?) Suffice it to say that in the short time I was there, I stifled laughter several times.

This book is hilarious. It's unsurprising, seeing as how Marx wrote for The Harvard Lampoon and Saturday Night Live. Her heroine is absurd and witty and neurotic and intelligent and ridiculous, and all those things. Like an unabashedly imperfect cousin of Blue Van Meer. While "studying" at Cambridge (but mostly finding ways to procrastinate) she also fixates upon the archetypal preening intellectual, whose all-consuming ego makes him sexy. And over ten years he comes and goes, and strings her along, while she tries with varying levels of success and effort to do something with her life. And deal with a cast of wacky parents, bosses, friends, and colleagues.

But I wanted to share some of my favorite quotes. So despite the growing length of this entry...
*When her father badgers her about making a will: "I was beginning to think that either he knew something I didn't or that he was planning to kill me."

*On we, the reader: "I hope you are not getting fed up with me because, as it happens, I think I'm beginning to like you more and more. You're a good listener. Plus, I bet you have a winning way of turning the page."

*On Eugene, the pompous lover: "he believed that the later work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan was derivative of Eugene's early work, which was an audacious theory, in my opinion, since Eugene hadn't entered Lacan's field of work until Lacan was dead."

None of these play as well out of context as they do on the page. (Boo.) But I hope you can read this entry and see how a steady stream of digressions and non sequiturs is exactly my kind of thing. If it's yours too, check out Patricia Marx.