(Reposted, a bit late, from Facebook, b/c clearly I have my priorities straight.)
This list was impossible to put together. In the end, I just went back through my blog, which only covers the second half of the decade. So it's my favorite books that were published 2000-09 that I read in 2005-09, with one exception, which was my favorite book of the decade and thus had to be included. It ended up being a slightly surprising list, because some of these I didn't particularly seem to like that much when I first read and posted about them. Who knows how favorites are made?
10. Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Marisha Pessl
9. Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace (which prob benefited from an Infinite Jest bounce)
8. The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
7. The Abstinence Teacher, Tom Perrotta
6. Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
5. The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
4. Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen
3. The History of Love, Nicole Krauss
2. The Post-Birthday World, Lionel Shriver (2)
1. My Name is Red, Orhan Pamuk (no review, but here are a couple other posts...)
Showing posts with label Perrotta. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Perrotta. Show all posts
Monday, January 11, 2010
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Suburban Sex Ed: The Abstinence Teacher
I LOVED The Abstinence Teacher, by Tom Perrotta. I first heard about it sometime in October, after finally seeing Little Children sometime in the summer.
There were so many times this book made me laugh aloud at the sheer ridiculous of the human situation, and just as many times I cringed in sympathetic embarrassment. And there are passages I marked down, but they all seem awfully risque for this blog. So you will just have to trust me, and hopefully go read it yourself.
I haven't read many reviews of this book besides Kellogg's, which I cited above and had forgotten by the time I started reading. But somehow I just decided everyone would like this book and was a big chagrined when I updated my books on Facebook and discovered that lots of other people were underwhelmed.
Anyway, I haven't said too much about the book yet. It's a culture clash b/t an emerging megachurch and the New England social liberalism embodied by sex ed teacher Ruth Ramsey. And while Ruth works to be a warrior and yet not entirely alienate her tween daughters, the clash is best exemplified by her foil Tim, the ex-addict rocker who found salvation in Jesus and in coaching her daughter's soccer team.
You really root for Ruth and Tim. At least I did. And while I, the former sex ed counselor, found myself quite clearly on one side of the issues, I still felt that Perrotta was both sympathetic and skewering on all sides. For a satirist, he's so nice. (Maybe a little like Jane Austen?) Anyway, I've gushed verbally and in e-mails to so many people in the past week that now I find myself all gushed out. Sigh. So read it for yourself, and decide for yourself. Making your own decisions, after all, might be the moral of The Abstinence Teacher.
There were so many times this book made me laugh aloud at the sheer ridiculous of the human situation, and just as many times I cringed in sympathetic embarrassment. And there are passages I marked down, but they all seem awfully risque for this blog. So you will just have to trust me, and hopefully go read it yourself.
I haven't read many reviews of this book besides Kellogg's, which I cited above and had forgotten by the time I started reading. But somehow I just decided everyone would like this book and was a big chagrined when I updated my books on Facebook and discovered that lots of other people were underwhelmed.
Anyway, I haven't said too much about the book yet. It's a culture clash b/t an emerging megachurch and the New England social liberalism embodied by sex ed teacher Ruth Ramsey. And while Ruth works to be a warrior and yet not entirely alienate her tween daughters, the clash is best exemplified by her foil Tim, the ex-addict rocker who found salvation in Jesus and in coaching her daughter's soccer team.
You really root for Ruth and Tim. At least I did. And while I, the former sex ed counselor, found myself quite clearly on one side of the issues, I still felt that Perrotta was both sympathetic and skewering on all sides. For a satirist, he's so nice. (Maybe a little like Jane Austen?) Anyway, I've gushed verbally and in e-mails to so many people in the past week that now I find myself all gushed out. Sigh. So read it for yourself, and decide for yourself. Making your own decisions, after all, might be the moral of The Abstinence Teacher.
Monday, October 22, 2007
War and Peace and Sex
This week's LA Times Book Review brought a few happy discoveries:
New translations of War and Peace. Tolstoy's tome is in my all-time top three, so the idea of new, updated interpretations thrills me. Plus, one of them (by Andrew Bromfield) is of an early draft of the novel, a shorter one, and one in which my favorite character appears to meet with a less tragic ending.
The Abstinence Teacher, by Tom Perrotta. Reviewed by Carolyn Kellogg, formerly of LAist. She notes that this book is getting lots of review attention. And speaking of, I heard Perrotta on last week's New York Times Book Review podcast.
New translations of War and Peace. Tolstoy's tome is in my all-time top three, so the idea of new, updated interpretations thrills me. Plus, one of them (by Andrew Bromfield) is of an early draft of the novel, a shorter one, and one in which my favorite character appears to meet with a less tragic ending.
The Abstinence Teacher, by Tom Perrotta. Reviewed by Carolyn Kellogg, formerly of LAist. She notes that this book is getting lots of review attention. And speaking of, I heard Perrotta on last week's New York Times Book Review podcast.
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