How to become a bestselling novelist

The Glamorous (Double) Life of Isabel Bookbinder - Holly McQueen (Washington Square Press, 2008)


I really shouldn't complain, b/c this book made me laugh a lot. (It's always fun when the baristas look over at you wondering what's so funny.) And it has a cute twist. And the requisite Daniel/Mark Darcy triangle. However, I don't feel like we get to know our romantic male lead nearly well enough, and we probably should.

More importantly, who are you, Isabel??? Her antics and total inability to understand almost anything led me from chuckling to wanting to bang my head on the table. I kept waiting for some sort of personal growth, or something... but if it existed, I missed it. I probably felt this especially keenly having just left Ellie from The Last Letter from your Lover.

Lots of intriguing characters though, and I think McQueen has a lot of space to play around with the eccentric mother secretly pursuing a bizarre dream, the disapproving father, the friend who has everything together except for a totally unreasonable crush (I wanted more of this storyline!). This is her first novel, and I'll be curious to see how her next ones develop.

A little bit of magic

Howl's Moving Castle - Diana Wynne Jones (Greenwillow Books, 1986)


First of all, the book is pretty different from the Hayao Miyazaki film (which I want to go back and watch again). So you should probably make sure you come across both of them, else you'll be missing out.

This was a book club selection (I finally made it to a meeting!) and received positive-to-mixed reviews from the members. There was some frustration with the abruptness of the ending, and uncertainty about whether Howl was actually a romantic dude.

But first, plot. Sophie has resigned herself to a dull life taking over the family hat shop when a witch's curse turns her into a 90 year old crone and she leaves home to ... well, that's not very clear. But she soon finds herself in the walking castle of Wizard Howl, where she and his fire demon agree to a deal: he'll lift her spell if she can free him from the contract binding him to the castle hearth.

And then adventures go from there. Howl is a dandy rather than an evil eater-of-hearts, everyone seems to have more magical power than they think, and Wales circa 1986 makes an appearance even among the towns in this fantasy land.

I am slightly embarrassed to say that Sophie reminded me very much of Bella Swan (Wow, I barely blogged about Twilight at all. I must have been ashamed) and if Stephenie Meyer didn't use Sophie Hatter as inspiration, both authors were at least trying to do the same thing. Which is? Sophie & Bella don't see their own power. Sophie believes she is plain and destined for a plain life; Bella is plain and awkward and surrounded by creatures far more beautiful and powerful. And yet, the problem throughout is that they don't see themselves clearly; they don't recognize their own beauty and strength. It's a difficult task to carry off, and both books have problems, but the trope is one of the things I like most about YA fiction.

As Time Goes By

The Last Letter from your Lover - Jojo Moyes (Viking, 2011)


One of the reasons I feel blessed to be a reader is for the feeling you get when you come across a book that makes you so pleased to be reading it. It may be romantic, or exciting, or heartwarming, or tear-jerking. But whatever it is, you are glad that the book exists, and that you exist and are able to read it.


All of which is a rather over-the-top way to say that I really loved this book. I am all about the British romances, apparently.


Story, in brief: in October 1960, Jennifer Stirling wakes up in a hospital, her memory essentially gone. She tries to return to upper-class life with a husband she feels is a stranger ... and then finds a letter. She had been having an affair, and now much begin a mad search to determine the identity of her lover, the trajectory of their love, and what her husband and friends may have known. 


Interspersed are flashbacks just a few months, to when she met the man behind the letters, all from his point of view. How he found himself desperately in love with someone who should have been only a conquest. And then time moves forward.


And then time moves dramatically forward, to 2003. Ellie, a reporter whose own "all-consuming" love affair threatens to wreak havoc on her career, finds a cache of these letters. For reasons both professional and personal, she sets out to discover what became of Jennifer & B. 


The earlier story is the more compelling, and I wouldn't blame any reader who wanted to take Ellie and shake her for being just like any other British chick lit heroine. But that is unkind, and not entirely true. (And also kind of okay, b/c this reader loves [most] British chick lit.) And Moyes does two things that I adore. The first is making a romantic hero of the librarian. (Thank you!) The second is entwining the two stories such that the resolutions of each are entirely bound up in one another.


If I only read novels like this, I'd be pretty darn close to perfectly content.

KGB-CIA Smackdown

The Charm School - Nelson DeMille (Warner Books, 1988, 2006)

My mom tells me that she went through a phase when I was a baby where she believed it inevitable that Reagan would blow us all up. And really, am I too blasé in my conviction that the Cold War was never really going to go thermonuclear?

I grew up, for all intents and purposes, after the Cold War. Born weeks after the Miracle on Ice, I knew the USSR as a place my daddy had visited as a student. Heck, he worked for a Russian businessman who - I think? - was installing laundromats in Moscow or something. It was perestroika, glasnost, and then a Wall fell, but I was too little to understand. And then a putsch. And aftermath. Drunken Yeltsin dancing on a stage. So long Soviet Union, I hardly knew ye.

Even after I became a scholar of Soviet history, I was just that: a scholar. I never had known the USSR as an existential threat, the way my professors had. Well, many of them hadn't felt that way themselves, but they existed in a world that did. (And some did. Certainly.)

But I digress. There's a book here. A spy thriller! I don't think I've ever read one of these before. It's exciting! And during the Cold War - probably set roughly around when it was written, 1988. And it takes things so seriously. And gives the Soviets points for competence that, quite honestly, they probably didn't deserve. The allure of détente vies for primacy with the deeply rooted sentiment that the Soviets would do anything to win.

Lots more for me to think about as well. Often the action (and exciting action! KGB training "Americans" how to completely pass and infiltrate our society. Car chases! Plane crashes! Lots of doublespeak! Oh, and sex) felt like just a distraction from the questions I wanted to ponder about the importance of the Cold War as an origin myth in the construction of post-war identity in both the USA and USSR. So my point is: this was fun! Seriously. Spy novels are awesome. But it also made me want to run into the garage and dig through boxes until I found all my history books.

Just a fling? Ha!

Only Mine - Susan Mallery (HQN Books, 2011)

Sometimes, when I'm reading a romance, and a woman gets involved with a guy in one of those "no strings attached, just for fun" affairs, I kinda want to take her and shake her. "Don't you ever read romance novels?!? Haven't you ever seen a romcom?!? You're totally going to fall for him." It's a similar urge to wanting to smack the characters in horror movies, who clearly have never seen a horror film before.

(Admittedly, on occasion, characters go meta and say shit to themselves like: Snap out of it [character's name]. This is real life, not a romance novel. Ha!)

But! This book has no fake marriages, although one faked relationship, which actually, for maybe the first time in romance history, makes sense. It also has both twins and triplets (two more books coming this fall, if you were wondering). And I took the book home mainly to figure out where in California the fictional town of Fool's Gold was located. I'm still going through this wistful phase where small-town life sounds really really good.

Not Alone

Midlife Crisis at 30 - Lia Macko and Kerry Rubin (Plume 2004)

I really wish I had read this 3 years ago, when it first came into my life via a bookswap. Because despite all the differences and things that "make me unique" and whatnot, I often felt like I was reading my life story.

So Macko & Rubin explore what seems the feminist mystique for my generation: that the promise that "you can do anything" turns into the expectation that "you should be everything" ... and inevitably, guilt and panic when we're not. It's a little frustrating to travel back to 2003 and 2004. Man, I wish I were building my career then; I'd happily take that economy over this one.

Anyway, a couple moments of deep identification:

• "a sense of bewilderment about why their lives felt so out of sync with their expectations, as well as a deep fear that the paths they had chosen were leading them in the wrong direction"
• "Despite my best intentions, I ended up exactly where [I did not want to be] at 30."
• "I feel like I just got divorced without ever being married." [This one. So. Much.]

and then the more helpful moments of hearing from women on the other side:

• There's still plenty of time.
• The difference between a B and an A often isn't worth the extra effort and struggle. Sometimes it's okay to settle for that B-plus.
• and from Lt. General Claudia Kennedy: "There are times in your future when you will be more beautiful than you are today; you need to get old enough to be that beautiful."

Anyone who has spent five minutes talking to me in the past 3 months knows that I needed to hear all those things right now. But really, I think just about every young woman I know needs them too. We're a bit younger than Macko and Rubin. Our generational experience is a touch different. But the questions and fears and identity crises we're facing: they haven't changed much over the past decade.

Lost in a Painting

The Museum Guard - Howard Norman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998)

This is one of those novels that creates a deep sense of unease from the start. Maybe it's because you find out right away that something is not right with DeFoe's romantic relationship, or because of the telling of his parents' horrific death when he was a child. Not only their death, but the way that adults tried - ineptly, as all efforts must surely be - to protect him from some of the worst of the blow. Or maybe it's just 1938, and a growing awareness of the tragedies already taking place in Hitler's Germany.

At any rate, nothing feels right in DeFoe's Halifax: neither in the residential hotels where most everyone seems to live, nor in the art museum where he guards an unpretentious collection.

Much of the first half of the novel was taken up by my wondering why his girlfriend was so cruel to him. I think I used the term "jerking him around" quite a bit. I was not impressed. But as she falls further and further under the spell of one particular painting, everything gets so convoluted, that you just want the train wreck to actually occur, the crash to happen. It's like watching a disaster in slow motion.

Despite my saying slow motion, the pacing is both fast and slow. Just when I began to feel I understand Norman's rhythms, it would switch up again. Considering how consistently I've reached for cheerier books over several months, this was a departure for me. And a difficult one. I need some sunshine.

One exchange, though, between DeFoe and Miss Delbo, the museum's tour guide, stopped me in my tracks. Somehow, it seemed the truest and most familiar moment in the whole book.

Miss Delbo: Imogen is lost to you, DeFoe. I may as well state it now as later. You aren't -- forgive my bluntness -- you aren't a man who recognizes his own nature.

DeFoe: I recognize a lot of it. I just don't know what to do with what I recognize.

Stay. Or let me go.

The Playboy - Carly Phillips (Warner Books, 2003)

This is the second in the trilogy (first here) about a trio of brothers who are sworn bachelors, until mom gets in the way. And the right woman blows into town. And....

Anyway, it's cute. It's sweet. And like far too many romances, it makes me want a change. A new town. (It makes me think of the lyrics to "Boston" for that matter.)

I'll get out of California, I'm tired of the weather,
I think I'll get a lover and fly him out to Spain...
Oh yeah and I think I'll go to Boston,
I think that I'm just tired
I think I need a new town, to leave this all behind...
I think I need a sunrise, I'm tired of the sunset...

Maybe change is in the air. Certainly feels like it must be.

Do you speak my tongue?

The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts - Gary Chapman (Northfield, 1992, 2010)

I've been curious about this book since a friend gushed over it about a year ago. It seemed a little self-helpy to me, and my library catalog attaches it to Christianity. Also, I'm not sure what marriage I'm working on. But.

It seemed pretty self-evident to me that there are different ways to express love, and that some expressions of love mean more to different people. So I picked it up, and spent an afternoon with it and a glass of iced tea.

Here are the five love languages:

• Words of Affirmation
• Quality Time
• Gifts
• Acts of Service
• Physical Touch

Dr. Chapman devotes a chapter to each one, and has lots and lots of examples of marriages falling apart that were saved by the decision to really try to speak one another's language. Cute.

Okay, fine. I get that. What I found most interesting was the relative ease and difficulty of figuring out the dominant love languages of those around me. My mom was immediately obvious, and it threw a lot of areas of our family dynamic into sharp relief. My dad was harder. Some friends became clear just as they popped into my head over the past few days, as I'd be thinking about other things. What frightens me is that I look at my past romantic relationships, and I can't say for sure what my partners' languages have been. Even more so, I can't figure out my own. He offers lots of tips for figuring it out, but all I really got to was that one of the five is definitely not mine. (This one, by the way, happens to be my mom's, which I find amusing.) So I'm still puzzling that out. (Chapman has an edition for singles, which might be worth digging up.)

What I have thought about is that I can show love and appreciation in my relationship through all these ways, and that I should, in order to really ensure the people around me know that I appreciate them. It has also been a good reminder that they show their appreciation and love in different ways too. Sometimes, when you're convinced love looks a certain way, you miss the love that's right in front of you.

Hell-o Starling

Bright's Passage - Josh Ritter (Dial Press, 2011)

I am a sucker for "Snow is Gone." I could just listen to it over and over again. I'm still discovering Ritter's other songs, but it alone was enough to get me excited when I saw he was coming out with a debut novel this summer.

Bright's Passage is lyrical and fascinating, but devoid of the joy that drew me to the songs. It makes sense; what joy is to be found in a hard world, where the trauma of the First World War is followed by the trauma of losing one's wife in childbirth and fleeing the raging inferno that has taken over your home? The chapters alternate between Bright's attempts to make his way with his newborn son and his experiences on the front lines of a war that was all over except for the brutal and senseless killing. Plus, we get a peek at the opaque menace that is Bright's father-in-law, out for revenge. As a result, the book just gets harder and harder and harder to read. Which is, I must believe, Ritter's intent.

Nothing has ever convinced me that war is anything other than hell. And this novel places it on a continuum of horrors that have followed Bright from childhood. No wonder he has picked up an angel, who offers the promise of something better. Perhaps.

The questions of redemption is left until the final pages, which is all I will say about that. Can there be such a thing as redemption in a world where such arbitrary violence is allowed to occur?

Aw, it's blue because... well, you'll see

Something Blue - Emily Giffin (St. Martin's Griffin, 2005)

Have I mentioned anything about liking John Krasinski? Maybe once or twice?

Anyway, I'm so glad he's (I presume) going to be playing Ethan when they film this follow-up to Something Borrowed.

Um, there's really no way to talk about this book without spoiling the end of the earlier novel, so we'll have to deal with that. Darcy has spent 30 years as the golden girl, who always gets what she wants. And who is always wanted. And suddenly she finds herself alone, dumped by friends and loved ones, and pregnant. So she does what any woman would do - flee to London.

I preferred this book to the first, which I didn't expect. I never really got over my discomfort with Dex. I kept wondering... if I were Rachel's friend, wouldn't I tell her she's too good for him? That she deserves someone more willing to take a stand? In this novel, the ick factor was different. Darcy is a bitch, but she's also our first-person narrator, and it's nice to remember from time to time that shallow and selfish people aren't only shallow and selfish, that they often believe they are trying to be good, and that often enough, they are capable of growing up.

So we grow to like Darcy. And we are awfully fond of Ethan, the childhood friend who finds himself a sucker for Darcy's damsel in distress. And so it works. And works enough that I devoted an entire Saturday to devouring the book essentially in a single sitting.

You drive and you drive and you drive some more

In a Sunburned Country - Bill Bryson (Broadway Books, 2000)

Last week I drove about 800 miles over 2 days. It made me a little cranky, and definitely sore. But I was driving between Southern California and the Bay Area, where there is plenty to see, even on that cow country stretch of the 5. So I felt a little sheepish reading Bill Bryson in Australia, where there are regular 1000+ mile drives to get pretty much anywhere.

Bryson is hilarious. I think I knew this, but here is proof. This exploration of Australia's cities, interior, features, people, culture, etc. is the result of 3 separate trips that expose him to much (and yet still just a small piece of) the land Down Under.

Themes: Places have a lot of weird stories. And when you're on the road, you get intrigued by all sorts of roadside attractions.

Australia has LOTS of things that can kill you. Lots and lots and lots. Animals mostly. And getting lost in the desert and dying.

Bryson walks a lot. He makes me wish I were better at going offline and just walking.

He also drinks a lot on occasion. Especially when traveling with a friend.

Travel plans get messed up pretty often.

Australia is awesome, and writers get to go there surprisingly often (well, to me) for book tours.

Also, you should probably find this book just for the description of cricket. I almost fell off the couch. It's most of chapter 7, although it appears here and there elsewhere in the book. This may be one of the lazier book reviews ever, but I promise, you will enjoy this read.

My Best Friend's Wedding

Something Borrowed - Emily Giffin (St. Martin's Griffin, 2004)

I knew the book would be different from the movie. And I wanted to see the movie - um, hello John Krasinski! - and read the book. So: movie first. That way I wouldn't be disappointed by it.

It worked pretty well. Except I am sorry, but I still think Rachel is too good for Tom Cruise, or Dex or whatever. Maybe I just want to think that the right guy won't be so wishy washy about me. And the book and movie were surprisingly different. Even on major plot points. The book did things that just couldn't have worked on screen. I think we would have hated Rachel more. And maybe that's too bad, that we have to bow to convention, but so be it.

Rachel's "best friend" is bratty Darcy, whose fiancé is changing his allegiance. But her real best friend is co-worker Hillary. Although other childhood bud Ethan is pretty cool too. In the movie, rather than complicate things with another actress, we just wrap them both into Ethan (John Krasinski!) who has secret feelings of his own.

Anyway, totally enjoyable. I like that Rachel does something pretty horrendous - sleep with her best friend's man mere weeks before the wedding - and yet is portrayed as sympathetic and human. And while you root for her, you also do feel squeamish about what's going on. Except that you also don't. And you also - if you're me - can't decide if you think Dex is a cad or just a guy who misplayed his hand and is now figuring that out.

The sequel follows Darcy. And I bet we are going to learn to like this spoiled princess. But I sort of don't wanna. That said, I'll read the book. And watch the movie. After all: John Krasinski!

The Dark Side

I Am The Cheese - Robert Cormier (Dell-Laurel Leaf, 1977)

First of all, my boy Corey Perry just won the Hart Trophy for League MVP. I'm a whole mess of happy about that. But I won't let that distract me from my book review.

It starts with Twitter, and the #YASaves trending topic that got big a few weeks back after a WSJ article posited YA lit today was darker than in past years, and even dangerous. (I am oversimplifying.) Anyway, the response was immediate and severe. The consensus: YA literature helps teens navigate the perils of adolescence, and adults who write for the WSJ need to calm the eff down. (Again, oversimplifying.)

I had a few discussions arising from some RTs of mine. A friend told me that while reading the article, he was reminded how I Am The Cheese was a really powerful book, that stuck with him. I decided to read (or maybe re-read?) it. Which I did on Monday night.

It's powerful stuff, this book. Adam's story is revealed in alternating chapters. His solo bicycle journey from his hometown to a Vermont town 70 miles away, where his father is in the hospital, and then the transcripts of taped sessions between him and a shadowy doctor of some sort, who is asking questions about his past. It quickly becomes clear that something in his life went dramatically awry, both recently and in his very early childhood. You fear for Adam, and reading this now, an adult, all my maternal instincts kicked in. I was troubled that I was obviously too late to protect this child.

1977, and this is dark. Apparently not as graphically dark as what's out there today. But powerful. Harmful? I doubt it.

Speaking of the impact of YA, another discussion led to Lois Duncan.... My friend brought up Don't Look Behind You, a 1990 novel about a girl whose family is in the Witness Protection Program. Of course I remember this book! I must have read it a bunch of times. But the one that stuck with me more is Stranger with My Face, the novel that introduced me to the concept of astral projection, and also terrified me away from ever being willing to give it a try. (Wimp.) Are these books still being read?

Before I wrap up, I want to mention that the books that stuck with me the most are the scary ones. I bet this isn't uncommon. And I wonder how much it relates to the central thesis of Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment, namely that dark tales enable children to safely grapple with their fears. I am sure there is plenty of scholarly literature out there on the topic. Maybe one of these days I'll do a little more searching. For now, just speculation....

In the Mood for Love

The Bachelor - Carly Phillips (Warner Books, 2002)

First Lady - Susan Elizabeth Phillips (Avon Books, 2000)

No one has to pretend to be married! No fake marriages! Well, except in the latter, the widowed FLOTUS does pretend to be pregnant, and is at least once introduced as the wife of the guy to whom she's hitched her runaway self. And in the former, a fake illness forces our hero to find a lady to wed. In a hurry. Luckily his old high school crush is back in town too.

I should stop. Talking about romances makes me ironic. Because there's no way to admit you read and enjoy them without telling everyone that you are a hopeless romantic. Rolling your eyes dramatically at least shows you know they are foolish.

But who am I kidding, really? Would I keep reading them if I found them so moronic? (Well, maybe...) I am a sucker for them. I love the dramatic arc. Damsel is in distress, finds herself latched to vaguely abhorrent but totally sexy man, and as she falls for him, discovers all this strength within herself. I know there is plenty that is escapist and dangerous about this fantasies, but they really could be a lot worse. There are many worse things than believing that you can grow into your own best self and find true love. Right???