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!)

We're all a little mad around here

The Uninvited Guests - Sadie Jones (Harper, 2012)

2012 wrap-up coming tomorrow-ish, I hope. (If not, at least know that according to my blog count, I read 50 books this past year. Decent enough statistics.) Until then though, what better way to close out the year than a trip to the turn of the last century: Edwardian England.

This book reminded me of two things: a sitcom episode in which events spiral increasingly out of control, and one of those dreams in which you can't ever get to that thing that you desperately need to do, b/c other things keep happening. Now throw in a dash of Gothic ghoulishness.

It's Emerald's birthday. Her stepfather is away, trying to save the "family" home impractically purchased by Emerald's dead father. He - the stepfather - has only one arm, a fact of no major importance, but dwelt upon all the same. Emerald's mother is weird in that way 19th-century English literature mothers often are. Emerald's brother sulks, her younger sister runs around in a dirty nightgown, hatching schemes that only neglected youngest siblings do, and the housekeeper has only one more set of hands to put together a birthday party. And then there are guests: another set of siblings, and a wealthy farmer's son.

And then there are more. A train accident, and for some reason haggard survivors descent en masse to the house. In a series of events fairly reminiscent of Clue, the family shuts the survivors in a room and then tries to get back to the matter of the dinner party. Except increasingly creepy things start happening, and eventually all hell breaks loose.

The novel turns into something of a fever dream, until the fever breaks. And people awake, a little hungover, but really none the worse off, all things considered.

10 days, 100 stories

The Decameron - Giovanni Boccaccio (trans. G.H. McWilliam (Penguin 1972, orig. 13??)

It may have struck you that I've been reading a lot of lighter fare recently (although now that I have discovered Hart of Dixie on Netflix all my soapy attention may be placed there) but in addition to whatever other books have passed over my nightstand, since around Thanksgiving I've also been working through a "big book."

Yes, nothing says holiday season reading like a fourteenth-century collection of stories themed around a group of young people trying not to succumb to the Black Death. Wooooo!

And yet, I forgot for hundreds of pages at a time that plague lurked around every page of this book. In some respects, this may have been the lightest reading of all. Ten young folk (plus servants) set out from Florence to escape not only the disease itself, but the obsession with it that has struck everyone. To amuse themselves, they wander and frolic, sing and dance, eat... and tell stories. Each day, each member of the party shares a story. Ten days, ten people = one hundred tales.

Most days have a theme. And this is when you learn that Italy in the 1300s was a pretty rocking place. My lingering cold makes me too lazy to go through and count statistics, but stories generally involved one or more of the following: wives and husbands cheating on each other (usually wives); corrupt priests, nuns, or other members of the clergy; people scheming to steal and play tricks on one another; individuals pinballing wildly between extreme wealth and fortune and abject poverty. But really mainly sex. So much sex. And described in such hilariously euphemistic ways.

For the first several (3?) "days" I was utterly enthralled by this, and recounted each story to my indulgent boyfriend. But after a while, I grew accustomed to the return of these same topics, and the remaining days passed by in a strangely soothing rhythm. (This girl likes structure.)

A couple points. Just because I'm not going into the details of the stories doesn't mean that many of them weren't awfully enjoyable. (I have told the First Day, Second Story to probably 10 different people.) And just because it took over a month to get through the 830 pages doesn't mean it was dull or slogging. It was actually a surprisingly quick read. But with holiday stuff and my desire to jump around and experience other stories, it just got spread out across a longer period of time.  Anyway, recommended with more enthusiasm than I might have expected. Good work Boccaccio :)

Something old, something new

The Singles - Meredith Goldstein (Plume, 2012)

This novel dips into two of my favorite genres: the chick lit (naturally) and the college-friends-in-their-lives-after-college that has the potential to cross into literary fiction.

And it's set at a wedding (a commonplace venue for the latter type mentioned above) - a time of hubbub and ridiculousness that feels familiar smack in the midst of the holiday season.

It's Bee's wedding. Don't get too attached to Bee though, because although there are all sorts of interesting hints about her and her relationships to the people around her, we really don't get to meet her much. It's really about the group that at most other weddings would be tossed together at the "singles" table, but for some reason aren't here: three college friends (one of whom is a bridesmaid), an uncle, and the groom's mother's friend (or rather, her son).

Chapters skip from the perspective of one to the next. Over the course of the evening, each undergoes a crisis (or two or three) and as they bump into each other, you get hints of the ways they might yet come to be one another's saviors. Although there are plenty of red herrings thrown in. And in the end (spoiler? I guess?) each emerges from Bee's wedding ready to enter a new stage of life, perhaps even more so than Bee herself.

Maybe I've done it wrong, but I've never had quite this experience at a wedding. But then again, that's probably for the best.

Spies and otherwise

What Happens In London - Julia Quinn (Avon, 2009)

I didn't really get the title. I guess there's a lot of intrigue afoot - some gossip, spying, a haughty prince who may have a variety of nefarious plans - but it's not as though anything "stays" in London once the action moves somewhere else. Eh, whatever.

Which reminds me - there aren't any London-themed hotels in Vegas, are there? I wonder why not...

Anyway, it was all very charming. I've got nothing else to add, I'm afraid. Oh, and no fake marriages, sadly.

Dream lover

Imaginary Men - Anjali Banerjee (Downtown Press, 2005)

Yet another book that mysteriously made its way onto my "to read" list. But it seems right up my alley. Once upon a time I was reading a lot of South Asian-inflected fiction, and chick lit is my specialty. But to be honest, I'm still not quite sure how I felt about this one.

The premise totally works - Lina is a matchmaker (one of those professions I really only hear about in novels) and in the eyes of her Indian family, an old maid now that she's crossed 30. And to avoid a relative's meddling matchmaking, she claims to be engaged. And hijinks ensue. Mainly because she uses the name of the hot (but terribly conservative) man she just met, and because her family gets SO excited and demands to meet him, and because she's still trying to come to terms with the death of her former fiance.

The plot moves quickly, and I plowed through this book during finals week like it was candy. All good. But I found myself wondering what role Lina's fiance played in the book. People seemed blithely inconsiderate of her loss, and I couldn't quite understand why. And then we have Lina's imaginary man, who is either a)aforementioned lost love; b)her fake new lover; c)the new man she's actually falling for; d)some weird amalgamation. The answer is e)all of the above, but I somehow wanted more from him.

Am I too demanding? Is this why I'm still unmarried?

On the other hand, I really appreciated the ending, which offered a richer, more real portrait of how "happily ever after" doesn't just happen.

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?

Snakes and snails....

This Boy's Life: Tobias Wolff (Harper & Row, 1989)

In short: a memoir of a kid growing up in the school of hard knocks during the 1950s and 60s. Tobias and his mom move around a lot, as she tries to get away from an abusive boyfriend and eventually form a new family. (Meanwhile his dad and brother are living among the wealthy on the East Coast, although heaven knows we get enough hints that this situation isn't without its perils.)

Toby becomes Jack, and dreams big dreams, but along the way he is a liar, a thief, a truant, and a general hoodlum. Possibly nothing really outside the ordinary boundaries of being a working-class boy at the time, but it was hard for this girl reader to identify.

Also, I was completely distracted by marginalia. This copy previously belonged to someone who read the book for school - guessing high school. And she had plenty to say about the book. She was very troubled by the men in the story (with good enough reason, I'll admit) and had plenty of smiley faces for the mom. Marginalia tells you so much about a reader and the times in which that reader lives and ... well, anyway, it was fun.

The best part of the book (for me) came at the very end, with this line:

When we are green, still half-created, we believe that our dreams are rights, that the world is disposed to act in our best interests, and that falling and dying are for quitters. We live on the innocent and monstrous assurance that we alone, of all the people ever born, have a special arrangement whereby we will be allowed to stay green forever.

This quote struck such a chord for me. My teenage reader, on the other hand, let it slide by unremarked.

Runaway Bride!

The Great Escape - Susan Elizabeth Phillips (William Morrow, 2012)

Instead of a fake marriage, we have a wedding that aborts just before takeoff. And if this sounds familiar, it may be in part because it's the other half of Phillips' last novel. There, the runaway bride's best friend finds herself stranded with the just-too-perfect groom. Here, we ditch Texas for the Great Lakes, where the bride ends up after a stint on the back of a motorcycle. (This, btw, is not the first time this scenario has played out in a Phillips' novel.)

Did we mention the bride is the daughter of the former president, and thus this non-wedding is a huge scandal?

Lucy didn't get to sow any wild oats during her teen years. So she's going to do that now. With a reluctant biker named Panda, and some hair dye, and fake tattoos, and whatever else it takes. The love story plays out more or less the way you'd expect. But the B and C plots are delightful. Lucy picks up some girlfriends along the way, and an orphaned boy, and there are some nice lessons learned about resilience, vulnerability, and the ways in which communities can provide for one another. Pretty charming.

(Why did I never set up an "absurd but adorable marriage plot" tag for my blog?)

Inside magical thinking

An Invisible Sign of My Own - Aimee Bender (Doubleday, 2000)

For me, Bender's novel was alternately a zoomingly fast read, and almost unreadable. This world was too terrifying to me, perhaps because of how much I recognized it. Mona is 20, and an elementary school math teacher. Set the unlikeliness of this aside. Because there's plenty more weird where that came from.

She's fixated on numbers, and their significance. She has help in this from her high school math teacher neighbor turned hardware store owner. He wears numbers around his neck corresponding to his mood - often very low. She sees numbers appear in people's yards, that just happen to herald the age of a resident within who is about to die. When these show up again in the novel, the dread I felt as I waited for Bender to prove the causality untrue was unbearable. I recognize these superstitions, these intuited "meanings," these compulsions. Because I haven't even told you about all the compulsions.

I finished the book a week ago, and have been playing around with some of the themes in my head ever since. They aren't easy. We find clues and significance in coincidence. We believe we have the power to shape outcomes with our thoughts and actions. We believe that if we shout our fears and stay fixated on them, they cannot come to pass. (Or, that at the very least we will court the faceoff and get it over with.) We bind things that make us feel good and connected with things that make us feel sick and alone.

Or do we? I found the actions of the characters to be (generally) exaggerated versions of the ways our own neuroses manifest. But does spotlighting these thoughts and behaviors diminish their power, or merely feed it. I'm still not sure.

Spirited away

The Night Circus - Erin Morgenstern (Doubleday, 2011)

I am going to admit that I held off on reading this book because I was jealous that someone named Erin wrote such a well-received novel. Stealing my thunder and all. But thank goodness I got over this absurdity. Because this book is magical. MAGICAL.

Most of the week I was reading The Night Circus, I spent non-reading time really wishing I were reading. It was transporting. Short chapters (and intros and such) whisk through between characters, times, and places. Which is a little like the circus itself. The circus, which appears as if by magic, runs only at night and only in black & white, and is the venue for increasingly inspired flights of magical imagination.

It is also the venue for a competition of sorts. Two men facing off; their proxies young, well-trained, and mostly ignorant of the rules governing their battle. And can two practitioners of such powerful magic grow to know their opponent so well without falling in love?

The novel is stunning. I reached the climactic scene one sofa over from my boyfriend, who was engrossed in someone on the television. (Fringe maybe?) And when I started silently weeping just because I was too overcome by the emotion of the whole thing, I had to hide it, because how do you explain that you're crying because it's just all too lovely?

Vaguely disagreeable olde England

Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh (Laurel Edition, 1944, 1945)

It's kind of fun to read old paperbacks. This one cost 75 cents when it was printed in 1965 (I think) and it is falling apart something pretty impressive. I think I'll be its final reader.

That sentiment is probably not true for the novel itself. (Obviously.) I am not crazy about Waugh, and it was a bit of a slog at the beginning. Lots of chummy gay college boys or something. Someone told me to not bother with the read and go straight to the movie, and I was sorely tempted. But I was glad to have stuck it through. Because after a spell it gets easier, and then suddenly, it gets much much easier. And without offering spoilers, I'm perhaps a little troubled by why I might find certain plots more agreeable than others.

That said, I still didn't have much affection or sympathy for any of the characters. It's been a week since I finished reading, and I had forgotten the narrator's name. He seems ... so distant, I suppose.

But! Onto the film adaptations!

The absurd marriage makes a lot more sense in books set in the 1800s

His at Night - Sherry Thomas (Bantam Books, 2010)

Ravishing the Heiress - Sherry Thomas (Berkley Sensation, 2012)

And returning to historical romance, which is a far more hilarious genre than I had really given it credit for being. A few months back, I read my first novel by Thomas, which launched the trilogy that RTH picks up. And for a variety of reasons involving book requests, I also ended up with His at Night.

And Thomas doesn't disappoint in the earlier novel, with my favorite "marriage under false pretenses" scenario. Elissande sees unexpected company as her chance to get herself and her aunt out of an abusive home, and swindles a poor, hapless duke into getting caught with her in a compromising position. Of course, he is neither poor nor hapless (just pretending to be) and he sees her trap (which, of course, doesn't stop him falling into it) and hates them both for it.

So again! Everyone's pretending to be something they're not, and lust and romance ensue. Plus there's a scandalous plot involving (more!) secret identities and scandals. Yippie. But again, high on the ZOMG SO CUTE scale.

I was less satisfied by the second read. It's a more ambitious plot - "marriage under forced pretenses" so to speak. Millie is an heiress, Fitz an accidental duke who has to marry well to save his family's land and whatnot. But he has a childhood sweetheart that he really really does not want to let go of. So the book bounces back and forth between the present, eight years after their wedding, and the past, concerning the early days and years of their marriage. It's a lovely testament to the possible success of arranged marriage, as what makes their relationship sparkle is the friendship and respect that have grown over time. But at the same time, you miss the wicked banter and push-and-pull of the romances where both parties are simultaneously attracted and repulsed by one another. But that's coming in the third installment of the trilogy, so huzzah for that.

All's fair in love, war, and politics

Queen Margot - Alexandre Dumas (Hyperion, 1994)

In high school, my friends and I watched the film adaptation of this novel a whole bunch of times. the people in it were all too beautiful. It was ... well, memorable. So while I found the book at some book sale, I bought it. And it languished on my shelf. Until a couple weeks ago.

"Queen Margot"is Marguerite de Valois, daughter of one French king, sister of two more, and wife (pre-annulment) of a fourth, Henri de Navarre. But the novel, thick as it may be, covers only two years in her eventful life. It begins with her marriage to Henri, intended to settle unrest between Catholics and Protestants, and ends when Henri flees back to Navarre, to stay safe until he can one day assume the throne. In between: the St. Bartholomew Massacre, several assassination attempts (most engineered by the queen mother, Catherine de Medicis), and a couple pretty fantastic love affairs.

The most memorable part of the film (well, to 16-year-old Erin at least) was the love between Marguerite and a lesser noble, La Mole. (There is also an unintentional murder that was pretty amazing.) But in the book, this relationship is almost surpassed by a strange and enduring friendship that extends unto death. And also much more about the machinations of Queen Catherine. In the book, it becomes a point of humor. She started to remind me of Wile E. Coyote, devising ever more certain plots to take out Henri de Navarre, and having each go awry.

I had far too much fun reading this, as I'm sure did the 19th-century audience that first encountered it in serial form. First of all: history! I mean, I'm not sure entirely where Dumas' imagination takes over, but still... And then romance and intrigue and beautiful costumes and and and. Does it come as any surprise that I have the DVD waiting for me to watch this evening?