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Saturday, August 02, 2008

books for July

Look! A books post! TWO IN A ROW! And actually somewhere near the beginning of the month!

1. Westmark -- Lloyd Alexander -- 3.5
   • I've had this book for ages, and I read in someone's blog -- maybe Toddled Dredge? -- about how this was one of somebody's favorite YA books, so I thought I'd give it a try. I must preface this review by saying that I'm not exactly a diehard fan of the breed of book that involves imaginary countries that are stuck somewhere in the Middle Ages, technology-wise. (Oh, except that whole Narnia thing. Maybe I can enjoy Narnia for the same reason I can enjoy Outlander in spite of the fact that most romance novels that feature 18th-century Scots make me want to remove my eyeballs with my thumbs: because of the addition of modern real-world characters. Hmmm.) That said, this was an above-tolerable story, especially at the beginning. The middle dragged just a wee bit (good overall, though, and I liked the characters more as I went along, especially the ones who appear in the latter two-thirds), and the ending annoyed me. Not that the end was badly done, just that -- OK, spoiler coming -- the characters spend the second half of the book discussing whether a monarchy is a fair form of government, and you kind of get the idea that none of the good people realize it's the ideal, and then the neatly-tied ending has one of the main characters finding out that, wowee! She's a princess! It was just a bit of a letdown for me.
2. Over Sea, Under Stone -- Susan Cooper -- 4
   
   • This was another one that I've owned for a while and never read (I collect Newbery books). It concerns a family of British children who vacation in an old house in Wales, where they become engrossed in a mystery having to do with an Arthurian legend, involving some really evil bad guys and some quite decent good guys and oh yeah, a holyish kind of grail sort of thing. I had a bit of a hard time putting the book down long enough to do my chores, because I really did want to find out what happened to the characters, who, OK, aren't the Pevensies, but they were interesting and clever and plucky British children. Low point: Finding out that a Major Character is actually supposed to be Merlin. (BUZZKILL.) High point: The holiday parade near the end of the book. I could see it, hear it, smell it, feel the children's confusion and worry.
     

(herein begins the embarrassing part.)

3. Girls in Pants -- Ann Brashares -- 4 and


4. Forever in Blue -- Ann Brashares -- 4
   
   • 
     Hello, my name is Rachel and I like the Traveling Pants books.

     (Hi, Rachel.)

     Seriously, I don't know if it's because I remember being a teenaged girl or because I am the mom of a girl who will become one before I know it (PLEASE CAN WE MASTER THAT TIME-PAUSE THING NOW), but these books have resonated with me since I read the first one a few years ago. Not that my teenagerhood was much like that of the four girls in the books: I was neither beautiful nor athletic nor charismatic nor whimsically artistic; both my parents were (are) living and still married to each other; I did not have scalp-tingling relationships with wildly attractive slightly-older guys or geeky-but-sweet video-game champions (oh wait); I did not have a magic pair of pants and if they'd been flare-leg low-rise ones I probably wouldn't have worn them anyway. Also, is it just me or is this group of four friends totally unlike any actual group of four friends in that age bracket, what with the utter lack of jealousy, infighting, favoritism, and drama? Or maybe my friends and I were the weird ones. And yet I really like this series. I cry when I'm reading sometimes. Maybe it's because the author hits the nail right on the head when it comes to things like growing away from your mother (SOB) and then growing back (SNIFF) and looking at yourself and realizing that you've lost the person that is you at some point (CHOKE). Whatever the reason, I am willing to stand up and admit that I'm in my mid-thirties (note: HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?) and yet I truly enjoy this popular, light, young-adult girls' series. I think Ms. Brashares made a wise decision to end the series while we all wanted more, but I'm kind of bummed all the same.
     




5. Tara Road -- Maeve Binchy -- 3.5
   
   • This was the first Maeve Binchy book I read. It's an engaging story which tells (of course, because it's Binchy) of the havoc that is wreaked in one Irish family when it's destroyed by infidelity. The second half of the story takes place both in Connecticut and in Dublin, as the scorned ex-wife swaps houses on a whim with a woman who has some pretty serious troubles of her own. You know what I've just realized about Binchy's books? I always love her children. The kids of this broken marriage are endearing, and seem very real what with their childish hopes and misconceptions. Binchy's dialogue is also, as always, natural and very well-done.
     
6. Scarlet Feather -- Maeve Binchy -- 4.5
   
   • My favorite Binchy; it's richer than most of hers and the unavoidable marital infidelity (I really sometimes wonder how happy that woman's marriage can possibly be, dedications to her husband at the front of every novel notwithstanding, when she knows so much about unfaithful spouses) does not take center stage. This was a reread, but it had been long enough since I blew through it the first time that I found that I'd forgotten exactly how it ended, and I was pulling for the characters as they followed their mutual dream to start a catering company. (Also, the nine-year-old twins in one of the sub-plots are even better drawn than the children in Tara Road, described above.) This sounds clunky and just weird when I sit here and write about it, but trust me, this is the kind of book in which you live during the time it takes to read it. If you like Binchy at all, please do yourself the favor of trying this book.
     
7. While I Was Gone -- Sue Miller -- 3.5
   
   • Intriguing story about the frightening way in which your past can come back to haunt you (at least, it can if you live in a Sue Miller novel). This was a well-done story overall. Miller does an excellent job of drawing you in, with a placid enough opening followed by increasingly intense reminiscences by the main character, all of which revolve around a house shared by a group of hippies in the late 1960's, until what started out as just another literaryish chick book becomes quite a whodunit. And then, well, you find OUT whodunit, in a kind of surreal way. If Maeve Binchy and Scott Turow had a love child who then was raised by Ann Patchett, that child might grow up to write a book like this one. It's an OK book, maybe a tiny bit scattered at times, but worth reading once.
     
8. The Collected Short Stories of Dorothy Parker -- Dorothy Parker -- 4.5
   
   • (The high rating above is for the stories themselves. It wasn't Ms. Parker's fault that I read them all in a row and got a wee bit tired of her by the time I was done. I recommend spreading them out a bit if you can.)

     Dorothy Parker certainly didn't get her reputation for genius out of a crackerjack box. The woman knew her way around relationships and the human psyche, and her felicitous skill with words (if you've read her poems, you know what I'm talking about; the woman was brilliant) makes each story in this collection a gem. Parker, if your brain can handle having both women in it at one time without exploding, was the twentieth century's answer to Jane Austen, in my opinion: wry, scalding wit used to expose the ludicrous and simply silly, taking particular aim at the lives and habits of those in high society. If you were forced to read Parker as a teenager and didn't like her, please give her another try. If you like her poetry, you'll probably love her stories. If you've never heard of her, give yourself forty lashes with a wet reticule and get thee to the library pronto.
     

9. Me and Mr. Darcy -- I can't remember -- urgggh
   
   • Seven-word review: An interesting premise done very, very badly. I made a list on the back of my library-receipt-turned-bookmark of the things that annoyed me as I read this book, but I don't have the energy to inflict the list on you. A bare bones summary (of the part I read, because I couldn't make myself keep going after a while and I skipped to the end to see if what I thought would happen happened, and it did): Foul-mouthed Darcy-obsessed woman who runs bookstore takes Jane Austen-related vacation in Britain, meets pompous jerk who OH SO COINCIDENTALLY behaves in a Darcy-ish manner to her just as she happens to be reading the pertinent parts of P&P (example: woman overhears jerk bad-mouthing her to a friend JUST as she's reading the public-ball scene when Darcy calls Elizabeth 'tolerable'. WOW, THAT'S SUBTLE. I wonder if they're going to get together at the end. YA THINK? Answer: they do.) The characters are wooden, the clichés are thick on the page (the paragraphs about the main character's first few minutes in London were especially painful), there's a bizarre time-travelish element, and the male love interest is utterly unlikeable. You know, I can see the compulsion to write a book like this; it must be fun to set classic works in the modern era (and it worked really well for Clueless and Bridget Jones, right?), and you've got a guaranteed audience. But this book fails in so, so many ways. The author (whose name I'm glad I can't remember because I don't want her to Google herself and find this review, because I'm not being very nice and after all she did give it the old college try) simply doesn't trust us to be intelligent enough to pick up subtle clues, and she treats readers like imbeciles, not to mention the fact that she continually has her characters reference Mr. Darcy-related scenes that were created for FILMS (Colin Firth may have stridden [I hate this word] across a meadow wearing a wet shirt, but Fitzwilliam Darcy did not). AND her characters love the Keira Knightley adaptation, which shows how much she knows.
     

Tuesday, July 08, 2008

Two more books

I remembered today at the library that I'd read these, and they were really good so I wanted to mention them. Besides, what else am I going to blog about? "IT IS HOT. GARDEN IS GOOD. EATING OWN ZUCCHINI."

Oh, and "I CAN DRIVE STICK SHIFT." I haven't stalled the new car in ages. Or, OK, ten or twelve days.

Anyway. Shut up Rachel, on with the books.

The first one I saw sitting there on the New Books shelf looking all hurt because I'd forgotten to blog about it was Belong To Me by Marisa De Los Santos. (I actually think I wrote a twitter post mentioning this book, but that doesn't count, now does it.) This is a sequel to her first novel, Love Walked In, and I liked it very, very much. It picks up about five years after the previous book left off, as Cornelia and her husband (whose name I have, I'm ashamed to admit, forgotten) are moving to the suburbs. I was afraid at first that it was going to be yet another annoying "suburbs are eeeevil" novel, but it wasn't. It's a very busy novel, with a lot of things happening to a lot of people. I had a paragraph-long synopsis typed here, but I've just deleted it because the story is all the more delicious for being allowed to unfold a page at a time in front of you. I heartily recommend this book. Kat, thanks so much for pointing this author out to me.

Then I saw Run sitting there with the Ann Patchett books and realized that I hadn't blogged about it either. I think I may have even read that one before... Christmas? Can I have, possibly? I'm trying to picture myself reading it -- was it here, or at my parents'? Hmm. ANyway. Run was not as... shoot, how to describe it, as -- ethereal? beautifully unlikely? as the other Patchett books I've read. There's no deceased gay magician whose female assistant was in love with him; there's no opera diva taken hostage at a party. There's just a little girl who loves to run, and a pair of motherless college-aged brothers whose father is a Kennedy-ish politician, and a car accident in the snow, and a bit of a mystery as to how all these elements fit together. Patchett, as usual, writes a vivid and memorable story, and if it's not so brilliant a gem as Bel Canto, it's still very, very good and well worth the reading.

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

books for -- ah, heck, nevermind.

I am SO SO FAR BEHIND on books posts. I do feel bad about this. In April I actually reviewed two books right after I read them, and had the reviews (but only those two reviews) all ready to post in a "Books for April" post that never materialized, but since then I've just kind of given up and dealt with the guilt.

Maybe I'll try to do better for the second half of the year. But don't hold your breath. I'll rack my brain a bit, and dig around in my Library Elf emails, and pull out those two reviews from April, and overall just see if I can remember the more noteworthy books I've read in the past few months.

On vacation last week, I read The Book of Joe by Jonathan Tropper. Tropper is, like Nick Hornby, kind of a male Marian Keyes -- he writes about issues that are not-so-light, with a light touch and a lot of humor. On that score, The Book of Joe did not disappoint. It's about a man who has to go back to his New England hometown when his father has a stroke, which wouldn't be so bad except that the guy had, after shaking the small-town dust from his feet, written a bestselling novel that seriously trashed the people in it. They deserved it, mostly, but the author did a great job of having the reader and the character realize together that he could have handled the whole thing a leetle bit more maturely. Also, the story is structured carefully and well, with explanatory flashbacks getting closer and closer to the crux of the matter that caused the main character to feel so very bitter about the town where he grew up. However, this book did come VERY near to becoming a Very Special Episode about homosexuality and homophobia. Subject matter aside, Very Special Episodes bother me. A lot. Very well-written, and there's certainly a lot more to the story than that, so if you think you might like it anyway, dig in. (Also, that whole scene at the end? Was kind of freaky. You'll know which one I mean. Like a snowflake on his tongue? Eew.)

Sometime back in there I read The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, which was not at all what I expected it to be, but it was really readable and I liked it. It concerned a culture about which I knew almost nothing at all, so it was interesting from that perspective as well. I recommend it.

Oh, I also read Amsterdam by Ian McEwan. I actually don't remember a whole lot of detail about this novella, just that it was an enjoyable read with a moderately annoying (but not too surprising) dark twist at the end. I don't even remember what the source of the characters' conflict was. Oh, now that I make a serious effort it's beginning to come back, but still not completely. Whether that says more about my Swiss-cheese memory or about the quality of the story is anyone's guess. If you like McEwan, give this one a try.

Oh. I read a really strange -- but also memorable -- novel called His Illegal Self, which I picked up purely on the strength of the cover photograph and the title. It was set mostly in a commune in Australia. I liked the main character (a little boy, the son of permanently absent Communist revolutionary hippie types who is sort of accidentally abducted by another Communist revolutionary hippie type who he thinks is his mother) a lot, but I didn't like much else about the book, and the pretentiously unorthodox punctuation -- or, more specifically, the lack of it around quotations -- drove me bananas.

Hmm. Also in the Strange category -- Jenn, this is the book whose title I couldn't think of the other day, when we were talking about memoirs of people with crazy mothers or something like that -- was Her Last Death by Susannah Sonnenberg. Here's the review I put on Visual Bookshelf (which I no longer update, by the way) for that one: "Left me feeling dirty, somehow, and very glad for my ordinary humdrum wonderful relationship with my normal mother. Very well-written, but I still kind of wish I hadn't read it."

Aaaand back in April I read The Pajama Girls of Lambert Square, by Rosina Lippi. Lippi's writing and dialogue always crackle, and her characters are fresh and interesting as always. Maybe a little too fresh and interesting -- I found the agoraphobic, constantly pajama-clad female lead just that little bit too unrealistic for my suspension of disbelief to take (especially when someone so careful about her privacy hops into bed with the new guy in town practically the second she sees him. But then I guess in today's moral climate that's not unrealistic. Ahem.). Still, it's worth a read for the excellent writing, as Lippi's/Donati's books always are.

Here's the other of my April reviews -- I even formatted this one!

1. Conversations with the Fat Girl -- Liza Palmer -- 4
   
   • I liked this so much more than I thought I might. Maggie and Olivia have been best friends since they were the two designated Fat Girls in their class at school, but as the newly-thin Olivia's wedding approaches, the problems with their relationship are becoming increasingly apparent. Meanwhile, Maggie's been evicted and has a master's degree, a dead-end job, and a crush on a man she thinks is unapproachable. At first glance this seems like a typical fluffy best-friends-gone-wrong, girl-with-issues-meets-boy story, but there's a lot more to the book than that. For one thing, the writing is terrific, with believable dialogue, a steadily moving plot, and frequent sly little zingers of humor that catch you off-guard; even the chapter titles are clever. Also, in a rawther Marian-Keyesish fashion, there are some Deep Issues here, and they're deftly handled without the slightest bit of treacle or preaching or any tired clichés. The supporting cast, Maggie's mother and sister especially, crackle with life; Maggie herself is a woman who makes me root for her. The only way I could bring myself to put this down and stop reading long enough to get anything done for the past two days was to remind myself that I didn't really want to get to the end and have no more to look forward to. (So it's not perfect -- the best-friend's Bridezilla tendencies are a bit over-the-top at times. But it's still very, very good.)

OK. I know I read other stuff (besides all the reading I was doing for school up until mid-May) but that's all I'll torture you with. Now here's a meme. I keep seeing it around and hoping someone will tag me with it, but nobody has, so I'm just going to do it anyway. (Blog-tagging reminds me of waiting to be picked for teams in junior high.)

1. Do you remember how you developed a love of reading?
I just remember being really enthusiastic about the fact that letters made words and words made stories and stories made pictures in my head -- that, in short, all it took was the alphabet correctly arranged to create entire worlds out of nothing. (Although I wouldn't put it into those words until I was considerably older. I may have been an avid reader at three but I wasn't that precocious.) Also, my brother taught me to read, or at least I remember him teaching me the sounds the letters made -- I was stung by the injustice that while C could make a K sound, K couldn't make a C sound. And anything my big brother did had to be just wonderful.

2. What are some books you loved as a child?
The first ones I remember reading independently were the Frog and Toad books, and I still love those. Also, I was nuts about the Little House books, and Narnia, and the Oz books and Beverly Cleary and Doris Gates, and Trixie Belden and the Hardy Boys (not so much Nancy Drew although I read a lot of those books the way you eat a lot of gummy bears, without thinking much), and books of horse stories. As an older child I especially loved the Anne series. I enjoyed anything I could check out of the library and devour non-stop, really, but these were a few special favorites.

3. What is your favorite genre?
Overall, probably classic fiction. But it's hard to choose.

4. Do you have a favorite novel?
Talk about hard to choose! Maybe Persuasion. Maybe Jane Eyre. Maybe Anne of Green Gables. I love a lot of modern novels too (Never Let Me Go, A Thread of Grace, Into the Wilderness). Man, I hate this question. I could go on all day with answers. Moving on.

5. Where do you usually read?
These days, in bed. I read elsewhere too, but I always have so much else to do during the day -- school in season, working in the garden, house stuff, cooking, cleaning, hanging laundry -- that I just don't have the leisure to sit down without guilt as often as I used to, and when I do, I usually end up knitting because, I reason, I can read in bed at night, but knitting doesn't lend itself as well to that, and I have projects I actually want to finish before I die.

6. When do you usually read?
I think I just answered that pretty well.

7. Do you usually have more than one book you are reading at a time?
Yes. Usually I'll go through several lighter fiction books in the amount of time it takes me to finish a more serious classic (usually a reread), although sometimes I get so caught up in one book that I don't read anything else until that one is done.

8. Do you read nonfiction in a different way or place than you read fiction?
As much as I wish I were the type of person who read a lot of nonfiction -- seems so much steadier and more important than preferring novels -- I probably read maybe one or two nonfiction books per year outside of school requirements. I do like a good biography every now and then, and I'll check out nonfiction that sounds interesting when I hear about it, but I frequently turn those books in without reading them all the way through. Now you know my deep dark secret: I'm terribly shallow. I hope you can still be my friend.

9. Do you buy most of the books you read, or borrow them, or check them out of the library? Mostly I check them out of the library. Classics I'll buy.

10. Do you keep most of the books you buy?
Yes, the vast majority of them, because I almost never buy a book unless I know I want to own it for one reason or another. (One exception is library book sales, where I'll sometimes be less discriminate and end up with stuff I'll never read, which I then give away.)

11. If you have children, what are some of the favorite books you have shared with them?
Mostly, it's the list of books in question 2. But add a few: Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, the inevitable Goodnight Moon. My daughter is just now flying through the Little House books, and it gives me so much pleasure to discuss them with her. My son's rereading the Narnia series (actually, he'd only listened to those really good audiobooks of most of them before), so that's fun too. Both my kids loved Beverly Cleary and read just about everything she wrote for young children. One of the greatest joys of being a parent is sharing books with my kids.

12. What are you reading now?
I just finished North and South -- the Elizabeth Gaskell novel, not the one about the American Civil War. I'd listened to the Librivox version before -- back when I was doing the painting in our house, actually, so it was funny to be reading along and then suddenly flash to the mental vision of myself covered with yellow paint standing in what is now my living room painting cupboard doors. Now I'm slowly going through The Mill on the Floss -- is it just me, or is most Eliot not as accessible as Silas Marner? -- and also reading While I Was Gone by Sue Miller. Funny about this book: As I was reading along, parts of the story started sounding creepily familiar to me, but other parts were (and are) not familiar at all. I'm still not sure if I've read this book before, or if I read part of it, or if I read something else that bore a lot of similarity to parts of the story.

13. Do you keep a To Be Read list?
Not really.

14. What’s next?
I'm having a hankering to read some Gabaldon and Donati. Also some Dickens, and I'm going to try to make myself strike out and read something new of his, rather than falling back on David Copperfield. Again.

15. What books would you like to reread?
I reread so, so many books.

16. Who are your favorite authors?
YOU CAN'T MAKE ME CHOOSE. Seriously, if you've read this blog for five minutes you could probably come up with a pretty accurate list.

Whew! And that's all. Wow, that got long. Now I don't have to post for a long time, right?

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

putting the "ideal" in "idealized"

I've been thinking lately about male literary characters written by women. There's a certain kind of guy in books aimed at women who, though very well-written, is obviously the feminine ideal of a man, who may or may not exist anywhere in nature (but I'm betting on 'not'). For instance (ooh, goody, a list!):

• Cal, created by Jennifer Crusie in Bet Me. Cal is well-off, good-looking, sensitive, popular, and fun. OK, you say, I know lots of guys like this. Me too. Well, not lots, but shut up Rachel, they get the picture. The thing about Cal, though, is that he is falling for this woman, Min, who is plus-sized, although we never learn how plus-sized. Now, I am THE LAST WOMAN IN THE WORLD to say that well-off, good-looking, sensitive, popular, fun, and sane guys can't fall in love with plus-sized women. Happens all the time. But for those men to find the plus size to be a positive factor? For said men to discourage -- not just politely keep their mouths shut, which all men should know is wise, but to actively discourage their plus-sized love interests from losing any weight because they prefer round women? I'm sorry, but that just smacks of female fantasy right there. Liking curves? Fine; I don't think most real men want to get into bed with a skeleton with skin on, regardless of what Madison Avenue and the Hollywood might try to tell us. Not minding the extra weight? Totally believable, because most men are not jerks who can't love a woman if she's not fresh off a magazine cover. But most of the men I have heard of who actively want their women to put on extra pounds, beyond just avoiding being "skinny", are not... exactly... as normal as Cal. Nice idea, Ms. Crusie. Great book, and thank you for the lifelong Krispy Kreme craving. But I just don't believe you.

• James Fraser in Outlander and the rest of that series. Lots of women (many of whom I have met on the Internet) are full-out in love with Jamie, who is strong and handsome and rugged and virile and sensitive and loving and not afraid to cry and just flawed enough and he has red hair and of course a nice body and he's tall and twenty-three years old and he speaks with an enchanting and linguistically inaccurate burr. And he wears a kilt. There are thousands of pages with Jamie on them, and in every one of those pages he becomes more and more of a mythic creation. Men, if you are unsure what women want, do yourself and your lovelife an enormous favor and spend a few days reading these books, and then make yourself over accordingly and you'll have scores of a certain type of single woman knocking down your door in droves.
  
  Except, oh yeah, your average ordinary guy would rather, um, not. Wear a kilt. Or cry. Or, let's face it, be an enthusiastic virgin on his wedding night as he marries an older woman with vastly more experience. (Well, maybe that one.) And a note to women: most near-strangers to whom you end up having to marry yourself under an assumed identity in order to keep nefarious and corrupt British soldiers from harming your person -- meanwhile keeping said man out of prison and possibly saving him from hanging -- will not end up being this congenial. Perhaps this is because the author was free to take her favorite qualities of a modern male and combine them with the best qualities of a 1740's Scottish hero and then put them in a form that most women find rather appealing. In other words, Jamie only works because he is completely made up.
  
  Of course, the entire romance subgenre (I am an expert in this because I read five Silhouette romances when I was a teenager) is thickly populated with unrealistic ideal men, but I'm not counting them because a) they tend to be less well-developed than the two I've mentioned, for page-count reasons if nothing else and b) nobody expects them to be real; they are there to serve the heroine and the author and her legions of readers and everyone pretty much knows that. Whereas there are many, many women -- I've met some -- who now fantasize that some kind of red-haired kilt-wearing sword-wielding Gerard Butler clone is just around the corner, because his creator did such a good job making women believe in him. I remember Diana Gabaldon mentioning, maybe at a reading or maybe in an interview, that her husband told her that Jamie Fraser isn't a real guy; he's a woman's conception of a guy, which is totally different, and exactly what I'm talking about here.
  

Rachel, you are saying, hello, fiction? Escape? Ringing any bells? I know, I know, I don't mean to sound like I expect every man ever created in fiction to be straight out of real life. The topic seemed interesting to me when I started writing ;), and I meant to be much clearer about what sets these authors and their creations apart from the ordinary imaginary men we all like to read about, but I don't have time. I also meant to do more than two, but I have a history paper to write and dinner to plan. Any others you can think of? Do you disagree with me about these?

Wednesday, April 02, 2008

Books for March

I don't know what happened. March is usually a good reading month for me, but this time I only have two books to discuss. I think the main reason is school, with a side of general busyness. I did have an ongoing transcribing job this month, too, and late-night typing tends to interfere with my late-night reading. I have a good-sized stack of books from the library, but I'm not getting anywhere with them.

ANyway. On with the books. At least I'm posting about them.

1. Songs Without Words -- Ann Packer -- 3.5
   
   • A surface description of this book -- it's about a teenaged girl's attempted suicide and its impact on her family and on her mother's best friend, whose mother committed suicide when the friend was a teen -- sounds rather dramatic and overdone and trashy, but this is a very well-written book, whose issues (not just suicide) are deftly handled. I especially liked the way the author wrote the girl's character; having been a teen (and, let's face it, a thirtysomething) who's been known to go around muttering under my breath to myself about how socially inept and ugly I am, I found Packer's treatment of adolescent-girl mountains-from-molehills angst to be pretty much spot-on. (Excuse me while I go hug my daughter and tell her how beautiful she is.) At times Packer's descriptions of the details of the inner and outer lives of every -- single -- character get a bit old, but this was worth a read all the same.

2. Alas, Babylon -- Pat Frank -- 4
   
   • I read this at my husband's request. He doesn't read many novels, but he does go for the occasional end-of-the-world-as-we-know it apocalypse story, and he thought I might like this one. I did. It's not Lucifer's Hammer (READ THIS NOW THIS MEANS YOU), which was also one of his recommendations for me a decade or so ago, but it's really pretty good. In this 1959 what-if, Frank deals well with the practical issues that would be faced by the survivors of a nuclear holocaust; my favorite aspect of the book, though, is the way it (sometimes quite subtly) contrasts the attitudes and priorities of a life of ease against those where every decision has to be made with survival in mind.
   
   

And that's it. How pitiful is that?

Monday, February 25, 2008

I am so, so bad.

As the delurking Mandy pointed out (hi, Mandy!), I have, um, kind of not been doing monthly book posts. I missed the first one back in December (I think) because there was the move and the stress and augh and I hadn't been reading much and it was all repeats anyway and how many times do you want to read my review of my Mitfordy comfort-book crack? Then I didn't do one for January either, and I felt kind of guilty, but nobody noticed, and I figured if anybody HAD noticed (and cared, which was somewhat less likely), they'd know that I was moving, and making home improvements, and pursuing higher education, and all kinds of totally valid excuses like that.

Right?

OK, I'll try to catch up the memorable ones (good and bad) through February, and get back on track next month with the regular posts. Because I really have missed doing them, and they're some of my favorite posts to look back at later.

Seriously, in December it was pretty much all Mitford books, when I could keep my eyes open at night long enough to read. But there's a new Jan Karon book out, and I read that one:

Home to Holly Springs -- Jan Karon -- 3.75

• Technically, this is not a Mitford book; it's a Father Tim book, a distinction which was lost on me when I first picked it up, but it was clear by the end. Overall, there's nothing in the Mitford books that I wouldn't want Claire to read, if she should happen to be interested in the lives of people her grandparents' age who get really het up about things like the local Grill having to go out of business. Apparently the Father Tim novels are going to be more... adult in nature. Not that they're smutty, or anything, but there are considerably more adult themes covered. Timothy takes Barnabas to the town where he grew up, and meets a few people who knew him as a boy, and learns unpleasant things about his dad, and, oh, becomes a bone-marrow donor. The End. It was good, but not quite good enough to be a 4. There you have it.
  

January was another month of little reading and mostly rereads (picked up some LMM), but I did read the newest E.L. Konigsburg. I can't remember the name of it. It has a picture of kids holding frames on the front, and it's really hard to follow, and it has character cameos from her other books which I found a bit confusing, and it turned into a preachy kind of After-School-Specialish Book About Serious Issues at the end, which is one of my most serious literary pet peeves. I actively did not like this book, which is sad, because I wanted to like it. A woman who can have written two Newbery winners thirty years apart deserves more than an eye-rolling attempt to get through to the last page of her latest work just for the sake of finishing it. But there it is. Oh, yes, it's The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World. You might like it. I didn't.

This month I actually got some stuff from the library (well, I got a LOT of stuff from the library, because I'm writing a history paper on the International Geophysical Year, but I got some stuff that had nothing to do with school, for a change). The jury is still out on Julie And Julia by Julie Powell. I gave up on The Buenos Aires Broken-Hearts Club -- looked interesting, but it turned out to just be trashy and very, very first-novelish -- and I wasn't awfully impressed by Jodi Picoult's early effort, Harvesting the Heart. It wasn't bad; it just wasn't as good as she got later, with the knowable characters and concisely perfect descriptions. It came across more like an ordinary soap-operaish kind of novel. No annoying twist at the end, though! So there was that.

As a family, we've listened to The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and The First Men In The Moon by H.G. Wells, both read by the highly skilled Mark Smith. We really REALLY liked the first one, and liked the second one pretty well, although it dragged in spots and didn't end the way we wanted it to. Meanwhile I'm slowly but surely making my way through The Shirley Letters for LV, a book which is pretty much required reading for anyone interested in (or forced to study) California history.

Other than that, it's all been rereads. I'm on Rilla in the Anne series, but I didn't feel like starting with the ones I had pretty thoroughly memorized, so I picked up at Windy Poplars, back in January. I did buy new books with my Christmas gift cards, but I haven't been able to sit down and really get into them. One of my favorite finds in a late-night Barnes and Noble shopping trip was a copy of Problem Solving Through Recreational Mathematics, which is a college textbook full of logic and algebra puzzles, for NINETY CENTS. Here's the problem that has had me stumped since I first read it. The solution is RIGHT THERE on the tip of my brain but I just can't quite grab it. Math geeks, please give me hints: There's this woman, see, and she's rowing up a river. She passes a piece of driftwood. Half an hour later, she decides she wants the driftwood, so she turns around and rows back to it. She catches up to it a mile downstream from the point where she first saw it. How fast is the current of the river? This has been tormenting me in the odd minutes when I'm not studying, sleeping, transcribing, teaching the kids, cleaning up dog messes, cooking supper, doing laundry, tidying the house, planning the garden, walking the dog, shopping for groceries, or mediating sibling conflicts that make me want to tear my hair out by the roots. It makes me feel very, very stupid because I am sure I should know it. Any helpful math geeks who want to put me out of my misery are welcome to do so.

Thursday, November 01, 2007

Books for October

1. The Hero and the Crown -- Robin McKinley -- 4
   • Maybe this shouldn't be in bold, because I have read it before, but it was back in the dark ages of antiquity when I was in elementary school; except for a few moments here and there, the story was entirely new to me. I bought it early this month because I'm making an effort to collect Newbery winners, and because I remembered liking this one all those years ago. I still liked it, and furthermore, I can see why it appealed to the awkward misfit I was in the mid-80's. (Go ahead, say it.) The protagonist of this fantasy novel, Aerin, is a little clumsy and a lot unsure of herself. She was born into the royal family of her country, but her mother was an outlander, feared by the people, and since she's a child of a second family and female, she's not likely ever to rule. Instead, her cousin and dearest friend Tor is "first sola" -- inheriting prince, basically. Aerin feels the eyes of her people on her wherever she goes, and she knows they disapprove. Her cousins are all more graceful and beautiful than she is, and one girl in particular loves to play unkind, even dangerous tricks on her. Then, almost by accident, Aerin discovers her niche: She is an absolutely expert and unbeatable dragon-slayer -- not exactly a feminine-wiles kind of occupation, but there it is. Up until this point, I loved loved loved this book, as you can imagine. I have never read a book that does a better job -- without a single overtly feminist overtone -- at expressing to young girls that it's OK if you're not like everyone else; it's even OK if everyone thinks you are weird; it's even OK if everyone thinks that the thing you are really good at and to which you want to devote your life is weird; just be yourself and that's how you'll be happiest. Even Anne of Green Gables didn't ring quite true to me, much as I love it, because in L.M. Montgomery's imaginary world, Anne goes to school and all the kids love her not in spite of her brains and oddities but because of them. I would love to have gone to school with those kids. Aerin, who accidently becomes immortal in a place populated by dragons where even the grass is purple, faces what I found to be more realistic suspicion and dislike from the populace at large even after she finds herself. (Plus she gets to have a beautiful friendship with a gorgeous horse. My inner ten-year-old is alive and well when it comes to horse stories.)
     
     But there was that "up until this point" up there. For the last third of the book, McKinley got into the fantasy stuff a little more than I like. But then, this is a fantasy novel, so the complaint is obviously not with the author, but with the genre and probably even with me. I still recommend this book wholeheartedly, especially to awkward misfit young girls of about ten to thirteen years of age. Or to the women they grew up to become.

2. Salem Falls -- Jodi Picoult -- 4
   
   • A young, handsome male teacher serves jail time for sexually assaulting a female student, and then when he gets out he does it again -- or does he? This is no Nineteen Minutes -- have you read it yet? -- but still a good Jodi Picoult book, rich with her usual attention to detail and carefully-constructed relationships. The parallels to The Crucible and the Salem witch trials in general add interest. And of course there's a twist at the end; I cheated and read this one in advance and I can tell you that if you look carefully for nuances as you read, it won't surprise you. I got a little tired of the characters, especially the teenage girls and their exploration of Wicca, but YMMV.

3. House of Sand and Fog -- André Dubus III -- 4
   
   • This Greek-tragic novel, in which a woman's house is repossessed due to what turns out to have been a bureaucratic error and the man who purchases it understandably doesn't want to let it go, is a lushly composed story about the tragedy that can be triggered, domino-style, by circumstances beyond our control. (Well, not entirely beyond our control. If this story has a moral, it's "Dude, woman, don't let your distress over your divorce lead you to stop opening your mail.") I felt for all the characters, except perhaps for that one untrustworthy cop, and even he had his moments. The story kept me turning the pages right up until the end, which completely took me off-guard (not in a contrived Jodi P. way, though) and which actually made me whisper, "no, NO!" and cry a little.
     
   
   

I know I've read some other stuff, besides the Mitford comfort-rereading I've been mainlining doing and the incessant reading of annoying texts for my English class, but I can't for the life of me remember what it was. I am in the middle of a new Annie Dillard book, The Maytrees, and I can't wait until December first to tell you to READ THIS NOW THIS MEANS YOU. I LOVE Annie Dillard. LOVE LOVE LOVE.

Thursday, October 04, 2007

books for September

Oh, goodness, forgot about this. I've no idea why; it's not like I have anything else going on right now.

Really you didn't miss much. I read a few Mitford books (comfort reading at its best). I've rated and reviewed them here before.

Also, I listened to Daddy-Long-Legs, by Jean Webster, recorded for librivox.org by several fine readers. LOVE this book, LOVE LOVE LOVE, even though there are little bits about socialism that made me kind of roll my eyes in a smug "you early 20th-century socialists didn't really know what you were getting yourselves in for" way. Those don't interfere with the story, really, and the story is BRILLIANT. Also I think I'm the last girl in Western Civilization not to have read it, but oh well. The Librivox recording is really good too.

Aaaand I read a really weird book that I don't recommend at all, not even to my parents who like Christian fiction which is what this book was (sort of). It's called Sky Blue, by somebody Thrasher (I really hope he doesn't Google his way here -- hello, Mr. Thrasher! It's nothing personal!) and it was just ... weird. It's a well-known fact that Christian fiction is usually not as good as ordinary fiction because the demand is high but the supply of writers is slim, so it's easier for mediocre people to get published. In the case of this book, I'm almost inclined to think that maybe the author knew about this easier way into print and added the Christian bits here and there in order to take advantage. Anyway. The suspension of disbelief required by the storyline was just too substantial, and the metaphors were strained, overused, and kind of ugly (words like stew that spatter?). So. Um. Don't bother. I've read worse, I will say that.

And I think that's it for September -- I've been just a wee bit busy -- except for a book I read for English class which I'm not going to review right now. I'll post an essay about it later when I'm sure the instructor won't find it and think I borrowed it from here instead of the other way around.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

book meme! book meme!

My friend Kiwiria posted a BOOK MEME. I'm supposed to be either packing (looks ominously like we might get a light rain shower later and there's stuff that needs to get under cover at storage before that happens) or doing my homework for English class, but how could I resist?

Okay . . . picture this (really) worst-case scenario: It’s cold and raining, your boyfriend/girlfriend has just dumped you, you’ve just been fired, the pile of unpaid bills is sky-high, your beloved pet has recently died, and you think you’re coming down with a cold. All you want to do (other than hiding under the covers) is to curl up with a good book, something warm and comforting that will make you feel better.
What do you read?

The first thing that pops into my head for this situation is a Mitford book. Also L.M. Montgomery would be helpful here.

So, this is my question to you – are you a Goldilocks kind of reader?
Do you need the light just right, the background noise just so loud but not too loud, the chair just right, the distractions at a minimum?
Or can you open a book at any time and dip right in, whether it’s for twenty seconds, while waiting for the kettle to boil, or indefinitely, like while waiting interminably at the hospital–as long as the book is open in front of your nose, you’re happy to read?

Oh my gosh, definitely the latter. I can lose myself in a book anywhere, under any circumstances I can think of, much to the chagrin of my husband who, after thirteen years of marriage, still forgets sometimes that there is an established and necessary protocol for speaking to me when I'm reading.
1) Ask yourself: Is this conversation really necessary?
2) Get Rachel's attention and establish eye contact. If it is super, extra important that she pay attention you might want to explicitly ask her to close her book.
3) Speak your piece as efficiently as possible*.

Otherwise, I'm perfectly capable of remaining lost in my book and making 'hmm' sounds at appropriate places without being fully aware that someone is talking to me; this has been getting me in trouble my entire life.

*speaking haltingly in such a moment may result in rolled eyes and/or the use of "move it along" hand gestures. COME ON SPIT IT OUT THE BOOK PEOPLE ARE WAITING.

One book at a time? Or more than one? If more, are they different types/genres? Or similar?

Sometimes I'll be actively engaged in five or six books. Sometimes I feel more like focusing on one at a time.

1. In your opinion, what is the best translation of a book to a movie?
2. The worst?
3. Had you read the book before seeing the movie, and did that make a difference?

1. The best, in my opinion, is A&E's/BBC's Pride and Prejudice, hands down. BBC does a very good job with adaptations; their Wives and Daughters is very well done as well, especially considering that the book is about four inches thick. (OK, not quite four.)
2. First, I must say that I am the pickiest person I know regarding adaptations of books. Every once in a while I can like one that flies off on total tangents and even changes the plot and the characters' motivations, but that is SO SO RARE (Mansfield Park, I am looking at you.) Other than that, I am happiest if the screenwriter essentially just turns the text of the book into a screenplay... and this doesn't happen often. There are SO MANY adaptations that I have disliked that I am going to focus on a special category: adaptations that other people think are great, that make me shudder.

First in line for this non-award are the LOTR movies. Yeah, the timeline of events is basically correct (although there are many details changed, e.g. the beacons of Gondor, and many alterations for the sake of added drama), but the characters are completely altered. Every time my kids are watching this trilogy and get to the part where Frodo (who, yes, was one conflicted hobbit, I'll grant you) tells Sam to GO HOME I very narrowly manage to not do lasting damage to my television. Likewise the completely opposite-to-his-book-self character of Faramir. And the complete fabrication of the whole Arwen thing just so the film would have a woman character on screen for more than thirty seconds. And a jillion other incidents/characters as well. Don't even get me started on Frodo's drugged emo gaze filling the screen until it makes me feel physically nauseated.

OK, Rachel, don't hold back, tell us how you really feel.

Next (I could go on all day but I'll just do two), and I know I'm going to step on some toes here: the new Narnia movie. I know that even long-time Lewis fans really liked this movie. But not one single one of the four kids is anything like Lewis would have had them to be. Physically, the casting was flawless, and the actors were excellent, but let's go down a list from worst to not as bad: Susan, instead of being a mildly annoying older-sister type, is an absolute brat who wants to undermine the entire everything until practically the very last minute. Peter, who in the book is this very staunch, brave in spite of his fears, matter-of-fact doing-what-has-to-be-done boy hero, is a wishy-washy "eww, I don't want to STAB the wolf" whiner. Both Peter AND Susan constantly harp on their desire/need to go home and how they shouldn't be here and it's too dangerous waah. Lucy is not nearly as badly done as the first two, but even she has her moments (she, who "never once said 'I told you so'" as per Peter in the book, implies that concept virtually as soon as they step into the snow). Even Edmund, about whom I have the fewest complaints, instead of merely being a boy led astray who learns his lesson, continues betraying Aslan's people left and right for quite a while on his trip with the Witch. Just as annoying as the mischaracterization of the children was the way the entire movie had an entirely different tone from the one Lewis gave it. The books are these very subtle, subdued, British-feeling adventure stories; the film tries to be a kids' Indiana Jones, with daring escapes on a grand scale and snotty wisecracks from the animals and children (I have to physically leave the room when the scene with the river starts or risk committing mayhem; also, I would rather watch the humorously bad costumed-people-with-terrible-accents beavers in the 80's BBC movie than the cleverly animated smartass "The Honeymooners" beavers in this one).

My goodness. Um. Moving on. Question three.

3. Yes, I think it does. For a very long, detailed book, sometimes watching the movie first makes the book more readable for me (hello, Tom Clancy, I am looking at you). Also, I am more inclined to be fiercely loyal to a book if it's an old friend before I see it desecrated by filmmakers, but that doesn't mean that I have never learned to like a movie less once I realized how it veered away from its original source. However. I watched Forrest Gump and thought it was an OK movie; I tried to read Forrest Gump and couldn't make myself do it. The Black Stallion the film is wildly different from The Black Stallion the book, which I read as a child and really liked, but as an adult I infinitely prefer the film. And I watched The Princess Bride for the first time in junior high and have loved it ever since, in spite of the fact that when I read the book I found that the filmmakers had taken some pretty substantial liberties. In other words, I'm a fickle, inconsistent brat and don't listen to me.

Friday, August 31, 2007

books for August

1. An Invisible Sign of My Own -- Aimee Bender -- 2.5
   • I was bewildered by this book, honestly. I liked the premise (math-obsessed young woman teaches school, encounters other numbers-obsessed people, has a father with a mysterious and symbolic-seeming non-disease, buys an ax), and the writing was good, but it took the whole "adult fairytale" genre (think Jonathan Safran Foer, but less graphic) to some extremes that I just didn't get. I didn't know if the book was one random unrelated oddity after another, or if every oddity had some deep meaning that I was supposed to ferret out. The problem is, there were so many oddities that it made me tired trying to figure out which was the case. There are some good moments here. It's kind of a shame that the weird ones overshadowed them.

2. Dream When You're Feeling Blue -- Elizabeth Berg -- 4
   
   • Elizabeth Berg is one of my favorite authors, and yet if you had given me this book without her name on it I would have had no idea that she had written it. She's cast herself completely against type, to mix my media and my metaphors appallingly, in writing this little gem of a historical novel about a family of sisters and their experiences during WWII. This doesn't have Berg's trademark zingers -- those "of course I've always thought that, and just never known it" moments that can make me cry if I read her books too late at night; it's more plot-driven than her books generally are, and the style isn't as comfortable and easy with itself as her work usually is. But it is a story with a lot of heart, lovingly constructed, and sweetly told. It's an homage to a generation of men and women who deserve our praise and respect, and I recommend it.

3. Nineteen Minutes -- Jodi Picoult -- 5
   
   • I have been dreading writing this review. Not because I don't love the book, which centers around a bullied boy and the school shooting he perpetrated, but because I love it too much and I know I can never do it justice. I wish I had enough money to buy a copy for every student in every public high school in America; I would send marked copies to a dozen or so people from my past as well. Truly, Jodi Picoult has found her way into the head of an emotionally abused student in a way that no other author I have ever read has managed to do, and has documented her character's journey to violence with heartrending acuity. The supporting cast is well-drawn as well. Please, if you haven't read this already, read it now.

4. The Reluctant Fundamentalist -- Mohsin Hamid -- 2.5
   
   • This novel is told entirely in the narrative voice from the point of view of a Pakistani man who attended university and then worked for a year in America. The writing style didn't endear me to it, and the "don't you see, Americans, that everything you do is just wrong wrong wrong and that's why everyone hates you so much" theme didn't please me much either. Not that it didn't give me anything to think about, but every time I had a "hmm, you know, I'd not thought of that in precisely that way before" kind of moment, it was followed up by a load of such stereotypical Ugly American tripe that it lost its intended effect.

5. How to Talk to a Widower -- Jonathan Tropper -- 4
   
   • I really liked this. People compare Jonathan Tropper to Nick Hornby with good reason. You might also say he's like a man's Marian Keyes -- riotously funny, but full of wisdom on deep topics at the same time. This book centers around a young widower and the complications he faces as he attempts first to hold on to his grief and then to let go of it. Everyone who's ever grieved deeply will find something with which to identify here. Recommended.

6. Lost and Found -- Carolyn Parkhurst -- 2.5
   
   • Not a badly-written book; it moved along at a good pace, and it held my interest even though I was completely unfamiliar with its premise (a reality show). I even liked some of the characterizations quite a bit. The 2.5 is because I am so so so tired of books where the Christians are caricatures of evil badness and hypocrisy, while the unwed lesbian mothers are angels sent from heaven. Yawn. Except, oh yeah, heaven is full of evil bad hypocrites, nevermind. Obviously it's the author's right to write her characters however she sees fit. It's also my right to trash her narrow-minded decisions in a review.

7. Plain Truth -- Jodi Picoult -- 4.5
   
   • Just when I was thinking, "you know, I would LOVE to see a book from a mainstream point of view where there are Christians like the majority of Christians I know, portrayed in a realistic and non-negatively-stereotyped manner", along came this beautiful book, again by Jodi Picoult. (This one wins the Least Annoying Picoult-Patented Last-Minute Twist award from me, by the way, at least of the books of hers I've read to date). The story centers around an Amish woman and her community, as they are rocked by an accusation of infanticide against one of their own. I don't agree with everyone's actions or decisions, but I love the way Picoult treated her characters. The Amish are real people; the attorney who finds herself living far closer to them than she had ever thought she would is a real person, too, and their interactions ring with truth and compassion and true open-mindedness. Recommended.
   
   
   
8. Nickel and Dimed -- Barbara Ehrenreich -- 2
   
   • This much-talked-about bit of journalistic nonfiction left me cold, honestly. Everything from Ehrenreich's tone (condescending) to her methods (attempting to live as "the working poor" for a month at a time, three separate times, three different places) and her politics (I probably don't have to elaborate) bothered me. Her whole premise is undermined by the fact that her experiments were managed in a completely inaccurate manner. Diving into minimum-wage work as she did, she had no way of actually knowing what she professed to be telling the world in her book: what life is like for the poor. On the one hand, she had money going into the experiment for start-up expenses, a luxury that most of the working poor can't manage (she admits this); on the other hand, in her brief episodes of "slumming", she had no way of learning this crucial fact: Life is hard when you're poor, there's no doubt about it. But life is also full of joys and friendships and families and love and trials just like anyone else has. This book wasn't a complete waste of time -- the writing is engaging, and it may at least educate a class of people who've never worked for minimum wage and may not ever have thought about the fact that a waitress is actually a person.

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