Literary Transgressions

Movin' Out

2009-03-29T13:11:00.001-04:00

Hey everyone!

It's official, we've moved! Come join us over at Wordpress:

http://literarytransgressions.wordpress.com/

~ KT

On being eaten by office supplies

2009-03-02T15:47:00.005-05:00

If you click above, there's a larger image where you can actually read the insights on those Post-its -- things like 'KING IN THE MOUNTAIN' and strings of numbers that look oddly Da Vinci Code-esque.

See this, guys?

That's what my Tolkien essay looks like. Post-Its a-go go. They have taken over my room, my life, and my books. Bear in mind that the above picture doesn't include the three stacks of books I have yet to flag. Incidentally, that's pretty much why I haven't updated lately...but I do have news!

First, preparations are underway for Literary Transgressions to make the move over to Wordpress! Why, you ask? Because, in the words of my lovely co-bloggist, "It's so pretty and shiny!" And she's right, you know. There were promises of a custom header if we made the transfer, too, so look for that to come soon.

Second, there will be simply millions of posts soon. I promise. Mmhm. I have one drafted right now about Tolkien and contextualization, I have one in the back of my head about the King in the Mountain archetype, and I am sure there is going to have to be one sometime about Stardust, both in the novel and film forms (probably a comparision of, actually).

Third, ummmm...well, I guess there isn't really a third, except to say that this week is my final week of classes. What does that mean for you? Only that I just may have more flexibility and time to post in the future, lucky readers :)

The Shift from Square to Smart

2009-02-03T10:28:00.003-05:00

When I first started reading Girlbomb: A Halfway Homeless Memoir by Janice Erlbaum, I’ll admit I felt more than a little bit like a goody-two-shoes. Girlbomb tells the story of Erlbaum’s misspent youth from the moment she walked out on her mother at age 15 through her life and times in a shelter, a group home, back at home and out on the streets, all the while cracked out like only a teenager in Washington Square Park in the late 1980s can be. I meanwhile grew up primarily in an affluent upstate suburb where I insistently went to school everyday, actually once made a rather inane New Year’s resolution to say no to drugs (I was in middle school, give me a break), went to a nice college full of nice girls, graduated on time and pretty promptly got a job. I was even wearing a jumper the day I read it, for Pete’s sake. I felt distinctly square.

But as I continued to lurch my way through Erlbaum’s memoir, that feeling changed. I stopped feeling like an abject loser and realized how wholly sad her story was. It was the tale of a life disrespected and utterly wasted. On the surface, Girlbomb might well be telling the story of a crazy 1980s teenage-hood in New York City, but what really got through to me was just how many moronic and pointless decisions one person really can make.

And nothing bad truly happens to Erlbaum in the book (aside from the obvious drugs, sex and alcohol things that she herself chooses), a fact which makes her decisions all the more pointless. This book does not moralize or hint that these choices were perhaps bad ones and thank heavens she has now reentered society as a respected author. There is no climactic moment where she realizes the error of her ways or dies in a blaze of glory. Instead, Erlbaum traipses through the 1980s drug and club scene of downtown New York and nothing happens. She isn’t arrested, she never dies (okay, she comes close, but that isn’t surprising considering the amount of coke we’re talking about here), she doesn’t contract any life-changing and/or horrifying diseases, she doesn’t get beaten up by her dealer and the toughest thing she has to deal with is a curfew she deems cruel set by her remarkably lenient mother and the fact that her two best friends like each other more than they like her.

But the overarching message isn’t about pointlessness or hardship. Rather, my first impression was dead on. All through her crazy antics and drug-induced freak-outs, Erlbaum is undoubtedly saying “yeah, this was a folly of my youth, but, damn, don’t you think it was a cool folly?” The book is filled with an undertone of ineffable coolness that just comes off feeling a trifle forced and hardly true. No, Jan, it wasn’t a cool folly. It was just stupid.

And that is what the reader takes away from Girlbomb: Erlbaum needlessly, idiotically and senselessly wasted her life. The sheer stupidity and pointlessness was what ended up really getting to me. The book calls itself a “compelling story,” but to actually be compelling, I think something dramatic followed by some kind of death or turn-around would really have to happen. The entire book comes off as pointless, since by the end of it, our dear Janny has set herself back on the road away from drugs, but not in a particular redeeming or dramatic way. One minute, she’s shouting profanity at her lover and then trying to make up with her boyfriend and the next she’s just out of the bad stuff and living in her own apartment (paid for by her dead grandmother) as she goes off to college. It’s all a trifle jarring, bizarrely more so than all the shocking nonsense that goes on before that moment, and the book just ended up confusing me more than anything else.

Click here for the first chapter read by the author herself, courtesy of Poets & Writers podcast.

Relevant Writing

2009-01-27T14:04:00.002-05:00

In light of the recent discussions we've been having on this blog and in the comments about "fluff" books and chick lit, I thought I would link you all over to this extremely intelligent viewpoint on the matter written by Joanne Rendell over at the Huffington Post.

In all our discussions here at Literary Transgressions about "fluff" and chick lit, we have yet to breach what might perhaps be the most basic aspect of the debate: gender. As a Smithie, I know it sounds woefully cliche to bring this up, but it seems to me that in all our ponderings about what makes chick lit today so derided and simply not respected, we have failed to look at the fact that most chick lit authors are women. Is there something more to be said there or is chick lit disrespected for other, more stylistic reasons?

Hot Town, Super in the City

2009-01-27T09:13:00.001-05:00

Super in the City by Daphne Uviller is (Devil Wears Prada aside) my first true foray into what society at large has not-so-lovingly dubbed "chick lit." I must say that I was more inclined than most to read this book and even more inclined to like it, having become e-quainted with said author over the past few months (she just seems wonderful). And yet...?

The book's main flaw is its very genre. Chick lit is by nature infuriating with its rampant escapism, its unattainable alternate realities and, at the gushy heart of any chick lit book, its mythical One striding about in a very manful manner. It is nice to delve into and even disappear into this relatively tidy little world where you just know everything is going to eventually work out. It's peppy and comforting and wonderfully distracting, but it is not real. The moment you lift your nose out of any chick lit book's light pages, you immediately crash. On the cover of this book, Elizabeth Gilbert compares the novel to candy ("intelligent candy," mind you) and I think that is very much accurate of the genre. You get this happy little sugar rush reading and then, once done, you crash back to reality with very little residual buzz to show for your time. It's disheartening even as you were moments ago reveling in your sunny little chick lit world.

However, setting the main constraints of the genre itself aside, the book was not in and of itself at all bad. In fact, I just plain old liked it! There isn't anything really deeper to read into that or anything to really comment on why or why not, I just liked it. The book is the simple, friendly little tale of an extremely likable woman with the fantastic name of Zephyr Zuckerman. She merrily skips through the novel, going through a range of emotions and catastrophic situations before finally getting her perfect, rainbow over Manhattan happy ending. It's great.

Most simply, this book was a nice little moment of escapism and one that is not so far-fetched as to really hurt you when you come crashing back down from chick lit land. Ms. Uviller's writing style is utterly fantastic: intelligent without seeming pretentious (although, as a Yale graduate, she would have every right to be so), funny without hitting you over the head with the punchline and wonderfully real-feeling, even in its moments of greatest unreality. Zephyr honestly comes to life, as do the people she encounters along the way. I have absolutely no idea what other genre Zephyr might have more happily fit into (although judging by her preoccupation with romantic fantasies of the mind perhaps chick lit is the right place for her), but it might have been nice for Ms. Uviller to try out her debut writing chops on something equally shiny, equally nicely written but perhaps slightly more substantive.

Note: I actually wrote this review some weeks ago since I was beneficently given a review copy and, since then, I have slightly revised my thoughts on the book. This book stuck with me a surprisingly long time and I still find myself thinking about it sometimes, weeks later. While no one is going to confuse Super in the City with high literature, I must say this was a good, thoroughly likable book. Please do read it in your spare hours! It goes quickly and is quite an "upper."

Valley of the Dolls, not the chicks

2009-01-21T07:07:00.003-05:00

At first, I wasn't sure why Valley of the Dolls wasn't included in chick lit week for my literature course. After all, it has a pink cover, follows three young women through various career arcs and romances, and has enough sex to qualify. Plenty of handsome men and beautiful girls to go around.

But from the first chapter, I knew that Valley was in a category apart for certain. Though Anne, the main character in the first part of the book, is beautiful and pursued by a millionaire, Jacqueline Susann sets a tone in the beginning that makes the reader feel as though Anne's life is much more real than any chick lit protagonist could ever hope to be. Though a millionaire wants to marry her, she lives in a singularly squalid one-room apartment; and though her boyfriend seems to be a sweet, unremarkable young man, it is soon revealed that he is, in fact, connected with a lotof money gained through very dubious means.

We discussed chick lit a lot in our course, at least during the class assigned to it, and we came to the conclusion that though they are regarded as 'fluff,' they do deal with important issues such as body image, female self-worth, shopping addiction, and the angst inherent in being a single 30-something in London. Still, a lot of us were left with a vague sense of contempt for the genre, though we were unable to articulate it when the professor asked, 'How can you call this fluff if it deals with these issues?'

But Valley of the Dolls answers his question clearly. I could never call Valley 'fluff'; though it was popular, and therefore it has the stigma of common approval, it is also a complex, raw examination of show business, women, relationhips, and what people will do to protect what they think is valuable.

Valley deals with addiction (mainly to pills, called 'dolls'). It deals with body image (all three of the characters make livings off of their bodies). It deals with being single, or rather not being able to get who you want, until you finally get them and realize it's not enough. It deals with the horror of having to take six Seconal and still not being able to sleep; it addresses cancer, insanity, fame, fortune, love and adultery.

And it does it all at the same time.

Chick lit can only deal with one issue per book, sometimes per series. Jemima J is about body image. Full stop. It doesn't bother to delve into the disturbing fact that Ben only likes Jemima after she's skinny. Confessions of a Shopaholic and the rest of the series is about shopping addiction and debt, as well as the possible involvement of the financial industry. Slightly more complex, but as everything always works out okay for Becky Bloomwood, you can hardly say this is an intense examination.

Bridget Jones's Diary does deal with a few more issues, including judging by appearances, trying to find self-worth in the midst of a society that tells you you're worth nothing without a husband, the falsity of tabloid journalism and the demerits of weighing under 9 stone. However, Bridget Jones is the best of the bunch, and everything ends with a happy ending that doesn't quite ring true.

Valley, with all of its glamour and glitz, never feels false. Despite the blockbuster sensationalism of the subject matter, Susann has a firm grip on what feels real and what a simply realistic ending would be, based on the character's pervious actions and tragic flaws. Pessimistic, possibly -- but then it definitely escapes the dreaded moniker of 'fluff.'

What goes around comes around

2009-01-16T14:01:00.003-05:00

When I said earlier that Edward Rutherford’s epic The Forest didn’t deserve its own post, I was just plain wrong and lumping it rather unfortunately in with other books I read towards the end of 2008. Having now finished the volume, I can say that, more than Rutherford’s other books, this one most certainly deserves its own post. I say this not because The Forest is so far superior to its compatriots, but because this one was so much more unreliable in its quality.

I have without reservation been merrily recommending Edward Rutherford to just about anyone who would listen since the latter half of high school. “Read anything by him,” I would say excitedly, “It will all be brilliant!” While that might well be the case with both London and, perhaps even more truthfully, Sarum, I am very disappointed to report that Mr. Rutherford lost his swing in this particular tome. The Forest tells the story of, simply put, the New Forest located in the south of England. As with all Rutherford novels, this one successfully covers centuries of history by stopping every hundred years or so in various time periods and examining the people who are found there. Another Rutherford trademark is unsurprisingly present in The Forest: he follows five or six select families in the given region as he skips about through time, checks in with their descendants and makes little winky mentions of previous forebears as he goes through time.

This format may sound at best like a tedious exercise in attempting to bring the past to life for the ordinary reader (who cannot really be expected to really feel for someone living in 1614 without personifying 1614 with Alice Albion, for example). However, tedium is simply not a part of the Rutherford formula. Despite the book’s simplistic formula (and Mr. Rutherford unfailingly follows it in every chapter), Mr. Rutherford possesses the unique ability to quickly sum up a time period (quite accurately most of the time), introduce/define some characters and get on with the plot in such a way that the book never lags. At least, that is the goal. And one that he admirably attains in his previous works (the aforementioned Sarum and London among others).

However, he does not truly make it work in this book. The first half of the book is charming and interesting as any other Rutherford novel, but as he enters the seventeenth century, his ability to make it all interesting apparently just deserts him and the reader is dragged through an increasingly uninteresting and distended piece about the Stuarts, the unfair trial of Alice Lisle and Oliver Cromwell. One can easily see that Mr. Rutherford did some research, discovered Alice Lisle and then thought it would be just wonderful if he could incorporate her into his novel, which he did at much detriment to the novel itself. The story of Alice Lisle is quite interesting on its own simply because of the extreme injustice done to poor old Alice, but the whole retelling just comes off as forced and more than a little dull in Mr. Rutherford’s attempts to force his families into the mix. I admit I struggled woefully for weeks through that unending chapter about the seventeenth century and emerged from it liking Mr. Rutherford and his book rather less and hating the Stuarts and Oliver Cromwell about equally as per usual.

That said, Mr. Rutherford does manage an impressive save after the unfortunate “Alice” chapter by bringing the late eighteenth century and a Jane Austen-like chapter into play directly thereafter (“Albion Park”). One of the things that makes Mr. Rutherford's book so interesting is how his tone changes to match the time period he has entered in every chapter. While there is a calm, descriptive even-handedness pervasive throughout the book, Mr. Rutherford is also very much aware of literary styles of any given time period and relishes in morphing into them a little bit. He disappears almost entirely in Jane Austen for his “Albion Park” chapter and it is a very enjoyable exercise.

The book lags a little bit in the chapters after “Albion Park,” but he never truly loses himself as he did in the seventeenth century. His Victorian section seems a little pointless and plotless (more of a character study and familial check-up than anything) and his tacked-on 1920s and 1980s narratives make you wish the book had just ended in “Albion Park.”

Despite these shortcomings, the book is still an impressive feat of historical research and this is an area Mr. Rutherford clearly loves. I would more readily recommend his other, earlier novels, but this one was good enough. Even if he somehow lost his magic touch to make everything fascinating, the book is still an interesting study in history and how a place changes over time. This may not be enough to tempt most readers into taking on this epic (indeed, I might not have bothered if I had known that it was not Sarum-like in its excellence), but it is a great accomplishment nonetheless.

Take Out the Trash Day

2009-01-04T13:00:00.004-05:00

It's come to my attention that I have four books sitting in my "shelf," all of which I have spent considerable time with over the past month, and all of which I was planning on blogging extensively about. However, I have recently written papers on all of them and am still a little burned out. So, in the spirit of the new year, I have decided to write one short post summing up all I have to say, and then completely refresh my shelf.

Lady Audley's Secret is on there first, and was originally meant to go with The Great God Pan. Lady Audley's secret is about a young lady named Lucy Graham who appears as if from nowhere and marries a baronet at least 20 years her senior. All is well and good until her new step-nephew arrives with a friend in tow. This friend disappears, presumably murdered, and the nephew goes on a hunt to discover the truth about Lady Audley.

The Great God Pan is about a doctor who punches a hole in a patient's head in an attempt to make her see what is 'beyond the veil,' or what he calls the Great God Pan. The woman becomes an idiot. 20 years later, reports of mysterious deaths in London lead several men to investigate the results of this old experiment. Their explorations lead them to one Helen Vaughn, a young woman whose origins are hazy.

The main things these books have in common are young women who succeed in society, and men who die or almost die as a result. Also, men who investigate with the intention of taking down these succeeding women. I meant to explore the idea that while more scandalous than earlier novels, what with their emphasis on murder and sex, they are in essence socially conservative. No woman who rises under false pretenses, or by using unorthodox methods, is suffered to live. Therefore, the overarching message of these books is that society will bring down any woman who attempts to use her sexuality or any other power within her means to rise in society is a threat, and must necessarily be brought down. Sounds pretty conservative to me.

The Coral Island and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland also went together for me, and while I was going to write a big long post on identity and consumption, what I am going to say is merely that people love food, people define themselves through what they will and will not eat, and certainly this is even more true for children, who are just realizing who they are or who they want to be.

If you read Alice carefully, you can see that she is often refused food (the tarts, tea with the Hatter and Hare) in an attempt to teach her self-restraint, and any time she does eat, she is thrown into a state of physical and emotional confusion. In the beginning when she drinks the potion and eats the cake, she is so thrown by her dramatic physical changes that she cries, wonders who she is, and essentially loses her identity.

For the boys on Coral Island, food is a way to reassert their British identities. In redefining the coconut-juice and breadfruit they find on their island as lemonade and wheaten bread, they show their unwillingness to part from the familiar, and in rejecting the notion of cannibalism as practiced by the natives, they make the natives an "other," opposed to the Crown and who must either be conquered or converted.

So there you have it. All I was going to say about four books, in one simple post. Relatively painless, yeah?

And guess what, Jane? Fairy tales aren't real.

2008-12-30T21:44:00.006-05:00

Hey readers! I have finally got around to a book review -- well, a rant/book review, in letter form, a la the Mercy review from a while back. Enjoy~

Dear Jane Green,

How could you? How could you write a book like Jemima J?

I have to assume that you are an intelligent woman, because, in general, writing is hard, and writing a novel is even harder. You have somehow managed to come up with an okay plot, some decent characters, and even played around a little bit with narration and perspective. You're also British, which, as we all know, makes you at least sound smarter than us kooky New-Worlders.

But you have obviously missed the memo on some very important facts of life, and I find myself in the awkward position of both wanting to kill you and wanting to take you aside and have a nice, deep heart-to-heart with you. Since I obviously can't, I will instead have to settle for writing you a cyber-letter, a letter which you will never read, but will make me feel infinitely better for having gotten my incredible anger off my chest.

So, Jane (can I call you Jane?), here are just a few of the things I feel you should know:

1) Not all fat girls are funny. I see why you would like to think so, Jane, and we would all like to think that everyone has one redeeming factor that could make someone fall in love with them, and for fat girls, it's easy to say that they have excellent personalities, or are sarcastically funny. In fact, it's almost realistic, because so often people who are insecure use sarcasm or other forms of humor as defense mechanisms.

I thought you were really, really close to getting to the 'some people are just mean' idea, as well as the 'just because someone's fat doesn't mean she's a good person deep inside' theory, when you introduced Jenny the surly PA. But as it turns out, Jenny is a delightful person, who also nabs the dream guy. Too bad, Jane. Too bad.

2) Not everyone would be striking if they just lost some weight. Guess what, Jane? I know you're beautiful (nice picture on the jacket, by the way), but here's a news flash: some people are just dogs. There are no two ways about it. There are plenty of skinny, ugly girls out there, plenty of average-sized ugly girls, and plenty of people who are just kind of middling. Paul the graphics dude drawing in some cheekbones on Jemima is not enough to convince me that she would, in fact, be a babe if she lost 90 pounds.

And shame on you for telling fat girls that if they would only exert a little effort, lose a little bit of weight, they'd be turning heads in Starbucks. That is so untrue, I can't even express to you how completely false it is. It's almost as outrageous as telling women that if they just lost a stone or two, they would finally get that promotion, those designer clothes -- which you also seem to think will actually happen, judging from your novel.

3) Not every girl gets the guy. Jane, have you ever heard of a spinster? That's right, that's a woman who never marries, usually because no one wanted to marry them. Sometimes they have a terrible past, like Miss Havisham, but more often than not they are just women who were left over when everyone else paired off. Just because some chick loses weight does not mean she is going to get the guy of her dreams, and it is just so wrong of you to suggest that someone should change everything about herself on the off chance that the guy of her dreams will fall in love with her.

For every Jemima, there is an average girl somewhere, pining after some gorgeous guy who will never notice she exists. Eventually, said average girl will settle, not for the hot young TV presenter, but for some balding 40-year-old man. Or maybe for an overweight World of Warcraft aficionado with Cheez Doodle stains on his t-shirt. But Jane, she will settle, or buy thirty cats and live alone in an apartment for the rest of her sad, lonely life. Those are her choices.

4) Not all almost-virgins are good in bed. Let's be real, Jane. There's a reason virgins are virgins. It's because either no one wants to have sex with them, or they're so freaked out about the possibility that they might blow it (not in that way) that they put off sex as long as possible. Or they're religious, but let's put that option aside for the moment. Either way, the first time one of these girls has sex is going to be an awkward, messy, possibly painful experience. It is not all doing the reverse cowgirl on some mind-blowing hottie, whom they will later shag on a desk, a fur rug, and in an elevator. Life is just not that fair.

5) The Perfect Guy isn't ever perfect. Now, Jane, I know what you are thinking. You are thinking that I'm totally wrong, because you have met your knight in shining armor (sorry, armour, to you) and he is wonderful and fantastic and everything you dreamed, which is why you dedicated your book to him. That's nice. But I don't believe it for one bloody second.

You have created this character, Ben Williams, and he is certainly delightful in every way. Ben is too delightful. Ben doesn't even have the flaws requisite in a Nora Roberts character. Ben never leaves his socks on the floor. Ben collects original vintage political cartoons. Ben drinks Becks from the bottle, wearing an impeccable suit and watching the news. Ben is adorably awkward, and actually utters the phrase: "Er, yes. Quite." Ben the deputy news editor is so hot every woman in London is absolutely gagging to be with him, yet he remains blissfully unaware of his hotness and is just waiting for the right girl.

But what is most important in our darling Benjamin's life? Becoming a BBC newsreader, and hanging out with the junior reporters on staff. Oh, and being incredibly sweet to the fat girl. Whom he will later shag, but only after she's turned into the babe of his dreams.

The above are just some basic things I think you should be aware of, dear Jane. You are a good writer -- hell, I stuck with you for 300 pages while you blithered on about Jemima's weight loss regime and how amazingly sweet Mr. Deputy News Editor is. I think it's cool that you played off of the little Brad/Jennifer thing -- I am assuming Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston were together when you wrote this? At any rate, even if it's just a coincidence, I enjoyed it.

And, to be fair, I enjoyed that Jemima lost the weight, I enjoyed that she got the guy, I enjoyed the makeover, and I enjoyed that she was happy with herself. What I didn't enjoy was the letdown when I closed the book -- the letdown as I realized that life wasn't actually like this, that no one loses 90 pounds in three months, that a guy like Ben Williams would never notice Jemima J, and that not every girl is a diamond in the rough.

So thanks for giving me four hours of escape to a world where anything is possible, but maybe next time you could get a tighter grip on reality and possibly write a book worth rereading.

Thanks,
Disgruntled Reader

PS: Americans get sarcasm fine, thanks. There's no need to be snarky about it.
PPS: Are you aware that your main concept is a lot like Jennifer Weiner's in Good in Bed? Just curious.

'Tis in my memory lock'd...

2008-12-23T15:39:00.000-05:00

I’ve read a few books in the past month or so, mainly topping off half-read books that have collected dust over the past two years. While none of them seemed to really merit their own post, I sat and tried to think of some meaningful common theme or thread that would connect them and thus allow me to post about all of them at once. I’ll give you their titles and you tell me if you can come up with one: Peter the Great: A Biography, The Museum Guard and The Forest. Anything? I was stuck in a similar situation of no continuity. The best and most pathetic result of my thinking was “history.” The common thread of history. Pitiful, I know.

Or is it really so? Forgive me, but I would argue that the common thread of history connects much more than three books pretty obviously about that subject. The Forest by Edward Rutherford aptly illustrates this perhaps obvious point. It is an epic work of historic nonfiction that fascinatingly traipses through centuries of English history focused in and around the New Forest in southern England (near Salisbury, the setting of one of his other wonderful and similarly formatted books, Sarum). The book moves through the centuries briefly pausing every two hundred years or so to look in on the evolution of a given place, a few chosen families and the country’s broader history. The book is comprised of little snapshots and while each chapter is equally interesting and Rutherford undeniably excels at quickly creating fully-formed characters one can’t help but care about, the broader point the book makes is that while we all go about our lives and seem so unrelated and so different, a common history unites us all, and oftentimes even more common and closer than you think. Rutherford makes the subtle point that history is more important than just for studying; it shapes who we are and who we become as a people, as individuals and as families. Even without active knowledge of the past—a mode in which most of his characters blithely exist—history undeniably moves us.

The Museum Guard by Howard Norman concurs with the point that history is very much an active presence. His book is more character study than novel and tells the story of DeFoe Russett, a museum guard of a small, local art museum in Halifax called the Glace Museum. DeFoe’s simple existence is utterly unraveled (seriously, our even-keeled art lover is by the end of the book to be found in prison) when a certain painting arrives at the Glace Museum. The painting depicts a woman standing outside of a hotel in Amsterdam holding a loaf of bread and it proceeds to change all the character’s life in ways big and small. The book broadly deals with the onset of World War II, jewishness and how art can affect our lives, but DeFoe is most moved by two things: the premature death of his parents in a local zeppelin crash and the strange transformation undergone by his lover inspired by the painting. Both these events are deeply rooted in history: the zeppelin crash that killed his parents becomes part of the local history, dehumanizing the event for DeFoe even as he most sorely still personally feels the aftermath, and his lover retreats from reality into the historical moment portrayed in the painting. History is another character in the book; the common local history, the feeling throughout the book clearly felt by all the characters that they are witnessing history as Hitler begins his rampage through Europe and the actual withdrawal into history by DeFoe’s lover all reiterate the point that history is no passive afterthought. History is everywhere, informing decisions, moving action and forcing retrospection.

Of these three books, perhaps no protagonist (or subject, in this case) most sorely feels the pull and judgment of history than Peter in Peter the Great: A Biography by Lindsey Hughes. Of all the people in the books, Peter is by far the most aware of history as an entity. Rutherford’s characters primarily simply exist, at best only partially informed of what has come before through folklore or rumor. Norman’s DeFoe is primarily uninformed and only speaks to the history that he himself has experienced. But, as Hughes argues, Peter the Great was extremely conscious of the importance of history and strove constantly to make sure he was remembered properly and regarded well in the annals of history that came thereafter. Not only that, Hughes makes the argument at the end of her book that while Peter himself was involved in his own making of history, the Romanovs who held the throne after him were very much aware of the political importance and usefulness of history, using Peter’s memory and image well into the twentieth century to prove to their followers (and detractors) how good they really were for Russia. History was seen and used as a legitimization of the present because it still felt so relevant and so real. History was not something mustily confined to books no one read. History was real and it was everywhere.

Call this review an attempt to proselytize by a former history major, but history is too often mistaken for something unimportant, easily forgotten and rarely studied. I believe it is far more relevant to today than most people would give it credit for. As Rutherford shows through his study of the centuries, history is undeniably everywhere, even in the commonest or simplest story. Every moment is history. Life is entirely made up of interlocking disciplines and to forget any one among them, history particularly in my opinion, or to dismiss any one as irrelevant to the present, is not simply lamentable, it is inexplicable. Anything can create a connection and history does daily.

Power to the Sisterhood -- I guess?

2008-12-21T12:03:00.006-05:00

Isabella Thorpe and Catherine Morland in the BBC's production of Northanger Abbey, courtesy of The New York Times

Yep, I am a failure. See what happens? You give me a co-blogger and I get lazy. Anyway, trust me, I have been doing lots of literary things, just nothing that's made it on this blog...until now.

I know this is not going to win me any friends, but I am becoming less and less a fan of feminist criticism. This is not to say that it's entirely without merit, or that feminist critics are not really intelligent, educated people. What I would like to point out, though, is that because most feminist critics are women themselves, they're more apt to project, or to see what they want to see in the books they examine.

Take The Romance of the Forest, for example. This is a great story, by one of the first popular woman writers, and clearly Ann Radcliffe must have been somewhat independent in her own right to even be a female writer. The main character in Romance is Adeline, a young lady who has been separated from her father, separated from her foster family, is being chased by an evil marquis, and who is pretty sure her ain true love is rotting in prison awaiting his death. So you can see how there is a lot of opportunity for Adeline to step up and assert her strong-willed womanhood or whatever.

Claudia Johnson, in her book Equivocal Beings (which is actually brilliant, except for this one point), argues that "Adeline behaves like a pretty good man, at least when her 'glowing charms' aren't in the way," further saying that Adeline and Theodore essentially 'trade off' being tearful and valiant at various points in the novel.

While it's true that Theodore has some tears throughout the novel, they are mostly when he is in prison being visited by his sick father. It's more standard for the male lead to be brave in this case, but when confronted by the prospect of death within the hour, along with a sobbing father, sister, and lover, I think pretty much any man would break (or could without being judged, at any rate). And let's remember that Theodore has valiantly rescued Adeline about twelve times before this point.

Adeline, however, is not valiant. Ever. Possibly when she finally breaks and tells La Luc she's in love with Theodore could be construed as heroic, but really, since she doesn't even know why that's important, it's not that heroic (hopefully that's not a spoiler...). She weeps and wails and moans and faints at every opportunity, including when she and Theodore are confronted in an inn by the Marquis' troops and both their lives are threatened. At some point, she actually hinders Theodore's usefulness, preventing him from defending them against the soliders by throwing a faint.

To interpret the book in a way that made any sense to me, I was forced to read Adeline not as a character, but as a plot device, or a catalyst, a passive center around which everything revolved (much like the eye of a hurricane). I should hesitate to take Claudia Johnson on regarding this point, but I think she's mistaken.

That's not to say she's the only one. Constantly, discussions in my literature class will revolve around "strong women" in novels where such women simply don't exist. One memorable discussion revolved around Isabella Thorpe, a character in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. Isabella and Catherine Morland, the main character, are both in Bath for the marriage market, but while Catherine sets her sights on Henry Tilney and sticks with him for the duration, Isabella plays two or three men against each other and, I believe, ends up losing both of them.

One girl in my class argued that Isabella was a strong woman, playing the marriage market to her own advantage and going after what she wanted. She argued that Jane Austen was way ahead of her time, having a character like this who went after her goal and didn't let anyone get in her way. She said she loved Isabella as a character because she was strong-willed, said what she liked, and did what she wanted.

Note, please, that this same girl takes pride in her own strong will and straight talk.

Note, also, that while Catherine Morland manages to nab the guy she wanted in the first place, Isabella constantly attempts to sell herself to the highest bidder, who turns out to be no bidder at all and abandons her in Bath.

That's not even mentioning the slight aside that while Catherine is a flawed character, she is still human and fairly realistic, while Isabella is an exaggerated gold-digger and, some critics argue, just an ironic characiture of the kind of woman in high society who was only interested in marrying well.

So while I'm glad women out there are re-reading classic novels from a feminist point of view and attempting to shed new light on the works, I think every reader and critic out there needs to be aware of the temptation to project what one wishes a character was onto a fairly ordinary and un-liberated character.

Obviously, there are flaws in every critical theory, from biographical critics who draw lines between actual and fictional events where there is no connection, to formal critics who fail to draw connections where they clearly exist, and we cannot expect those flaws to disappear. But it's important to recognize these flaws when we meet them, and also to be able to field them with more well-founded arguments.

(I promise, more book reviews at some point! I'm swamped with two papers for various classes, parts of which I am sure will make it up here at some point, so I haven't been doing much other reading. But it's coming!)

A Less Than Magical Look at Fairies

2008-12-04T19:55:00.011-05:00

By Arthur Rackham, Fairy Illustrator Extraordinaire
In Fairies and Fairy Stories: A History author Diane Purkiss rather apologetically set out to write a scholarly history of fairies, opening her book with "This book is an imperfect and limping creature" and then remarking that "I had always thought of fairies as dull." One wonders whatever inspired her. Fortunately, she answers that question soon enough and it certainly wasn't Disney (in fact, Ms. Purkins seems to have a particular aversion to Disney and its purported "magic," a fact I will return to later). In Fairies Ms. Purkiss was inspired by the "real" fairies as she deems them. These are not the dewey, light-hearted fairies who live in the blossoms of daisies, oh no! Ms. Purkiss' "real" fairies are primarily nasty-spirited little creatures who humans live more in fear of than in awe of. Her book is spent tracing the history of these wicked creatures from ancient Greece through to the 21st century.

The narrative is undeniably interesting even as it winds through various points in quick and sometimes not quite fully fleshed out succession. The very scholarliness with which the Fae are treated is quite fascinating. Having never encountered an actual scholarly work on fairies, I was endlessly finding new ideas in this book. In fact, new ideas are primarily what this book brings the table. Most often, Ms. Purkiss brings up some fascinating way of looking at something, makes a brief mention of a primary source that backs up her argument and then speedily moves on to her next, probably equally interesting, idea. The book is so chronologically broad so as to not allow her more time to dandy with any one idea and she speeds through centuries and ideas at a sprint. One feels that she might have been better served limiting her time frame or lengthening her text so she could spent plenty of loving time with each new idea. (So perhaps the publisher is to blame in this instance, although her research at places seems a little spotty, so maybe it is Ms. Purkiss after all.)

For me, I (rather unsurprisingly, I'm sure, for loyal readers of the blog) found her brief comments on the imperialism of fairies (and, on a related note, the British nationalism and the use of fairies to that end) to be captivating. Ms. Purkiss, as always briefly, argues that fairies were a sort of home-grown British thing that really resonated with both country folk and urbanites through to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was then, as the countryside became increasingly known and the world outside of England was ever-expanding, that fairyland up and left England. Rather than being "o'er hill and under dale," fairies were now living "somewhere in Persia," because it was unknownable and people felt that distance from London to the exotic East was just as untraversable as the distance from Yorkshire to the seat of the Fairy Queen. There are snippets of thoughts of this caliber and of unfortunate brevity all through Fairies and one hopes that Ms. Purkiss goes back and perhaps expands on even one or two of the arguments put forth in the book.

The other short-coming of Fairies is Ms. Purkiss herself. She undermines her own argument with her firm distaste and disdain for what she deems to be "fake" fairies, those which have accompanied many a twentieth-century childhood. Her constant and fairly plain abhorrence of those fairies which she does not consider "real" does not make her argument stronger. Rather, it only makes the book seem particularly slanted and thoroughly biased against the fairies that anyone off the street would recognize as such. Rather than even discussing these "flimsy" fairies, Ms. Purkiss chooses instead to scoff at them and berate the reader about his or her own misconceptions as she attempts to prove that her fairies are in fact the "real" ones. As another reviewer put it, this argument in and of itself is fatally flawed as there is no one true belief in terms of fairies. That problem aside, Ms. Purkiss' personal convictions prevent her from truly presenting a full history of fairies.

One can't help but get the impression of a rather embittered, disgruntled, sci-fan fan and fairy-hater as the author interjects her own (often pretentious, bitter and generally disbelieving) opinions into the text. The final chapter, which deals with fairies in the "new millennium" was a particularly tough pill to swallow as Ms. Purkiss leads the reader through, first, a disparaging attack on what the latter-half of the twentieth century did to fairies in popular culture. (It is at this point that the disdain for Disney that has been quite apparent throughout her book truly hits its zenith. She damningly writes that they have "such strenuous banality that it almost leads the viewer to pick up a sturdy chainsaw at once" before continuing that every Disney fairy "is dull and powerless and unmemorable." Having been raised on those very fairies, forgive me if I beg to differ that they are any of those three adjectives. Personally, I find them to be quite lovely most of the time, have great powers of suggestion over the imaginations of children and adults alike and to be, as evidenced here, highly memorable.)

After this little jaunt into offending anyone who grew up in the late 1980s and all of the 90s, she then makes some particularly broad statements about how all middle class parents want little girls so much more than little boys (a sentiment I fully support, but the absoluteness of her statement which I do not) and how every good, sensible, intelligent mother feels a cringe of shame when her daughter wants to dress up like a fairy. I could go on about how she then discuses X-Files fan fiction and then Buffy the Vampire Slayer and vampires and then (believe it, people) Elvis, of all people. However, suffice it to say that all the little opinions that seemed out of place and distracting throughout the book bloom in her final chapter. These opinions leave a decidedly foul taste in one's mouth after a book that has done its best to disarm any pleasant notions of fairies the reader may have been holding onto.

Happily, those of a stout heart and of firm beliefs will have no trouble taking her arguments as interesting, her research as unusual and her tone as perhaps playful (rather than aggravating) and emerge from the other side of this book with some new ways of looking at the literature of fairies, but with their own private murmurings of "I do believe in fairies, I do...I do..." still pleasantly in tact.

I dina cair muckle far Rob Roy

2008-11-25T22:43:00.004-05:00

Photo courtesy of Undiscovered Scotland

If I were to attempt to rival the sheer braininess of KT’s last post, I would put myself to the task of writing something about Roy Roy by Sir Walter Scott that has to do with the constant British use throughout the eighteenth century of an “Other” (often Scottish) as a way to define themselves as a nation. Unfortunately, having a decidedly English bent to my exploration of Britain as a whole, I’m afraid I am not as up the task as a scholar of Scottish history would be (or perhaps a good literary critic either). Thus, I am left to the task of discussing Rob Roy in my usual plebeian form of choice: the basic book review.

Rob Roy primarily tells the story not of its eponymous character but of a would-be poet named Francis (Frank to his buddies) Osbaldistone. In his desire to be a poet, Frank incurs the displeasure of his businessman father who assumed that his only child would take on the family business. (What, exactly, the family does other than deal with large amounts of money is one of the many things in Rob Roy that is not made particularly clear.) Mr. Osbaldistone Senior, thus incensed at his son’s betrayal of the familial calling, packs Frank off to live with his uncle, Sir Hildebrand, and his motley crew of rather stupid sons. In exchange, Sir Hildebrand sends his one brainy, but otherwise quite malignant, son (Rashleigh Osbaldistone) off to take on the family business that Frank so dislikes. Whilst staying with his uncle and rowdy country cousins, Frank falls in love with Sir Hildebrand’s ward, Diana Vernon, a remarkably plucky excuse for a heroine. Their love, of course, is forbidden since Diana must either marry Sir Hildebrand’s idiot son Thorncliffe or be confined to a nunnery. (Why these are the only two options is another loose plot point.) Needless to say the wicked Rashleigh gets up to all kinds of plotting when Frank’s father heads off to do unnamed but very important business on the Continent and it is up to Frank, Diana and (where did he just come from?!) Rob Roy to stop Rashleigh’s ruination of Osbaldistone family business.

That convoluted plot explanation aside, I assure you that the book was about as easy to follow (by which I mean not very). Having just finished it, I am still at odds to truly explain the latter half, wherein Rob Roy appears and the Jacobite Uprising of 1715 occurs, almost as an afterthought, whilst Frank and Co. traipse around the Highlands looking for some papers Rashleigh has stolen from Frank’s father’s firm. Indeed why Frank had to leave Sir Hildebrand’s and go into Scotland at all is rather unclear to me, as is most of his time in Scotland since it is primarily conducted in an unintelligibly written Scottish brogue. Rob Roy, while confusing to me in many ways, did make me recognize one of my all time top ten book pet peeves: writing accents out. Forgive me, but I honestly feel that the potency of the Scottish accent would have just as easily been communicated if anything said by any Scottish person in the book were simply written in plain English and followed by something like “he said in a thick Scottish brogue.” That would have saved us poor non-Scottish readers passages like “it was a Hieland loon gied the letter to that lang-tongued jaud the gudewife there.” What?!

The brogue and the plot aside, Scott did manage to have one shining moment in a book that otherwise left me longing for Ivanhoe. The two paragraphs below are by far the best parts of Rob Roy, even in their very bleakness. As there is little I can say to follow up the feeling in these passages, I will end my review here by saying that Rob Roy is a book that could have benefited from either more or less in the way of plot (it could have been a fascinating character study of the Osbaldistones if Scott had simply left Frank with Sir Hildebrand and his sons and one which I’d wager could have petered out just as disappointingly at the end as Rob Roy actually did) and definitely a lot less brogue.

In the second half, Frank and his buddies are captured successfully by English troops and then Rob Roy’s fearsome wife, Helen. After Helen gets them, another Englishman (Morris) happens upon the band of Highlanders and Helen stonily orders his execution after he pathetically begs for his life. Scott gives us these moving, if grisly, passages:

“The victim [Morris] was held fast by some, while others, binding a large stone in a plaid, tied it round his neck, and others again eagerly stripped him of some part of his dress. Half-naked and thus manacled, they hurled him into the lake, there about twelve feet deep, with a loud halloo of vindictive triumph, above which, however, his last death-shriek, the yell of mortal agony, was distinctly heard. The heavy burden splashed in the dark-blue waters, and the Highlanders, with their pole-axes and swords, watched an instant to guard, lest, extricating himself from the load to which he was attached, the victim might have struggled to regain the shore. But the knot had been securely bound; the wretched man sunk without effort, the waters which his life had disturbed, settled calmly over him, and the unit of that life for which he had pleaded so strongly, was for ever withdrawn from the sum of human existence.”

The reader, feeling the agony and horror of this act, is then taken along with Scott’s remorse and his feeling when he, as Frank, adds, “…I know not why it is a single deed of violence and cruelty affects our nerves more than when these are exercised on a more extended scale. I had seen that day several of my brave countrymen fall in battle: it seemed to me that they met a lot appropriate to humanity; and my bosom, though thrilling with interest, was affected with nothing of that sickening horror with which I beheld the unfortunate Morris put to death, and in cold blood.”

Romance and forests (and maybe a few vampires)

2008-11-20T14:41:00.001-05:00

Her beauty, touched with the languid delicacy of illness, gained from sentiment what it lost in bloom...now entered another stranger, a young Chevalier...in [whom] elegance was happily blended with strength, and had a countenance animated, but not haughty; noble, yet expressive...

I had an existential crisis the other day when one of my good friends (NOT an English major) told me she was reading Twilight. Now, I am of the opinion that while this book is explosively popular, that just makes it explosively popular trash teen fiction of the Buffy-meets-Mr Darcy type, mixed with a little early Anne Rice and, I don't know, Nora Roberts. Obviously Stephanie Meyer has been able to tap into some deep yearning teenage girls have to marry and have raucously violent sex with glittery, undead 100-year-old teenage boys, but that still doesn't make the books good, and neither does throwing in the odd symbol (here, have an apple).

While I was on my high horse, however, ranting about this to said friend, I realized something. One, that I probably should read the book before I judge (another issue for another post) and two, that a lot of what I read on an every day basis for my Popular Literature program was, in fact, described as trash at one point or another.

Case in point: Anne Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest. This is a story about a beautiful orphan girl named Adeline who is taken in by a family running from their debts in Paris to the French forest, where they take refuge in an abandoned abbey. Here, in the various nooks and crannies that ruined abbeys are wont to have, they find a manuscript which appears to be the diary of a man who had been imprisoned there, a rusty dagger, and a skeleton.

Eventually this family meets the owner of said abbey, a Marquis who decides he wants to marry Adeline. Unfortunately for him, he is accompanied by a handsome young chevalier by the name of Theodore, who quickly forms a very intense (and yet chaste) attachment to Adeline and spends much of the rest of the story fighting off the evil Marquis and his henchmen with one arm while supporting the swooning Adeline with the other. There is blood, swordplay, incest, lost-and-found nobility, and an outrageously happy ending. It's amazing - and yet the subject matter would seem to be undeniably trashy.

Critics of the time declaimed it as unrealistic, superstitious and likely to make young women hysterical over nothing. Jane Austen wrote a whole novel, Northanger Abbey, that basically said that silly girls who read silly novels like The Romance of the Forest will get silly, irrational ideas and start to see ghosts and specters and murder everywhere they look, and will have to be talked down by sensible (if a bit effeminate) men who they will eventually marry.

Other novels I have read recently can be accused of the same flaw. The Great God Pan, Lady Audley's Secret, and She: A History of Adventure all involve a lot of sexuality (if not actual sex), a lot of coincidence, and a real penchant for sensationalism. In that case, who am I to say that the intense-yet-chaste nature of Adeline and Theodore's relationship has more literary merit than the similar relationship between Edward and Bella?

Well, the simple answer is that I'm an English student. This means that while I am not the most educated person on the face of the planet, and while I have a profound lack of knowledge of literary criticism that I blame squarely on my American education, I can recognize literary theme, sociological contexts, and moral, spiritual and social issues in texts.

This also means that I can tell you that The Romance of the Forest has stood up to criticism for almost two centuries now. Critics have ripped this book and its genre to shreds, and have found layers upon layers of intention and meaning and issues that I simply don't have time or room to go into in full.

You could make a living off of the portrayal of women in Radcliffe's novels (including the fact that Radcliffe clearly knew that most women hate women they feel threatened by in some way, which explains why Adeline's foster-mother hates her because Adeline is prettier than she is, but Adeline can easily make friends with Theodore's pretty sister). Radcliffe was also aware of the tension between the supernatural and the rational, which she dramatizes by using seemingly supernatural events to create suspense and interest, but also ultimately explaining them away with rational (though pretty contrived) conclusions. This novel is a representation of the battle between pre- and post-Enlightenment thought, in which Enlightenment is the victor.

It also shows a continuing British nationalism, in that Radcliffe set the story in France, a crazy place where crazy things will happen that could never occur in Britain. The importance of social order is another major theme -- it's shown later that the Marquis gained his title through murdering the rightful heir, an act for which later he is severely punished, and everyone is eventually returned to their rightful social standings and marry people of the correct class. The few working-class characters are mostly evil, and mostly die.

But what can you say about Twilight or other books of its ilk?

Well, teenagers yearn for love/sex but may be scared of it, hence the fact that Bella does not have a single romantic choice that involves her not falling in love with a potentially dangerous supernatural being. Teenagers are still children enough to love the fantastic, but adult enough to be interested in more mature themes. And the covers are nice, if nothing else.

On a more personal note, Stephanie Meyer seems to believe that women should fear men, or she is at least is at least informed by one conservative Christian view that men are raging sex beasts who lose rationality in the hunt for someone to mate with. Bella's choices seem to be a wolf-man and a blood-sucker, not rational beings by any means, and certainly connected with images of violence and consumption. Not exactly a positive view -- and take a look at one of the creepiest movie posters I've seen, with Mr. Dashing Vampire hovering over Miss Helpless and Submissive Female like a barely modified incubus. The Nightmare, anyone?

Okay, so maybe that's a little extreme. The thing is, besides the obvious allure of the Dark Side, there isn't a broader scope to this novel, so far as I can see. Bella never has a real choice -- her choices range from not so good to worse, from marrying a vampire and becoming one of the undead to hooking up with a werewolf and possibly being destroyed by vampires. Maybe it's a statement about how love conquers death. Or maybe we're all dead. Or something.

Really, though, I think Stephanie Meyer just wanted to tell a good story. There's nothing wrong with that, so long as we recognize that for what it is. I mean, Nora Roberts can tell a pretty good story. But it takes something more than a good plot to make something a good book. And while The Romance of the Forest and other novels of that type make statements about real and relevant issues, and thus take their place in the canon, books like Twilight really don't seem to have a point -- beyond giving girls an excuse to fantasize about sleeping with the sparkling undead.

'Beginner's Greek' Proves Cinematically Wonderful

2008-11-14T11:08:00.000-05:00

Author's Note:Because I feel rather like all the books I write about are slightly stodgy nonfiction books, I give you a review I wrote for my school paper last year on a much more people-friendly book called Beginner's Greek.

One of the many complimentary things I can say about Beginner's Greek by James Collins is that it is undoubtedly the most cinematic book I have ever read. Never before have I been struck within the first few pages so forcefully that the book I was holding in my hands should undoubtedly be a movie. It was like love at first sight, appropriately enough, except it was movie at first sight.

Beginner's Greek is, at its gushy heart, a romance novel. Before utterly turning you off with that statement, let me say it is a romance novel in the same way that Pride and Prejudice is a romance novel. Beginner's Greek is the story of a man, Peter, who has been idealistically waiting all his life to fall in love at first sight. He decides that this will happen most easily on a long airplane flight since there is plenty of time for the first spark, a friendly conversation, some flirting and the creation of a genuine bond between two people. The book begins when his adorable, though unrealistic, view of falling in love actually occurs. Peter falls in love with Holly and then, in a cruel twist of fate - one of many scattered painfully throughout the novel - he inexplicably loses her number. The rest of the book takes us on an almost painful journey as Peter and Holly try to recover their lost love through a series of increasingly unbelievable and unfortunate events.

It sounds sappy, but it really is quite good. It is a quick, light read that I thoroughly enjoyed over spring break. The only downfall of an otherwise happy book is that author James Collins goes a little too far. There are just one too many unfortunate events to keep our lovers apart. The whole book is comprised of various events that keep them apart, open up opportunities for them to be together and then create something else to keep them apart. It's all very frustrating since almost none of the events are the characters' fault. At least in any good Austen novel you can hope for some personal growth that will allow the characters to finally be together. Collins' novel is not that kind of book.

Beginner's Greek is a book about Fate, and the reader, like the characters themselves, must keep believing in Fate and that it ultimately will do good in the end. Repeating to myself, "My gosh, there simply must be a happy ending to this," was really what got me through it at the end of the day, especially towards the end, when Collins apparently couldn't keep himself from throwing in that one last "keep them apart" event. A reader's incredulity and frustration can only be suppressed so long, Mr. Collins.

Presumably, Beginner's Greek will soon be coming to a cinema near you - for how could it not with such writing and positive belief in Fate? - but I recommend reading the book first. It's optimistic and touching; it lets you get into the heads of the characters and really feel for them as movies cannot do, no matter how many voice-overs the filmmaker helpfully provides. And if there are things every Smithie needs at this time of the semester, if not always, they are friendly happy endings and a good dose of optimism.

Books About Books

2008-11-11T18:48:00.006-05:00

I recently completed The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop by Lewis Buzbee and it reminded me of one of my favorite sub-genres, most commonly found in used bookstores but now making a pleasant resurgence in other bookstores: books about books.

Books about books may sound like an annoyingly redundant form of literature, but I assure you it is a beautiful thing. In a pretentious frame of mind, I suppose I would compare it to a great cathedral. Books about books are created solely for the glorification of something else or, in their case, some other book or books. Cathedrals, similarly, are built solely for the glorification of, depending on who you ask, God, the town or Art. In any event, not for the sake of the cathedral itself. I would also argue that books about books and cathedrals also share a grand beauty, cathedrals with flying buttresses and stained glass and books about books with the perfect words. Indeed, books about books, being written by those who love books possibly best of all readers (to such an extent that they felt compelled to write a whole book about how much they love books), are often some of the most eloquent books you'll find.

Suffice to say, I generally love the form even if it can go horribly awry as is the case with Rereadings, a book of essays collected by the great Anne Fadiman. The essays all center around the idea of rereading a favorite book and each of the essays is, tragically, written by a different author. All attempt the high art of writing a book about books (or in this case an essay about books) and most, frankly, fail. There is always the opportunity in a book about books to be too self-centered and most of the essayists in Rereadings seize this opportunity with zeal. The essays range from wholly pretentious to literary criticism (a thing quite different from books about books) to simply egotistical. In my opinion, the book about books is ideally two parts intelligence, one part biography and one part adoration mixed with some good old fashioned good writing. Of the authors in this collection, only Ms. Fadiman succeeds at this.

In fact, the greatest of all books about books for me will always be Ex Libris by Ms. Fadiman. I often try to articulate just what is so wonderful about this book, but it is well nigh impossible. Suffice to say that the writing borders on divine and whenever I read (and reread and reread) it, I am simultaneously struck with awe, jealousy and admiration that such writing still exists in this digital world. At the risk of veering into fangirl territory, I will leave off and simply recommend vigorously that you read it.

Hugh Walpole (above with his dachshund), perhaps more well-known as a novelist, wrote a lovely little piece of bibliomania called Reading: An Essay. I stumbled across it in a used book store, and I have never been quite so pleased with an impulse buy. It is delightful, relatable, eloquent, amusing and intelligent. In addition, the book is rather autobiographical but, despite coming from a gay man living in the 1920s, is still perfectly applicable to today. I guess reading and readers haven't changed much in the ensuing decades, which is rather as comforting as this book is.

Mr. Buzbee's The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop enters this realm of extremely good books about books with aplomb. His book is described as "a memoir, a history" and it is wonderfully both. Unlike Ms. Fadiman's collection of unconnected essays in Ex Libris, Mr. Buzbee's book has a narrative that follows his life in books and bookstores with a cleverly parallel account of the history of the book and bookstore as an institution. Both sides of the story are fascinating and the book only falls slightly short in the latter chapters when Mr. Buzbee feels compelled to take a stance on the "literacy is dead!" debate that has risen with the Internet as well as toss in his two cents on what his favorite bookstores are and why. The history of the book parallel has died out by this point, which is a shame, as it might have enlivened the later chapters. That aside, the book is a genuine joy and I heartily recommend it as I head out the door to find other books by Mr. Buzbee.

Next Up: Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott. At last! A return to fiction!

"A Curious History"? More like a winding history

2008-11-04T09:03:00.002-05:00

Nothing would have made me happier than to be able to come to you after reading Footnote: A Curious History and say it was amazing. That it approached levels of humor, interest and impressive research that are laudable in such a specific and unusual text. That I was charmed by the idea of such a topic and that the book's actual content kept me equally excited and inspired throughout.

However, the truth is actually much duller. "Dull" is, in fact, the word of choice for this "curious" history of the footnote. In the book, Anthony Grafton admirably attempts to create a history of citations in the field of history. Where did the footnote begin? To whom do we owe this great, academic debt? I say he attempts to do this because his text is so utterly winding that one often finds one's mind wandering away down some more interesting mental path only to be jarred back into the book before you by (in my case) a literal jolt from the subway.

On the outset, Grafton asked some interesting questions about where the footnote came from and perhaps with a stronger editor, this book would have flourished. As it is, the reader often loses sight of Grafton's interesting questions and, even worse, his argument towards answering them. Almost every chapter wound through interesting historical VIPs and era-specific savage academic debate only to have an argument tacked on the end by Grafton as if to remind us that he is, in fact, building up one. Remember? Unfortunately, the reader does not and there is absolutely no overall sense of a budding argument. Rather, it just seems like your basic nonfiction book filled with little stories, but with nothing coherent to tie them all together. Were the book done correctly, the footnote would very obviously be that something.

Happily, I can say that the research is quite impressive. Grafton clearly went through his paces, not just in terms of English sources, but German, French and Latin ones. (Indeed, Grafton's sheer linguistic prowess alone makes the book rather impressive.) Also, Grafton rather charmingly makes good and full use of the footnote, filling up half-pages with notes on his sources. On the downside, his footnotes are nothing like those of Gibbon (which he hails as "witty" and generally seems to think quite highly of). Instead, his footnotes are merely notes, comprised of the quoted text in its entirety and with few comments, which I think might have improved the readability of the text greatly.

This book seemed to promise so much to a bibliophile and ended up being just so impossibly dull that I couldn't even top off the epilogue. (Although Grafton did seem on the verge of perhaps "tying up" his poorly defined argument.) The highlight of the book is undeniably the people you meet in it. While the narrative flags and the argument is almost invisible, the people are really wonderful. Most notably, Leopold van Ranke, best-known as one of the founders of modern citation but also an ardent lover of archives and historian extraordinaire, Gibbon (see above) and Pierre Bayle, a Huguenot and author of what many consider to be the first encyclopedia (complete with extensive notes, of course).

The people and research are undeniably great and it is just a shame that Grafton's narrative and argument couldn't rise to the levels of his other parts.

Next up: The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop by Lewis Buzbee

Corruption of an adult by a minor

2008-11-02T19:24:00.008-05:00

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

Would you believe I didn't know the origins, or indeed, the true meaning of the term "Lolita" until a few weeks ago?

Being an English graduate student living with another English graduate student, naturally the topic of favorite books comes up. After I blabbed for about half an hour about and The Catcher in the Rye and Great Expectations, my apartment-mate mentioned that her favorite book was Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov.

"It's so beautiful," she told me, telling me stories about how Nabokov was so obsessed with finding the perfect word order that he wrote the words of every sentence on index cards and moved the cards around until the flow was just right. On top of it, English is not Nabokov's first language, which leads to both a self-consciousness about language and a compulsion to get everything exact.

She was right, to an extent. The first paragraph was jewel-like, incredible, amazing; other parts scattered throughout were heart-breakingly beautiful. Still, the plot and the language was not sufficient to make me forget that this was a 40-year-old man having an affair with a 12-year-old girl (however nymph-like she may be). Beautiful though it may be, I couldn't move beyond the gross-out factor.

I wasn't quite getting it. I had read too fast, the plot was a little boring, and I was confused by the ending because I had missed a key clue earlier in the book. Thankfully one of my other friends has a passion for Lolita and an excellent DVD collection, which contained Adrian Lyne's version of the story.

This version, made in 1997, stars a striking Jeremy Irons and a self-conciously sexual Dominique Swain. It's so very clear in this version that Lolita knows what she is doing to Humbert, that Humbert loves her rather than just lusts after her, and the complete and utter Freudian nightmare that is their relationship is painted in much clearer terms (this portrayal just helped clarify their relationship, not take away from the book's portrayal of it at all).

I cried at the end (which is nothing new to regular readers of this blog, but this time it was justified). I even forgot somehow that this older man was technically the criminal, and this manipulative, cheating shrew was ostensibily some sort of victim. All I saw was a man so in love he would do anything to keep his lover his, and at the same time a man desperate to protect his 'daughter' from the clutches of dirty old men.

Please, do read Lolita. There are some beautiful scenes that the movie doesn't bother to go into, and if nothing else, it's worth reading just to marvel at how brilliant Nabokov must be to be able to write like this in what is not his first language.

But if you find that the novel falls a little short for you, go rent the Adrian Lyne version of the film and spend two hours or so watching Dominique Swain drive Jeremy Irons out of his mind. I promise, it will bring your appreciation of the story to a whole other level.

Reflections on Onliness

2008-10-26T18:45:00.003-04:00

This past week I read both Only Child: Writers on the Singular Joys and Solitary Sorrows of Growing Up Solo, which made me question every action I've ever taken and wonder if it is totally textbook only child, and Washington Square, which has an only child as its heroine. Perhaps because I read Only Child first, my reading of Washington Square was necessarily tainted by the attempted psychoanalysis I now give to things related to only children. However, that aside, here are my thoughts on both.

At the obvious risk of outing myself, I am an only child and it was for this reason that I wanted to read Only Child (and because I recently made the acquaintance of one of the co-editors, another only). I hoped that I would read the book and either find commiseration in things I never realized were only child things or realize that I was what I hoped to be: a utterly not stereotypical only. (You know the type. Self-centered, spoiled, bratty. A general headache.) However, what the book ended up doing was opening up a Scylla and Charybdis of things I never thought to worry about before. For example, when you're an only, who is there to remember your family memories after your parents are gone? It's just you. Similarly, who is there to help you take care of your elderly parents? Again, just you. And who will be there to grieve when those parents are gone? Can anyone but a sibling feel the kind of pain you feel over the loss of your parents? I don't care how many cousins and other well-meaning relatives you have, I can't imagine anyone feeling the loss of either of my parents more sorely than yours truly.

That said, I also feel compelled to make everyone around me read this book. It honestly affected my life and the way I think about things and what more can you ask for in a book? There is this curtain of curiosity that exists between onlies and non-onlies. It is sheer and you can just make out the shapes on the other side, but you can never really join them, but that doesn't ever stop you from wondering what it is like over there. I think Only Child just might be the answer to pulling back that curtain a wee tad and learning a little more about the other side.

Having gotten those essays under my belt, I turned to Washington Square by Henry James. It is my second James and the official New York City Big Read this year, so it seemed like a good choice. And, as fate would have it, an utterly appropriate choice following Only Child since the heroine is an only. While my first James (The Aspern Papers) was utterly disappointing, I really enjoyed Washington Square.

The book is a close character study focusing on four characters, Dr. Sloper, Catherine Sloper, Mrs. Penniman and Morris Townsend. There is a small plot, but the characters are mainly what move the story. This works quite well since James is extremely deft at keeping up the mystery of someone's "true" character. While he left the women in the book utterly unambiguous in their character (e.g. Catherine is sweet but simple and Mrs. Penniman is foolish), the two males were much more complicated and their motives are less easy to see. And, coming at the book from the perspective of only-child-ness, Catherine was a wonderful treat. The conflicts set up by the essays in Only Child, such as the unenviable decision an only must eventually make between parents and mate, played out beautifully in Washington Square.

On the whole, I would probably recommend Washington Square if you were simply looking for something well-done and eloquent to read and Only Child if you want something to talk to your only friends about or, if you are an only, something to make you worry to no end. (Doesn't sound appealing? Better stick with the James, then.)

Since I can't seem to access my shelf at right, I give you
Next Up: Footnote: A Curious History by Anthony Grafton.

By Way of Introduction

2008-10-23T15:24:00.003-04:00

The thing you should know about me is that I have a problem. It's been a life-long problem, but one that has only truly manifested itself now that I have a regular paycheck. The problem is thus: I simply cannot (and I mean really cannot, even when I put my sternest stuff to the task) stop buying books. To give you an idea of the magnitude of my problem (and the detriment to my bank account), I give you the following list of books that I have purchased merely in the last week:

The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading by Francis Spufford
Once Voice Please by Sam McBratney and Russel Ayto
Washington Square by Henry James
The Latke Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming: A Christmas Story by Lemony Snicket
The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop by Lewis Buzbee
Only Child: Writers on the Singular Joys and Solitary Sorrows of Growing Up Solo edited by Deborah Seigel and Daphne Uviller
Orientalism by Edward Said
Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott
Footnote: A Short History by (someone whose name I can't remember but who rather wonderfully wrote an entire book about footnotes with numerous and lengthy footnotes)
Amor Est Sensus Quidam Peculiaris by Joan Walsh Anglund

Yes, indeed, the last is entirely in Latin, a language that, at my best, I am only passingly fluent in. I doubt I could ever read an entire book in Latin even after studying it for semesters on end. That alone should be indicative of my problem.

I tell you this by way of introducing you to my reading habits, clearly rather varied and often entirely unexpected even to myself, and to give you a teaser for what's coming up. Having purchased these books, I should now rightfully be compelled to read them. So here's hoping that during my tenure at this lovely blog, I'll get to write about all these books in some way or another. (And we'll just count the above comments as the extent of my writings on Amor Est Sensus Quidam Pecularis since I think we all know I shall probably never muscle my way through that one.)

Teasers

2008-10-23T05:53:00.012-04:00

I stole this from the book blog Reading Adventures (a "Blog of Note" this week) and thought it was an easy way to get a vaguely interesting post out. It's also a fairly decent way to keep you even vaguely interested in the books I'm reading currently.

Here's the deal: I have grabbed the books I have in the "On The Shelf" bar to your right, flipped to a random page, and chose two sentences between lines 7 and 12 on that page. Ready? Okay --

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
"They also wanted 'For Those Who Willingly Made The Supreme Sacrifice' to be written on the front. Father refused to back down on the sculpture, saying they could consider themselves lucky the Weary Soldier had two arms and two legs, not to mention a head, and that if they didn't watch out he'd go for bare-naked realism all the way and the statue would be made of rotting body fragments, of which he had stepped on a good many in his day."

Lolita by Valdimir Nabokov

"I watched dark-and-handsome, not un-Celtic, probably high-church, very high-church, Dr Humbert see his daughter off to school. I watched him greet with his slow smile and pleasantly arched thick black ad-eyebrows good Mrs Holigan, who smelled of the plague (and would head, I knew, for master's gin at the first opportunity)."

The Romance of the Forest by Ann Radcliffe

"All was dark and silent. She called aloud for help, but no person appeared; and the windows were so high, that it was impossible to escape unassisted."

Let me just add briefly here that the above teaser is typical of The Romance of the Forest, in which the heroine is constantly calling for help in the middle of the most deserted situations and then pacing, wringing her hands and crying until (most improbably) someone rescues her. At this point she usually faints, and the hapless rescuer is forced to either carry her out of her imprisonment or to stay until she recovers and try to fend off whomever might come to investigate.

Welcome to the Club

2008-10-22T14:17:00.006-04:00

I would like to introduce my new co-blogger, Corey! She has been solo blogging over at Travels Through Life and we've done some joint writing in the past on various projects, so I'm excited to have her on board!

Reading-wise, Corey tends to be far more comfortable than I am with the non-fiction side of things, especially anything involving the British Empire, Egypt, and Emerson. Also, she reads things like Dumas. This is why she's brilliant and probably going to go to Oxford for a PhD and I am getting a master's in Popular Literature.

But welcome, Corey, and I'm so glad there's someone around here who wouldn't be caught dead with a Jodi Picoult novel in her hands! Though let's face it, if you're having a bad day, there's nothing like some cheesy chick lit to cheer anyone up.

Works in Progress

2008-10-03T16:31:00.004-04:00

I've been a little busy -- not so busy, though, that it's kept me from buying six books in two weeks, and starting reading three of them. Here's what you can expect in the upcoming weeks, as well as a few tidbits about my purchases recently:

* Arthur & George by Julian Barnes -- I picked this up for 1 euro at Charlie Byrne's in Galway, which I viewed as fate, since a friend and I had just been talking about it. It's about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and George Edalji, and since it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, I'm guessing it's pretty decent.

* Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling -- I couldn't resist picking this up at some bargain-basement/thrift store in Galway, especially with a two and a half hour train ride ahead of me. I won't review this one, but I'm loving the chance to read it again and pick up on all the stuff I missed earlier. I am kind of glad I waited on Harry Potter until most of the buzz was over...it's giving me the chance to read it without getting caught up in the frenzy and judge objectively how good the series is and how likely it is to last.

* The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood -- I am deeply in love with Margaret Atwood. Actually, I kind of want to be her. She is one of the most versitile and original writers, and when she finds her stride, everything that comes from her pen is so beautifully written and so true that I can hardly tear myself away. This book is getting a review once I finish it, and once I find the time. Oh, and by the way, read Oryx and Crake if you like dystopian novels, and The Robber Bride if you don't. Also, The Edible Woman was my favorite Atwood for a long time, and even though it's her first novel, it's well worth reading.

* The Romance of the Forest by Anne Radcliffe -- The Gothic novel that spawned all other Gothic novels! Radcliffe was so popular in her day, and she was enough of an influence on literature that Jane Austen felt the need to take the piss out of her (heh -- pardon my Irish) in Northanger Abbey. Can't wait to start this one!

* Chocolat by Jonanne Harris -- I won't review this one, I don't think, since I've already read it, but I would recommend it, even to people who have seen the movie. It's different from the movie, but it's really fun and better-written; even though I loved the film, the book is better. I'm a big fan of Joanne Harris, especially Gentlemen and Players, but this one comes a close second.

* Christmas Books by Charles Dickens -- Okay, this one is just bragging, but I was so freaking excited...I found an edition of this book at the Temple Bar Book Market for six euro, and was excited enough just to find an old copy of a Dickens book. Then I opened the cover, and read this: "Xmas 1903 / To Dear James / with best wishes / MOC". The copyright date is 1894, the condition is beautiful, and I was so thrilled I couldn't stop from grinning as I paid the lady running the stall. She probably thought I was crazy, but then most people here do, so I'm not worried about it.

* Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. As read by Hugh Laurie -- I found this set of 3 CDs tucked away in the corner of the Classics section of Hodges Figgis, and I grabbed it like it was a gold nugget. And I suppose it is, even though I'm sure millions of copies are out there, this was the first I had seen, and I didn't even know it existed. It was also the last one on the shelf, so for all I know, it could have been a direct gift from God, dropped there to reward me for actually going through with this crazy-ass idea to move to another country and get a master's. Then again, if it was a heavenly gift, I suppose it wouldn't have had an ISBN or, ya know, a price tag on it...anyway, I cannot WAIT to listen to this, and it might actually inspire an entry on Great Expectations, so be looking for that! Note: There is a an audio version of this on iTunes, but not read by Hugh Laurie, so I don't know if it's worth it.

Take Me Away

2008-09-18T15:41:00.004-04:00

Those of you who know me (which is, um, all of you) know that I have moved about three, maybe four times since January and am about to move again to a city which I’ve never been to. As much as I’d like to think of myself as a free-spirited, wild-eyed rover, that is really about as far away from my true personality as possible. So obviously, I feel the need to escape from the sheer panic induced by words like “plane” and “airport” and “moving boxes” and “luggage.” Me being me, I bury myself in a book.

This is cheesy, but all of you already know this on some level – books create worlds of their own. They are reflections of how the author thinks the world works, or how the world could work with a few modifications. With enough modifications, the author can create a world of their own, and then the book could become science fiction or fantasy, depending on how in depth the modifications are and the direction they take the novel.

So, my reading life lately has been all about escaping this world for alternative ones. Here’s what I’ve been turning to instead of dealing with the trials of my everyday life:

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

This, I think, is the best book ever to read in an airport. The chapters are relatively short, and the beginning and end are very exciting, and the middle is marginally so. What this means for you is that as you’re waiting for your flight to take off, you will be totally engrossed in the novel, but not so engrossed that you can’t fall asleep during a long flight. You’ll have plenty of the novel to occupy you during a layover, and then enough to keep you awake during a short flight that you don’t want to drop off during.

This novel is a mostly prewar vampire hunt, in which two graduate students, prompted by the disappearance of a professor, go to hunt down Dracula’s tomb. The story is told in the form of the one graduate student telling his daughter what happened, letters the professor left before his disappearance, and the daughter filling in narration from her own vampire hunt that resulted from her father’s. It’s amazing – even if the first time I read it, I did have to give up in the middle and try again. It does take a little focus, but if you’re in an airport, you have nothing but time and nothing else to focus on.

The Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb

Okay, I’ll admit it – I’m a fantasy nerd. Like, so big of a fantasy nerd that I have to keep myself from reading it, or it’s all I’d read. In fact, when I found Robin Hobb, her books are all I did read for the course of a few months.

I actually got into her Farseer books from her book Golden Fool, which has some of the same characters but not the same plot line. The trilogy is basically about this young boy named FitzChivalry (oh, I know) who is the lovechild (mm-hmm) of the late and lamented Prince Chivalry and some woman from the mountain country. Turns out that not only can Fitz communicate with animals and perform some pretty powerful magic, he has what it takes to be the official Royal Assassin and help Prince Verity and King Shrewd keep their kingdom from being taken over.

I don’t even remember whom, exactly, they are fighting – all I know is that Fitz makes friends with a wolf puppy named Nighteyes somewhere in the second book. From then on I was hooked. Probably not a book to really read in public unless you don’t care if other people judge your reading choices.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling

I just put that title down for the sake of naming a specific Harry Potter book; really any of them will do, but I tend to prefer the later ones for escapism. I enjoy Goblet of Fire because it isn’t nearly as dark as Order of the Phoenix, all the good characters are still alive, and Harry isn’t quite an obnoxious teenager yet.

Half-Blood Prince, though, would also be good, or Prisoner of Azkaban – just note that the later ones are a little more sophisticated than the first few, which makes them better suited to the purpose of keeping your attention for a longer period of time. And I don’t know about you, but I can never remember exactly the way the book turns out, even if I’ve read it before, so there’s always that element of suspense.

The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Wow, is this a book that sucks you in and won’t let go. It’s a retelling of Authurian myth but with an emphasis on goddess worship and Lancelot’s heritage as the son of the Lady of the Lake. Here’s my only caveat: I haven’t read this whole book, and what I did read was a long time ago.

However, this is more the exception that proves the rule, as the only reason I didn’t finish it was because I was in my uber-Christian high school years, and couldn’t separate the fact that I thought goddess worship was wrong from the fact that maybe it was okay in the context of the book and, you know, for fictional characters. I am going to go back to it, though, once I have the chance, because I remember being so drawn in, that I could barely make myself stop. I did, though, because this is what good Christian girls are supposed to do, resist heresy and Satan in all his forms, even if that form is a really, really interesting book. This is also why I didn’t read Harry Potter until I was almost 20, but that’s another story.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke

The only book in this list that I have barely even started, but that’s because I am saving it for the inevitable breakdown that will surely follow my move to Dublin. I need an extraordinarily good book to keep me occupied between the time my mother drops me off at Buffalo’s airport and the time I finally settle into life at Trinity, a period of anywhere from a week to two months (after which I will fly back to California, only to have to make that adjustment all over again. Yay fun).

But this really isn’t about me complaining – I think this novel will do the trick, as it’s about magic returning to England during the Napoleanic Wars and, apparently, a rivalry between two magicians. And hey, Neil Gaiman liked it, and I like Neil Gaiman, so who am I to doubt his word?

What's the story, morning glory?

2008-09-08T21:11:00.003-04:00

Or, in other words, what is going on with the total lack of posting? In case you are wondering, yes, I am planning on posting more in the future, but my moving around so much is making it hard to blog, even when I read wonderfully ridiculous books like The Monk that are sooooo worth writing about.

I will be off line for much of next week and probably too busy to blog for another two weeks after that, but I will continue to write posts on my computer and actually post them when I get the chance.

Speaking of which, I'll blog about it later, but if you have the chance, read The Monk and just try not to laugh your ass off. Yeah, it moves a little slowly, but you're allowed to skim, since you don't have to read the whole thing for class like I did. It's better than a Harlequin romance, I swear. I felt like I was getting away with something when I read it in public, that's how salacious it was. There is a love child -- that's all I'll say.

Comfort Reading

2008-08-21T13:19:00.003-04:00

As I come closer to the end of the summer and the beginning of graduate school, I am finding myself getting more and more apprehensive about my future. And, like many others, when I get nervous, I eat. Or at least cook – sometimes the only cure for a bad case of nerves is to pound a cup of toasted slivered almonds into crumbs for a batch of Almond Cookies. It’s amazing what fifteen minutes with a rolling pin and a Ziploc bag full of nuts can do for your sanity.

But I can’t cook all the time, and I’d rather not gain the freshman fifteen before I become a first-year again, so sometimes I have to replace the rolling pin with a book. Here are my “comfort foods” of literature, some chicken noodle soup for your soul, if you will, but a little more literally (and a little less annoyingly – does anyone else hate those books like I do?):

The Fourth Star by Lisa Brenner
This book follows the staff of Daniel, a formerly four-star New York restaurant that was bumped down to three stars when a new food critic came to the New York Times. The staff tries desperately over the course of a year to gain back that last star, and reporter Lisa Brenner shadows them in all aspects, from front of the house service to back of the house food preparation.

It really impresses me how much Ms Brenner manages to cram into this book, and how much real dialogue she is able to capture. I felt as though maybe this book could have been more like a movie or a TV show, what with all of the drama and action in there. It’s one of my favorites, and a definite must-read.

Julie and Julia by Julie Powell
Julie and Julia is the story of Julie Powell, who comes to a crisis when she is told she has a hormonal imbalance that will make it hard for her to have children if she doesn’t do it soon. This, of course, in typical Sex and the City fashion, makes Ms Powell feel as though she has done nothing useful with her life. Her husband suggests she go to culinary school, and Ms Powell retorts that if she wanted to learn to cook, she would just work her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

And the rest is history. A copy of the book is procured, a blog is started, and ingredients like beef marrow and squab start appearing in the Powell kitchen. The book is well-written; Ms Powell is kind of abrasive at times, but her redeeming factor is that she is aware of her tendency to overreact and there is generally a little undertone of either amusement or shame when she recounts her more dramatic episodes. I didn’t think the pieces of Julia Child’s life that punctuate the book were strictly necessary, but I also didn’t think there was anything really wrong with them – I just found Julie’s life more interesting than Julia’s.

Waiting by Debra Ginsberg
I think everyone should read one book on waitressing or restaurants in the course of their lives, and preferably sooner than later. Though it’s nearly impossible to fully understand the things servers have to put up with from clients and back of house staff alike without actually ever working as one, reading one book like this will convince you that servers work a lot harder than most of us give them credit for.

I have read a few blogs by servers that are amusing and enlightening, and one thing that seems common to all of them is the lament that people simply don’t know how to behave when they go out to eat. Poor tipping, over-the-top demands and the inability of parents to control their children are the main topics that get these servers steamed up.

Debra Ginsberg also gets rather angry throughout the course of the book, but since she breaks up her rants with stories about working in a diner and a few bars, as well as statistics on tipping and other matters, she’s much more readable than many of the server blogs out there. She also clearly defines characters, as if writing a novel, which many bloggers don’t. However, if you’re still interested, check out Waiter Rant, The Insane Waiter and I Serve Idiots (I know he tells you to go to a different URL, but that address is defunct).

French Lessons by Peter Mayle
I am pretty sure this is the first food book I ever read, so it’s on here for the purpose of nostalgia, if nothing else. How can I neglect the author who taught me that truffles are mushrooms, not just little balls of chocolate, and yes, people really do eat and enjoy snails?

Mr Mayle begins the book with a story about traveling to France for the first time and sampling their version of the British classic, fish and chips. This first meal is like a revelation to him, as British food is notoriously bad, and French food is notoriously awesome.

The Gourmet Cookbook, edited by Ruth Reichel
It is impossible for me to resist a bargain, which is how I ended up taking this book home with me from a discount store. I used to read Gourmet magazine, and having read Ms Reichel’s Garlic and Sapphires and Tender at the Bone, I knew at least the preface of this cookbook would be worth reading.

It was, of course, but the rest of the book proved just as amazing. As promised on the back of the dust jacket, this is, in fact, the only cookbook I think I will ever need. Short of pulling a Julie and Julia-type cooking marathon with Gourmet, I know I will never work my way through everything it has to offer. Still, I can try...red wine risotto, anyone?

Summer Lovin'

2008-08-08T14:10:00.003-04:00

It’s August, and suddenly the carefree “summer will last forever!” attitude I had all through July is completely gone. Far from amassing fun summer reads that I pile in corners of my shared room and imagine myself absorbed in on a beach somewhere, I find myself buying school books on Amazon and looking at John Steinbeck in used bookstores. Yuck.

So, as a last hurrah, I bring you three books from my “summer smut” reading list:

The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant

Actually a fairly decent novel, both plot-wise and…otherwise. Not overly smutty, but not really lacking it ether. The basic idea here is that Alessandra falls in love with a young painter who is working on the frescos for her family’s chapel. In order to keep herself out of a convent, she agrees to marry a much older man who turns out to be her older brother’s lover. Awkward.

I think we can all see what’s going to happen with the painter here. While he is straight out of a marginal romance novel, he also has enough quirks too keep his character interesting. And since Alessandra and he only meet a few times, there’s enough plot in between to keep this novel a novel, and not a romance. Nice work, Ms. Dunant.

A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies by Ellen Cooney

Charlotte, who is recently recovered from a form of polio, discovers that her husband is having an affair and finds herself in a hotel where the male employees are mainly employed to “service” the clientele. Yep. That’s it.

The main problem with this book is that Cooney feels the need to burst into flashbacks in the middle of very exciting scenes. I could barely keep track of it all, and the flashbacks weren’t even interesting. It got to the point where I would scream in frustration when I saw one coming. Also, there is something about a stolen identity involving the main male character, and something else involving a police chief that was, in my mind, never really resolved. Not even worth borrowing, and certainly not worth the 99 cents I paid for it at a thrift store.

The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller

Okay, according to a review that was tucked into the pages of this book, I was supposed to be sobbing my eyes out by the end. I didn’t even well up -- and keep in mind that I burst into tears during the season finale of So You Think You Can Dance the other night.

While I may have speed-read it, and I can certainly understand that is really quite tragic to fall in love with a free-wheeling photographer who you only know for a week when your family is at the Iowa State Fair, only to have to sacrifice what could be the world’s greatest love affair to remain in Iowa with aforesaid family, it’s kind of…eh. I had a very hard time believing it, to be honest.

Sure, it’s sad that this woman will never have mind-blowing sex again, and had I not been distracted I might have cried somewhere near the end-slash-middle region (you’ll see if you read it), it’s sadder to me that this woman ever left Italy in the first place than that now she’s stuck in Iowa. She made her choice long ago, and it shouldn’t be such a great tragedy now that she’s being forced to live it.

Though, to give Mr. Waller his due, the thing with the bathtub was a nice touch.

Chick Lit: The books, not the gum

2008-08-08T13:37:00.002-04:00

Sophie Kinsella is one of those authors whose prose you can spot a mile away. She’s undeniably British, her characters are humorously self-effacing, and her stories generally start with a crazy situation and end with a kind of fairy tale satisfaction. Here, because they’ve been sitting on my floor for weeks as I put off writing this post, are two of her works that prove my point:

The Undomestic Goddess

Samantha Sweeting, despite her crazy name, is quite possibly my favorite chic lit protagonist, and here’s why: she’s a high-powered lawyer with a huge firm in London, with an amazing work ethic, a drive to be the best, and a potential offer for partner in her firm. Unfortunately, as these things go, she finds an overdue memo on her desk, loses a client 50 million pounds (approximately 100 million dollars), and finds herself working as a housekeeper in the Cotswolds.

That premise was enough to make me spring the 75 cents at my local Goodwill for a decent secondhand copy. And okay, so the end was a little cutesy and you know from the second he walks into the kitchen and smells the burning chickpeas that the handsome gardener will fall for Samantha. But it was also pretty gutsy, in its own small way.

Samantha is pulled between menial but satisfying work as a housekeeper, and her glittering career as a corporate attorney. And as a rule, books like this leave me cheering for the protagonist as she undergoes her spiritual journey or whatever and realizes that she deserves to be an attorney because she’s smart, damn it, and she should use her Ivy League education.

Not this time – and while I think that probably a more satisfying ending could have worked out, I do admire the emotional realism of the one Kinsella used (if not realism regarding the odds of a handsome, college-educated, pub-owning, lawyer-hating gardener coming to London to search for his lady love, who he has recently realized has been lying to him about her identity for several months).

Cocktails for Three (as Madeline Wickham)

My first impression of the book was that a soon-to-be-mother should not be drinking cocktails at all, let alone three, and that apparently that is not as taboo in Britain as it is here. Wow.

The main plot is that Candice is reunited with a girl from high school whose father was ruined by Candice’s father’s shady business dealings. Candice makes an attempt to make up with this girl by getting her a job, moving her into her apartment, and generally letting herself be taken advantage of in every way. She is egged on by her across-the-hall neighbor, while her friends, Maggie and Roxanne, deal with a baby and the death of a long-term clandestine lover, respectively.

It’s safe to say that this is an earlier book of Kinsella’s (who writes under the name Wickham for this book). The protagonists aren’t as sparkly as Becky Bloomwood and Samantha Sweeting, and though they all (with the exception of Candice) seem to have their feet firmly planted in reality, that’s not really what I’m looking for in a book like this. I didn’t find them as endearing as Kinsella’s other characters, sadly, though Maggie was passable.

For more books by Sophie Kinsella, try Can You Keep a Secret? which is about a girl who spills her secrets to a man next to her on a plane who turns out to be her new boss. Really good, actually, and much better than the entire Shopaholic series (though try Shopaholic Takes Manhattan if you’re determined to read something from the set).

An English Major's Bookshelf

2008-07-21T14:18:00.012-04:00

Let’s face it; everyone has had that moment in class where the professor referenced Prometheus or the important symbolic value of snakes or Jung or Freud or something else outside the realm of literature that went straight over his or her head. Here, for every student who has felt like a complete moron in one English class or another, is a list of several books that, when all else fails, will at least make you sound smarter when you cite them:

Mythology
by Edith Hamilton
My friend Corey has been after me to read this book since fifth grade, so that’s a good 12, almost 13, years. I even tried to buy it on Amazon once, only to have my college’s mailroom lose it. Finally, Corey simply gave me one of her twelve copies, for which I am really, truly grateful. It covers Greek and Roman mythology almost comprehensively, with a smattering of Norse mythology at the end. Perfect for looking up all those crazy mythological references in Fitzgerald.

The Hero with A Thousand Faces or The Power of Myth
by Joseph Campbell
If you steer clear of his self-help books and concentrate on what Campbell has done with his examination of the common themes in world myths, stories and folklore, you’ll be amazed at how easily you’re able to find patterns that connect the themes in almost all literature. Also, it gives you the chance to raise your hand in class and say things like, “Well, the way I see it, Huck is really on a modified and somewhat ironic hero’s journey…”

Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
by Carl Gustav Jung
Campbell owes a lot more to Jung than he admits, and also this is a great way to get ideas for paper topics like “Shadow Figures in Children's Literature” or “Who Is That Masked Woman? The Nature of the Modern Anima as Seen in John Cheever’s Short Works.” Or something.

The Interpretation of Dreams
by Sigmund Freud
Haven’t read it, but I plan to as soon as I can wrap my head around the whole notion of sitting down with Freud on my summer vacation. Heh. Anyway, Freud is kind of another perspective from Jung, and I’m willing to bet that anything Jung didn’t cover, or didn’t cover in a way that would help you, Freud did.

The Origin of Species
by Charles Darwin
Obviously, Darwin’s work had an incredible impact on the scientific, social, and literary realms. Seriously, he started a whole movement of literature called “naturalism” which was all about biological forces and natural selection and the like. So it’s probably good to have.

The Encyclopedia Britannica
Yes, the whole thing. And no, I don’t own it. But even though Wikipedia is faster and much cheaper, professors won’t take Wikipedia as a reliable source. No one is willing to mess with the old EB, though, so use it at will. Also makes for a great conversation starter, as you’ll know facts like that coffee is the second most traded product in the world after petroleum.

Other Works You Might Want:

A good Latin-to-English dictionary
Older works and even some new ones use Latin a whole lot. So you’re going to want this, especially if you’re reading Thomas De Quincey or something.

A good French-to-English dictionary
Same as above; I’ve always found mine useful. Then again, I was also taking French, so it came in handy in other ways.

The MLA Stylebook, Eats, Shoots and Leaves or The Chicago Manual of Style
Anything that will help you with grammatical questions while writing papers. You might be the most brilliant literary mind in several hundred years, but no one will take you seriously if you don’t know the difference between their, they’re and there.

Mercy by Jodi Picoult

2008-07-21T13:59:00.002-04:00

Dear Jodi,

Oh, Jodi, Jodi, Jodi. What were you thinking here? I mean, I loved Plain Truth. I even referenced it in another post because I liked it so much. It felt so real, and so researched, and so amazing that I lauded you as the girl who graduated Princeton and became a fantastic writer.

Apparently it didn’t happen that fast. Or you messed up along the way somewhere. Because somehow, you managed to produce Mercy, a book that, while it has some wonderful imagery and ideas, was possessed with the kind of absurdity I would never have expected from you.

Number one, how is it possible for everyone in the town to be related if the protagonist married a woman from his hometown? If he married his cousin, just say so. But it seems like everyone in the town is related except for her, and that gets confusing. It’s a little like asking where Cain found his wife, you know?

Number two, I find it hard to believe that you can so easily translate a Scottish clan leader from the 1700s to a modern-day police chief in a small town. I mean, maybe. But I really think you pushed the Scottish thing too far. These people are American. Their ancestors might have been Scottish, they may have Scottish heritage, but none of them should be breaking out into brogues. Which, unfortunately, the main character does more than once. This being a man who lived in Scotland only briefly, twenty years ago.

Number three, the affair? Ugh. What in God’s name were you trying to do there? The main character’s affair was everything the relationship in Plain Truth was not – overblown and characterized with a passion that I am pretty sure you stole out of that month’s Harlequin Romance. The flowers were a nice touch, but not enough to rescue it.

Finally, and I hate to say this, but you managed to make me hate almost every character in this book. The main character was a jerk and a cheat and a fake, his wife needed to grow a pair, his lover needed to get over herself and stop being so bloody free-spirited, his cousin needed to come to terms with the fact that even though he killed his wife out of love, it’s still a murder, and his cousin’s wife needed to realize that perhaps asking her husband to kill her might have some unpleasant consequences for him. Like jail time.

That’s not to say that they were badly drawn, I’m just saying, I wanted someone to root for. I did like the lawyer, though, so well done there. (Side note: All your lawyers are sympathetic, and at least one is really heart-wrenchingly hot. Are you perchance married to a lawyer?)

I’m glad you’ve changed and grown since this, Jodi. I can only hope that My Sister’s Keeper is better, proving that Plain Truth is a true representation of your work, and not just a fluke.

Eat Pray Love By Elizabeth Gilbert

2008-07-03T19:49:00.004-04:00

So Sofie and I have come to Pizzeria da Michele, and these pies we have just ordered—one for each of us—are making us lose our minds. I love my pizza so much, in fact, that I have come to believe in my delirium that my pizza might actually love me, in return…

Like all great philosophical ideas, this one is simple to understand but virtually impossible to imbibe. OK—so we are all one, and divinity abides within us equally. No problem. Understood. But now try living from that place…

But I was always coming here. I thought about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen.

See, this is why I love Penguin Books: because they print books like this. There are so many reasons to love this book that I can’t even think where to start. Elizabeth Gilbert in an Italian café, wishing an Italian friend would kiss her. This is as good a place as any, since at its heart, this book is basically about a woman who has a passion for travel and an infatuation with life—or is it the other way around?

In the introduction, Gilbert explains that her book is made of 108 short episodes, divided into three sections containing 36 stories each, all of which were written in her 36^thyear. The quotes above include one quote from each section, starting with Italy, the next from India, and the next from Indonesia.

Now, I don’t consider myself an excessively superstitious person, or even overly obsessive-compulsive, but I have to admit there is something reassuring about a logical structure based on a number that is held to be sacred (or at least very important) by at least two world religions. And it's my favorite number, so that counts (har har) for something, I guess.

So I was already sold by page two. But then Gilbert talks about how she got to Italy—the divorce, the depression, the affair, the yearning to speak a language that makes her feel sexy again. And, in addition, how she has chosen three countries (Italy, India, and Indonesia) to help her regain her sense of who she is and how she should be living her life.

It’s clear that Gilbert has found out who she is—her voice is not only strong and clear throughout, but amazingly likeable. Even though she obviously has some extensive financial resources, judging by her ability to take a year off and travel, she never name-drops about her employment or gives off the tiniest air or superiority.

The book reads like your friend Liz invited you over for a cup of coffee and you two had a conversation about some amazing things she did. Never preachy, always enjoyable, and often life-altering, this is one of the few books I know will go with me wherever I end up.

And for my next trick...

2008-06-18T17:16:00.003-04:00

Okay, folks, here's what's coming as soon as I get my life together:

* Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
Kindly lent by my little sister, and so amazing I read it in a day.

* Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
Picked up at Wal-Mart yesterday, and so great I find myself nodding along as I read like she's talking to me. I'm way excited about this one.

* Mercy by Jodi Picoult
Mom's choice at Wal-Mart, but it looks pretty good. Apparently there's some sort of trial in this one as well? Not sure.

* Edith Hamilton's Mythology, if I can find some way to do a review on it. It seems like I am going to need a different sort of format. Maybe not a review so much as a pondering, or a list of all the non-literary books English majors need to have in their libraries.

* Any suggestions, which will be put into action as soon as I get a paycheck and can get on Amazon. Don't hold your breath, as my debit card just expired and I'm supposed to be saving money for Ireland. Heh.

EDIT: Not so much on the Mercy, folks. I tried, but around the time the main character slipped into a Scottish burr--mind you, the man has barely been to Scotland--I stopped. Maybe I'll try again later, but don't expect a stunning review.

The Coffee Trader by David Liss

2008-06-18T16:58:00.003-04:00

“This coffee isn’t like wine or beer, which we drink to make merry or because it quenches thirst or even because it is delightful. This will only make you thirstier, it will never make you merry, and the taste, let us be honest, may be curious but never pleasing. Coffee is something…something far more important.”

This book is every caffeine addict’s wet dream. Sorry for that graphic image, but 386 pages of a high-stakes fictionalized historical account of how coffee came to Europe cannot be described any other way.

Every single character drinks, as well as sleeps and breathes, coffee. Coffee is described as this miraculous, almost magical, drink that makes failed men successful, virtuous men backstabbing, and submissive women full of spunk. The book has this kind of nervous, jumpy, impatient feel that makes me wonder how much coffee David Liss was drinking at the time – but the novel is all the better for it.

Unfortunately, the main character’s scheme to bring coffee to Amsterdam involves a financially risky and rather complicated set of plans to manipulate The Exchange, 17^th century Amsterdam’s version of the stock market. This means a great deal of financial talk, a lot of complicated language revolving around “puts” and other things that totally went straight over my head – all three times I read it, so it’s not like I just read too quickly.

But if you’ve got the mindset for finance, the novel would probably be even better. Even if you don’t like finance at all, there are still plenty of interesting characters and historical idiosyncrasies to keep you amused. There’s a woman who grows up Catholic and discovers she’s a secret Jew, a Jewish man who lived through the Inquisition, a widow and her manservant who are both more and less than what they seem, and a very strange, possibly mad, Dutchman who inexplicably speaks Portuguese. And all of the above are connected by coffee.

David Liss has also written two other books concerning historical intrigue: A Conspiracy of Paper and A Spectacle of Corruption. Maybe if you have no interest in the stock market, even historically, these would be a better choice?

Plain and Simple

2008-06-09T21:03:00.007-04:00

“There’s no way for me to make you understand what it means to be Plain, because most people can’t see past the buggies and the funny clothes to the beliefs that really identify the Amish. But a murder charge—well, it’s an English thing.”

My mother reads a lot of books about Amish people, and I don’t know why. They all seem to involve a young man and a young woman who fall in love, but one is an Englischer and one is Plain so their romance is impossible. Sometimes the woman has been shunned from the Order and falls in love with an English man, only to realize that she’s really Plain at heart. Usually someone comes to the Lord.

So when my mother plunked Plain Truth down on my dresser (on top of the baked good mysteries), I teased her mercilessly. It wasn’t until I read that Jodi Picoult has an A.B. in Creative Writing from Princeton and a master’s from Harvard that I started to gain some respect for her.

If everyone who comes out of Princeton can write like this, I think we should round up all those romance novelists and make them take a few courses. Picoult takes the reader into the center of Amish culture and exposes the humanity behind all the rules and restrictions. The woman could have been a journalist, with all the research that must have gone into this book, and the realism with which she paints everyday life in a Plain community. That being said, I’m glad she decided to be a novelist.

The plot is good. I am used to being able to guess what the outcome of any given book is going to be, with the exception of Gentlemen and Players by Joanne Harris and a few select others. And while there were hints through Plain Truth about the real story behind the dead baby in the barn, I have to say, I was stunned when I discovered what happened. Picoult says in the readers guide that she found it really challenging not to have the end be a Scooby-Doo moment – to place tiny clues throughout the narrative so the conclusion made sense. I don’t think she should have worried, because she did it absolutely perfectly.

The characters aren’t bad, either. I liked Ellie, the big-city lawyer, and her psychiatrist friend/lover, Dr. Cooper (he of the coffee and peppermint gum, who goes by the inane nickname of Coop throughout the entire novel). What I loved about this pairing was that Picoult was keenly aware of whenever she was on the edge of a too-soppy moment.

In one courtroom scene where Ellie has Coop on the stand and they begin talking about their relationship through the guise of the case, in a way that is perhaps a little overdrawn, the judge wryly asks Ellie to please change the channel from As the World Turns back to The People’s Court. It’s that kind of self-awareness that keeps Picoult from being just another feel-good women’s fiction writer.

I liked the sympathy Picoult has for her other characters, too, including the Plain boyfriend of the woman who had the baby in the barn, who easily could have been just a dolt or a kind of Amish jock – handsome, but nothing in his head. Picoult gives him feelings and ambitions and an amazing sense of humanity, especially once he’s on the stand in the courtroom.

This is most definitely the best book my mother has made me read so far. While I’m not sure if I’d read it over again (though I probably would), I am definitely going to be on the lookout for more of Jodi Picoult’s books – and I’ll be less hesitant next time Mom tries to make me read something. Maybe.

You know you're single when...

2008-06-09T20:24:00.005-04:00

I am turning into a bitter old woman, and here’s how I know: I couldn’t finish the three cheap romance novels I meant to read for the post today. Sure, I read the first two. But somewhere between starting the third and viewing 27 Dresses, my will to suffer through another overwrought, unrealistic romance disappeared, only to be replaced with a raging cynicism that is singularly unattractive.

The first romance novel I read was The Husband She Never Knew, about a girl named Vicki (as in vixen, in case you didn’t get that) who married an Irish guy who was desperate for a green card. When she later wants to marry a dashing and yet slimy antiques dealer, her previous marriage causes problems. Somewhere in the middle there are a storm and a twisted ankle, incidents that end in Vicki and Irish Man making tender, yet impassioned love on a sailboat.

The second one was called Wife for a While, in which Chelsea, or “Chels” as she is affectionately referred to, offers to marry Ben so he can keep his grandfather’s apple orchard. The only condition is that she wants a baby in return, and then of course he objects to being treated like a sperm bank, so they make tender, yet impassioned love on a couch, I think. Bonus points to Ben for refraining during her period (yuck).

In the third, called The Millionaire and the Glass Slipper, was about a millionaire who has to find someone to marry him or lose his share in his father’s business. The only catch is that she can’t know he’s J.T. Whatever, and she has to marry him for love. This is the one I didn’t finish, but I am sure that J.T. and Amy (the plain younger woman he falls for instead of her sophisticated polished stepsister) make tender, yet impassioned love on a yacht or in his office or something.

And that’s where I stopped. Because I cannot imagine that there are women out there who are so deluded or so lonely that they actually believe these plotlines and these men. First, there are simply not that many men out there who have to get married to save a large sum of money. Second, I refuse to believe that romances like these exist in real life.

There are fictional romances I can get behind, don’t get me wrong. There are higher-end romance novels that are not too shabby, and I'll admit to reading and enjoying Nora Roberts from time to time. As for romance in other types of novels, there’s a moment in the next book I’m going to review where the protagonist describes the guy she’s after as smelling like coffee and peppermint gum. I can believe that – coffee because it’s morning, the gum because stale coffee breath isn’t attractive. The fact that she noticed this fairly everyday scent (not aftershave or a vague ‘man smell’ that I can only assume is made from sperm and Axe) and found it attractive is even better.

But when every single man in these other novels is so clearly a figment of some uncreative female fantasy, described as rugged, yet somehow polished; dignified, yet somehow wild; and gentle, yet somehow untamable in bed, I can’t believe that. I can barely dignify it with a response, though clearly I managed to rise to the occasion.

The fact remains that I can only suspend my disbelief for so long. Maybe I could have finished the one about the millionaire had I not been forced to watch the travesty that was the character of Kevin Doyle -- who, by the way, is about as realistic as Superman. Find me a journalist who isn't fat, doesn't live off of cheese doodles, has time to follow women all over the city, dresses that well and can still afford to give away Blackberrys, and then I'll be happy to recant. Good luck.

Sure, the men in romance novels and romantic comedies are designed to make women fall in love with them, and I’m sure many women do. But not this bitter old crone, who has these novels to thank, not for some satisfactory light reading or even an amused laugh at the poor quality of the writing, but for a bitter taste in her mouth that even a whole pack of Stride isn’t going to get rid of.

The Cookie Jar Mysteries

2008-06-07T14:44:00.004-04:00

I have been known to read the odd mystery, which is why I didn’t balk when my mother dumped three of Joanne Fluke’s novels on my bed and demanded I at least look at them.

And look I did, because if there’s anything I love more than a mystery, it’s a mystery that involves food. And since all of Fluke’s works have the word “Murder” combined with some sort of baked good in the title, I figured they were worth a shot. And, lucky for you, three books means a triple review.

Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder

The thought struck Hannah like a lightning bolt of dread. Bill had told her to be careful about asking questions and she thought she had. But what if the killer had the misguided notion that she was hot on his tail?

I’m a little mystified (har har) about the title of the book. The murder victim was found with chocolate chip cookies scattered about, yes, but that’s a minor detail and they had nothing to do with the death, so why do they get such a place in the title? That aside, though, the book really wasn’t bad.

This is the first in the series, and though some of the characters are a little shallow and Fluke’s idea of an attractive male character involves a mustache, it wasn’t bad. The small-town atmosphere was cute, the requisite romantic entanglements and a miraculous transformation from frumpy to sexy were all there, and I actually grew to like Andrea, the protagonist’s sister, very much.

Hannah Swensen herself isn’t bad either, as female detectives go. Not as witty as Amelia Peabody Radcliffe and not as sexy as Rei Shimura, Hannah seems like a genuine human being with her own set of problems (including a stunning caffeine addiction). I’ll always take a realistic coffee-swilling baker over an international detective who falls into bed with two to three different men in every book.

Strawberry Shortcake Murder

Same dilemma about the title, frankly. Murder victim found with his face in a plate of Hannah’s strawberry shortcake – recipe included! Side note, my mother tried this recipe and hated it, which is probably good because I don’t know how I’d feel about eating shortcake knowing that the victim in the book had bled all over a similar piece.

But I digress. I liked Hannah even better in this book, though I think if Fluke is going to try to have this sexual tension involving the two men in her life, she needs to make sure it’s clear that Hannah actually likes both of them. The more handsome prospect is so overwrought as to be laughable, and the other, balder man seems like he’s never really going to be more than a friend.

The plot wasn’t badly executed, though, and it kept me interested through most of the book. I do think that Hannah, being the detective she is, would not have so easily missed those last few clues that led to the murderer’s capture, but I see why Fluke needed to make Hannah momentarily stupid. Clumsy writing, yes, but also understandable.

Carrot Cake Murder

Possibly this woman needs to stop handing out baked goods. This time, she gives a few slices of carrot cake to a man who is later discovered with an ice pick in his chest. Yikes.

What struck me most, though, about this particular book is the amount of times Fluke seems to introduce a topic just to show off the trivia she knows. I noticed it a little bit in both Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder and Strawberry Shortcake Murder, but it came out in full force in this book around page 44, where Fluke takes a whole half page to talk about the weights of regulation and practice hockey pucks, as well as the different types of hockey pucks and what they are used for. All this while Hannah’s phone is ringing and her cat is running around inside the bathtub like a whirling dervish. Am I supposed to believe that anyone would take that kind of time to ponder sports equipment, especially at that particular point?

The series as a whole is definitely worth checking out and reading, if not re-reading. There are 10 total books in the series, starting with Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder and ending with Carrot Cake Murder, so far as I’m aware, but there might be more. Not sure if the recipes are any good, though – I’m dying to try the Scandanavian Almond Cake from that last book, but my mother’s attempts at Fluke’s recipes didn’t yield great results. Possibly they’re more of a gimmick than anything else.

The Eye of Jade

2008-06-03T14:11:00.003-04:00

The Eye of Jade by Diane Wei Lang has a beautiful cover, and to be honest, that's what drew me toward it. It's all red and gold and absolutely gorgeous, and generally if that much attention is spent on a cover, it's safe to say that the actual book will be pretty good. Not so in this case.

It's ostensibly a mystery novel, with protagonist Mei Wang opening her own business as a private detective in China. Lang tells the reader that private detectives are illegal in China, which should add excitement to the plot, but sadly no one in the book seems at all concerned that Mei is living outside the law. The story opens with her taking on a case from a man named Shao, a case that has nothing to do with the rest of the novel and only leads to confusion later. Twenty-five pages in, there is still no hint of the artifact the dust jacket promises Mei will be commissioned to find, and there is no sense of the plot heading anywhere. There are flashbacks galore that seem like they're supposed to add depth to the character, but they're so vague and so out of the blue that the reader ends up more confused than enlightened.

Near the middle of the book, I found myself writing things like "WHAT'S THE POINT?" and "FOCUS?!?" in my notes. I thought maybe I had missed a previous book in the series and that's why I was confused (no such luck), I thought maybe I was the one not focusing, and I eventually just gave up and put the book down unfinished.

Maybe I missed something. After all, Lang's native language is Mandarin, not English, and maybe her writing style has literary influences that I don't recognize and therefore didn't appreciate. Maybe I focused too hard on the mystery part of things rather than just taking the plot as it came and seeing how Lang worked things out. It's very possible that my total lack of enjoyment was my own fault, and not anything Lang did wrong.

I think I understand why the book was written. With the recent mania for everything Asian, it makes sense that a Chinese woman might see what Sujata Massey, Amy Tan and Jhumpa Lahiri (not Asian, but same idea) have done and think she could do it. And Lang is probably right; there is a niche right now for Asian-inspired everything, and with the Olympics coming up in Beijing and the comparative lack of Chinese-inspired literature, sure, there's space for a Chinese writer.

I also think that Lang wanted to use some of her own life for a story. Beginning writers are always told to write what they know. Since both Lang and her protagonist have been in labor camps, both of their fathers have died in them, and both struggle against Communist China in their own ways, I'm positive Lang took this advice. Other authors (see above) have done it with great success, but somehow Lang didn't take it beyond autobiography and make it into a really good story. I found myself wondering what Mei's past had to do with finding this artifact that is barely mentioned but presumably the point of the novel. Maybe if I had finished the book, I might have understood better, but suffering through 200 pages to get the answer didn't seem quite worth it.

That's why, despite getting why the book was written, I can't recommend it. Some critics are calling it exquisitely written, but since this book made me want to whip out a pencil and start rewriting it in the margins, I'd have to respectfully disagree. Steer away from this one, unless you have a passion for China or a lot of time to kill.

So I lied.

2008-05-29T20:03:00.003-04:00

This post was not even hinted at in the last one, and that's because my mother has taken up the habit of shoving books in my hands and being like, "Here! Read this! You'll really like it!" Most of these books involve young Amish people dealing with love and life in the order, but once in a while she actually choses a good one.

The latest novel she demanded I read was The Friday Night Knitting Club. I’m always kind of skeptical about novels that revolve around handicrafts, and here’s why: their target audience is almost always middle-aged Southern Baptist moms who are looking for something to read before bed.

That’s fine, especially if you happen to be a middle-aged Southern Baptist mom, but that’s not me and, as such, I never enjoy that kind of book. But Kate Jacobs seems to have taken the traditional form of the handicraft novel and tweaked it just enough to make it interesting.

The book is clichéd, yes. There are reunited fathers and daughters, pregnancies, and trips to find relatives abroad. But it’s not a Christian romance novel, and people actually cheat on their husbands, make sweaters that don’t fit and afghans that are really ugly, explore the tricky subject of race (albeit briefly and a little unconvincingly), and discuss the importance of gynecological appointments for sexually active senior citizens.

Because of those slightly different aspects, I got the feeling that Jacobs was trying very hard not to fall into the feel-good novel trap. This is most likely why she peppered her writing with very mild swear words that she probably felt gave her writing a hip edge. I don’t believe Kate Jacobs ever actually uses the word “damn” in real life, and I think she relies on it to bring validity and realism to her dialog, when it actually does just the opposite.

Still, she gets points for being pretty gutsy later in the novel. At the risk of revealing a spoiler, let’s just say that when something very terrible happens to a very loveable character, Jacobs lets it run its full, purely realistic course without trying to make much sense of it or imbue it with a moral lesson. Shit happens, Jacobs seems to say, and sometimes there’s not a reason. Though there are a few soppy scenes surrounding the incident (and throughout the novel), it was genuinely gut-wrenching without being preachy or too emotionally manipulative. Way to be -- definitely a book worth borrowing.

Coming Soon to a Blog Near You

2008-05-24T11:54:00.003-04:00

My internet access will be touch and go until sometime next week, but here's a brief look at what's coming once I get settled:

-- A special romance novels post, highlighting three "best of the worst" (or is it worst of the worst?) novels from various series. Most of them involve inheritances that are about to be lost, the need for green cards, sexual abuse, and pregnancy.

-- A review of The Undomestic Goddess by Sophie Kinsella. Not a bad book, all in all, but not really for serious literary people. You'll see what I mean.

-- A half-review and a pondering of The Eye of Jade by Diane Wei Liang. It's a half-review because I didn't finish the book. You'll see why.

-- Other reviews, including The Coffee Trader by David Liss, Gentlemen and Players by Joanne Harris, a book about interpreting body language, and whatever else my parents gave me for graduation.

I'm also debating tweaking the subject matter of this blog to make it exclusively about bad books, or books I expect to be bad, which seems more in keeping with the title but would narrow the field a bit. On the other hand, bad books are always easier to write about and more fun to read, so maybe I'd actually post more. Hmm.

Sharp Teeth

2008-05-16T10:41:00.012-04:00

"We are wolves," Cutter chants
in his mind.
"We don't find the weak. We
don't prey on the slow.
We simply eat absolutely
fucking everything."

I first heard about this book in Mother Jones, where they interviewed the author, Toby Barlow. After hearing what it was about (werewolves in L.A.) and desperate for a good book during my last week here, I ran out to the library and tracked down a copy. So excited that I found it, I settled back in my nest chair, opened to the first page....and let out a cry of dismay.

Poetry. The whole thing is an epic free verse poem. Now, I hate poetry with a passion. I think that most post-modern poetry is pretentious, narcissistic and cliched. But this book sounded so good, and it was shelved with the novels (rather than poetry or, God forbid, sci-fi) so I decided to give it a go.

And it was amazing. Eight pages in I already couldn't put it down. This book grabbed me and held me and wouldn't let me go until I finished all 308 pages of lyrical wonderfulness.

The language is excellent -- this free verse isn't Walt Whitman-style, with huge long sentences that don't give your brain a chance to keep up. Barlow writes in snippets, almost, little snapshots of information that really are perfect for grabbing and keeping one's attention. Even I, with my tendency to unconsciously speed-read, didn't skim for at least the first 250 pages (a miraculous feat, really). To give you an idea of the length of the lines, I actually had to count to make sure it wasn't blank verse.

The poetry also gives Barlow a chance to be more flowery than he would be able to in a novel of this sort. If he had written in prose, it might have been a good book, an okay book -- but it would have simultaneously have been overwrought and underemotional. There would have been too many unnecessary words and we would have been following around a pack of dead-inside dog/humans who have little to no beauty in their world.

But the poetry allows Barlow to dwell on how wonderful it is to be with someone and feel safe, the joy of living the life of a surfer in Santa Cruz, and how beautiful the moon is. And all without being too sappy, because it's tempered by the depictions of how utterly violent these characters are. The second one of Barlow's characters pulls out a chain saw, all soppiness is pretty much gone.

The characters are amazing, too, and coupled with a twisted plot that comes together almost seamlessly (though it suffers a little, I think, because of the form of the novel itself), this makes for one seriously impressive debut novel. Rumor has it that the film rights have been bought and screenwriters are working on it now -- though Barlow told Mother Jones that he doesn't think it will work, I think it's at least worth a shot.

A Reader's Guide to a Wacky Post-Modernist Novel

2008-04-20T19:51:00.003-04:00

"She went to see my grandma...my other grandma," he said. "I have another grandma?" How to describe the way Christian said this? How to describe a five-year-old boy who finds out that he has two sets of grandparents and not just one? How to describe a boy who discovers that his father has for years and years lied about his own parents' being dead? And how to describe a father who doesn't think that, in killing off his parents, he has killed his children's grandparents in the bargain?

It's like Brock Clarke had a dream about a guy who burned down the Emily Dickinson house, went to jail, and had a lot of things happen that he can't make sense of. Following the plot is like being stuck in a dream of your own, with only a vague idea of how the ideas connect and how you got where you are.

The best part of this book is the main character, Sam Pulsifer. Sam is the most bumbling protagonist I've seen in quite a while, who gets himself into the weirdest situations possible but in such a fundamentally real way that it seems almost plausible.

That is to say, Sam himself is real (contrary to what another character will say somewhere in the middle), but his world is about as surreal as it gets. Bond analysts who write novels about other people's lives? The son of the people he killed shows up and steals his wife? Someone starts copy-catting his Emily Dickinson bonfire? Bizzare.

But unlike in Invisible Monsters, I think the characters and the motivations are realistic, and Sam's bewilderment at the events of the novel just help solidify that. He doesn't know how the wife-stealing happened, he's not even sure how he got his wife to marry him in the first place, so the feelings of the reader are confirmed by that of the protagonist himself.

Brock Clarke is headed for something amazing; this book is good, but not his masterpiece. I think even he would admit that this novel is better than his last one, Ordinary White Boy -- in fact, Clarke has his protagonist poke fun at that book in the middle of this one. Though he's not quite there yet, look out when he makes it, because he's going to be one of the best post-modern novelists out there.

Silly Rabbit, books are for kids!

2008-04-15T10:28:00.009-04:00

You know what I miss? Reading silly young adult novels without being judged. Come on, we all read some really, really lame books when we were younger, or at least I did. But because it's spring, and I'm in a silly and nostalgic mood, I thought I'd talk about some of the books that stand out in my mind from those years when I read everything I could get my hands on...none of which I'd be caught dead reading now, but really loved at the time.

Woman in the Wall by Patrice Kindl
This was my favorite book for a year or two. Never mind that there's no way a seven-year-old girl could build a whole living space within the walls of her house only using the tools her dead father left behind, let alone that her family would be cool with this. But I get the metaphor, though I didn't at the time -- it's hard to miss the moth/cocoon connection later in the story, and this book is really too bizarre to be taken literally by anyone but the very earnest young reader I was.

Eva by Peter Dickinson
I checked this book out of the library at least six times over the course of my pre-adolescent years. Now that I know it's not actually that easy to transplant a young girl's brain into that of a chimpanzee, it has lost some of its charm, yeah. It's probably not even scientific enough to be science fiction. Nothing is really resolved in the end, except maybe something about environmentalism and that we're all just animals anyway and probably we shouldn't be so cruel as to ignore animals lost in scientific progress. Or something. It's probably important to note that this was written in the 1980s.

Emperor Mage by Tamora Pierce
Another book about a teenage girl who does something really, really cool. Sensing a theme here? This was my favorite book ever until I had the imagination beaten out of me by serious literary criticism and an interest in journalism. I mean, come on. The girl speaks to animals, has the ability to turn into one if she wants, and at some point resurrects the bones of dinosaurs to storm a castle. There's not much out there that can compete with that. In retrospect, I think I might have liked the story of Wolf Speaker, its prequel, better, but this is the one where she starts to shape-shift, which I thought was pretty amazing, without any of the creepiness of the Animorphs series that was kind of popular at the time.

Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell
Wolf-Woman by Sherryl Jordan
The Music of Dolphins by Karen Hesse
So I was fascinated by survival stories, especially ones that involved animals in some form. I also went through a really long wolf-loving phase that reached its peak in middle school, so of course a book about a girl who was partly raised by wolves (in conjunction with the girl who can talk to them -- see above) was just about my favorite thing ever. But dolphins were pretty cool, too, as anyone who's ever bought a Lisa Frank folder can tell you, so that explains the others.

Live from the Library

2008-04-07T11:54:00.008-04:00

So, I was thinking today (as I sat in the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library trying to look unapproachable) that there are probably very few book topics left out there that haven't been used. That in itself is depressing enough, since I would guess that "very few" is more like "none." But what's more depressing is that there are so few topics out there anyway, especially for fiction.

Leaving aside the greats and the classics, let's go with mass-appeal fiction. There are a few categories I can come up with off the top of my head:

Historical. Divided into:
a) thrillers in which a person overcomes the limits set by their time period and solves some mystery full of intrigue and murder. If the person is male, this is seen as unremarkable, though eccentric. If the person is female, every other character will remark on how it's unseemly.
b) romances. More on this later. Often these will be half history, half fantasy. See below.
c) pseudo-biographical, meaning the author was too lazy or too entrenched in the creative process to write an actual biography.

Romance. Oh boy. These are the worst. There are:
a) pseudo-pornographic. These exist solely to use raunchy metaphors and to embarrass women when they (the books, not the women) fall out of one's purse in public. Identified by their oddly similar and yet completely lifeless characters. Bonus points for checkered pasts, including run-ins with the law and previous sexual abuse, the damage from which is undone by a mind-blowing orgasm around page 20.
b) artsy-fartsy. These pretend to be literature (judging by the covers), but when you read them, it's the same old thing. Fewer metaphors and less embarrassing, but no less predictable.
c) Christian. More on this later. MUCH less sex. That is to say none at all beyond longing glances and passionate hand brushes.

Sci-fi/Fantasy. I am smashing these two together despite my better judgment, only because they are shelved together. These include:
a) romances in all categories, except generally Christian. Usually these will take place in either a castle in a made-up kingdom, or in some solar system where the planets are warring and there's a lot of death and zipping around in spaceships. Sometimes there are people who can turn into/talk with animals. That's always a plus.
b) "concept" novels. As in, wouldn't it be interesting if....fill in the blank. Like what if Homo Erectus didn't become extinct/the South won the war. Usually the idea is okay, the story is not.
c) pseudo-historical. Often these involve Arthur and magic, but sometimes there are cave people.
d) "prophetical." Generally preaching about what could happen if...fill in the blank. We don't stop global warming, we micro-manage the population, etc. Sometimes these are Christian (Left Behind), other times they are not (Brave New World, etc).

Horror. Often found in the mystery section, but also can be found in fantasy, sci-fi, or sometimes maybe romance. These almost all involve monsters, ghosts, psychopaths or other things that go bump in the night.

"Redemption" novels. Someone bad turns good. Usually this someone also overcomes an obstacle of some sort that was holding them back. Can be found in all other categories.

"Anti-redemption" novels. Someone bad tries to turn good, fails. Or dies while attempting to surmount an obstacle, which usually makes it a redemption novel, but not always. Can be found in all other categories.

Mystery. Someone solves something, often while in the midst of a historical/made-up world, romantic entanglement, or personal conversion (religious or otherwise).

Christian. Oh boy. Here's the run-down:
a) Historical. These are either in a time or place where Christianity is oppressed, or where everyone is Christian except the bitter man/woman/war vet/cowboy/spinster school teacher. Eventually he/she will find the Lord and all will be well, the kingdom saved, war ended, sheep sheared, etc.
b) Romance. Same as above, sometimes historical, but will always end with the bitter atheist finding love and the Lord at the same time. Usually there are children.
c) Sci-fi/Fantasy. With the exception of C.S. Lewis, these combine the worst of the two genres. I've never really run into a stereotypical sci-fi novel with life on other planets and such, but I can tell you that usually there are thrillers with odd breezes and evil spiritual forces that try to bring down the believer. Someone converts.
d) Horror. Again, from what I've seen it's usually more thriller-y than anything else, but I'm willing to bet there's Christian horror out there that I have missed. No doubt some of Satan's minions come stalk the earth, only to be overcome by a kindly priest and a couple who has brought each other to the Lord and fallen in love in the process of conquering evil. Sensing a theme?

My battery's about to die. But my point is, there's nothing left to write. Nothing. I'm willing to bet that every book, with the exception of the greats (eh, not even all of them), fits into these categories. Good luck finding one -- or writing one -- that isn't ;)

Book Slut

2008-03-29T21:44:00.002-04:00

Ha! I would so dump a guy if it turned out he hated reading or, at the very least, wasn't willing to hear me expound on Salinger every once in a while. Apparently, I'm not the only one:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/books/review/Donadio-t.html

I know this is becoming more of a "highlights of the New York Times Book section" than a literature blog, but things have been crazy. I promise, more when I've finished The Grapes of Wrath, Sula, and all that stuff on Virginia Woolf's mental illness. I've also got some Harry Turtledove and An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England on the back burner, so look for those soon.

It just keeps coming...

2008-03-07T12:00:00.002-05:00

Apparently Ms. Seltzer (of my last post), made up the foundation she worked for to aid gang members as well. Read the article here.

Well, at least this might take some pressure off the publisher...

Consequences, yes. Love? Not so much.

2008-03-04T23:13:00.003-05:00

Oh man. I am so glad I am not this publisher right now. Why? Because of this.

For those of you who don't know, Margaret B. Jones wrote a very touching memoir about being the half-white, half-Native American foster daughter of a black family, including her involvement with gangs and drugs in South-Central Los Angeles.

Too bad her name is Peggy Seltzer, she's actually all-white, grew up in a well-to-do family, and made up the entire thing based on the experiences of friends who had been in gangs.

Yes, it's bad that The New York Times ran two articles (second here) on it and somehow managed to miss the fact that she was lying about her past. I really cannot believe that Mimi Read went to this woman's house, carefully examined her lifestyle, and somehow missed that maybe Ms. Jones wasn't all she said she was. But now they're covering the issue again and again, and they'll come out okay. This is probably the best book-related story all year, and at least it's selling papers.

It's bad, too, that editor Sarah McGrath spent three years working on this book and didn't know. But obviously Ms. Seltzer was a seasoned liar if she could fool two Times reporters and an entire branch of Penguin Group USA. She knew her story -- hell, she wrote a whole life story and appropriated it as her own!

Ms. Seltzer is essentially a combination of Jay Gatsby and Tom Ripley. And while the Times and Riverhead Books probably are kicking themselves over this whole thing (I would have loved to be a fly on the wall in that newsroom), really the only person to blame is Ms. Seltzer herself. Everyone remember James Frey? Yeah. Same deal.

Edit: Check out this article on yet another author who came clean about her fabricated memoir. Come on, people. It's still good if it's just a novel. Also check out this Slate article.

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

2008-02-25T09:48:00.009-05:00

I am a person who feels guilty for crimes I have not committed, or have not committed in years. The police search the train station for a serial rapist and I cover my face with a newspaper, wondering if maybe I did it in my sleep.... I seem to have developed a remarkable perspiration problem. My conscience is cross-wired with my sweat glands, but there's a short in the system and I break out over things I didn't do, which only makes me look more suspect.

I'm about two years behind the bandwagon on this book. Actually, it might be more like three or four years, but regardless, at some point, David Sedaris was the hot new thing in the book world.

I guess I can see why. I enjoyed all of his stories, and while some of them were a little too neatly tied up and others sort of dropped off in the middle of nowhere, there's no doubt this man can write.

There's a hysterical anecdote in this collection about a tourist in Normandy stopping for directions and catching Mr. Sedaris drowning an injured mouse in a bucket. This in itself is not terribly funny, especially since the story is in the same vein as the "I-did-nothing-why-do-I-feel-guilty" pedophilia story. However, I cracked up at the line, "Oh...I see you have a little swimming mouse." I don't know why, but it probably has something to do with the image of an accented man in track pants and black loafers leaning over a bucket containing a swimming mouse and trying to make conversation.

All of these stories -- essays? -- are autobiographical, so though there is a lot of laughing at himself and his family, Mr. Sedaris's book also has a good dose of bitterness. There's the typical teen agnst in some of the earlier stories, as well as kind of a literary tirade against people who use the words "homosexual" and "pedophile" interchangeably in one of the later ones. Still, it's hard not to like a writer who describes the voice of reason as sounding like Bea Arthur.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

2008-02-17T21:30:00.007-05:00

A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her...for the most part, oddly enough, she must admit that she felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance. And yet she had said to all these children, You shall go through it all.

I really want to like Virginia Woolf. Honest, I do. I think she's a great writer, a brilliant thinker and critic and essayist, and that she does exactly what she sets out to do when she begins to write, with the exception of those disappointments all authors have with their finished products.

Still, I just don't like To the Lighthouse. I know that my enjoying the novel is more or less irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, as I'm just a piddly undergraduate living 100 years and 4,000 miles away from where Woolf was writing from.

The ideas are brilliant, and really more of what's in Mrs. Dalloway -- mourning the passage of time and lamenting the burden of life (can you tell Woolf was a teensy bit suicidal?). I suspect James will never get to visit the lighthouse, and that Mr. Ramsey will continue quoting "The Charge of the Light Brigade" without ever getting past that one line.

Is it okay to say the book is amazing without having actually enjoyed it? When I count down the criteria I consider necessary for a work to be "good," To the Lighthouse fits them perfectly. Strong theme? Check. Good metaphors? Check (though sometimes they are a bit obvious). Plot? Check -- kind of, but that's not a major one, anyway. Solid, fluent and fluid sentence structure? Check.

I have a feeling this novel(la?) is one of those books that will be taught widely in twenty years or so, even though I think it's relatively obscure right now. It has all the earmarks of a great work, but as of yet none of the attention of Mrs. Dalloway or A Room of One's Own. Still, for reasons I can't quite put my finger on, I just...couldn't like it.

Invisible Monsters

2008-01-28T10:39:00.000-05:00

You can count down the facts and it's so depressing. I can only eat baby food. My best friend screwed my fiance. My fiance almost stabbed me to death. I've set fire to a house and been pointing a rifle at innocent people all night. My brother I hate has come back from the dead to upstage me. I'm an invisible monster, and I'm incapable of loving anybody. You don't know which is worse.

I think the only book I have ever read that was this messed up was Zelda's Cut by Phillipa Gregory. Even then, that story was only strange because the woman and her gay agent used to dress up like the same woman and then have sex, so it was basically like they were doing themselves. Only with two of them.

Anyway, Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk is so crazy I couldn't stop reading. It's like a tabloid -- you know it's crazy and trashy and whatever else, but it's just so bad you can't stop. It's like you've got to stick around to watch the train wreck.

And what a train wreck it was. Wow. In case you ever read this book, I won't spoil it, but suffice to say that Palahniuk has a real talent for painting a scene. I physically recoiled at some of his descriptions (a girl had her jaw shot off, and she shares the after-effects in graphic detail), but some things, like the opening scene with Evie, the inferno, and the rifle, are just incredibly beautiful in a really sick and terrifying way. Incidentally, the opening scene is also the closing scene, and it's even more fantastic the second time around.

I still feel like I missed something, meaning-wise, but that's okay. I'm okay with this book just being, like Palahniuk says, like a fashion magazine -- probably there's an artistic statement, probably there's a deeper meaning, but for now I'll just flip through, look at the crazy pictures, and wonder if I'm the type of person who can pull off the veil/silk negligee/rifle look.

If she were my sister, I'd kick her out too

2008-01-27T18:14:00.002-05:00

Is there anything in the world more boring than Sister Carrie? Well, probably, but the fact is that when a journalist goes to write a flowery novel about the tragedy and hardship of life, clearly all is not going to go as planned.

Theodore Dreiser flunked out of college and wrote for two newspapers in the Midwest before becoming a novelist. I have to give him credit for being an objective writer. He was probably a pretty good journalist, and he's not prone to using any sort of trickery to make the reader feel sorry for his characters. In fact, he hardly seems to care about his characters, especially Carrie, to such an extreme that when he attempts to point out how hard Carrie and Hurstwood have it, it's incredibly out of place and more annoying than heart-wrenching.

Dreiser at his best is fairly forthright. He really should have stuck with journalism, but the fact is that in Sister Carrie he cannot make up his mind whether to be strictly objective and naturalistic or to succumb to the kind of overwrought prose typical of the Victorian novel. He makes a distinct mistake in not remaining straightforward, and instead tries to be eloquent and whatever else, resulting in passages that are hilarious in their awfulness. Hurstwood's money-feathers were growing in? Come on.

That being said, I'm sure there are many wonderful things about this book. I just don't know what they are. Good luck trying to find them...

Randomly Trippy

2008-01-25T11:20:00.000-05:00

I know this is a literature blog, but since I technically was reading an online newspaper when I found this, couldn't it count?

Apparently the creator of this piece is what is called an "outsider artist," usually a person with severe psychological disturbances that lead to amazingly original art. Some of it is trippy, some of it is disturbing, and some of it is just plain weird -- but all of these artists are supposed to be creating in these "bubbles" of expression and with an intense dedication to their respective visions. You know, like deer with huge eyes behind...tombstones?

This particular artist, Eugene Andolsek, was obsessed with the idea that he was going to be fired from his office job, but never was. Apparently making these "mandalas" with colored ink and graph paper (think those circles you used to make in seventh-grade math class when you were bored) helped to calm him down and relieve that fear. Since mandalas are used as a meditative device for Zen Buddhism and other Eastern religions, this seems to make some kind of sense, even though I have no idea if Andolsek made the connection himself. If you click on the picture, you should be able to see it in more detail. It's really incredible.

Anyway, doesn't literature do this? I mean, people like Kurt Vonnegut and Siegfried Sassoon were certainly disturbed, and Hemmingway drank for a reason. Some of the most original writers of their time were either experimenting with drugs or had some other kind of psychological issue.

J.D. Salinger certainly wasn't the picture of mental health, especially after he became famous -- and, as you'd expect, he got much more original after he basically retreated from the world. Early Salinger reads a lot like John Cheever, his closest predecessor, but who knows what he's writing now? I'm willing to bet it's either really great or incredibly awful, but that it's definitely different from anything else out there right now. Maybe true originality can only exist in isolation -- to an extent, I guess, unless you really can create art in a vacuum.

For more information on "outsider art," click here or here.

New Year, New List

2008-01-17T21:38:00.000-05:00

Forget about the holiday reading list. That was way optimistic. Here's the list of books I'm currently reading and that maybe I'll get a chance to write about sometime:

Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser. Not that Carrie is all that interesting on her own, but I think the purely naturalistic approach we're taking to it in my American Novels class should be okay...different than my last professor's view, anyway.

A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf. Virginia Woolf is brilliant, and this is an awesome read regarding women and fiction in all of their connections. Not that I agree that Jane Austen wasn't the literary genius Charlotte Bronte was (something Woolf argues for several times), but the general idea is fantastic.

Witness by Whittaker Chambers. The blurbs on the back of this book claim they are going to change my life. We'll see -- but the forward, written as a letter to Chambers' three children, is incredibly powerful and very moving. It's dense and kind of a tough read, but I think it'll be good.

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. Apparently he died recently? Anyway, had this on my shelf for about a year and haven't read it yet, so I decided that's my new bedtime read. Don't expect me to finish this one anytime soon -- it's good, but I have about 700 pages to read for Tuesday, so this one might be put on the back burner.

There's the new list! I had better make it allllll the way through this one...

Cleaning House

2008-01-13T20:44:00.000-05:00

Ugh. It really sucks, getting rid of books. I save books for the same reason my grandma saves tinfoil and those little tables that come on takeout pizza -- because someone might need it someday.

I have books on Irish storytelling that I hate, because it's total "shamrockery," but I keep them in case someday I overcome the hatred of everything Americans think is Irish and actually read them. Also, someone who knows I lived in Ireland for a while might, one day, ask me for a book on Ireland, and I'd be really embarrassed if I didn't have one.

I have one rather scandalous book which I will not read in public, but still love because the overblown dialogue always makes me laugh. This, however, is separate from the trashy romance I keep because I bought it on a road trip with a friend and we spent three hours reading it out loud and laughing.

I have too many books on Shakespeare. I have one giant book that contains all the "necessary" plays, but I don't actually know what those plays are, so it's flanked by backups of my favorites. I also have two plays that I don't even like but were rejected by a friend and I had to take them in.

Since I'm moving and don't know where or when these books can finally come out of their boxes, some of them have just got to go. The multiples, I can deal with -- no one needs three copies of The Grapes of Wrath. It's also time to let go of some of the textbooks I was keeping just because they cost me a LOT and the bookstore wouldn't buy them back. Still, I'm going to miss seeing that trashy romance stashed next to The Irish Story and one of four copies of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The Omnivore's Dilemma

2008-01-02T11:24:00.000-05:00

But imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost.

Michael Pollan is, quite simply, a brilliant journalist. I mean, he's clearly not above a little pretension and that shows in his book. But I think if I was that smart, I'd be a little cocky, too. He follows the trails of four different meals, one fast food, two "organic" and one gained entirely by hunting and foraging. The first concentrates mainly on commercial beef, the latter two on industrial organic and sustainable organic and the last on boar and mushroom hunting.

Though eventually Pollan decides that the best way to understand where our food comes from is by practicing the type of foraging our prehistoric ancestors did, he admits that this practice is not exactly realistic in this day and age. In the same vein, any attempt to increase the prevalence of sustainable organic farming (my personal choice for best and most realistic solution) could lead to the industrialization these farmers are trying so hard to avoid.

Pollan does not end up giving up meat at the end of the novel, and though he tries vegetarianism for a brief period, he does not seem quite satisfied with it. First, many vegetarians are ovo-lacto, assuming that cows and chickens are not injured or killed in the processing of milk and eggs and therefore it's acceptable. Pollan's dissection of that rationalization was enough to make me pause before making an omlette, but like him, I'm not sure giving both these foods up is the answer. Historically speaking, of course, humans evolved to eat both animal and plant matter, and I take Pollan's point that humans shouldn't toy with natural selection.

Pollan also addresses the culture dilemma which faces vegetarians -- those who shun meat are automatically alienated from traditions like Turkey on Thanksgiving, hot dogs on the Fourth of July, and other food-centered holidays. Since one of his early points is that Americans have suffered from a lack of tradition surrounding food which leaves us to fend for ourselves, the decision to be a vegetarian, for him, would mean abandoning the albeit limited food culture we do have.

Though this book did not convince me to eat cow (certainly not -- my goodness, I will never eat an American cow again after the feedlot section), it made me seriously consider my eating practices, the ethics behind it, and what I can do to minimize the damage I cause to the ecosystem every time I make a meal. I mean, it's not such a crazy idea, right, being able to tell where food came from, what damage its production did to the environment, and what, exactly, is in it?

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

2008-01-02T10:43:00.000-05:00

Arriving at the store, [Francie] walked up and down the aisles handling any object her fancy favored. What a wonderful feeling, to pick something up, hold it for a moment, feel its contour, run her hand over its surface and then replace it carefully. Her nickel gave her this privilege. If a floorwalker asked whether she intended buying anything, she could say, yes, buy it and show him a thing or two. Money was a wonderful thing, she decided.

The cover of the book with the introduction by Anna Quindlen claims it was chosen as one of the Books of the Century by the New York Public Library, and I have no trouble believing it. It's not deep or metaphorical or philosophical or anything, at least not in the way most literature we study is. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is probably the most accessible literary masterpiece I have ever read in my entire life, and for that reason, it's one of my new favorites.

It's the perfect picture of life during what seems to be the depression. I spent an entire day just reading this book, and I really felt like I was there. It's amazing, and the fact that it's largely autobiographical probably contributed to the realism. Also, I love how Francie's father is Irish, her mother is awesome, and the entire community Smith creates in this book is incredible and detailed and completely without pretension.

The realism is probably what makes this novel so incredibly heartbreaking. As one of my friends put it, Smith gets you at the beginning, the end, and all the way through. By the time Francie finds the roses on her desk after graduation, I was ready to excuse myself and have a good hard cry in the ladies' room as Francie herself does.

I would have rather Ben had not entered the novel, but as Betty Smith really did marry a law student and follow him to Ann Arbor, I understand why she did it. Throughout the novel, Smith refuses to compromise her realism. Johnny Nolan didn't have to die, but he did, and Francie didn't have to make the decision to hand her life over to some pompous Brooklynite, but she did. That's the way the world works sometimes, and if Smith does anything well, it's portraying life.

NEXT: The Omnivore's Dilemma

List Update

2007-12-27T11:04:00.000-05:00

Remember the Christmas reading list? So far, I've finished On The Road, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (which I will not be writing about) and started The Omnivore's Dilemma. I hope to get around to posting about all of them in the relatively near future, so check back soon!

I'm also cutting The Dickens Hero from the list. I'll replace it with something else, but I returned the book to the library because frankly, I just didn't care.

On The Road

2007-12-27T10:35:00.000-05:00

"Ah, man, what a dreamboat," sighed Dean. "Think if you and I had a car like this what we could do....Yes! You and I, Sal, we'd dig the whole world with a car like this, because, man, the road must eventually lead to the whole world. Ain't nowhere else it can go--right?"

I really didn't think I was ever going to finish On The Road. It's not like the book is that long, it's just kind of dense and it goes at such a breakneck pace that I had a hard time keeping up with it.

Rumors that Jack Kerouac was on Benzedrine while writing this book don't surprise me at all, as I found out he wrote the whole thing in something like three weeks from journal entries and such. Kerouac himself claims he wasn't on anything except caffeine (in coffee form, I believe, not, you know, grinding up caffeine pills and snorting them or anything). Knowing as I do how tripped out people can get on caffeine, I guess I wouldn't be surprised if that really was the only stimulant he used. But he was definitely on something, because this book is crazy.

Kerouac's book, as well as his character, Sal Paradise, bounce from one end of the continent to the other on borrowed money. The reader knows Sal is a World War Two veteran, going to school on the GI Bill, and many of his friends are veterans as well. However, other than that, the war is never mentioned.

Not to bring up Salinger again, but since Kerouac and Salinger were writing at the same time and had some similar experiences with the war and Buddhism, it's hard not to compare them in some way. Though Holden is a lot younger than Sal and was never in the war, both characters are totally disillusioned and frustrated with the previous generation. You won't see a lot of older people in On The Road, and the few that are present (like Sal's aunt) are on the fringes.

The main difference between the two of them is that Sal is always surrounded by people. As in the scene where Dean and Carlo are talking about everything they're thinking, he might not be interacting, but they are still there and reach out to him from time to time.

Sal is a people person, for lack of a better phrase, and he says he loves everyone around him, because they're all crazy. Holden says he hates everyone except Phoebe and Allie, and whether that's really true or not, the fact that Holden thinks he hates everyone and Sal knows he loves everyone is a major difference between their characters.

But now that's way too much on Salinger again. Back to Kerouac. I think On The Road is the answer to what all American heroes have been searching for since Huck Finn. Most American heroes want to go West, always West, and Sal does that -- he travels from New Jersey to Denver to San Francisco and back more times than I could keep track of. And I love how America seems too small, finally, for Sal and Dean, so they drive through Mexico, considering Mexico City the "end of the road."

NEXT: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

All I want for Christmas...

2007-12-08T14:03:00.000-05:00

One of the things I'm looking forward to most about winter break is being able to read whatever I want, whenever I want.

I have not had the chance to read anything lately, other than a lot of feminist spirituality books for a class and lists of Latin verbs for another one, so I have a long list of books I want to read over break...so in the spirit of the holidays, here's my literary Christmas Wish List:

1) On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Not sure how I've missed this one so far. Jack Kerouac was one of the founding members of the Beat movement in the 60's, and wrote the whole thing in some insanely short amount of time on one huge roll of paper so the flow of his words wouldn't be interrupted by having to change the sheets in his typewriter.

2) A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
This book has been recommended to me by two of my friends, as well as my grandmother and my mother. Seeing as my mother really doesn't tend to like "the classics" and my grandmother never reads fiction, I figure this is probably a pretty important book.

3) The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan
This man is just brilliant. I started this book a while ago and never got around to finishing it, but just the first three pages managed to change my life, so I'm thinking I should finish it.

4) The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan
See above: haven't started it, but this man is brilliant. He teaches journalism at Berkeley, incidentally.

5) The Dickens Hero by Beth Herst
I meant to read this for my thesis, and never quite got to the downtown library that had a copy of it. I still think it sounds really interesting, though, so I wanted to read it at some point and break is as good a time as any.

6) Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J. K. Rowling
My friend lent this to me about four months ago and I have yet to crack it open. I have been slowly working my way through the series since December of last year, when I bought Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone at a bookstore at King's Cross station in London and proceeded to finish most of it later on a bus ride back to the airport. But since Sirius is dead, I don't know how good it's going to be. Honestly, you've got to admire J. K. Rowling for her ability to just kill off major characters in a blaze of glory.

7) Moby Dick by Herman Melville
One of my friends told me she really liked this book, and again, she's not one to love traditional literary standards (this is the friend with whom I had an enormous argument about the merit of Great Expectations). Somehow I managed to miss it in my Early American Lit class.

8) The House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Same here-- managed to miss it. But this wasn't really recommended to me, more like my friend was trying to convince me not to read it and I thought it sounded cool...

Merry reading, everyone!

'Tis the season for Dickens

2007-11-30T10:38:00.000-05:00

It's been a crazy few weeks, but finally I have a second to sit down and update this. I uploaded all my Christmas music, stole all the Christmas movies I could find from my parents' house, and am debating the merits of decorating my room.

One of my favorite parts of Christmas, though, is how it brings together two of my favorite things: Charles Dickens and the Muppets. If you haven't seen The Muppet Christmas Carol, you need to. Immediately. It's absolutely fantastic, and my favorite Christmas movie of all time.

Merry Christmas!

Cover that up

2007-11-13T13:00:00.000-05:00

So I have to write a paper on disguise in 18th-century literature. I love disguise. I even kind of love 18th-century literature, so this topic is actually pretty exciting. What I don't like is the page limit, because 4-6 pages is just not going to be enough to spout all my thoughts on masking and taking on other identities.

My favorite book about disguise is not 18th century, but rather a retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth called Til We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis. The main character, because she is not as beautiful as her sister Psyche, but extremely smart and a kick-ass Queen, decides to hide her face behind a veil. She comments on how most of her subjects cannot imagine that behind the veil is just an ugly woman; they say she's a goddess, or so beautiful that her face would stun anyone who looked on it, or that she's faceless, or any number of things except the simplest explanation.

That's the awesome thing about disguise in literature. Characters get to try on someone else's life or identity for a while, and basically become whomever they want. How they react and how other characters react to them says a lot about their personalities and motives, and I know more than once Shakespeare has used disguise to show characters' stupidity or malleability.

But often characters go into these other personas thinking they'll have unlimited freedom, and they just don't get it. They have rules and restrictions placed on them that they didn't expect. The Queen in Lewis's book is free from the stigma she'd receive if she were ugly, and endowed with a divine status by her more superstitious subjects. But she can never lift that veil, as it makes her Queen. Once she's put it on, she cannot revert to her status as an individual with faults and feelings like anyone else.

She has to supercede these limitations and own her original identity, though. The Queen takes a spiritual journey through her sister's trials -- her search for herself is connected with Psyche's search for Cupid. They're two halves of a whole, and the meaning of Psyche's name ("soul"), makes her representative of her sister's soul and identity.

That's true of anyone who disguises him or herself in literature; they always have to return to their own identity when all is said and done, and it's only when that happens that the world is right again.

Which, I guess, brings me back to Joseph Campbell's hero's journey...which is another topic for another blog post. :)

Cinderelly, Cinderelly

2007-11-12T14:56:00.000-05:00

I was thinking this morning about how there has to be more to Cinderella. I'm not talking about turning the story into something like Ella Enchanted or Ever After (God forbid). I just mean that Cinderella is cooler than she's usually portrayed, and all because of the glass slipper, something that's usually kind of overlooked.

All the "updated" versions of the tale I have seen either ignore the issue of the slipper completely or hold that Cinderella left it by accident. In Ella Enchanted, the slipper has very little to do with Charmont's recognition of her, I believe that Ever After ignores it completely, and even the Disney version has Cinderella literally stepping out of her shoe on the stairs.

She had to have left the shoe on purpose. There's no way she could have just stepped out of it while running down the stairs. In order to be running that fast in those heels, they would have had to fit absolutely perfectly, especially for a girl who has been living her life as a maid and who is more used to going barefoot. And to run later in only one heel, as the Disney movie suggests, is virtually impossible and probably a scenario dreamed up by a man.

The French version of the tale says that Cinderella "left behind" one of her slippers; it's her stepsisters who attribute the loss to "haste." The Cinderella of this story is much more quick-witted than that of other versions; she "jests" with her sisters, "amusing" them (and herself) while in disguise, and though she is certainly patient and kind to them, it's easy to see how she is just biding her time until she can out-smart them and somehow gain control.

As opposed to just giving her the attributes of "graciousness" and a good heart, Perrault also gives her "intelligence, courage...[and] common sense", a list of virtues usually absent or ignored in this story. What girl wouldn't drop a slipper and hold on to the matching one, so the prince could track her down and make certain of her identity? It's really a brilliant move, and I think it's sad that the character doesn't get enough credit for it.

(As a side note, I love how blogs let you totally go off on tangents in the middle of a sentence with a simple hyperlink. I can point you to the French Cinderella without even breaking the rhythm of my sentence. Awesome.)

The Obligatory Welcoming Post

2007-11-12T10:50:00.001-05:00

If you're reading this, you somehow found my blog. I know there's not much yet, but I promise at some point this will be my outlet for all literary thoughts that never make it into an English paper, for some reason.

Often, it's not going to make sense, and a lot of it is not so much based on scholarly research as it is my personal opinion on everything from Dickens to Chaucer to Rowling to Lahiri and whomever I happen to be reading at the moment. No doubt I will often write incredibly stupid stuff down, but hopefully some of you will find it interesting.

I'm open to co-authors as well, so feel free to comment with your interest! Happy Reading ~