Muse at Highway Speeds

Romance February #1: A Night to Surrender (Tessa Dare)

2012-02-09T17:01:00.001-06:00

Liked but didn't love Tessa Dare's A Night to Surrender. Fantastic first chapters, and I really dig the setting for the series of which this is the beginning: Spindle Cove, a tiny seaside town that local gentlewoman Susanna Finch has turned into a haven for oddball ladies from all over England. Some are too smart for gentlemens' social comfort, some are sickly and made sicker by Regency medicine (bleeding and leeches and mercury, oh my!), some are fleeing bad relationships; all are thrilled to find this enclave, nearly all female, and dedicated to just letting them be themselves, whoever that should be.

Of course, this can't last--there wouldn't be a story otherwise! And so Lieutenant Colonel Victor Bramwell, still limping from a knee shattered by a French bullet, comes to town with his corporal and his ne'er-do-well cousin, Lord Payne, hoping Susanna's father, gunsmith Sir Lewis Finch, can use his influence to get him back commanding in the field--the only life he's ever known, and the only life he's ever loved. They meet with a literal explosion--Payne's novel idea for scaring a flock of sheep blocking their path--as Bram tackles Susanna out of harm's way, and then can't resist stealing a kiss.

Both main characters are strong and opinionated--so of course there's some good verbal sparring in between the smoochin'--and Susanna's unconventional and fiercely protective attitude towards her bevy of misfit maidens makes her immediately likeable. Oh, and Bram acquires a pet lamb named Dinner, which is obviously awesome. There were just a few things that kept me from being completely swept up: first [SLIGHT SPOILER], I didn't care for Susanna's father's feet of clay; second, I know there's no romantic way of describing coitus interruptus, but "[i]n some primitive way, it satisfied him to mark her"? EW. And I'm grumpy about the couple being set up for the next in the series, A Week to be Wicked (out in March!), because the lady is an impetuous, bespectacled geologist prone to carrying around a reticule full of interesting rocks, whereas the dude is . . . an incorrigible rake. HE DOES NOT DESERVE HER. MORE NERD HEROES PLZ!!!!

Going Home (Jon Katz)

2012-02-06T13:57:00.000-06:00

OK, this entry is going to make me cry if it goes on too long, so I'll keep it brief.

On the left? Me and Juliana. I got her when I was 15 and she was a silly itty witsy kitten--now she's 17, and slowing down: skinny, easily confused, prone to yowling piteously in the night. She may have a brain tumor, or have suffered a stroke, since she's got an uncontrollable head tremor and a tendency to walk in tight little circles, always turning to the right. Our time together has been wonderful--I have spent more hours with her than any single human being--but it is coming to an end, and it hurts so much to contemplate.

But it hurts a little less after reading Jon Katz's Going Home. Subtitled "Finding Peace When Pets Die," it's a very simple but profound and necessary book. Katz is known for his writing about animals, particularly the border collies that live with him on his farm; the genesis of this book was his having to euthanize his beloved dog Orson. Like most pet owners, he struggled with guilt and depression, as well as the persistent shame of being so broken up over an animal: "It's only a cat, after all," says our rational self (and sometimes misguided people who are trying to help).

Katz advocates inhabiting your grief, while trying to let go of guilt--animals do not fear death, he reminds us, because they don't understand it, even while it's happening--and perhaps creating rituals for yourself to honor your pet and the joy you shared. I've decided that upon Julie's eventual death, I will donate a sum to a Siamese rescue group, and design a felt cameo to approximate her sweet little face. I'm not saying it won't be hard--devastating, even. But I know I won't be alone.

Wedding reads.

2012-02-04T14:28:00.001-06:00

Yep, that's right: gettin' hitched! In October, at the amazing Queens County Farm Museum, which means we get to take a break from setup to get lost in a CORN MAZE!!!

And because I am me, my first step in a huge undertaking is sussing out books on the subject (did the same thing when I moved to NYC). Due to our realistic budget and general non-buying-into the Wedding-Industrial Complex's soul-sucking (and vaguely misogynistic) materialism, said books are focused on creativity, bargains, and niceness. Here are three reads that have been reassuring, wise and helpful thus far.

First up, Meg Keene's fantastic A Practical Wedding, based on her blog of the same name. This is a wedding book that starts off by talking about joy, and ends with embracing imperfection and the knowledge that the wedding is a blip in your married life. Great stuff, and very thoughtful about both logistical concerns and the strange alchemy of marriage, where two people become one unit. She also provides a clear overview of how U.S. weddings have actually been held over time--a century ago, almost everyone got married at home, wearing their best clothes, whatever color they happened to be--to keep in mind when worrying about tradition. Best advice:

You won't remember how your wedding looks; you'll remember how it feels.
A good way to plan the event? Think of the parties the two of you usually have. Then just scale it up.
Pay attention to the ceremony itself! That's the real thing; the rest just celebrates it.

I also enjoyed Denise and Alan Fields' Bridal Bargains, which as the title implies concentrates on inexpensive alternatives to the all-out debt-incurring bashes sold by the WIC. I skimmed over a lot that didn't apply to us--I'm wearing my mom's dress, for instance, so I skipped the gowns chapter--but there's a lot of good and specific advice to be gleaned, and a total willingness to name names. Definitely worth a look if you're not rolling in dough.

And I haven't re-read it yet, but Miss Manner's Guide to a Surprisingly Dignified Wedding came out while my sister and brother-in-law were in the midst of the planning process, and as the maid of honor, I read it for backup. It is scathingly hilarious (as is Ms. Martin's wont) and eminently practical. The largest lesson to take from this one is that etiquette aims to make people contented and comfortable, not stressed or humiliated. And asking people for money is the height of tackiness. (She even thinks registries are tacky, but admits that they're so expected one might as well create one . . . just only tell people about it if they ask.) Can't wait to re-traipse through, laughing and thinking, "Well, at least I'm not these people." Just like watching Toddlers & Tiaras!

Romance February II: The Quickening Boogalo: This Time It's Personal. IN SPACE

2012-02-01T16:47:00.000-06:00

For all those waiting breathlessly for the second annual installment of Romance February--in which I read more romance novels than usual, and also your regularly scheduled bunch of stuff--herewith, The List!

Gold Rush Bride, Debra Lee Brown
Untouched, Anna Campbell
Lord of Scoundrels, Loretta Chase
A Night to Surrender, Tessa Dare
The Duke Is Mine, Eloisa James
To Wed a Wild Lord, Sabrina Jeffries
Outlander, Diana Gabaldon
The Dangerous Viscount, Miranda Neville
Mistress By Marriage, Maggie Robinson
Not Quite a Husband, Sherry Thomas

That's ten, for those keeping score. I reserve the right to carry over into March, because ARCs and book clubs and wedding planning and YEESH. Books, man. There are just so dang many of them sometimes.

The Code of the Woosters (P.G. Wodehouse)

2012-01-30T14:00:00.000-06:00

Wodehouse at last! Now I compare writers to him like crazy.

I'd actually seen the events that take place in The Code of the Woosters in television form, as the first two episodes of season 2 of the beyond-brilliant BBC adaption starring Hugh Laurie as dissolute, ditzy aristocrat Bertie Wooster and comic partner Stephen Fry as his unflappable and erudite butler Jeeves. Here are some adjectives which describe Wodehouse's glorious plotting: madcap, absurdist, zany, convoluted, farcical. Also: LOL, ROFL, and LMFAO! This is giggling-uncontrollably-on-the-subway stuff.

And here is a partial summary of said plot: Bertie, with Jeeves in tow, is summoned to the country house of Totleigh Towers by a boyhood friend--timid newt-fancier Gussie Fink-Nottle--to rescue the latter's engagement with Madeline Basset. Conveniently, Bertie's formidable Aunt Dahlia also wants him there, for a more nefarious purpose: to steal a silver cow-creamer that Madeline's father, Sir Watkyn Basset--a former magistrate who once fined Bertie five pounds for stealing a policeman's helmet--bought out from under Dahlia's collector husband. But Sir Watkyn being suspicious from the first, how is Bertie to carry out his aged relative's request? And how to keep himself from being once again accidentally engaged to Madeline herself?

More than the plot, though, the joy of Wodehouse is his breezy, idiosyncratic prose. I was struck by the modernity, the Internetiness of it: the needless abbreviation ("I mopped the b.," "That's the situash") and, conversely, using far too many words to say something simple ("I had seen this man before only in the decent habiliments suitable to the metropolis, and I confess that even in the predicament in which I found myself I was able to shudder at the spectacle he presented in the country"). It's delicious to read. And the best part? Since Wodehouse wrote 90+ books, I shall never run out!

Picture book roundup!!!

2012-01-29T10:20:00.002-06:00

So in the almost-three years of this blog, I have terribly remiss in talking about picture books. I do read them all the dang time, and love many of them; I'm trying to get better at actually recording that I do so. Part of it, of course, is that they take so little time to read, and I generally can't generate more than a few sentences about them. From now on, though, I'm just going to periodically subject you to posts like this one, in which I post a plethora of clumsily-aligned covers and exult a bit over the charmingness of these nine stellar titles.

Dog Loves Books, Louise Yates: The eponymous canine loves reading so much he opens a bookstore . . . and then fields requests for cups of tea and directions from people who don't even notice what a wonderful place they're in. Particularly precious for booksellers and librarians!

It's a Book, Lane Smith: Another title custom-built to be an analog-bookseller favorite, featuring a bookish ape and a donkey who just doesn't get it--"How do you scroll down?" A great Christmas gift from my little brother's awesome girlfriend! (Oh, and there's now a board book version, It's a Little Book, which leans more towards the more basic "books are not for eating" lesson.)

I'd Really Like to Eat a Child, Sylviane Donnio: An adorable, petulant baby alligator does not want to eat any more bananas, thank you--today a kid is on the menu! Provided he can find one. Spoiler: children turn out to be much, much bigger than baby alligators, who should probably nosh bananas until they're big and strong.

I Want My Hat Back, Jon Klassen: I tell you what, I tried to handsell this book to every single person who came in looking for a picture book this past holiday season! Totally my new favorite. It's a simple tale of a bear looking for his missing red chapeau--and kids will adore solving the mystery before the characters do! (Oh, and the ending, in which maaaaaaybe the bear eats the culprit? I don't think a kid too young to think it's hilarious will even get it, so there.)

Children Make Terrible Pets, Peter Brown: I just love Brown's blocky, half-saturated illustrations for this funny book and its possibly even funnier sequel, YOU WILL BE MY FRIEND! Both feature an enthusiastic young bear, Lucy, who (in CMTP) finds a little boy in the woods, brings him home and names him Squeaker, over her mother's wise protestations that children aren't suited for pethood. In YWBMF!, Lucy decides she needs more friends, and adopts the not-particularly-successful tactic of simply going up to various woodland critters and announcing their new BFFness in loud, uncertain terms.

Gator, Randy Cecil: A much-appreciated surprise gift from my friend Shiraz, this is the sweet, sweet story of a carousel alligator who gets lonely when fewer and fewer people come to visit the amusement park where he lives, and sets off on adventure to find friendship and happiness--predictable but poignant.

A Penguin Story, Antoinette Portis: Edna the little penguin has only ever seen three colors--black night, white ice, blue sea--but she's sure there must be more out there! So she packs a lunch (a nice dead fish) and sets off to find another color. Great use of a minimal palette! Also check out Portis's great first book about imaginative play, Not a Box.

Red Sled, Lita Judge: An almost-wordless (but for spot-on sound effects) tale of what happens when a bunch of woodland creatures take a joyride on a little girl's sled. (And how come kids in picture books always get to live by woods full of friendly creatures? Hmpfh.)

Stop Bugging Me: That's What Friends are For, Daniel Cleary: Cleary's bare-bones illustrations are smudges and squiggles on a notebook-paper background, but they're still incredibly expressive! I loved this little story of grumpy Smudge's attempts to run a secret errand that keeps being interrupted by a coterie of friends who will not take GRUMP for an answer. (N.B. the book description claims Smudge is a dog, but he/she is clearly a cat I had growing up. Ol' Smudge-y. That cat hated everybody.)

Hedy's Folly (Richard Rhodes), plus a personal failure

2012-01-28T10:51:00.000-06:00

I can't remember where I first heard about the connection between bombshell actress Hedy Lamarr and the invention of spread-spectrum radio (blah blah blah science, but anyway without it cell phones wouldn't be possible)--I had thought it was on the listifying website Cracked, but I can't for the life of me find it. Anyway, having read the story in capsule form, I was excited to read Richard Rhodes' latest book, Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World--and also to introduce myself to Rhodes, author of some heavy-hitting histories, including The Making of the Atomic Bomb.

It is, no doubt about it, a fascinating story. Austrian-born actress Hedwig Kiesler ("oh, of course that's what Hedy is short for!") fled an unhappy marriage to an arms dealer to take Hollywood by storm in the late 30s. She was, though, as whip-smart and inventive as she was pretty, and somewhat bitter about being known only for the latter--once saying "Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid." During the now-unimaginable celebrity fervor to support the war effort during WWII, she teamed up with avant-garde composer George Antheil, whose compositions often depended on synchronized player pianos (for research, I looked up and listened to his most famous piece, Ballet méchanique, which sounds to my philistine ears like a rolling suitcase full of spoons being pulled over a broken sidewalk. With an air-raid siren in the background). Together, they developed a communication system to make the signals guiding radio torpedoes more difficult to jam. While they patented the idea and submitted it to the Navy, the military demurred . . . until they realized in the 60s it was immensely useful. Conveniently after the patent rights had expired. In fact, Lamarr didn't get credit for what turned out to be a world-changing invention, the basis for wi-fi and cell phone technologies, until 1997. Antheil had died in 1959.

The only problem with the book is that it's not a book-length story--more of a long article. So even though Hedy's Folly is already slim (272 pages, with a heckuva lot of notes), it feels padded, especially Rhodes' digressions into how an inventor differs from a scientist or how to write a patent properly. In that sense, it's not a successful book. But it does bring this weird little slice of history to a larger audience, and that's a worthy endeavor.

As for that personal failure? Well, with apologies to my friend M. Sullivan, I could not for the life of me get through the first volume of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series, Master and Commander. It was actually the meticulously researched historical accuracy that did me in, I'm afraid--I appreciate the intricate knowledge of how Napoleonic-era sailing ships worked and all, but I don't really . . . care about the names of the different sails and bits of rigging? For me, at least, there was too much of that and too little of the people. Whether it swings towards the latter later on, I will never know.

The Leftovers (Tom Perrotta)

2012-01-21T12:02:00.000-06:00

Tom Perrotta's sneaky The Leftovers is the February read for Freebird Books' Post-Apocalyptic Book Club--while I never make it down to Red Hook for the meetings, I'm trying this year to keep up on the books. (Yes, I know it's January. But while I Really Really want to read Colson Whitehead's Zone One, I'm like #35 on the list at the library.)

I call it "sneaky" because it is, at heart, the kind of straightforward domestic literary novel I almost never read. Except for the looming sfnal premise that drew me in: three years before the main action takes place, millions of people all over the world just . . . disappeared. It wasn't a proper Rapture at all, as the remaining premillenial Christians point out sourly--heathens, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and all manner of sinners vanished as well as true believers. Perrotta never tries to explain what happened; instead, he simply explores a world that's suffered such a drastic and mysterious loss, both people who are forever changed and those struggling to recreate normalcy in the face of what becomes known as the Sudden Departure.

At the heart of the narrative are the Garveys: Laurie, who has abandoned her husband and children to join a cult called the Guilty Remnant, whose faith includes a vow of silence and constant cigarette smoking; Kevin, mayor of their small suburban town, tentatively starting a relationship with a melancholy woman whose entire family Departed; son Tom, who dropped out of college to follow Holy Wayne, a self-styled prophet with a predilection for teenage Asian girls; and seventeen-year-old Jill, a former A student fallen in with the worst crowd that will have her.

The Leftovers is largely a meditation on grief, what it does to individuals, families, and society. Which isn't to say that it isn't also funny in places, sweet in others. While it's only tangentially a post-apocalyptic novel, it's still a good one, I think in the very realistic-novel sense that would have made me shy away from the book without the improbable hook: the characters are fully, recognizably human, and their attempts to rebuild their lives wholly believable. I feel a little humbled by my liking it: perhaps this genre of "literary fiction" has some gems after all.

REREADATHON!

2012-01-15T11:03:00.000-06:00

My Christmas present to myself this year was oh-so-cheap and deeply appreciated: the guilt-over-taking-my-finger-off-the-pulse-free rereading of three wonderful books.

First, an upscale airplane read (which carried me through all my holiday-trip flights): Foucault's Pendulum (Umberto Eco), the labyrinthine, loopy tale of three editors who set out to create the ultimate conspiracy theory and succeed behind their wildest dreams. (Wow, is that the blurbiest sentence I've ever written?) It's a thriller by way of Rupert Giles' library, and the source of everything I know about kabbalah, the Templars, the Rosicrucians, folk religions of South America, etc., etc. for gobs of medievalist esoterica. And it's erudite in the way only the most formidable erudition can be, in that it's glorying goofily in the whole enterprise, playing fast and loose with logic in the name of narrative. So much fun!!

Then, brought down the room with Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth. Good grief, this book is a punch to the gut, but such a beautiful, elegant, necessary one, an indictment of a whole society by an insider. If you haven't read it--and you should, and you should also watch the movie with Gillian Anderson, because she nails it--it follows lovely Lily Bart, brought up to crave opulence and to live beyond her means, through her slow downward spiral out of society and into failure. She's an amazing, conflicted character. There's this core to her that wants something--anything--more than what the turn-of-the-twentieth-century New York deems appropriate for a beautiful woman. She longs for love yet can't accept a marriage without money, knowing her luxurious tastes would cause her to resent a man who couldn't indulge them. A part of her, though, chafes at the idea of marriage without love. Trapped between the two, she can only flounder, and a series of poor decisions ruins her chances for even a comfortable life. Her gradual failure is heartbreaking, because she's so likeable--and yet when she realizes she's a "useless person," she's absolutely right. She has no skills, no real talents. She is merely decorative--and once she ceases to serve that purpose, she's thrown out like a Christmas tree after New Year's. (For the other side of the coin, read Wharton's uproarious The Custom of the Country, which chronicles the meteoric rise in the same social milieu of scheming-to-the-point-of-sociopathic Undine Spragg. Ooh, look, come March you can get both with The Age of Innocence in a sexily-illustrated omnibus edition! Penguin Classics, I love you.)

And even though I first read it less than a year and a half ago, I fell madly in love with Skippy Dies all over again. Like I wrote previously, it "hits the sweet spot for me between bleak and hilarious, between epic and hopelessly mundane." Paul Murray evokes both pubescent coming-of-age and the modern second attempt at maturity that (in a First World-y way) occurs in our late twenties with such pathos, such brutal precision, it would be unbearable if he weren't also so freakin' funny. I'd forgotten the variety of narration he uses, sometimes subtle ones, as when conversation is sometimes set off with quotation marks and sometimes only with commas--and second person present, the trickiest, weirdest POV, makes frequent and effective appearances. His sentences swell and ebb expertly, punchily short following protracted ones, comma-strewn but carefully constructed. Oh, and this time I actually marked a few particularly gorgeous passages, so you don't have to just trust me when I enthuse about the glory of the prose! Here ya go:

"[An elderly priest] in his black raiment looking like a single downward stroke of the pen, a peremptory, unforgiving slash through the error-strewn copybook that is the world."
"[Ruprecht] gently lowers Optimus Prime into a kind of metallic crib [part of a machine intended to bridge eleven-dimensional space]. And there, for a moment, on his knees by the foil-lined pod, he bides--like Moses's mother, perhaps, with her bulrush basket on the banks of the Nile--gazing reflectively at the robot's painted eyes, thinking that to do anything, epic or mundane, bound for glory or doomed to failure, is in its way to say goodbye to a world; that the greatest victories are therefore never without the shadow of loss; that every path you take, no matter how lofty or effulgent, aches not only with the memory of what you left behind, but with the ghosts of all the untaken paths, now never to be taken, running parallel . . . "
"You know, you spend your childhood watching TV, assuming that at some point in the future everything you see there will one day happen to you: that you too will win a Formula One race, hop a train, foil a group of terrorists, tell someone 'Give me the gun', etc. . . . Gradually the awful truth dawns on you: that Santa Claus was just the tip of the iceberg--that your future will not be the rollercoaster ride you'd imagined, that the world occupies by your parents, the world of washing the dishes, going to the dentist, weekend trips to the DIY superstore the buy floor-tiles, is actually largely what people mean when they speak of 'life'. Now, with every day that passes, another door seems to close, the one marked PROFESSIONAL STUNTMAN, or FIGHT EVIL ROBOT, until as the weeks go by and the doors--GET BITTEN BY SNAKE, SAVE WORLD FROM ASTEROID, DISMANTLE BOMB WITH SECONDS TO SPARE--keep closing, you begin to hear the sound as a good thing, and start closing some yourself, even ones that didn't necessarily need to be closed . . ."

I really can't wait to read everything Murray writes for the rest of his career--I won't be able to think of Irish literature without calling up his name.

Fletcher Hanks: comics weirdo

2012-01-07T11:00:00.000-06:00

I admit to being both ignorant of and fascinated by superhero comics--never read 'em as a kid, and am utterly daunted by the DC/Marvel decades of shifting mythology, but gosh they can be fun (and yeah, I prefer "fun" to "gritty." Which is why I prefer Superman to Batman. And the Flash to either). They can also be weird as all get-out, particularly in the embryonic early days (late 1930s-early 1940s). And I have it on good authority that no one was weirder than Fletcher Hanks, whose complete works can be found in the Fantagraphics volumes I Shall Destroy all the Civilized Planets! and You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation!.

Hanks wrote and drew for two years, 1939 to 1941, and then disappeared--apparently to a life of itinerant alcoholism--but he left behind comics which are stupefying in their brutal simplicity. Here's the usual plot: villain up to no good (alien, rogue scientist, fifth column) manages to put his evil plan into motion for long enough to kill quite a lot of innocent people before one of Hanks' bizarre heroes shows up and puts a poetic-justice stop to it. His two favorite good guys are Stardust, a space wizard who's also a crimefighter, and Fantomah, an ostensibly beautiful damsel and protector of the jungle who, uh, turns into a skull when she's angry. But then there's also several stories featuring Big Red McClane, who's just a logger who punches people a lot, kind of a bulkier Mark Trail without any pretense of loving nature.

The most confounding thing about Hanks' comics is how completely unappealing they are. The art is clunky, the characters deformed, the colors are garish, the writing strewn with deus ex machina (usually in the form of "rays"--disintegrating, anti-gravity, oxygen-destroying, etc.). And yet, I kept reading, and I don't think comics historians are wrong for calling him a genius and a visionary. What's there, I think, is a mind totally uncluttered by influence--an unsophisticated, kitchen-sink kind of mind, playing with a sort of frantic delight with this new medium, just throwing things at the panels to see if they stick. Even the way he draws people--just barely recognizable as human through our brain's awesome trick of pareidolia--grows on you, especially the corrugated masks of his villains (at first, with my Old-Timey Media goggles on, I'm like, "Is this racist somehow?" but I think it's more misanthropic) and the way Stardust can grab said baddies by the shoulder and just crumple up their bodies like a coat. Essentially: Hanks' comics are fun in a pure, childlike way, like running around with your arms out pretending to be an airplane or stomping about making T-rex noises (which I certainly never do when I'm grumpy. Ask anybody!). Exactly what I look for in a superhero comic.

O HAI 2012

2012-01-06T12:33:00.000-06:00

You know what? I'm not even going to go into my (valid) excuses for the blog's falling off last month. Because they are boring. And because wild inconsistency is, after all, the God-given right of the amateur blogger. Instead, I'll just do better in the future--one of my (extremely specific yet unambitious) goals-not-resolutions for 2012 is two blog posts a week. I can do that! I read at least two books a week!

Still, since the year's off to a rough start, I'm beginning with the softest of softie-woftie softballs that is ZooBorns Cats!: The Newest, Cutest Kittens and Cubs from the World's Zoos, a surprise gift from a friend at Simon & Schuster waiting in my work locker when I returned from vacation last week. This adorbs little photobook showcases "the largest number of juvenile feline photos from different species assembled in one publication." Which is essentially all you need to know, and much more articulate than my own limb-flailing THE BEBEH KITTEHS WITH THEIR ITSLE EARS AND FEETS AND NOSES!!!

The coolest thing about ZooBorns Cats!, though, is its sheer range: of course, there are lion and cheetah and tiger cubs, but there are also little-known wild felines from around the world. From South America, there's the Geoffroy's cat, which will stand up on its high legs to survey its surroundings; the round-eared guiña; the dexterous margay, which can rotate its ankles 180 degrees--useful for an almost entirely arboreal existence. Asia has the fishing cat, the teensy-weensy rusty-spotted cat (adults top out at 3.5 pounds!), and the Iriomote cat, the remaining 100 wild individuals of which live only on a remote Japanese island. And there's the Pallas's cat, the jungle cat, the pampas cat, the sand cat, the oncilla . . . really, more kittens on heaven and earth than my wildest dreams of floofiness.

Most of them are endangered--through habitat loss and interbreeding with domestic cats. So all this cuteness has a cause: not only to bring attention to animals we've never even heard of, but to spur us to support the efforts of zoos and other conservation organizations to keep these animals from disappearing. Some of these babies represent years of work, money, and science--proceeds from the book go to the Association of Zoos and Aquariums Conservation Endowment Fund. (The ZooBorns website doesn't limit itself to just cats, or even to mammals: the top story right now is an Andean condor chick named--very appropriately--Muppet.) Donating to which, I realize, needs to be another goal for the year.

YA break!

2011-12-20T11:58:00.001-06:00

So I'm in the midst of my first December working retail at Grand Central Terminal--this week, leading up to Christmas and Chanukah, is proving to be a doozy. Luckily, there's young adult literature to smooth over the rough spots.

Withering Tights, Louise Rennison: By the hilarious author of the Confessions of Georgia Nicolson series, which I really must read the rest of, WT starts off a new series with a bang! This one centers of Tallulah Casey's misadventures at a quirky-to-say-the-least performing arts school on the Yorkshire moors. Plenty of adolescent romance, humiliation, and sarcasm for all! And I loved that Tallulah realizes her true talent lies in comedy--since some still contend that women can't be funny (hello, the late Christopher Hitchens!), it's nice to see a different attitude pitched to young'uns.

Everybody Sees the Ants, A.S. King: Purchased on the strength of King's Please Ignore Vera Dietz, one of my favorite books of last year. Wasn't disappointed--Ants is a mix of raw and witty, with an otherworldly undercurrent. Its narrator, Lucky Linderman, has been mercilessly bullied by Nader McMillan since he was seven. Eight years later, he's lost faith entirely in the world of adults to protect him: not his distant father, not his obsessive mother, certainly not the school administrators and therapists concerned more with his joke-y proposal to do a social studies project surveying students with the question, "If you were going to commit suicide, what method would you choose?" His sole trusted authority figure is that of his grandfather and namesake--and that only happens in dreams, where he tries time and time again to rescue him from a Vietnamese prison camp. This mission, given to him by his beloved grandmother on her deathbed, blurs the line between fantasy and reality, as Lucky brings back objects from the dreamworld into his real, miserable life. The book is funny and haunting by turns, at a level rarely reached in soi disant adult literary fiction.

Darker Still, Leanna Renee Hieber: Finished off my streak with a good old-fashioned YAP break. Hieber's debut is a Dorian Gray-ish teen paranormal romance, wherein mute New Yorker Natalie Stewart falls in love with Lord Denbury, imprisoned by sinister forces inside a portrait, against the backdrop of 1880 Manhattan and the still-new Metropolitan Museum of Art. I liked but didn't love it--I wish that everything hadn't been just as it seemed, the bewitched lord righteous, his bewitcher so blandly evil. I need a little ambiguity in my heroes and villains.

The Possessed (Elif Batuman) . . . and a wee Christmas-y Gogol!

2011-12-19T20:08:00.000-06:00

Missed the last meeting of the Russian year of the WORD Classics Book Group due to dumb ol' stupid ol' fun-ruining illness, but I did read the book, and it was indeed a fitting cap to the Tolstoy-Dostoevsky-Gogol experience. Elif Batuman's The Possessed is a joyous journey through the lives and peculiarities of people of all nations who find devote themselves to Russian literature. Batuman is an unapologetic member of their ranks, having almost accidentally found herself a Stanford graduate student in comparative literature.

But though she's got a wonderful analytical mind, her prose evades even a whiff of academic density. The long essay that (in three parts) forms the backbone of the collection, "Summer in Samarkand," details her experiences ostensibly learning Uzbek in that still-exotic city--it's a laugh-out-loud funny culture-shock story, a historical introduction to the complexities of Central Asia (as she learned later, "Uzbek" was not even a defined ethnicity or language until the Soviets decided it was in the early twentieth century), and a guide to a literary tradition largely unknown (and honestly somewhat nebulous) outside of the region. Her writing's lovely, witty, smart--even if you've never read a word of those daunting Russians, I highly recommend the book.

I also read, in the spirit of the season, a wee New Directions paperback edition of Gogol's novella, "The Night Before Christmas," a decidedly un-Moore-ish romp featuring the devil, guilty husbands hiding in sacks, and caroling for sausages. It's a fun, frisky folktale, and just cemented my opinion: Gogol is totes my favorite Russian writer!

Broken Glass Park (Alina Bronsky)

2011-12-18T13:34:00.000-06:00

(Ugh, so many apologies for the involuntary hiatus. Was laid low for nearly two weeks by an illness whose main symptom was constant, debilitating fatigue. GUESS HOW FUN THIS MADE DECEMBER RETAIL. Am now almost recovered, whether from a persistent virus or anemia, I'm not sure.)

Broken Glass Park was Russian-born German author Alina Bronsky's first novel, and while it's not the black-comic masterpiece that is The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, it shares with that book an unforgettable, fully realized, fully habitable voice. Here, it's teenage Sascha Naimann, a Russian immigrant to Germany struggling to deal with her mother's violent death at the hands of her stepfather. She's filled with helpless rage and guilt--but she's also smart as a whip and fiercely protective of those she loves, notably her half-brother and -sister, who've lost not only their mother but the father who shot her. A confrontation with the editor of a newspaper that published a supportive interview the killer leads to a relationship with him and his son that shifts unsettlingly between familial and romantic. Bronsky writes Sascha's raw, conflicting emotion, her simultaneously jaded and naive view of the world, and her understandably dark sense of humor with the ease that only comes with great talent--the kind that makes me want to learn German so I can see how much more amazing it is in the original. But since that continues not to happen? Much thanks to Tim Mohr and Europa Editions for bringing Ms. Bronsky into my world! (And thanks to the Europa Challenge blog for giving me still more incentive to keep reading this terrific publisher.)

Treasure Island!!! (Sara Levine)

2011-11-30T17:14:00.003-06:00

I would never have believed that this year I'd read a book with a despicable, oblivious first-person narrator somehow more hilarious than The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine. But Treasure Island!!! is that book.

Said narrator (huh, I didn't even notice she's never named) is a spectacularly aimless 25-year-old who happens to pick up a copy of Stevenson's classic pirate tale when her teacher sister leaves it behind in disgust ("I hate a book with no girls in it") and is blown away by the contrast she finds with her own life:

When had I ever dreamed a scheme? When had I ever done a foolish, over-bold act? When had I ever, like Jim Hawkins, broke from my friends, raced for the beach, stolen a boat, killed a man, or eliminated an obstacle that stood in the way of my getting a hunk of gold? I, a person unable to decide what to do with my broken mini-blinds, let alone with the rest of my life, lay on my bed, while in the book's open air, people chased assholes out of pubs and trampled blind beggars with their horses. You needn't have a violent nature to be impressed with animal energy. If life were a sea adventure, I knew: I wouldn't be sailor, pirate, or cabin boy but more likely a barnacle clinging to the side of the boat. Why not rise, I though. Why not spring up that very moment, in the spirit of Jim, and create my own adventure?

Awash with the power of nineteenth-century children's literature, she derives what she believes to be the Core Values of boy-hero Jim Hawkins' character--BOLDNESS, RESOLUTENESS, INDEPENDENCE, and HORN-BLOWING--and resolves to put them into practice immediately.

The problem, though, is that she's a terrible person: narcissistic, backbiting, capable of truly great feats of self-justification. Thus her exercise in BOLDNESS begins at her part-time job at the Pet Library (exactly what it says on the tin: an animal rescue that allows its inhabitants to be borrowed and returned by patrons) as she asserts her selfhood by just not doing the nasty duties she doesn't want to do. She then uses what she assumes to be petty cash her boss has hidden in the back room to purchase a parrot--a Yellow-Naped Amazon named Little Richard--and while she's shopping for the bird, vandals wreak havoc at the Library. Summarily fired, she proceeds methodically to destroy the lives of everyone around her, remaining blissfully, hilariously oblivious to the carnage in her wake.

You know I'm a sucker for voice, and oh such a glorious voice has Treasure Island!!!: pointlessly smart, Waugh-ly arch, articulate and funny and mean and instantly compelling. Definitely my favorite new novel of the year.

P.S. Whilst idly researching whether Europa Editions has a subscription service (alas, no), I discovered and joined the Europa Challenge Blog--a group of folks dedicated to the publisher's amazing, quirky, international catalog. This year I'm participating at the "Ami" level--only one book to go! (I'm planning on You Deserve Nothing.)

CALDECOTT BONUS ROUND!!! The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Brian Selznick)

2011-11-29T16:38:00.000-06:00

Unless you're a book nerd like me, you probably don't remember it being controversial that The Invention of Hugo Cabret won the 2008 Caldecott Medal, but believe you me, it was--usually the illustration award goes to a picture book, leaving the Newbery for middle-grade reading*. Hugo is a hybrid of both, 158 pictures and 26,159 words, not quite a novel and not quite a graphic novel. It is, really--and this is wholly intentional on Selznick's part--closest to a silent film, with extra-loquacious intertitles. The art is all black-and-white, pencil on watercolor paper, with the same otherworldly, dim-yet-glowing quality of those first movies. And it's also pretty darn fantastic. I'm embarrassed I didn't read it until the month the movie came out (directed by Martin Scorsese, in 3D. Seems an odd choice to me, but the boy points out it's the 21st-century equivalent of the experimental techniques the pioneers of cinema used.).

Hugo Cabret lives alone in the recesses of the Montparnasse train station in the early 1930s. His loving father, a clockmaker who taught him the intricacies of cogs and gears, died in a fire, leaving Hugo with his alcoholic uncle, guardian of the Montparnasse clocks. But his uncle has disappeared, and so Hugo keeps the time himself, surviving by pilfering from the station's cafe. His only companion now is an automaton--a magician's prop in the from of a mechanical man seated at a desk with a pen in his hand. Discovered and repaired by Hugo's father, then damaged in the same fire that killed him, the construct is Hugo's last connection to his previous existence, and he's determined to fix it. To do so, he periodically steals parts from a toy shop in the station. When the toymaker catches him, though, it starts a chain of events that ends up with the amazing early fantasy films of Georges Méliès. Which Netflix doesn't have, even A Trip to the Moon. Argh! Time to hit up Photoplay, the actual brick-and-mortar video store in Greenpoint.

*FUN FACT: the Newbery and Caldecott Medals, though American, are both named for Englishmen (John, an 18th-century publisher; Randolph, a 19th-century illustrator).

FURTHER FUN FACT THAT I JUST LEARNED: the U.K. equivalents are the Carnegie Medal (lit) and the Kate Greenaway Medal (illustration).

I liked these books.

2011-11-28T17:18:00.001-06:00

'Tis time once again for all things yearly-wrap-up-ish! Here're my favorite books of the 139 I've read since the last time I did a list like this. Books are in arbitrary (alphabetical) order; links go back to original mention on this blog, in an omphaloskeptical sort of way.

FRONTLIST:

Bossypants, Tina Fey
A Dance with Dragons, George R.R. Martin (the whole dang series, really)
Embassytown, China Miéville
Fantastic Women, ed. Rob Spillman
Hark, a Vagrant!, Kate Beaton
The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, Alina Bronsky
I Am Maru, Mugumogu
The Iron Duke, Meljean Brook
I Want My Hat Back, Jon Klassen (funniest picture book I've read in ages!)
Molly Fox's Birthday, Deirdre Madden
Mr Toppit, Charles Elton (pubbed in 2010, but I read it in December, so it wasn't on last year's list)
Other People We Married, Emma Straub
REAMDE, Neal Stephenson
Season for Temptation, Theresa Romain
Those Across the River, Christopher Buehlman
Treasure Island!!!, Sara Levine (review up this week, promise)
When Beauty Tamed the Beast, Eloisa James

BACKLIST:

1491, Charles C. Mann
The Anubis Gates, Tim Powers
Barchester Towers, Anthony Trollope
A Brief History of the Dead, Kevin Brockmeier
Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol
The Desperate Duchesses series, Eloisa James
The Emperor of Ice-Cream, Brian Greene
An Evening of Long Goodbyes, Paul Murray
The Fur Person, May Sarton
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke
The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
Please Ignore Vera Dietz, A.S. King
Stoner, John Williams
The Tale of Despereaux, Kate di Camillo
They Saw the Elephant, Jo Ann Levy
A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan

THREE NOTABLE REREADS:

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, Mildred D. Taylor

Small reads.

2011-11-28T16:41:00.000-06:00

A trio of books read recently, briefly and approvingly noted:

I Am Maru: Internet cat celebrity (there is probably a portmanteau encompassing all three of those titles, but I refuse to look it up) Maru, in book form. Exactly what it says on the tin. LOOKIT THIS BIG FURRY GUY! Sometimes when I'm feeling hectic/irritable at work, I'll just go take off the cover, which features a poster on the inside, and stare at it until I feel better. Ahhhhhh. P.S. His name means "round." Of course it does!

How 2 Be Awsum: Speaking of Internet cats . . . . This is another book of LOLcats. You'll love it or you'll hate it--ain't no middle ground on these fluffy feline misspellers. GUESS WHICH SIDE I FALL ON GUYS

Runaways, Volume 2: Teenage Wasteland (Brian K. Vaughan, Adrian Alphona): Next installment (issues #7-12), in a so-far great comic book series about a bunch of kids who discover their parents are supervillains. This book was even better than the last one--exposition over, straight to action!

Newbery November: Kira-Kira (Cynthia Kadohata)

2011-11-27T13:17:00.000-06:00

Finished up my newer-Newbery run with the lovely Kira-Kira, a book which encompasses, in no particular order: the Japanese-American experience in the 1950s, the horror of chicken-processing plants (for both the animals and the humans who work there without benefit of union), the love (and friction) between sisters, and the havoc wreaked on a family when one of its members falls seriously ill. That's a lot for any novel to cover, and complex for a middle-grade book, yet Kadohata handles it fluidly.

I feel like I don't have much more specific to say, though? I guess I'll take it general: Kira-Kira's very much in keeping with the tradition of quality young people's historical fiction--like all my rereads and others I didn't get to (Jacob Have I Loved, Dicey's Song, Sarah, Plain and Tall, and so forth). So what's the appeal of this to kids? Speaking from my own experience, I loved reading about other children in places, times, and situations far different from my own, whether realistic or sfnal* (i.e., The Girl with the Silver Eyes, The Boy Who Reversed Himself). It is, I think, a form of empathy--inhabiting the lives of others, comparing reactions and emotions, finding commonalities. I don't think this is as easy to do with movies or television; you can identify with characters, sure, but you're necessarily seeing an actor who's not you. Narration, particularly in the first person, can eliminate this distance. (Of course, first-person narration can also create distance, but that's an essay for another day. OK, an essay I wrote on Poe in college specifically. Dude knew from unreliable narrators.)

Reading these books as an adult is a similar experience--with the added bonus that you can also recapture the feeling of being a child (and if you're rereading, the feeling of being a child reading the same book for the first time). Which is a roundabout way of saying that I've had a fantastic time with this project, and may return to it every November!

Stay tuned for a SPECIAL BONUS ROUND. Probably Wednesday.

*I learned a new word this week! Short for "science fictional." Pretty cool, eh? Also, Anne McCaffrey died. Sad face.

Strawberry Girl (Lois Lenski)

2011-11-24T12:09:00.000-06:00

OK, so this one wasn't as good as I remembered. But I can tell why I liked it as a kid: I had a Little House on the Prairie-bred fascination with the everyday activities of pioneer life. Planting crops and tending animals and churning butter and goin' to town for penny candy! The house I lived in between the ages of five and eight had a vacant lot next door; when the grass got really long, my little sister and I would run through it pretending to be Wilder children. (There are now I think three houses on that lot? With, like, NYC amounts of space between them.)

Anyway, Strawberry Girl is all about daily life on ten-year-old Birdie Boyer's family's farm in backwoods Florida, around the turn of the twentieth century. The book's long on logistics and kinda slim on story, though conflict with the Boyers' even poorer neighbors, the Slaters, propels what narrative there is. The Slaters don't feed their livestock (cows and hogs), just let them roam--and don't take kindly to Birdie's father fencing in his land to keep his crops from ruin. Mostly, though, Lenski seems concerned with simply recording this slice of rural history, the struggles, frolics, and vernacular of the Florida Crackers. (Yep. It's what they called themselves--apparently it comes from the crack of the whip used by the local cowboys.)

I hadn't known before that this is just one in a long series of books Lenski wrote about children's lives in various regions of the United States--some contemporary, others historical. It's an impressive, wide-ranging project, and deserves credit for often focusing on poor communities: coal miners, sharecroppers, migrant workers. She also gets ups for writing about African- and Chinese-American children. Unfortunately, I think the didactic purpose of the books, lost on its intended audience, makes it not an especially exciting read as an adult. Sometimes you can't go back.

Sunday finishes up Newbery November with Cynthia Kadohata's Kira-Kira.

Heart of Steel (Meljean Brook)

2011-11-23T10:19:00.001-06:00

See, here's a prime example of why "romance" is less a genre than an attitude: one could easily classify Heart of Steel and the preceding novel Brook set in this world, The Iron Duke, as sci-fi/fantasy, specifically steampunk/alternate history. (This is a universe where the Mongols had nanotech, and used it to stomp the heck out of their enemies (soon, subjects) for five hundred years.) They'd be marketed differently, of course, and there would be fewer abs on the covers (to stay with tired old stereotypes, you could just stick the heroines in leather on the front instead)--but I don't think the content would need to change a bit. Romantic plots and subplots abound in SF/F! Hell, even Perdido Street Station has a love story in it. Not that it ends well. (Boo, now I'm sad.) Wherein would lie the difference, I suppose--that all-important Happily Ever After.

That said, I liked Heart but didn't love it like I did Iron, not through any fall-off in writing quality, but just cause I wasn't as into the central couple, both of whom appeared in the previous book. Yasmeen is an airship captain--though she loses her Lady Corsair, and its crew, to assassins unknown early on here--with badass, acrobatic fighting skillz and slightly tufted ears, plus a murky past. I don't think she's any less of a Type than flinty policewoman Mina Wentworth was in the first installment, but I just didn't like her as much. Archimedes Fox is a treasure hunter and star of a series of pulp novels by his sister, Zenobia, last seen when Yasmeen abandoned him in zombie-infested Venice. (Oh yeah, did I mention mainland Europe is pretty much overrun with a zombie plague? That's pretty important.) Maybe I just can't forgive her for this? Though he certainly does, and I do love his soft, squishy romantic's heart, a great contrast with his swashbucklin' exterior. Together, they set off on an expedition searching for Leonardo da Vinci's clockwork army, dodging Horde soldiers and mysterious enemies all the while; along the way, trying deuced hard not to fall in love.

There's a lot going on here, and Brook does a swell job keeping all these balls in the air. She's clearly got this world more fleshed out in her mind than she will ever need to commit to print, and goodness, she knows her way around escalating sexual tension. More telling than all this verbiage? I will totes pick up the next in the Iron Seas series. Her website says late 2012.

Comics history.

2011-11-22T13:30:00.001-06:00

So even though I've nine self-assigned books this month (Newberys + Russian classics book club), I've found myself with spare reading time in between (mostly wonderful) obligations. Over the past couple of weeks, I diverted myself with a pair of books on the gory, over-the-top crime and horror comics of the Fifties and the outcry against them that led to the prudish Comics Code--far stricter than the Hays Code ever was. Unfortunately, both had pet-peeve flaws that kept 'em from really floating my boat.

David Hadju's The Ten-Cent Plague is a narrative history of the comic-book genre, from its origins in the newspaper comic strip to its newsstand-grabbing sensationalism to the Congressional hearing that led to its (temporary) decimation. He interviewed dozens of writers and artists who worked on the sometimes-controversial comic books, and quotes them ad infinitum (to his credit, he does note when their testimony seems more self-serving than truthful). It's an interesting story, a tale of populist culture vilified and ultimately censored by the quasi-scientific and law enforcement establishments. But I do feel that Hadju falls too easily and too often into the Those Repressed Fifties Folk trope, wherein it goes without saying that any objections on the part of parents or government at the time was witch-hunting or quashing dissident (and, it's implied, correct) viewpoints. It's true that paranoia and fear cause overreactions, and blaming comics for juvenile delinquency was objectively untrue. I think, though, that were (and are) points to be made about the appropriateness of the images churned out by EC and its multitude of imitators: they were shocking, gory, grotesque. They were meant to be, and they were not on the whole meant to subvert the dominant paradigm and to expand the minds of children, to save them from the unbearable conformity of the times. They were designed to make money; anything else was a side effect.

One of the other problems with the book is its near-total lack of images, which is why I read it in tandem with The Horror! The Horror!, a collection that includes many of the crime and horror comics referenced by Hadju. And boy, there are some doozies! Melting faces, ax murders, lots and lots of pointy breasts--fun to look at for low-culture-appropriating adults like me, but honestly? I can see what worried parents. It also can't be denied that, with a few exceptions, these comics were badly drawn, poorly plotted, and cheaply printed. Well, strike that--both Hadju and Jim Trombetta, who contributes overly academic, sneering, insufferable essays* in between the comics collected here, would deny that. I think that damages their case, honestly. Rather than arguing for the preservation of these comics on artistic grounds, couldn't they simply point out that censorship is wrong even when what's being censored is no great loss?

*If I had stopped reading these in-between bits after rolling my eyes at the first few, I would have enjoyed the book, like, 75% more. That's what I recommend for anyone not looking to relive their days in grad school lit.

Newbery November: The Tale of Despereaux (plus BONUS DICAMILLO)

2011-11-20T08:36:00.000-06:00

Guys, I'm pretty sure Kate DiCamillo is a time traveler. Or a vampire.

How else to explain the way her books read like dispatches from the past? I wrote of The Magician's Elephant that "it feels like it was recently discovered in an attic in London, written in spidery brown ink on yellowed parchment," and the same could be said of The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane or 2003's Newbery Medal winner The Tale of Despereaux. All are fairy tales in a very old sense: before they were morality plays, before they were comforts for children, when they were thought experiments for human emotion and imagination. There's always a great deal of darkness in her stories, and qualified, quiet happy endings--but everything, everything is suffused with love.

Despereaux Tilling is a misfit mouse: born with his eyes open, with overlarge ears and a tiny body prone to fainting. Where a proper rodent forages for crumbs, he's transfixed by the beauty of stained glass and music the others don't hear. Where they nibble books, he finds himself reading them, learning by heart the story of a brave knight and the beautiful princess he loves. One day he seeks out the source of the song and ends up meeting--and speaking to--the Princess Pea, an act forbidden by the Mouse Council that gets him exiled to the dangerous, rat-infested dungeons of the castle. The book is also the tale of a broken-hearted rat named Chiaroscuro, a lonesome, battered servant girl called Miggery Sow, and their plot to kidnap Pea. Despereaux bravely sets out to free her.

Not only is the story exciting, scary, and sweet (with beautiful, inky illustrations by Timothy Basil Ering), DiCamillo's authorial asides frame the whole thing as a story about stories, saying in the end

I would like it very much if you thought of me as a mouse telling you a story, this story, with the whole of my heart, whispering it in your ear in order to save myself from the darkness, and to save you from the darkness, too.
"Stories are light," Gregory the jailer told Despereaux.
Reader, I hope you have found some light here.

I loved this book so much I wished it was three times longer. When I found myself too close to the end yesterday, I had to buy another DiCamillo for the subway ride home: so I acquired The Tiger Rising.

Tiger is as uncompromising and spare as a Flannery O'Connor short story. It's about Rob Horton, a twelve-year-old boy with a dead mother, a persistent rash on his legs, and no friends, who comes across an amazing thing in the Florida woods: a real tiger, pacing and pacing in a cage. A strange, defiant new girl at school, Sistine Bailey, quickly becomes the only person he trusts with his discovery. She is determined to let the tiger go--but at what cost? It's a bleak and heartbreaking little book, with nothing easy or gentle about it. But somehow DiCamillo's prose (which I am trying not to call "luminous") imbues the tale with beauty and joy. Seriously: I think she's my favorite modern children's author. Friends with kids, take note.

Newbery November: The Witch of Blackbird Pond (Elizabeth George Speare)

2011-11-17T17:14:00.003-06:00

I was surprised by how much I'd forgotten about The Witch of Blackbird Pond. First of all, the "witch" is only a small part of the tale of sixteen-year-old Kit Tyler, who's left her grandfather's plantation in Barbados after his death to live with an aunt she's never met in the far-off colony of Connecticut. Leaving her pampered tropical existence for Puritan New England proves even more of a shock than she'd thought: the climate is chilly, the work backbreaking, and the religion staid. But there are bright spots here and there--perhaps the brightest is her forbidden friendship with an old Quaker woman named Hannah Tupper, who lives along by Blackbird Pond, and is suspected and feared by the townspeople.

The narrow world of 1687 Wethersfield opens up to a remarkably broad slice of history, much of it to do with freedom: religious (for the Puritans and Quakers), political (Connecticut's struggle to preserve its charter rather than be ruled by Massachusetts--and by extension, the king of England, of whom the Puritans were hardly fans), even simply personal (both Kit and her grandfather owned slaves in Barbados, who were sold to pay for the journey. Her cousins are as shocked by this as she is by their two Sunday services). And, of course, Kit yearns for the lost freedom of her wild childhood, running and reading and paying no mind to the world. Gradually, she learns what we all learn growing up: that pleasing yourself is important, but not all. (Put another, less back-of-the-book way: when to hold 'em, when to fold 'em, and when to just walk away.)

Another great, great read, that I think could easily be an adult novel. Kit is impetuous and opinionated, like all the best romance novel heroines--but everyone else is interesting, too, and full of nuance. Even the townsfolk who persecute Hannah and eventually accuse Kit herself of witchcraft aren't evil, but afraid. The message is more complex than "be yourself!" or "different is good!" Because, of course, both those platitudes don't always apply. More books for kids should acknowledge this, darn it.

(It's also pretty fun to needle my Stamford-born boyfriend in re: New Englanders always being frosty and confrontation-averse. Unless, you know, it's burnin' witches. Everyone enjoys a good witch-burnin'. And Kit's uncle insults someone by calling him a "whited sepulcher," which I must use from now on.)

Sunday: Kate DiCamillo's The Tale of Despereaux! I wish this one were three times longer, because I already don't want it to end.

Newbery November: Crispin: The Cross of Lead (Avi)

2011-11-13T08:30:00.001-06:00

So here's the problem: the two medal winners from the oughts I've read this month? Nowhere near as good as the older ones I'm rereading. It is impossible to tell how much of this is due to childhood memory and the gut-level good associations of Roll of Thunder and Island of the Blue Dolphins. I do think the prose in Single Shard and this week's newer read, Avi's Crispin: The Cross of Lead, is objectively less sophisticated--and this is a complaint I didn't have with this year's winner (the stellar & evocative Moon Over Manifest) and 2010's (the brilliant, brilliant, OMGBRILLIANT When You Reach Me). But when all is said and done, I just didn't think Cross of Lead was a good book.

There are good things about it, of course--Avi deftly conjures his medieval milieu, especially the omnipresence of Christianity in everyday life. But rather than stay with his protagonist as he believes himself to be at the outset--the poorest of the peasantry, who's only eaten meat a few times in his life--Crispin ends up being [SPOILER] the bastard son of the local lord, whose mother was gently born and literate. Which moves the narrative from that of a completely neglected class to that of a clichéd Secret Royal tale. Very disappointing.

The death of his previously-unknown father causes him to be pursued by a broadly-evil steward, kin to the lord's wife, who wants to make sure Crispin doesn't claim any part of the estate. Chases ensue. Then Crispin hooks up with a juggler/spy with fabulously anachronistic ideas about the Equality of Man and the Unnecessity of Organized Religion (seriously, in 1300s England? Maybe there was one guy. But not several, and not a secret brotherhood of rebels). More chases ensue. Then nothing is resolved, and there's a sequel I'm not interested in reading.

(Another COMPLETELY UNFAIR thing that bugged me? The old-fashioned-y words and locutions in the prose are three hundred years too late for the time the book is set--vaguely Shakespearean. I know PERFECTLY WELL that they would have been speaking Middle English at the time, and OBVIOUSLY you're not going to write a kids' book in Middle English . . . but if you're going to use anachronistic vocab, why not make it modern-modern? Yes, this is a stupid quibble. But it's one I had, and this is my blog to air my stupid quibbles--really, it should be on the masthead.)

Next Thursday, back to childhood faves! This time it's Elizabeth George Speare's 1959 Newbery winner The Witch of Blackbird Pond.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Alexander Solzhenitsyn)

2011-11-12T15:18:00.000-06:00

WORD's classics book club, aka Talking to Stephanie and Toby About Stuff, strikes again! Really, one of my favorite events every month. This time around it was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's slender but powerful account of life in a Stalin-era work camp.

I first read this book for junior-year English class in high school--I remember some of my friends mashing it up with Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat ("Go go go Ivan, you know what they say!") for a weird-ass little video. (This is something we did a lot: we were a very special type of nerd.) I've read it a few times since, notably a few years ago when I graded essays on it for a teacher at my old high school--I managed to blank on the due date and had to grade 90 papers in, like, two days. Teachers of America, I salute you!

It is, I think, a perfect book. In many ways it's a stark contrast to much of the nineteenth-century Russian literature the club has read this year; whereas in Tolstoy or Dostoevsky there is much melodrama over trivialities, in One Day the everyday injustices faced by Soviet political prisoners is barely reacted to by the zeks. The lack of one catastrophic incident for a plot to turn upon is an ambitious and ultimately effective way to structure the novel--this one day is nothing special. Its importance lies in the succession of thousands of days just like it.

It's also a very habitable novel, by which I mean it's easy to see yourself in it. Despite obvious disparities, both Ivan and I wake up, head to work, solve problems, eat dinner. We both have routines, minor deviations from same--we both divide our life into what is ours and what belongs to others. This ease of correlation is both comforting and terrifying, and inspiring in a non-hokey way. Human beings approach survival in the same way, whatever obstacles--major or minor--they have to overcome. And as a species, we're damn good at surviving. One Day is one tiny example.

Newbery November: Island of the Blue Dolphins (Scott O'Dell)

2011-11-10T17:09:00.001-06:00

I was obsessed with this book for a while in third grade. I remember writing an extremely derivative story about a girl living on an island by herself. This must be the book where I first came across the words/concepts "abalone" and "cormorant"; while I still have only vague notions of both, they carry with them such an allure of exoticism and self-reliance such that--despite my land-locked distrust of shellfish--I would totes eat an abalone given the opportunity. (I mean, I'm sure it would be gross. But I would eat it.)

Yet I only learned quite recently that Island of the Blue Dolphins is based on a true story. The eponymous island is called San Nicolas, and it's 75 miles off southern California coast--in 1853, a woman was discovered who'd lived there alone for eighteen years, since the rest of her tribe (decimated by Russian-led Aleut otter hunters) departed for the mainland and she was somehow left behind. By the time she was found, her people had all died of European diseases, and she succumbed to the same a mere seven weeks later. No one spoke her language, so no one ever knew her name.

Knowing this gave an undercurrent of melancholy to the reread, but it didn't come close to masking the excitement I remembered from the first several times through--it all came flooding back. O'Dell imagines her isolated life in rich detail: what she eats, wears; where she lives; how she passes her time and assuages her loneliness (mostly by making friends with animals. She's got the best dog). For a little girl without an ounce of self-sufficiency to her credit (I was def. an Indoor Kid, even though I went to a magnet elementary where camping was part of the curriculum), it was hopelessly romantic to think of making my own spears and building my own canoe. Too, while boy adventure stories were (and are) common, this was a book about a girl surviving on her own, by her wits and with her strength--the dudes could have Hatchet. Me, I was gonna be like Karana.

After talking to a customer a few weeks ago about the 50th anniversary of The Phantom Tollbooth, I wondered what on earth had won the Newbery instead in 1961. It was Island of the Blue Dolphins--and you know what? Even with Tollbooth being one of my favoritest favorites, I'm okay with that.

Sunday: Avi's medieval mystery/thriller (at least that's how it's reading so far) Crispin: The Cross of Lead, which won the Newbery in 2003.

Hark! A Vagrant (Kate Beaton)

2011-11-07T13:31:00.000-06:00

The temptation is just to go KATE BEATON HAS A BOOK YOU GUYS EEEE and be done with it . . . but maybe I should try to explain why that’s so exciting? OK: Hark! A Vagrant is a collection of (mostly) comics from Beaton’s website of the same name—with value-added new stuff, of course. Even the repeats, though, are thrilling on the page—on paper! With a hardcover! And an ISBN!

Beaton’s brilliant comics—drawn in lines I can only describe as “loping,” simple and expressive—hit this sweet spot of nerdy literary and historical references with pop culture and absurdity that, to me, is some of the funniest writing happening: dude watchin’ with the Brontes (“Anne, why are you writing books about how alcoholic losers ruin people’s lives? Don’t you see that romanticizing douchey behavior is the proper literary convention in this family!”), the depressing lot of the pre-modern lady scientist (“Is it a scientific breakthrough in feelings?”), fifteenth-century peasant romance (“I’ve like, never ever brushed my teeth”). Oh yeah, and the WWII hipster battalion, and the crankiest Wonder Woman around, and the wise-ass slacker Mystery Solving Teens. And everything I know about Canadian history. All this stuff you can see for free: takes on Macbeth and Jane Eyre and Crime and Punishment are twenty bucks away. But really, the chance to enable a hilarious, smart-as-a-whip lady artist to live off her creativity? Effing priceless.

[P.S. Here endeth my Internetless backlog of posts: ten days in a row! We now return to twice-a-week-ish.]

Newbery November: A Single Shard (Linda Sue Park)

2011-11-06T09:20:00.001-06:00

Linda Sue Park's A Single Shard won the Newbery in 2002, the year I graduated from college. The setting is world-expanding, at least for me: twelfth-century Korea, in a village known for its celadon pottery, celadon being a stoneware glaze producing a unique blue-gray-green color. The main character is an orphan named Tree-Ear, who's lived most of his life under a bridge with his crippled guardian, Crane-Man; Tree-Ear is fascinated by master potter Min, spying on him as he throws pots and fires them into beauty. When he breaks a pot by accident, he offers to work off the debt, secretly hoping Min will teach him his craft. Min, meanwhile, dreams of a potter's highest honor: a royal commission to create pieces for the king.

Beyond the novelty of the mise en scène, it's a pretty straightforward book. It was striking how much simpler the construction of the prose was than Roll of Thunder--twenty-five years certainly affected the complexity of children's literature--though I wouldn't call it simplistic. It is less engaging to an adult reader, however. The cynic in me feels like the real value of the book lies in middle school teachers being able to check off "Asian" in their diversity boxes--but hey, what's wrong with that? I mean, I'm more historically educated than most, and I still know almost nothing about Korean history, except that they were constantly invaded by China and Japan. Also, kimchi. So a book to fill in that gap early--and to provoke thought about the art of pottery, its mix of manual skill, imagination, and chance--is a good thing.

Thursday: Scott O'Dell's 1961 adventure yarn Island of the Blue Dolphins.

Gold Rush Groom (Jenna Kernan)

2011-11-05T12:04:00.000-05:00

I figured, hey, if I'm gonna write a Gold Rush romance, I should know what else is out there, right? Hence: Jenna Kernan's Gold Rush Groom, also my first category romance (Harlequin Historical for September 2011). Somehow, despite having it on hold at work for weeks and then on my to-read shelf for a similar while, I did not notice until the moment I picked it up to read that it's set in the Yukon Gold Rush, not the California: 50 years later, totally different terrain. Oh well.

Still, I enjoyed the book. The heroine, Lily Shanahan, is believably plucky and adventurous (like the Modern Major General): when we meet her, she's been idling on the Alaskan coast for months, having traveled there determined to lead life on her own terms, escaping the States' proscribed, subservient roles for the daughter of an Irish immigrant. But now she needs a partner with whom to make the dangerous trek to the Yukon gold fields, and the men who come through mostly laugh at her. This wild frontier, too, circumscribes its women.

Jack Snow, on the other hand, comes from a once-privileged Connecticut family, ruined by his father's irresponsibility. He's come to Alaska armed with half a degree in mechanical engineering, confident he can use his skills to improve mining efficiency and earn the fortune necessary to buy his mother and younger sister back into society. He realizes quickly that he, too, needs a partner--Princeton has left him utterly unprepared for this frozen, mountainous landscape.

So they join together, BUSINESS PARTNERS ONLY OK, and set out, along with Lily's adorable Newfoundland mix (I know that a loyal pooch is a quick trope to establish a character as caring and trustworthy, but gosh, it's effective. Works much better for me than doting on a kid), braving rapids and hunger and exhaustion. Oh, and falling madly in love, obviously, and agonizing over the difference in their social stations that means they can never be together. OR CAN THEY?

Gold Rush Groom was a perfectly pleasant read (OK, except that Jack says "You're mine" during sex. I guess there are ladies who don't find that disturbing?), with hard-working and resourceful characters, easier to relate to than heiresses and nobility, I have to say. There was some odd stuff with time in the narrative--I'm sure that the trip from the coast to Dawson City really did take six months or more, but I found it harder to believe that nothing advanced in the relationship during the narrative lacunae. I also thought Lily's making money hand over fist as a cook and a singer was a little much. Category romance is, I think, supposed to be more ephemeral than single-title: yep, this fit the bill.

Fantastic Women (edited by Rob Spillman)

2011-11-04T16:09:00.000-05:00

Fantastic Women collects eighteen stories originally printed in Tin House, all by women, and all, well, fantastical. Not in the dragon-and-wizard sense (though you know me, I’d never knock that sense): the stories are all weird like wyrd, like they’re being told to you by some half-human creature you had to go on a quest to even find, and it is very important you understand them, because the fate of the kingdom might be at stake. Here, have some examples: in Samantha Hunt’s “Beast,” a woman turns into a deer every night, and worries about how to tell her husband. In Karen Russell’s “The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach,” a teenage boy living in the shadow of his much cooler brother begins to suspect that the titular birds are stealing pieces of the town’s future. Julia Slavin’s “Drive-Through House”—well, it’s in the title. And Kelly Link! A Kelly Link story I hadn’t read before ZOMFG!!! “Light” concerns a woman whose mother vacationed in a pocket universe when she was in utero (like you do), causing her to be born with two shadows, one of which eventually became her difficult brother.

So why is this a collection by women? Well, there’s the glib answer, “Cause men have all the rest of the anthologies,” but I will further say this: in my experience, women writers are often better than men at what I will term the domesticity of the surreal—the mixing of everyday human concerns with the outlandish and impossible, without losing emotional weight in the process. (Haruki Murakami is an outstanding male practitioner of this.) Almost all of these stories revolve around real relationships—with husbands, with siblings, with children—ordinary relationships that, when examined in depth, become every bit as unbelievable in their continued existence as any dragon, selkie, or alternate dimension.

Newbery November: Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (Mildred D. Taylor)

2011-11-03T17:21:00.001-05:00

When I read this year's Newbery winner, Moon Over Manifest, months ago, I found myself listing off all the other historical-fiction medal winner I loved when I was little, and yearning to reread them . . . then my penchant for alliteration got the better of me, and from this was born Newbery November. This month, I'll be rereading four old favorites--and four modern winners from the mid-oughts. Posts will go up Thursdays and Sundays.

First up: 1977's Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. Holy cow, this book is great. I am going to make the bold claim that it's in fact a better kids' book about race relations than To Kill a Mockingbird. (Yes, TKaM is a kids' book.) The biggest reason for this? The little girl learning harsh truths about the racial injustice of the 1930s South is black herself. Scout may be troubled by what she learns about her world, but she can escape it as Cassie Logan never can.

Cassie is far luckier than many of her schoolmates, the children of tenant farmers--her grandfather managed to buy 400 acres of his own land, and the Logans farm for themselves, though her father still must spend months working on the railroad in Lousiana to pay taxes and the mortgage. Her mother is a teacher at the local black school, which runs only from October to March, since the students are needed to plant and harvest. The white school in the community, which hands down dilapidated, outdated textbooks when it feels like it, owns a school bus; every day the driver amuses his passengers by running Cassie and her brothers (one older, two younger) off the road, or splashing them with mud from puddles. These everyday humiliations, which they've learned to take in stride, are eventually eclipsed by far larger, darker acts of hatred.

Taylor's writing is just beautiful. I really think prose like hers is rare even in adult literature these days. Here, the first paragraph of Chapter 9:

Spring. It seeped unseen into the waiting red earth in early March, softening the hard ground for the coming plow and awakening life that had lain gently sleeping through the cold winter. But by the end of March it was evident everywhere: in the barn where three new calves bellowed and the chicks the color of soft pale sunlight chirped; in the yard where the wisteria and English dogwood bushes readied themselves for their annual Easter bloom, and the fig tree budded producing the forerunners of juicy, brown fruit for which the boys and I would have to do battle with fig-loving Jack; and in the smell of the earth itself. Rain-drenched, fresh, vital, full of life, spring enveloped all of us.

LOOK at that long sentence: a colon and a semi-coloned list! Remember how The Hunger Games used nothing but commas? Taylor, quite the contrary, trusts ten-year-olds (like, you know, 1989 me) to figure out those little black specks and come away knowing new ways to put words together.

Another wonderful and brave thing about the book? No happy ending. Little is resolved, in fact, following a truly epic climax featuring a storm, an attempted lynching, and a cotton fire. Instead, Cassie cries, unable to unlearn what the year has taught her.

Wow.

(P.S. The copy I picked up at Housing Works, another 50-cent rack score, is a tie-in edition from a 1978 TV movie--with Morgan Freeman as dapper Uncle Hammer. Awesome.)

Sunday: 2002's A Single Shard by Linda Sue Park, set in a potters' village in 12th-century Korea.

Pale Fire (Vladimir Nabokov)

2011-11-02T16:33:00.000-05:00

Pale Fire had been on my to-reread list for ages, and then a few months ago I found the very edition I’d previously read—my father’s, a 1975 Berkley Medallion mass market paperback—on the 50-cent rack at Housing Works. SCORESVILLE USA!!!

Gosh, golly, goodness, this may be—certainly in terms of structure—the most amazing novel ever written. It begins with a 999-line poem in rhyming couplets, written from the point of view of an aging American poet, John Shade, reflecting on his life: his childhood; his love for his wife; the sad, short life of his daughter. The remainder of the book is commentary on the poem by Shade’s crazy neighbor, Charles Kinbote, who may or may not be the exiled king of the vaguely Slavic country of Zembla, and who uses the slightest pretext to spin his own story from the unrelated words of Shade’s magnum opus.

Pale Fire is ambitious, funny, weird, heartbreaking, and—to use a diluted word in its original strength—unique. I suppose there might be people out there who find Nabokov’s hyperliterate, wordy, playful prose difficult or annoying, but I just want to cram it into my mouth while saying OM NOM NOM. His writing just tastes good, like a cherry tomato just off the vine, warm from the sun—or like a curry with two dozen ingredients. Just pure joy.

The Tiger's Wife (Tea Obreht)

2011-11-01T18:30:00.003-05:00

The Tiger's Wife (out in paperback today) took me a bit to get into--mostly because I couldn't help but compare it to How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, the gold standard by which I shall measure all future novels touching even tangentially on the 1990s Serbian-Bosnian conflict. The books have more in common than just setting: both begin with the deaths of the narrator's grandfather, both contain elements of (though I hate the term) magical realism; thematically, both deal with communal memory, how the events of our childhood are colored and created by how we remember and retell them.

At some point I didn't notice, though, The Tiger's Wife grabbed me and held on, and I would look up surprised that time had passed, because it felt like everything else should have frozen as the story rolled out. While there are many stories crossing in and out of the narrative--the travails of being a med student in post-war Serbia, with such a lack of intact cadavers; the narrator's attempts to vaccinate a group of orphans living in a monastery across the border--the two most crucial are the story of the tiger's wife and the story of the deathless man, "the story of how my grandfather became a man; the other . . . how he became a child again."

The tiger here isn't metaphorical: he escapes from the Belgrade zoo during the WWII bombing of the city, and makes his way into the forest outside her grandfather's tiny hometown of Galina, where the half-tame beast is befriended by a deaf-mute girl married to (and brutally beaten by) the town's butcher. The deathless man? A wandering-Jew sort, unable to die but able to tell others when their death is imminent. The narrator becomes convinced her grandfather was trying to find him before his own death, and sets out to seek him herself.

I will say I found the narrator's journey the least interesting part of the book; for me, it was slowly learning the stories of the tiger and his human wife, and the lonely immortal. Obreht's writing is lyrical and smooth, and she's hilariously young for being so talented (born in 1985! She's also blonde and pretty, which the cynic in me suspects is a contributing factor to her critical darlingness). All in all, The Tiger's Wife won me over, and I'll definitely back the general recommendation; in fact, it's now my go-to handsell for book club ladies. (You should also read How the Soldier, though. Tell Saša I sent ya.)

Everything I Know About Love I Learned From Romance Novels (Sarah Wendell)

2011-10-31T16:31:00.000-05:00

Man, I feel guilty about not loving EIKAL. Esp. cause I went in on my day off to meet Smart Bitch Sarah Wendell at Posman’s, and she is every morsel as funny and gracious as in person as she is online. Let me hasten to add: I liked it, quite a lot. It’s a cogent defense of how romance novels—rather than giving women unrealistic expectations that doom them to unhappy relationships forever—give them an arsenal of tools to recognize and create happy alliances. Her argument is bolstered by quotes & weigh-ins from romance authors and readers, and she is absolutely right—since when could you say that about an opinionated book? Too, I kept getting all mushy-smirky about what a perfect Romance Hero my own boyfriend is: smart and charming and caring and supportive and all that good stuff. (MWAH, sweetie!)

A few things keep me from being All About This Book, though. First, the layout sucks. Pull quotes in a book make me think I’m reading a book For Dummies, and this is not a dumb or simplistic book! Second, I kinda got tired of reading quotes from folks who weren’t Sarah; the book often felt more like a comment thread, which is fine, but an entirely different style of reading for me, and I had trouble making the transition from screen to page. Finally, the very cogency and seriousness of EIKAL made it less enjoyable for me than the freewheeling snark of her previous book (with Smart Bitches co-founder Candy Tan), Beyond Heaving Bosoms, which made me laugh hard enough to disturb the cat, like, every other page. Obviously Sarah wasn’t intending this to be a humorous book (at least, not an entirely humorous book: lady can’t write 200 pages without being funny) —fighting the demonization/dismissal of romance novels is very important to her, and to me. So it’s not really a fair criticism—let’s just call it a preference.

The Hunger Games Trilogy (Suzanne Collins)

2011-10-30T14:40:00.000-05:00

Yeah, late to this party, but after chats with new (awesome) co-workers at Posman’s, I finally checked out this mega-bestselling trilogy—i.e. The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay. I really have trouble expressing my thoughts without sounding glib or dismissive (see apologia in previous post), but here goes: I think they’re beginner’s dystopia, solid young-adult novels. In this sense, they’re fantastic—goodness knows I want post-apocalyptic awesome and revolutionary sentiment inculcated into kids ASAP. Totes in favor of QUESTION AUTHORITY onesies.

But I don’t quite get the crossover appeal. There’s a lack of sophistication to the story (and the writing—the constant comma splices in the first book made me twitch), and I don’t think the structure of the dystopia holds up to scrutiny. The country founded on the ashes of North America consists of a tyrannical central Capitol—decadent and cruel—that relies on half-starved, oppressed districts for raw materials and consumer goods. The Capitol doesn’t produce anything, and yet it has technology like genetic engineering that the districts can’t match. This isn’t how economies work. And its inhabitants are uniformly wealthy and comfortable, simultaneously frivolous and totally down for watching teenagers from the districts slaughter each other in televised blood sport (the titular Hunger Games, held yearly as punishment for a previous rebellion). This is an arguable point, but I just don’t believe that the silly party people we encounter, happily chattering about their hip new hairstyles, don’t feel any remorse over the on-camera deaths of children.

I also think the books would have been far better served by being written in third person rather than first. Our tomboyish heroine, Katniss Everdeen, has the unfortunate habit of being wounded and out of commission for weeks; she’ll regain consciousness and have to be told about everything that happened when she was out. It’s not a particularly skillful way to construct a narrative, and it got worse as the series wore on. The first book, concentrated mostly on the 74^th Hunger Games, where Katniss and love interest Peeta are contestants, is definitely the best, especially in the arena. Maybe I’m contradicting my last paragraph, but it really picked up for me once the killing started. The second and third books deal with the districts’ rebellion against the Capitol—Katniss’s behavior during the Games makes her a powerful symbol of defiance. There’s some good ambiguity as she realizes the rebels are also using her for propaganda purposes. But then there’s also a pointless love triangle. And the resolution was both mystifying and unsatisfying.

Again: they’re not bad books. They’re books for kids. Adults who loved them should try out The Gone-Away World, Perdido Street Station, A Canticle for Leibowitz, or Battle Royale (the latter a Japanese novel about teenagers battling to the death for entertainment which must have inspired Collins. When I read it, I kept a spreadsheet!).

Heiress in Love (Christina Brooke)

2011-10-29T08:35:00.000-05:00

All right, there are going to be a couple of reviews here where I’m kind of “ehn” about a book BUT have to stress that this is wholly subjective and not really critical of the book qua book. Sometimes things don’t strike my fancy, you know?

Such was Christina Brooke’s Heiress in Love, the beginning of a series which will be guided by the Ministry of Marriage—a group of wealthy and powerful British aristocrats cold-bloodedly planning alliances without regard to the feelings of the parties involved. Jane, Duchess Roxdale, recently rid of one loveless marriage, now forced by her late husband’s cruel will into contemplating another arranged match, with notorious roué Constantine Black. She’s got to overcome her disgust with Constantine’s infamous immorality, and her own repugnance with the matrimonial act. Luckily, he’s got the patience and expertise to help with the latter, and as she gets to know him, she realizes the former doesn’t tell the whole story.

The only reason I didn’t adore it—because it is marvelously written, with a lot of striking metaphors—is that I’m just not into rakes. Lord Horndog is a common hero in romances, and I get it. First of all, he’s got the mad skills born of practice with which to pleasure the heroine beyond distraction. And there’s vicarious satisfaction in the Earl of Sexington’s being seduced into swoony monogamy.

But I don’t like it, particularly in historicals, where so much of the rake’s sexual proficiency stems from encounters with prostitutes, servants, and lower-class mistresses with elements of both (I should note that this is not the case in Heiress in Love, which I appreciated). There’s an unequal power dynamic that squicks me out. And I sometimes yearn to read about a heroine who has actually had great sex before, so that the HEA is less founded on hot and cold running orgasms. I’m perfectly aware that virgin heroes and experienced heroines exist in romance, and I just need to read more of them. (Also writing one—my heroine is a widow whose marriage was loving and affectionate, and the hero’s . . . well, I need to do more research on the sexual mores of the Chinese merchant class during the Qing Dynasty. But he’s not gonna have much of an amorous history.) Suggestions are welcome.

The Way Things Are (Lucretius)

2011-10-26T17:05:00.000-05:00

Inspired by the success of Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve—which describes the rediscovery of Lucretius’s ambitious poem about everything, claiming it helped spark the Renaissance—I pulled out my trusty college copy of The Way Things Are (Latinly De Rerum Natura) and re-had at it. I have to say, I didn’t love it as much as I did when I was nineteen. (I suspect this is the simple result of having read a lot of subsequent philosophy and science in the meantime, so that I’m too aware of what he got hilariously wrong.)

But it’s still an amazing achievement. Lucretius chose poetry as a medium to explain the universe through the lens of Epicurean philosophy, much of which is quite modern: atheistic, materialistic, logical. His oft-repeated refrain is:

Our terrors and our darknesses of mind
Must be dispelled then, not by sunshine’s rays,
Not by those shining arrows of the light,
But by insight into nature, and a scheme
Of systematic contemplation.

Many of his deductions have since been proven empirically: atoms, void, even the conservation of matter. To have figured this out just by thinking about it? Wow.

And then there’s the swerve. In Lucretius’s (pretty accurate, at least to my non-physicist lights) view, the world consists of different kinds of atoms flying about, colliding and recolliding until they hit upon a useful combination. What keeps them from falling into patterns, always mixing the same way, is the swerve—the element of randomness that causes the universe. It’s a charming and mysterious way to characterize the chance and chaos that sometimes coalesces into order. Here, have a helpful illustration from my long-ago title page! I think it really says it all.

Season for Temptation (Theresa Romain): Interview and CONTEST!

2011-10-13T05:31:00.000-05:00

Season for TemptationBack around the turn of the century, I landed my first summer job, at a Goodwill thrift store. It was great: first pick of all the clothes, 25-cent paperbacks . . . and I worked with my BFF Theresa Romain. One of our favorite pastimes was flipping through what I'm now aware were old-school romances--real bodice rippers--giggling and highlighting the naughty bits (or bits we could make naughty by highlighting selectively).

A decade-ish on, she's just published her first Regency (and thoroughly modern) romance, Season for Temptation. It's a delightful read, the story of Viscount James Matheson’s making a prudent engagement to kind, shy Louisa Oliver…before meeting her headstrong, scatterbrained stepsister, Julia Herington, who find herself as unexpectedly--and inappropriately—taken with him as he with her. The joy of reading a good romance is in knowing who will end up together but being mystified as to how; Season skillfully strings the reader along with moments of genuine anxiety and an impudent wit, largely exemplified by Louisa’s formidable aunt, Lady Oliver—who ranks with Jane Austen’s most redoubtable secondary characters.

I am pleased and proud as punch about her achievement! To celebrate, I had to do something special-er than just a review, something I'd never done before on this blog. Then it turned into TWO things: first, an author interview! I wrote a piece about her for her alumni magazine (Wichita State University), but there was so much great stuff I didn't get to put in, so it's publishing here in its entirety. Second, as part of her blog tour (oh these modern authors!), Theresa's graciously providing a copy of Season to one of you lucky readers. The procedure for entry? Just be a romance writer for a day! Comment below with your very best plot idea. I'll roll a d-something to pick a winner on Saturday at noon.

Without more ado from me, here's that interview. It's a good one.

So you've got this wonderful string of degrees [psychology, English, public history, all three from WSU]. Tell me about why you got each, what fascinates you about each discipline, and how/whether they're useful to your writing.
There was nothing systematic about what I studied, but I do think each field is useful to my writing. I started off studying psychology, because Plan A was to become a therapist. In my last semester before graduation, I suddenly became horrified by the idea (probably because I took a class in which I had to practice therapy and I realized how draining it was). So I studied English instead, just because I’ve always loved reading and I didn’t know what else I wanted to do. From there, history was a natural leap since it’s so intertwined with literature—every writer is influenced by the social and political atmosphere in which they live. And really, all three degrees are just different ways to snoop into peoples’ lives. That’s my ultimate goal: literary snooping and story-telling.

When did you start writing Season? How long did it take? Favorite scenes/characters?
I started writing Season for Temptation soon after finishing a nonfiction book, about 3-1/2 years ago. The first draft took me nine months, though I didn’t know it was my first draft when I finished because I’d never written fiction before. I’d spent years writing scientific articles and even a biography, and unfortunately that first draft of Season sounded eerily like a scientific article too. I tinkered with it for a while, then after months away from the manuscript due to a house flood (ulp) I saw it with fresh eyes and revised the whole thing.

I like all the main characters, because they have traits I admire but don’t possess. Julia, the heroine, is optimistic and outgoing; James, the hero, has a dry wit. Lady Irving, the aunt and matchmaker, says whatever is on her mind—who wouldn’t love to do that? And Louisa, the heroine’s sister, is socially insecure and bookish. Kk, maybe she’s kind of like me after all.

Tell me about the agent/editing/selling process.
My first sale happened kind of backwards, because I actually had an offer before signing with an agent. I’d been querying agents with Season for a while, but I also entered some first-chapter contests sponsored by state chapters of Romance Writers of America. Not long after we finished the clean-up from the house flood, I got word that I’d made the finals of one of these contests, so I sent in my newly revised book for the final judge—an editor—to read. She loved it and made an offer soon after. I called my dream agents and gave them the scoop, and one agreed to take me on as a client after reading not just Season, but my other works in progress. An agent isn’t in the relationship for one deal, but for an author’s career.

What surprised you about "the writing life?" What would you want other struggling authors to know?
This might sound common sense, but it’s a good starting point: authors should treat a writing career as professionally and systematically as they would any other career. For example, think of query letters as resumes; think of each agent as someone you’re interviewing for a job, and choose only “candidates” who work in your field (that is, agents who represent the type of work you write). Also, follow query and submission guidelines when sending your work to agents or publishers; this alone will set you apart from the crowd. And when you’re online, be professional—no public bad-mouthing.

Are you planning to write more novels? Will they also be Regency? (If so, why this period? What does it have over other "old-timey" eras?)
I’m in this for the long haul, I hope. I’d love to make writing my full-time career, and I do write every day (well, ok, almost every day). Everything I’ve written so far has been set in the Regency. I think a lot of authors and readers get hooked by the Regency because of Jane Austen’s novels. I got intrigued by that world through her work, and the more I researched it, the more it appealed to me. The Regency era in England is the last gasp of the pastoral, pre-industrial society, so in that way it’s very exotic to a modern reader—and yet the styles and fashions of the time appear very elegant to our eyes today. Playing the manners of the time off the expectations of modern readers is all part of the fun.

I also meant to ask about your social media presence. Can you explain to a non-industry insider why it's so important for an author to do this these days?
A social media presence—blogs, Facebook, Twitter—is an author’s supplement to a publisher’s marketing arm. Strictly from an author’s or publisher’s perspective, the goal of social media is to create awareness about a new book/series/genius-must-buy-writer. But the real purpose of social media is to connect with people, and it’s essential for an author to keep that in mind. Readers will be put off by a presence that’s just about self-promotion.

Most open-ended of all: why romance? Here's where you get to Bust Stereotypes and Defend Awesomeness. Can't wait.
Romance is fun to write and to read because it’s optimistic—yet it’s realistic, too. At its heart, a romance novel is a story about how a couple works together to overcome obstacles to a healthy relationship. It’s rarely easy, and it often involves struggle. I think the popularity of romance shows that this type of plot is something we can all connect with, because we all struggle sometimes with our own relationships (whether romantic, friendly or professional) and want a healthy, hopeful resolution.

The best romances I’ve read are among the best books of any type I’ve ever read. Unfortunately, the romance genre gets a lot of snark, mainly from people who haven’t read a modern romance novel. I’m not sure why that’s the case, because pretty much everyone likes romance, even if they don’t know it. For example, The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter movies had romance subplots. What’s not to like about people working out their problems and supporting each other?

Indeed.

Fathers and Sons (Ivan Turgenev)

2011-10-09T10:05:00.000-05:00

It happened with Anna Karenina, again with Brothers Karamazov, finally with Fathers and Sons: read the book, was worried the other WORD Classic book-clubbers were wholeheartedly into it and I'd be the odd one out. And for the third time, nope--we were all in puzzled agreement. But this wasn't the frustration we felt with AK, or the irritation we found in BK, just a certain gentle bemusement. I'm not sure what to make of Fathers and Sons. It's not a bad book at all; I didn't not like it; I didn't like it either. I have a near-perfect neutrality towards it, in fact.

As the title suggests, it's largely concerned with intergenerational conflict, at a particularly crucial time in Russian history (then again, I can't think of any non-crucial times in Russian history. "Volatile" is putting it mildly)--right before the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. The sons are self-styled nihilist ("Sounds exhausting") Yevgeny Bazarov and his naive hanger-on Arkady. These kids were hilarious, let me tell you: completely recognizable as early-twenties reject-everything quasi-philosophers. Yet while Turgenev is clearly smirking at their earnestness, he's got a nostalgic affection for them as well, which saves the satire from being mean-spirited.

But while the characters are sharply observed, they're not emotionally compelling. That's more or less the issue we had with the book: it just didn't engage us, for good or ill. Stephanie wonders--brilliantly, I think--if much of our shared trouble with these 19th-century Russian novels is simply having readers' brains attuned to modern English-speaking fiction, which is constructed so differently as to be an entirely different mental experience. It is, essentially, hard for us to read. This is definitely a factor: all three of the novels mentioned above contain unnecessary scenes, operatic melodrama, digressions into philosophical argument, and little concern with character development or kinetic prose. Of course, these are not bad things! Nor, obviously, necessary for The Novel as Form. Still, it goes a long way towards explaining why we didn't have much to say about these books. The mere practice of reading them, though, is flexing literary muscles little used, and can only make us better readers. Thanks, WORD, for giving us this opportunity! Best book club I've ever been in.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (Susanna Clarke)

2011-10-05T16:59:00.000-05:00

What a lovely, fun book this was!

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell takes place in an alternate Georgian England in which magic--though real--has not been successfully practiced in Britain for a couple of centuries. There are still gentlemen who consider themselves magicians, though only theoretical ones; they gather to read each other long boring papers on the proud history of English magic, including its greatest practitioner, the Raven King, who was raised in a fairy court and ruled northern England for three hundred years. One member of the York society of magicians, curious about why magic no longer works in England, asks the question of the reclusive Mr Norrell--who shocks him by asserting, and later proving, that he is indeed a competent practical magician.

And with that, the magical renaissance on the sceptr'd isle is underway. Soon Mr Norrell has been enlisted by the government for what aid he can offer in the war against France. Later, he acquires a pupil, Jonathan Strange, and as time wears on their magical philosophies begin to diverge on certain points: Norrell wishes magic to be proper, gentlemanly, and above all English. To him, this means turning his back on the wild fairy magic of the Raven King and his followers; but Strange isn't so sure. The decisions each makes in favor of his views drive the narrative.

Such a wonderful narrative it is, too! Clarke writes in the formal-yet-conversational tone of Austen or Trollope, and serves up footnotes to fill in the gaps of our thaumato-historical knowledge. I love the old-schoolness of her fairies--child-stealers and tricksters--and the ease with which she incorporates the Napoleonic wars into her bewitching tale. This is that very rare novel for fans of fantasy and comedies-of-manners alike.

In which I am a crank about Banned Books Week.

2011-10-02T13:11:00.002-05:00

So last week was Banned Books Week. I know as book folk I should be all gung-ho about this; but while of course I support the freedom to read, every year I get curmudgeonly about the way BBW is celebrated. And every year I intend to write about why. This year, I'm doing it.

My objections are twofold. First: Challenging is not banning.
When you read the lists of "banned books" posted in libraries or bookstores or circulated online, what you're mostly seeing is challenged books, meaning (according to the ABA website) someone filed a written complaint about them, asking them to be removed from a library or school. OK, fine. How much, really, does that mean? Anyone can object to a book (that's the other side of free speech), but objecting--even officially airing said objections--does not keep anyone from reading, shelving, or assigning a book. And while the ABA compiles lists and statistics of frequently challenged books, they admit that "most" and "a majority" of these challenges fail--yet they don't provide numbers, which seems disingenuous to me, as there's a difference between, say, 55% of challenges not resulting in bans as opposed to 85% . . . and, honestly, in the absence of such statistics, I'm inclined to believe it's closer to the latter. I can live with that.

Two: Schools and libraries are not governments.
Let's assume, though, that a challenge does go through, and a book is removed from a library's shelves, or a school's reading list. That's a shame, but does this honestly prevent access to the book? Only from that one source--which I strongly doubt is the main source for books for most teenagers. Even I, bookish to a fault, never checked anything out from my high school library--I went to the public library, or the Borders down the street, or just hopped online. Books--in the United States--are not hard to get, and their being challenged does very little to make this harder. Look back at that list of frequently challenged books for 2010, for example: it contains both Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games and Stephenie Meyer's Twilight, both of which have sold millions of copies. How on earth can anyone refer to these as "banned books"?
To me, a banned book is an illegal book: a book whose sale or possession results in criminal charges. And in the United States in 2011, I am unaware of this being the case for any book whatsoever. Even The Anarchist's Cookbook is $5 on the Kindle.
However, many countries do outlaw books, even countries we think of as progressive and free. Mein Kampf is illegal to own in Austria, with a possible jail sentence of 5-10 years. Australia won't sell American Psycho to people under 18. And Iris Chang's Rape of Nanking took ten years to be published in Japan. Matters are worse in some parts of the Middle East--a co-worker* from Palestine to whom I complained about the U.S. BBW said that it's definitely a problem there.
I think we should talk about this, here, during Banned Books Week. We should post lists of books that couldn't be published in their author's home countries, that found a home here. We should read from them at BBW events, instead of The Catcher in the Rye or Harry Potter. We should celebrate how incredibly free we are.

*Oh yeah, did I mention my triumphant return to bookselling September 15? Full-time weekdays at Posman Books in Grand Central Terminal! I cannot express how happy and relieved I am: it would require interpretive dance or several LOLcats.

The Night Circus (Erin Morgenstern)

2011-09-29T17:16:00.000-05:00

Let me offer this sentence as an exemplar of why I didn't bother to finish The Night Circus:

"[The Burgess sisters] ask the perfect questions to keep the conversation flowing, warding off any lulls."

OK. So what, may I ask, are these questions like? Are they teasing or thoughtful? Do they draw out information on the topic at hand, or do they change the subject? Of whom are these questions asked? Can you quote me just one that I might experience its perfection firsthand, instead of taking the author's word for it?

To me, this is unskilled writing, and The Night Circus is rife with it. The carnival of its title is supposedly an intoxicating panorama for all the senses, but we're given very few details about the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes in question, a vagueness at first mysterious but quickly annoying. I can only theorize that Morgenstern is unable to rise to her own descriptive occasions, that her reach exceeds her grasp. She's got a good premise here: the eponymous circus is unwittingly a battleground, the site of a game played out between the proteges of two rival magicians, with the students themselves unaware of the rules or the stakes. But (though I am alone in this, as I've been hearing rave reviews for months) I found the prose lacking in definition and emotional weight. And I just got bored.

Those Across the River (Christopher Buehlman)

2011-09-29T17:08:00.000-05:00

Oh man, guys. This is a scary book.

I rarely turn to movies for the experience of pleasurable (because controlled) fear--doesn't usually work for me, though I am a sucker for haunted house stories. Have you ever seen The Sentinel? It is great. Instead, perhaps because I'm more used to manipulation via fiction (fiction is manipulation, pure and simple, the creation of real emotions from imaginary stimuli), I turn to horror novels for the keep-you-up-at-night shivers.

I was smart enough to read Those Across the River, Christopher Buehlman's first novel, in broad daylight, but it slow-build menace did a number on me nonetheless. It's the story of WWI vet Frank Nichols and the woman he calls his wife, Eudora, who move together to the small town of Whitbrow, GA, to take possession of a house bequeathed him by an aunt he never met. This despite the aunt's dire warning to sell the property without setting foot there, because "this place will smell out I fear what is in you and claim you, for its own, it, will, hug, your, bones, into, the woods, & you will wish that you had never"

Frank and Eudora should be forgiven for ignoring this disturbingly effective dispatch from Horror Tropes 101; after all, it's 1934, jobs are scarce, and the scandal of their affair (Eudora was married to a professorial colleague of Frank's at the University of Michigan) has pushed Frank out of academia. In Whitbrow, they'll have a place to live, Eudora can take over the teaching job the deceased aunt vacated, and Frank can refurbish his credentials by writing a book about his vicious ancestor Lucien Savoyard, slaughtered on his plantation across the river by the slaves he refused to free.

Except nobody in Whitbrow goes across the river, and they can't quite say why. But every full moon for as long as the town can remember, they've sent a pair of pigs over there, garlanded with flowers and consecrated in a half-pagan rite that Frank and Eudora observe with amusement. Of course, the smiles don't last, and neither does the ritual--in the depths of the Depression, who can spare the pork? And really, what is it protecting them from? Is there really something there, across the river, waiting and watching in the dark of the woods?

SPOILER (you know, for aliens and time travelers): Yes. And while the enemy is ultimately familiar, Buehlman does a masterful job of drawing out the reader's anticipation, parceling suspense and shocks with style, like Santa Claus leaving a rattlesnake in your stocking. Good, scary stuff--shelve it with Joe Hill's Heart-Shaped Box and Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, and you may never sleep again.

1491 (Charles C. Mann)

2011-09-29T16:54:00.000-05:00

I think I've previously mentioned my father as the most well-read amateur historian I know--most of my knowledge of topics like the Napoleonic wars or the Schlieffen Plan comes from his pleasantly pedantic dinner-table conversation. So when he told me that Charles Mann's 1491 was "one of the most interesting books I've read in years" (enough that he sought out an indie bookstore on vacation in order to purchase the sequel, 1493, on its release date), I had to sit up and take notice.

Indeed, 1491 is a grade-A buttonholer, a book that makes you want to grab people on the street and cry, "Did you know this?" It's a distillation of decades of research by historians, linguists, archaeologists, even molecular biologists, all revising previous notions of the pre-Columbian Americas as sparsely populated by simple societies frozen in time, wielding no power over their environment--whether these natives celebrated as Noble Savages or disparaged as brutes, this version of their lives is familiar from textbooks and entertainment alike.

Except it might all be wrong.

From the Inka to the Amazon, the Wampanoag (who greeted the Pilgrims) to the Haudenosaunee (usually called the Iroquois), Mann argues that Indian cultures throughout the Western Hemisphere were large, technologically savvy, and above all, shapers of the landscape. They bred maize into a staple food of the world, understood the power of the controlled burn (still practiced in prairie ecosystems like western Kansas), even diverted rivers to irrigate crops. All this knowledge and more was lost in perhaps the greatest tragedy of human history: the genetic susceptibility of the inhabitants of the New World to the diseases of the Old, which some scientists now believe may have killed 90% of American indigenes, throwing their world into cultural and ecological chaos.

Mann covers an amazing amount of ground, untangling dissenting viewpoints, detailing academic rivalries of shocking vehemence, and upending mainstream beliefs on almost every page. The narrative is not always smooth--no one will praise 1491 as reading like a novel--but the information is so revelatory as to make it a page-turner nevertheless. It's to be hoped that the work of the tireless scholars he chronicles filters into our laymen's consciousness sooner rather than later.

REAMDE (Neal Stephenson)

2011-09-28T11:13:00.003-05:00

Capsule review of REAMDE for Stephenson trufans (even though we've all read it already by now): more Cryptonomicon than Anathem.

And here's what that means: REAMDE is a real-world international thriller, smart, topical, and precise. It's very much an ensemble novel, with an ever-shifting cast of characters, but everything stems from one central relationship between Richard Forthrast--a middle-aged techie who's turned a marijuana-smuggling past into a lucrative post at the helm of a MMORPG called T'Rain--and his niece Zula, adopted from war-savaged Eritrea as a child, raised by salt-of-the-earth Iowans, and in a doomed romance with Peter, a hacker whose shady dealings with the Russian mob lead to chaos. The book's title is the [sic] filename of a Chinese-gold-farmer-written virus, which hold its victims' data hostage until they pay up--not by Western Union or briefcase of cash, but within the sword-and-sorcery world of T'Rain itself, a scheme that plunges that universe into similar upheaval as IRL.

There's actually several more layers of complexity and intrigue to REAMDE's 1000-page narrative (including an absolutely hilarious rivalry between the two fantasy authors responsible for T'Rain's backstory), but I insist on some of them remaining surprises. I can tell you that the book never feels long. Stephenson writes action with fluid intensity, as assuredly in a wilderness gunfight as between magic-wielding avatars online. And he does a better job that any adult novel I've read in portraying people whose lives take place as much on the Internet as in "meatspace"--and the panic of being forced into pure analog existence--without dismissing them as freaks or shut-ins. To me (who's writing this review longhand due to a laptop power supply's demise), it's an instantly recognizable division of mental resources. It might be heavy to carry onto a plane or a train (unless you've a non-evil e-reader, of course), but REAMDE is solidly built to delight the action-movie-loving D&D nerd in all of us.

Spending time with terrible people.

2011-09-13T15:15:00.003-05:00

Having put Brothers Karamazov finally behind me--which I know, classic etc. Grand Inquisitor etc. "an onion" etc. but gosh, as a novel I just wanted to punch it in the face--I read two novels this weekend! Both, as it turns out, center on awful human beings, but there, as they say, the similarities end.

Bonnie Nadzam's debut, Lamb, comes out today, and There Will Be Talk. Because it's essentially the chronicle of a 54-year-old man's seduction of a freckled, friendless 11-year-old girl. For me, this elicits a basic question about my relation to art: can I say I "liked" a story that made my skin crawl from beginning to end? I don't think so, if I define "like" as synonymous with "enjoy," and consider them both contingent on pleasurable feelings...but I am well aware that these are not the only possible definitions. And conversely, I don't wish to say I "disliked" Lamb--the prose is gorgeously spare, the incidental hymn to the Rockies (almost) makes me want to go camping, the pacing is steady and assured. And Nadzam chooses to concentrate less on the physical aspects of the relationship than the emotional and material manipulation that ties predator and victim together--the interior sense of foreboding and menace is a perfect example of the novel's strengths as an art form. If you don't mind being disturbed, absolutely, go for it.

And if you have ever described your sense of humor as "sick"? You must have a go at The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, whose first-person narrator Rosa is one of the most obliviously despicable black-comic protagonists ever. I mean, in the first chapter alone, she forces her pregnant 17-year-old daughter (whom she hates anyway, because she's sullen & ugly) to undergo several attempts at a home abortion...none of which are successful. But her granddaughter, Aminat, turns out to be the apple of her eye, and she determines to win her beloved little girl the best life imaginable, no matter who she has to crush to do it. Vain, nasty, abusive, and often deluded, Rosa is also hilarious--a true feat on Bronsky's part! Yes, this one I Liked. Because of the LOLs, and then the sudden shocks as I re-remembered that I was being entertained by a monster. Also, maybe I should track down some recipes.

Oh! Also read the first volume of Brian K. Vaughan's Runaways comic, which fits in pretty well with the accidental theme, as it's about a group of kids who discover that their parents are literal supervillains. I quite liked it. I've heard there's a point where the series goes off the rails, though--can anybody head me off before I disappoint myself?

Trollope!

2011-09-08T13:02:00.008-05:00

Thank you, Michael Sullivan, for telling me to read Anthony Trollope's delightful Barchester novels--and for sending me a spare Everyman's Library copy of The Warden.

Thank you, Housing Works Bookstore, not only for helping me keep my bookselling skillz honed by volunteering the past few months, but for having a copy of Barchester Towers on the 50-cent cart.

And thank you, WORD, for setting up an affiliate program--click away on the covers above and you can order the books from them right away! (They also have Google ebooks, should you want all six books for...wait, 99 cents? Somebody get me a Nook for Christmas, OK?) If you don't have a beloved local indie bookstore, I'm happy to share mine.

I promise that while I read the next up in the Barchester novels (Doctor Thorne), I will be Proactive and Professional enough to underline all the marvelous quotes, and keep a list of all the nifty words I learned--because there were a lot of both, dang it, and they've fallen clean out of my brain! (Though luckily I appear to have preserved the theme song to Perfect Strangers intact.) Here's a bit towards the end of Barchester:

And who can apportion out and dovetail his incidents, dialogues, characters, and descriptive morsels, so as to fit them all exactly into 439 pages, without either compressing them unnaturally, of extending them artificially at the end of his labour? Do I not myself know that I am at this moment in want of a dozen pages, and that I am sick with cudgelling my brains to find them? And then when everything is done, the kindest-hearted critic of them all invariably twits us with the incompetency and lameness of our conclusion. We have either become idle and neglected it, or tedious and over-labored it. It means nothing, or it attempts too much. . . .

I could go on--just such easy, playful prose, for all its vocabulary. A joy to read.

Trollope's wit and authorial asides can hold their own against Austen, as can his quirky characters: the adorable Mr. Harding (the warden of the first novel), prone to playing an invisible cello when he's anxious; Miss Thorne, who considers anything invented after the Elizabethan era suspiciously modern. Too, their country-dwelling middle-class settings and concerns are similar. There's a lot more mid-Victorian High Church/Low Church intrigue and less romance in Trollope (although these first two books actually feature woo-and-win subplots involving the same woman, whose first husband dies between the volumes). I dream of someday editing series of tiny books covering historical subjects geared specifically towards puzzled readers, e.g. The Church of England for Nineteenth-Century British Novels or Russian Orthodoxy for Dostoevsky. Trust me, you have never read the word "prebendary" so many times.

But then there's this: in Barchester, when the odious clergyman proposes, our heroine SLAPS HIM ACROSS THE FACE. Advantage: Trollope!

GRRMania

2011-08-25T16:24:00.004-05:00

OK, it's been almost a week since I finished A Dance with Dragons, and as expected, I am feeling rather bereft. Not to the point where I'm dressing up my cats in tiny embroidered doublets...actually, that's a good idea...JULIE CAN BE THE STARKS AND BRAINS CAN BE THE LANNISTERS OMG

I really, really loved these books. I loved the intrigue and the magicks and the politics, the thousands of years of history and the dozen or so cultures & religions and the Russian-novel-multitude of characters. And the geography: first book ever where I kept consulting the map on the frontispiece because I wanted to know exactly where everything was. And all the descriptions of food. And the shifting points of view that give the narrative its scope. And the pervading shades of gray--with the exception of brutal Gregor Clegane and the chilling Ramsay Bolton (who I seriously brainstormed ways to TRANSPORT MYSELF INTO THE BOOK AND KILL), there's not an entirely evil person in the bunch.

I can keep raving, but yeah, you get it. So instead I'd like to address two criticisms I've heard of the series.

1. The writing's not very good.

Huh, you really think so? I mean, sure, no crazy Pynchon/Lethem/Harkaway-style verbal pyrotechnics--and I speak as a devotee of such--but I think it's a few levels above competent, myself. Certainly clear and effective, and I found the descriptions of place particularly evocative. But de gustibus non est disputandum, of course. There have definitely been books whose writing I found intolerable that were fêted by folks with taste...like last summer's vamp brick The Passage, the prose of which I found "overwrought but flat," and the could-not-be-more-overrated-if-you-ask-me-but-nobody-did The Magicians, which I thought was actually poorly written. Twitter was all jazzed about the release of the sequel earlier this month, and all I could think was "Really? You want more of that?" I FELT LIKE I WAS TAKING CRAZY PILLS.

On this point I will not attempt to convince you, simply say that this was not my experience, and if you haven't read the books it may not be yours either. (Nor do I feel I put my Lit Cred in jeopardy by giving ups to GRRM's prose.)

2. The women characters are not sufficiently empowered.
This, on the other hand, is just wrong. I'm mostly reacting to this Tumblr post (whose author is reacting to another article on female characters in sci-fi/fantasy and problems thereof), in which she claims "i don’t think any of [the women] ever talk to each other (except to be REALLY FREAKING NASTY), or have an identity independent from which dude they are sleeping with/mother to. sad story." In regards to the first charge: I cannot quote chapter and verse from the first book (the only she's read), but a) I do not believe this is true, and b) it is definitely not true throughout the series. It gets all Bechdel-test up in there, let me tell you.
As for the second, well, since I'm quoting here, Keryn (who is a stranger to me) pointed out: "it’s not just his women who are defined by their relation to others, it’s just about everyone in the book. The whole series is soaked in concerns about lineage and legitimacy, and I’d argue that the representations about sex and gender need to be read in that context too." I would further argue that the overarching dynamic of Song of Ice and Fire is redefinition: of culture, of society, and of individuals. Everyone is re-learning what it means to be a Stark or a Lannister or a Targaryen, a knight or a king, a man or a woman.
Even if your only criteria for Strong Female Character is Violent and Lots-of-Sex-Having (which, snoozers), hang out with Ygritte or Asha Greyjoy or the Sand Snakes for a while. Then we'll talk.

Home stretch.

2011-08-18T15:28:00.002-05:00

Guys, I am about to resurface from A Song of Ice and Fire in less than 100 pages, and though I am going to miss everyone like CRAZY and remain on tenterhooks for the next few years until The Winds of Winter comes out (although then I'll get to read them all over again in preparation! yay!), I will kinda enjoy digging into the other books on my to-read shelf. Because there are 21 right now--on the shelf, in person, not counting the other 150 on my to-read list on Goodreads. BOOKS!!!

I have managed to squeeze in a couple non-Martin reads recently, though, and they both deserve mention. First, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, a wonderfully written though very, very sad (I refuse to think about the imaginary animals right now, because I will cry again) novel about the lives of three children destined to be used as organ farms and their idyllic but doomed days at a boarding school called Hailsham. The strength of this book was voice, voice, voice: a first-person narrative, elliptical and episodic in the extreme, so good at capturing the way we tell stories, especially of our childhood. I would have read it in one night, but I started it at 10 p.m.

And a book I read as research for Gold Mountain (my romance-in-progress) but recommend to anyone interested in East Asian history or the historical bizarre: God's Chinese Son is a well-written guide to the Taiping Rebellion, a Chinese civil war (wow, it is sad that you have to use an indefinite article for that) that lasted 14 years (1850-1864) and killed a mind-staggering twenty million people. The Taiping were southern Chinese rebels inspired and led by Hong Xiuquan, who failed the Confucian civil service examination several times and then became convinced he was Jesus' younger brother, destined to overthrow the "demon" Qing dynasty. It's an often unbelievable story of culture clash (as when the British, French, and Americans, in turn, send out tentative feelers to these fellow Christians only to realize that 1) the Taipings' beliefs are heterodox in the extreme and 2) they believe Hong is ruler of the world, and hence don't recognize the sovereignty of the foreigners' nations) and madness (towards the end of the war, ensieged in his Heavenly Capital of Nanjing, Hong tells a dumbfounded general complaining of low food supplies that he should have been stockpiling manna for just such an eventuality), solidly written in present tense, an unusual but effective choice for non-fiction.

Memento Mori (Muriel Spark)

2011-08-01T14:39:00.000-05:00

I seem to have not written at all about the last Muriel Spark novel I read, 1963's The Girls of Slender Means, which was quite silly of me, because it's lovely. And with her well-deserving-of-classic-status The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) and Memento Mori (1959), it forms a sort of stages-of-life triptych. Girls and Prime advertise the ages of their protagonists in their titles. Memento is more subtle, since we don't all learn Latin anymore, but it's a unique novel in my experience because all its main characters are over seventy.

Unsurprisingly for a book about the elderly, mortality is first and foremost, as first one then others of an interconnected group of friends, enemies, frenemies, and acquaintances receives crank telephone calls consisting of four words: "Remember you must die" (memento mori translated--a medieval maxim and a CRAZYTOWN genre of art). Few of them take the advice, all too busy living in the past, still fretting over who stole whose boyfriend fifty years ago. Spark does a wonderful job mingling the pettiness of old age with flashes of bona fide wisdom-of-experience. It's a funny, mean, and tragic novel.

And CHECK OUT THIS COVER from the 1964 Time magazine edition, by French illustrator Tomi Ungerer (who I know from children's books, but apparently also does erotica. THE FRENCH, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN):

PERFECTION.

Bossypants (Tina Fey)

2011-07-27T16:43:00.000-05:00

Gosh, I have struggled with how to write this review, specifically because I refuse to use the sentences "Tina Fey seems so real!" or "I'll bet we'd be friends!" and those are all I want to say. Even with my natural petulant resistance to things marketed to my demographic (like Obama, or kombucha). So can I just throw my favorite quote at you, and then you will laugh, and then you will go get the book? SUPER.

"In the 'Great American Melting Pot,' rural Ohio may be a lump of white flour that hasn't been stirred properly. Not that New York is any better. New York is that chunk of garlic that you bite into thinking it's potato and you can't get the taste out of your mouth all day."

True that, sister.

Working title: Gold Mountain

2011-07-27T16:11:00.002-05:00

Soooooo you guys, I'm writing a book.

A while back Chris floated the following idea for a romance novel: "She's a 19th century schoolmarm whose schoolhouse turns out to be built on top of the mother lode. But which man can she trust with her fortune (and her heart?)? Westley, the local railroad construction foreman, or Chan, the handsome but sensitive railroad worker?" I was really interested in the idea of a historical with an Chinese hero--there don't even seem to be many contemporaries with Asian/Asian-American characters. But the Transcontinental Railroad starting building during the Civil War, and I didn't want to deal with that, so I decided to work with the California Gold Rush, and have settled on 1852. Research ahoy!

The heroine has morphed into Charlotte Gray (née Martin, which didja know is the most common French surname? isn't that weird?), a young widow from St. Louis who lost her husband to cholera along the California Trail; instead of reaching San Francisco to open the dress shop she's always wanted, she is marooned in the mining settlement of Hapless Bar, mending jeans and contemplating the suit of the handsome but vaguely sinister Paul St. Clair. As it turns out, she looks like my sister, down to the sectoral heterochromia in her eyes (look it up, it's pretty).The hero is Lo Jin, scion of a once-wealthy Cantonese merchant who lost his fortune in the Taiping Rebellion, trying to strike it rich in Gum Shan. But when he and the other "celestials" are chased away from the diggings by white miners, Jin takes refuge in the root cellar of the boarding house where Charlotte lives, where she finds him and begins to smuggle him food, books...and companionship. (NUDGE NUDGE WINK WINK)

I can't think of the last time I was so excited about a project. The advantage of historical fiction for plot-challenged me is obvious: the more research I do, the more events are written for me, and I can concentrate on character, dialogue, and prose. I hadn't previously realized how little I knew about the Gold Rush; it's an amazing few years that changed so much, e.g. the population of San Francisco, which went from 1,000 in 1848 to 25,000 in December 1849. The settlements were crazy diverse, as well--for minor characters, I'll be able to choose from German, Irish, French, Mexican, various local Native Americans, Mormons, even Australians. I'm gathering names (Charlotte Gray was the maiden name of my senior seminar tutor, whose married name was Charlotte Martin; my mother's provided ancestors of the appropriate generation: Melchior Sebastian, Cundegunda Quade, Lucinda Weethe), local fruits & vegetables, contemporaneous fashion, and the thousand tiny details that make up a world.

And of course I've checked a quadzillion books out from the library. Three I already know I'll have to buy to keep around: The Writer's Guide to Everyday Life in the Wild West, The Writer's Guide to Everyday Life in the 1800s , and the incredibly valuable They Saw the Elephant: Women in the California Gold Rush, which I read straight through like a novel, fascinated by the copious journal entries and letters giving the words of some of the bravest women I can imagine. I'm gonna steal so many little things from these lives (like Lodisa Frizzell's badass name, and Mary Ballou's amazing turn of phrase "making coffee for the French people strong enough for any man to walk on that has Faith as Peter did"). And by "steal" I mean "use with modifications and include in an adulatory Further Reading Note," because I am not a jerk.

I'll admit: my word count so far is 773. But that's totes OK, because I'm aiming to have a good shopping-about draft by July 16, 2012 (a year from when I started), and the mad research-y rush I'm in right now is necessary, and fun, and won't last forever. I am grateful to have Theresa Romain to provide been-there encouragement (and I've read her upcoming debut, and it's delightful Austen-y goodness! more closer to the October pub date), and the supportivest boyfriend ever, full stop. I'll share any excerpts I'm particularly proud of, shall I?

Series reads.

2011-07-13T11:53:00.000-05:00

Gadzooks! My apologies. I have been reading at my usually furious pace over the past 19 days, but I find myself less inclined to update when I'm reading books in a series. (As usual) I'm of two minds about this: first, remorseful, since several of my favorite novels are part of a sequence; second, somewhat justified, since much of the strength of a several-book narrative is consistency. Hence if I've said "Soulless is a funny and silly little confection of a book," must I repeat myself when its sequels prove to be of a piece? (That's Changeless and Blameless I've read so far; just-released Heartless is a hold-in-progress at the library.)

Likewise: George R.R. Martin continues to enthrall. My TOTES AWESOME sister got me the box set of the first four paperbacks, so once I got caught up on Brothers Karamazov (capsule review: fistfight fistfight 30-page conversation about God. Am I getting shallow in my old age?), I blazed through the rest of A Clash of Kings and am now embroiled in A Storm of Swords. And I just dropped $35 on the weapon-grade-hefty A Dance With Dragons--at WORD, natch!

And I haven't been blogging about 'em, but my friend Ed at Vertical has kept me up to date on the Chi's Sweet Home kitten adventures manga--up to Volume 6 now! Little Miss Tabbypants is learning and making friends. :3

Finally: finished up Eloisa James's Duchesses series, and I worry that she's just ruined me for all other romances. Her books are so sharp, her heroines so lovable, her heroes' reforms so believable!!! And this sextet, with a couple of overarching narratives, is a masterpiece of small- and large-scale plotting. I kind of hate it when people say of genre books, "They're even for people who don't read X!", as if regular readers of X will just swallow anything, but: pretty much everyone who's ever enjoyed being in love should read these. ESPECIALLY (though you have to read the first four to really get the payoff) the last two, This Duchess of Mine (in which an estranged married couple falls in love again--and for the first time) and A Duke of Her Own (being the story of the sleep-aroundiest duke ever and his joyful conversion to lifelong monogamy).

Two weeks later.

2011-06-24T11:42:00.000-05:00

To Reign in Hell, Steven Brust: Street find, didn't finish. Answers the musical question, "Can you make the interminable middle books of Paradise Lost at all interesting?" with a resounding "Oh my gosh, not even close."

The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler: Thus I moved to a languid summery reread (I think I first read all the Philip Marlowe novels one summer in high school? except there are a LOT of oeuvres I think I first read over a summer in high school, and there weren't that many). I love noir--the 20th-century heir to the gothic, resurgence of the Greek tragic hero...and oh yeah, so well dressed. Here, read a poem.

Changeless, Gail Carriger: Second after Soulless in the Parasol Protectorate series...and of all things, another street find. The zesty writing and the cheek and the steampunky fashion continue to go down like petits fours and cucumber sammiches! Oh, and my Word.A.Day email this morning taught me that her flamboyant vampire confidant Lord Akeldama derives his name from the potter's field bought with Judas' blood money! Neat!

Then I sank pretty much up to my neck in must-keep-reading bliss with George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones. Like so many things, I knew I was bound to love it when my sister did (we share a certain vehemence and catholicity of taste). It is straight-up fantasy epic--intrigue and dragons!--and though the prose is workaday, I'm amazed by Martin's ability to create so many characters and have them all be three-dimensional and distinct...and so very pleased by the number of important female characters. As my sister puts it, too, they're not just Important Female Characters; they are characters, who are important, who happen to be ladies. A distinction with a difference.

I'd planned to borrow the first four books from Chris's brother, but he'd left Book 2 (A Clash of Kings) at work or something, and his daughter was born last Sunday, so yeah, pretty sure sussing out the tome for me is now Priority A Million. Luckily, WORD was there for my George R.R. Martin Emergency needs (and the Museum of Modern Art Bookstore offices, where I'm filling in for the assistant book buyer through July, are there for my Income For Books needs, which YAY). I am being good and dutiful, though, and switching off days between Clash and The Brothers Karamazov, the next-three-months pick for WORD's classics book club--and a surprise gift from a college friend after an "I'm-broke-can-I-borrow" appeal on Facebook. So far it is making me feel dumb and fidgety. BUT I WILL PERSEVERE

Film Noir (c.2005)

2011-06-24T11:23:00.001-05:00

I could be the bad girl

lipstick like a stoplight

cigarette smoke exhaled in belly-dancer curves

flashing my garters as I open the suicide door

I would sit on your desk and swing my slingback heels

I would lead you astray

You could be the crooked cop

the gangster who wants out

the P.I. mourning his partner

You wouldn’t believe a word I said

but you’d take my money—and you’d know

that I was trouble the minute you saw me

but trouble is perhaps a chance for redemption

a chance for revenge

a chance for revelation

and they all would be against you

the police department City Hall the richest man in the Valley

you would be like America against the spectre of Communism

that is if you consent to be a symbol

You could be the hero in the shadows

cigar smoke exhaled like the breath from a gun

I would smell of jasmine and Pall Malls

drink whiskey like a man

hide a derringer in my bag to be

coolly pressed against your jugular “I’m sorry Sam

but I’ve got to have that bird”

I could get my just desserts:

“Goddamn it, Charlie, you sold me out”

my upper-class accents gone, back to

the guttersnipe I’ve always been

but no, you’d let me go

for whatever I did as the camera panned away—

this being the Forties that’s no small thing—

maybe I was just a pawn but more likely I was the power behind the plot

the jewel thief the madam the old man’s young wife

“It’s been fun, Phil, but I gotta be going”

with a wink, my false lashes like the vicious green fringe

on a Venus fly trap

The other two books I read this week.

2011-06-10T11:39:00.001-05:00

Two days over 90° this week; naught to do but sit in front of a fan in one's undies and read. Slightly higher-impact than just watching TV, I suppose, but saves on electric bills.

Embroideries, Marjane Satrapi: Satrapi is, of course, the Iranian-born graphic memoirist responsible for Persepolis; this is a similarly illustrated minor work dealing with the sexual lives of Iranian women--naive to debauched--trading stories around a samovar.

The History of Love, Nicole Krauss: I feel like I should have loved this book? I "only" liked it. The intersecting tales of elderly Leo Gorsky and 14-year-old Alma Singer hinge on the eponymous book, written by a mysterious Polish immigrant to Chile. The writing is lovely and the final dovetailing all it should be. I couldn't shake off the specter of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close's Oskar (huh, books came out within a month of each other. Good season for precocious list-making narrators) floating around Alma's voice, which seemed awfully little-kid for a high school freshman. So: not a winner for me, though I can easily see how it would be for someone else--to that end, I'm passing it along to Housing Works Bookstore where I'll be volunteering starting Monday next.

Dystopia. Kittycats. Yeah, this is my blog all right.

2011-06-10T11:05:00.001-05:00

I prefer to think of it as "consistent" rather than "predictable."

Wastelands, edited by John Joseph Adams: a terrific anthology from Night Shade Books, a sci-fi/fantasy publisher I really should seek out more often. Of course, any collection has high points; in this one, there's "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth," Cory Doctorow's exploration of the post-apocalyptic Internet, held together by a global nerd network; Octavia E. Butler's "Speech Sounds," which follows a harrowing event that wipes out most of humanity's ability to speak and understand language; and "The End of the World As We Know It," Dale Bailey's loving upending of the best after-the-catastrophe clichés. My only disatisfactions came with stories that weren't long enough to really sock me in the gut--the provenance of the Armageddon narrative. Except when they're hilarious. The editor has also prepared a lovely list of further reading which I am going to scan and consult the next time I'm in the mood for some good eschatology. (P.S. It is really hard to come up with synonyms for "post-apocalyptic.")

Daughters of the North, Sarah Hall: Luckily this one's dystopian. And honestly, not very good at all. I read the whole thing only because it was short, and I thought maybe the climax might be interesting, but quite the opposite. The story, such as it is, is that of Sister, who flees her repressive town in a totalitarian future Britain to find Carhullan, a legendary farm populated only by women, in hopes that they can offer her a better life. She finds them, they have hard-workin' utopian lesbianism-dabblin' good times, and then they attack the town. The weirdest thing about the narrative is how little time Hall spends on, first, the actual urban dystopia, and the women's army's battle to take and hold it. The latter, in fact, is entirely elided, by the conceit that the whole book is made up of Sister's after-the-fact testimony to the authorities, and that the "data" is corrupted. We are told that they "took the town and held it for fifty-three days," but the account of how it was done--the blood--is left out. It's a choice that stymies me. The only other caesura in the novel also contains a fistfight, where one woman is left bleeding. Does Hall think she's making a point about violence? Or can she just not write it very well? So what is in the book? Lots and lots of subsistence farming. Entirely undeveloped stock characters: grumpy nurse with a heart of gold, hard-as-nails leader. The rugged scenery of Cumbria, which is mildly interesting if only because I don't know much about that part of England. But really: eminently skippable.

From there, KITTYCAT BOOK!!! And a great one, The Fur Person, by May Sarton. (Once again, I am indebted to the boy who picks up kittycat books off the street for me.) It's third-person cat-niscient, the charming tale of a Cat About Town who decides he wishes for a housekeeper and finds two in Sarton and her partner (Brusque Voice and Gentle Voice), who name him Tom Jones and (thankfully for my nagging conscience) have him altered, at which point he ceases being a Gentleman Cat and becomes a Cat of Peace. Though it's intended as a children's book, it's a children's book from 1957, so the vocab is above most modern eight-year-olds: but just right for a feline-lovin' lady like me. Best book about cats from an author who doesn't usually write about them since Doris Lessing's amazing On Cats, which I reviewed back in ancient times before this blog existed.

Dipping a toe in the latest YA kerfuffle.

2011-06-09T11:31:00.003-05:00

So here's my deal: there was this article, in which Meghan Cox Gurdon bemoans the proliferation of dark YA fiction, in which sexual assault, violence, and self-mutilation have become de rigueur. And there was a flood of dismissive responses, usually centered on two points: "this stuff really happens" and "reading about it may help a survivor." Well, of course it does, and of course it may. But I can also understand Gurdon's point of view, and echo some of her concerns.

For me it's larger than YA, though (e.g., here's Ryan Britt's terrific blog post wondering why the sci-fi books that become literary classics are all so darned depressing). We are in a fiction moment right now wherein two fallacies hold sway: 1. that literature must be realistic in order to be serious or worthwhile, and 2. that realism largely consists of trauma and despair. I am as cynical as the next unemployed manic-depressive with a busted rib and no air-conditioning, but even I am aware that this is simply not true, that there is room for happiness in books as in life, and that said happiness can be realistic...or if it isn't, well, it doesn't have to be. Because it's fiction, and even a child can tell the difference.

But happy endings, right now, are not the way to either critical darlinghood or bestselling status. Witness Stieg Larsson's blockbuster Millenium Trilogy, the plots of which are rife with the torture, sexual assault, and murder of women. Conversely, Emma Donoghue's Room, narrated by a five-year-old boy whose only experience of the world is the shed he and his mother has been confined to by her kidnapper and rapist. The first is wildly popular, the second shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. And I am not interested in reading either one, thank you. As my astute friend Molly says, "I don't enjoy experiencing any more than the amount of pain or fear that my regular life entails." I don't think you're depraved or evil or sick for enjoying either of these books, or the sea of current YA fiction Gurdon finds so alarming, and I'm fine with them being published. But I don't feel in the least shallow or escapist for avoiding them. (N.B. How do I reconcile this with my taste for dystopian/post-apocalyptic fiction? Uhm. I don't. Large, contain multitudes, etc.)

It's not just book criticism that suffers from this happiness-isn't-serious misconception, either. Here's the last sentence of an AV Club review of Beautiful Boy: "[The film] offers the antithesis of escapism: a claustrophobic, punishingly intense, beautifully measured exploration of the depths of human despair." Honestly, who reads that and thinks, "Sign me up!!"

Again, I understand bristling at the idea that protecting your children from evil means pretending it doesn't exist (although I don't see Gurdon advocating for this anywhere. Guidance is not the same as constraint, and not buying a book is not the same as banning it). But I believe most parents' dearest wish is that they could protect their children from evil, and their deepest sadness that they cannot. We should not scoff at this, nor should we cast concern as bigotry, ignorance, or oppression.

Also, we should generate a list of awesome YA books with happy endings! Here are my contributions:

Savvy, Ingrid Law
The Westing Game, Ellen Raskin
The Confessions of Georgia Nicolson series, Louise Rennison

Meth and peanut butter.

2011-06-07T11:51:00.002-05:00

Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town, Nick Reding: Reading this book about the meth epidemic in the rural Midwest, the word that kept coming to mind was "harrowing." And while of course I intend that in the figurative sense, the agricultural setting also made me think of the farm implement that connotation derives from (though I had to look up which big scary machine it was): essentially a mammoth rake dragged over plowed ground to break down and even the land. It's a fitting image for what this drug does to people and communities.

The information in this book is rich and often staggering. For example, while I'd made associations between recreational meth and the Benzedrine used by WWII pilots, I hadn't realized that methamphetamine was legally prescribed for conditions ranging from mild depression to hay fever (I guess because it's a bronchodilator?). The associations Reding draws out between the general decline of rural America and the corresponding rise of meth are illuminating as well--corporate consolidation of meatpacking, for example, cut wages and benefits for workers who found production of the drug to be a much easier way to make a living. His characterization of meth as a quintessentially American drug, due to its ability to artificially ramp up industriousness, is especially sharp.

That said--that it is a book worth reading--I wasn't crazy about Reding's style, which I shall reductively and snottily describe as "New Yorker essay." His intention to microcosm the story in the Iowa town of Oelwein was dashed by digressions--which were necessary, and wouldn't have been digressions at all if he hadn't insisted on its being the Story of Oelwein. And in general, I find it really irritating in journalistic writing when real people are introduced with physical descriptions and then conclusions about their character are drawn from said traits. The book would have been stronger had these tropes been reigned in.

As a counterpoint to all the tweaking and harrowing, I double-fisted Methland with James Kochalka's Peanutbutter & Jeremy's Best Book Ever, a comic book about a kittycat in a necktie (Peanutbutter) whose 50s-sitcom-dad-non-specific office job keeps being thwarted by the antics of a mischievous, hat-stealing crow (Jeremy). But will they become friends? Yes, of course they will! It's adorable, expressively though simply drawn, and appropriate for all ages. Highly recommended as a mood elevator. (By the same author, Pinky & Stinky, about two little pigs on a mission to Pluto who crash-land on the moon, is also charming and whimsical and all those critically devalued but important things. Team Charm & Whimsy, that's me.)

Best street find to date.

2011-06-03T15:02:00.000-05:00

I can only take credit for snatching this up insofar as I had the forward thinking to be dating the awesomest boy in Brooklyn, who brought it home for me. (He also writes this awesome webcomic, which you will pretty much have to read all of, promise.)

This book is a gold mine of 70s feminist humor--pieces by Anne Meara, Florence King, Gilda Radner, Fran Lebowitz, and the proverbial many more. There's a Brenda Starr parody by Dale Messick herself. There are pitch-perfect parodies of women's magazines from True Confessions to Ms. Great convention-flipping bits like "Who Was That Gentleman I Saw You With?" and "The Myth of the Male Orgasm." And pages and pages of comics, even. Tying it all together is the editors' (Deanne Stillman and Anne Beatts, the latter of whom was the first female editor of National Lampoon and worked on Saturday Night Live during its first and best years) amazing introduction, speaking to the somehow still-extant stereotype that women aren't funny. I could quote the whole, thing, really, but I'll just give you this:

Titters is a book of humor by women, all kinds of women, and that means most of the subjects it deals with are things women in general find interesting. As a result, the book might be slightly overburdened with jokes involving the word "cuticle." There are no jokes in Titters about the following: jock straps, beer, trains, mothers-in-law, dumb blondes, cars, boxing, the Navy, chemistry, physics, stamp catalogues, spelunking, pud-pulling, or poker.

Why not? Because those subjects concern men, and, as such, have received their fair share of chuckles elsewhere. Sure, we could have chosen to parody Field & Stream and John Updike instead of the Tampax instructions and Lillian Hellman--and maybe we will, someday.

If you aren't lucky enough to have a gentleman friend spy this book on the street, there are used copies online for pretty cheap. Really, though, some influential female comedian needs to lobby to bring it back into print. Does anyone know Tina Fey?

Chrononautics!

2011-05-31T10:25:00.000-05:00

'Twas the vagaries of the Brooklyn Public Library that led to my reading two time-travel narratives in a row. All right, 'twas the vagaries of me having checked out way too many books at once and not being able to renew them because other folks have outstanding holds. But oddly enough daily fines for overdue books have fallen from a whole quarter to 15 cents, so I'm carrying a balance of like $2. Which even I can manage. LIBRARIES MAN THEY ARE THE BEST.

The Anubis Gates, Tim Powers: Merciful Thoth, this book is amazing! Think I read about it in the introduction to a steampunk anthology I read last year...I have no idea why, as there's not a whirring automaton to be found. There are, however, ancient Egyptian sorcerers for whom touching the Earth is excruciating pain, beggars' guilds, a body-switching hirsute madman, a stoned Samuel Taylor Coleridge wandering blithely through a dungeon of nightmares, disguises and reversals and a dozen OMIGOD THAT'S WHAT THAT MEANT moments (for my money, the best part of a time-travel narrative. Imaginations that can make such stories coalesce earn my everlasting awe). Through it all we follow the adventures of lit professor Brendan Doyle, who's distracted from his frustrated attempts to write a biography of minor 19th-century poet William Ashbless by a truly unbelievable windfall: eccentric business tycoon J. Cochran Darrow offers him thousands of dollars to deliver a lecture on Coleridge to a select group of travelers, who have each paid $1 million in order to travel to a London night in 1810 and hear a lecture by the poet himself. Darrow has discovered a series of gaps along the river of time, distributed in a bell curve around a mysterious event in 1802 (which we are privy to from the prologue); with the application of magic or technology, one can pop out through a gap and re-enter the timestream at any other gap. The Coleridge lecture is, it seems, safely situated in a four-hour window so that the 1983 group can return to their present. As is to be expected, something goes wrong...and Doyle finds himself trapped in 1810 without money or skills, with an inconvenient American accent. Also people keep trying to kill him. The novel has perhaps the best-written action scenes I have ever read, and is fantastic in the most literal sense of the word. Added to my "everybody should read" list for sure.

My "everybody's already read this but me" list got a book shorter with my completion of Audrey Niffenegger's runaway bestseller The Time Traveler's Wife...which in the end I don't think I liked much. Do I need to give a summary? It's about the out-of-order romance of Henry, a librarian who drops in and out of time without warning, and Clare, an artist who meets him for the first time when she is six and he 36 (conversely, he meets her for the first time when he is 28 and she 20). Here are the two things that began to irritate me two-thirds of the way through: 1. his time-jumping is a genetic defect, which is lame; 2. Clare has six devastating miscarriages (due to the babies' intrauterine time travel) before OH LOOK they have a baby--thank goodness because what marriage is complete without children, right--who grows up to be a time traveler like Henry. I hesitate to set an arbitrary number of attempts at pregnancy before one should--for one's physical and emotional health--explore other options for offspring. But it is less than six. I really started to feel Clare was a masochist at that point, and then I started to focus on the core narrative, which is a woman in love and endlessly waiting for an absent, unavailable man, and I became angry about this kind of story being held up as (to quote the Chicago Tribune from the cover) "a soaring celebration of the victory of love over time." Then, you know, they boff for the first time when she is 18 and he's 41. Ewwww. Apparently I'm that "hard-hearted reader who is not moved to tears" (Tribune again)?

The Emperor of Ice-Cream (Brian Moore)

2011-05-27T09:57:00.000-05:00

Brian Moore's The Emperor of Ice-Cream was indirectly recommended to me by Graham Greene. (I'm slowly catching up on references from the letters collection I read a couple of years back.) It appears to be out of print, which is crazy (maybe NYRB Classics will pick up the slack? They reissued his The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne last year). Seriously, go to the library. It's so good.

At heart, it's the WWII-era coming-of-age tale of aimless Gavin Burke, who's chosen to join the Belfast ARP rather than go to college as his Catholic family expects. In fact, they're both contemptuous and angry about his decision: his father hopes fervently that Hitler will triumph over the British, and his son's wearing the oppressors' uniform fills him with disappointment and rage. Gavin, though, is seventeen, secretly agnostic, drinking too much, trying in vain to part the knees of his Irish-virgin girlfriend Sally--and he has no idea what he wants to do with his life. The ARP is a means of putting off adulthood, a means of escape.

But then as now, adulthood is inescapable, try as one might. And even for a grown-up

the catechism rules prevailed. In both worlds, lack of purpose, lack of faith, was the one deadlly sin. In both worlds, the authorities, detecting that sin, arranged one's punishment. All of life's races are fixed and false. You stand at the starting line, knowing you can run as well as the others, but the authorities, those inimical and unknown arbiters, have decreed that you will not get off your marks. They know, those authorities, that your place is with the misfits, that your future will be void.

Yes, this flies straight to my own heart, even as I approach twice Gavin's age. I find that even the outwardly successful feel this, though, that the deck is stacked against us all.

The novel's prose is knifelike and resonant, the characters--from Gavin's snide socialist friend Freddy Hargreaves to their martinet boss, Craig--deep and lucid. The final chapters, dealing with the April 1941 German bombing of Belfast and its aftermath (fully half the homes in the city were damaged), are both horrifying and strangely hopeful: nothing focuses one like tragedy. And for me, it illuminated an aspect of this so-written war that I'd never thought about.

Really: you are all in charge of finding this book, reading it, and telling everyone you know about it. Would be amazing to get it back in print.

Buffy Season Eight!

2011-05-26T12:23:00.000-05:00

(Spoilers? Yes indeedy.)

In early 2007, when I was living in a wee adobe box in Santa Fe, I got an unexpected package from my friend Josh. Inside was the first issue of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight. I'd no idea such a marvelous event was even taking place, and it just straight-up made my year. (In fairness, 2007 was a lousy year. Doesn't lessen the excitement.)

I'd never collected individual comics issues before (OK, my sister and I did amass an enormous collection of Archie Double Digests), though not from any snobbery or cooler-than-thou; it becomes really difficult to catch up on this stuff when you didn't grow up reading it, you know? The DC and Marvel universes are decades old and crazy-ass complex...Buffy had seven seasons of crazy-ass complexity behind it, indeed--but it was crazy-ass complexity that was second nature to me. (The musical episode of Season Six is, in fact, my only homegrown Christmas tradition thus far.)

Now the series is through (40 issues--I've got most, having bought the first trade for issues #3-5, and I ran out of $$ for the last arc but read it on NetGalley, because NetGalley is the tits). As a whole, I'd rank Season Eight with the good seasons of the show (per my subjective-of-course opinion, 2 and 5; the great seasons were 3 and 6, the "ehn," 1, 4, and 7--though even those had high points, like the mostly-dialogue-less "Hush" in 4). Picking up around a year after the end of the TV show, it deals with the aftermath of Buffy's momentous decision to "activate" all the potential slayers in the world: from two (due to Buffy's various deaths) to 1,800, most girls working in loosely associated squads. The decision to create what's essentially an uber-race of ass-kicking ladies doesn't sit well with a lot of people, though, including the U.S. military and a mysterious cabal (are there non-mysterious cabals?) led by the charismatic masked Twilight.

Let's let that sink in: the Big Bad in this season is named Twilight. This made my brain explode with happiness. Whedon can swear all he likes it's a coincidence, but I can't imagine him doing any less than seething about the dominant vampire narrative of our time destroying his efforts to undo the helpless-female horror trope; he does pen a line for Buffy about the series, how she lived it, and "[her] vampire was better." There's also an storyline in which Harmony gets her own reality show and vampires become ever so chic, making slayers seem even more like villains, perhaps a response to the defanging of Edward and his ilk?

However: that storyline is really where the season started going sour for me. The four arcs that come beforehand are great: The Long Way Home, while largely exposition, seems giddy with excitement about the revival of these characters, and crackles with delight, snappy dialogue, and some brill reveals, the best of which is Flayed Warren, who's been kept alive since Season 6 by a skin of Amy's magic. He is understandably bitter. In No Future For You, Giles recruits Faith to kill an aristocratic Brit slayer who's decided that her blue blood and supernatural powers give her a moral carte blanche; since Faith knows only too well that slayerhood doesn't mean righteousness, she's the best woman for the job, but conflicted as she gets to know the girl and recognizes a lot of herself. And there is totes a cameo of the Tenth Doctor and Rose which I completely missed the first time around. The third arc, Wolves at the Gate, is weakest of the four, but there's still drama and fun to be had: hijinx with Xander and Dracula, who apparently developed a weird buddy/manservant relationship after Anya died; Buffy's controversial decision to sleep with a Japanese slayer named Satsu (me? I think it was perfectly in keeping with her sexual history, which is often thoughtless and always unusual). And then Merciful Zeus there's Time of Your Life, the Buffy/Fray crossover I hadn't known was necessary to make my life complete. (I was Fray two Halloweens running, made myself a scythe, see?)

Then we hit a string of one-offs (collected in Predators and Prey), and things start to plateau. There are important events--Harmony's media success and the continued demonization of the slayers, worsened by the activity of rogue slayers. Dawn finally sheds the ex-boyfriend-induced enchantment she's been under the whole series up until now (which has rendered her a giant, a centaur, and a living doll). But perhaps because these issues are all written by different people, they lack cohesion--funny, really, that Monster of the Week eps are often my favorites in TV terms, but don't quite work for me in this medium.

When the series returns to arc form in Retreat, though, I wasn't as compelled, despite the reappearance of Oz (now married to a Tibetan woman and living a peaceful werewolf-free and yak-butter-laden existence). I think it's because things got too huge: there's a teleporting submarine, full-scale slayer-on-military warfare, three giant wrath goddesses who give Buffy superpowers. One of the joys of the comic for its creators, of course, is not being shackled to a small-screen third-tier-channel FX budget, but from here out the temptation to go blockbuster grows too great, and true core of the Buffy ethos--relationships, ambiguity, wit--sometimes get lost in the spectacle.

Endgame arrives in Twilight and Last Gleaming, and I found it a bit of a mess (minus the awesome sequence of Xander putting Buffy's newly acquired superpowers through the Superman paces). Twilight turns out to be Angel (buh?), and he and Buffy literally screw a universe into being (also buh?), which threatens this universe and can seemingly only be cured by the banishment of magic. Dawn and Xander get together, apropos of really nothing that I could see. Then, Spike shows up (maaaaaaan, I know he came back to life in Angel, but his hero's death in Season 7 made me so HAPPY) in a spaceship piloted by bugs, reveals the existence of a glowing whatsamajigger that's the source of all magic in this world I think and is guarded by the Master (somehow). Honestly, I spent a lot of these arcs being simultaneously confused and dubious; I mean, Giles dies*, and I didn't even cry! AM I A MONSTER?!?! (*Yeah, this was a bit too spoilery for me. Highlight if you will.)

Still and all! The ending is satisfying, albeit mostly in the new world it sets up: magic is removed from the world, at Buffy's hand. Vampires and the slayers already called remain...but Willow finds herself powerless and defeated, and rage against Buffy spreads in the formerly supernatural community. There's expected to be a season 9 starting in September, which promises to ratchet down the bells & whistles and adhere more closely to the show's heart: identity, change, betrayal. And I'll be reading!

Retellings.

2011-05-22T18:26:00.001-05:00

I'm pretty in love with retellings and reinterpretations and suchlike in general. Posy Simmonds' brill graphic novels Gemma Bovery and Tamara Drewe (the latter a you-wouldn't-know-it riff on Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd, with a less implausibly named heroine--Hardy's is Bathsheba Everdene. Yet that's only my SECOND favorite Hardy heroine name, top honors going of course to Eustacia Vye from The Return of the Native. (Are you reading Hardy yet? WHY NOT). Matt Haig's haunting Hamlet take, The Dead Fathers Club. Angela Carter's brutal fairytales in The Bloody Chamber (dig that righteous new Penguin Ink cover!). Oh, and my favorite that no one else has heard of, Alison Habens' down-the-rabbit-hole Alice homage, Dreamhouse.

That said, they can't all be winners: sometimes a retelling just makes me want to reread the original. Such was Victoria Patterson's This Vacant Paradise, setting Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth in 1990s Orange County. It wasn't actively bad, just lackluster, and I didn't care a fig for either the aging must-marry-for-money heroine or the Lawrence Selden analogue, an insufferable sociology professor. Gave up after 200 pages, which seems a fair shake, yes? (Though I just flipped to the end, and looks like she becomes a waitress instead of killing herself. Hmph, some tragedy.)

Better was the upended Persephone myth in Emily Whitman's Radiant Darkness, in which she runs away with Hades to escape a mother who still thinks she's a child, and then struggles with learning to be a queen and the disturbing tales she hears of a drought in the upper world. There's a nice epic-poem lyricism to the prose, and some real dynamism to the character. Also, the hardcover deserves kudos for having a photo of a girl who may NOT be Western European on the cover! (Even though she should be holding a pomegranate, right?) Looks like the paperback blue-washes her into looking much more white, though. BOO.

Two book club reads.

2011-05-21T11:37:00.000-05:00

(Pre-book-talking-about ramble: I couldn't decide what adjective to use in this post title. I first thought "marvelous" or "awesome," and then I got sidetracked on how many of our laudatory superlatives come from religion, how we apply words designed for temporal revelations of God/god/gods to, you know, food we like, and then I got weirded out. So I thought "fantastic," and then I was like, huh, that's closer, but there's an unreality to it--which isn't that off for novels, I suppose, but there's another category of praise that's strange when you think about it. So: I think I want to go for is "lovely." Because I loved these books. Gosh and golly did I love 'em.)

Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol: For WORD's Year o' Russians. I've read some Gogol before--SJC read "The Nose" for an all-college seminar (and I subsequently participated in an inebriated parody of dubious taste called "The Ponytail." My school was weird), and my mom picked up Village Evenings Near Dikanka and Mirgorod in prep for a trip to Ukraine several years ago. Both were top-notch--"The Nose," especially, that streak of ultra-modern that comes up sometimes to my surprise and joy in some nineteenth-and-previous-century writing (*cough* Tristram Shandy). Dead Souls, too, reads like it was written yesterday--though its picaresque humor and outsize-but-authentic characters might remind one of Dickens or Twain, the latter particularly in the Duke & King sections of Huck Finn. It's the rambling tale of Chichikov, charmer and con man extraordinaire, who's found a loophole in imperial Russian bureaucracy: every landowner was responsible for collecting taxes from the adult male serfs he owned (yup, slavery! Fun times!), but the number was determined by intermittent census, and there were always muzhiks who died before the next count. Chichikov wheedles or buys these "dead souls" from their owners, taking on the taxes--but also amassing collateral for a mortgage, making money without the bother of actually taking care of anyone. Along the way, he meets a gallery of satirical types--peculiarly Russian but still familiar: gambler Nozdryov, hoarder Plyushkin, ladies and gentlemen and pretenders to both. It's riotously funny, full of sly authorial interjections. So fun.

The Brief History of the Dead, Kevin Brockmeier: For Freebird's Post-Apocalyptic book club (which I didn't make, because I got lazy and tired on Thursday. But I have been keeping up on the readings since February). This novel is beautifully written, and elegiac in the truest sense of the word: an original take on the post-apocalyptic trope, as most of it takes place in an afterlife, a City where the dead go about workaday lives until the last living keeper of their memory dies. New arrivals tell the story of worsening global war and then a rapid pandemic...and then the City begins to empty out, as humanity dwindles away. Meanwhile, a researcher named Laura Byrd, stranded in the Antarctic, undertakes an unbearably arduous journey across the ice to what she hopes is salvation. It's a gorgeous, gorgeous tale of memory and grief, and the lives that surround our lives.

Hotel Angeline

2011-05-10T11:26:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I did something momentous: I read an ebook. I don't have a dedicated e-reader, of course, so I read it as a pdf in Adobe Digital Editions...and let me say, without meaning any slight to either program or book, the actual reading process gave me a headache. I'm delicate.

I chose to make this literary leap against my late-if-at-all-adopter tendencies for a wholly unique book (which is also available in paperback, no worries): the brainchild of Northwest author collective Seattle7Writers, Hotel Angeline was written live last October in Seattle, by 36 authors taking two-hour shifts. The event raised money for literacy groups (50% of ebook & print proceeds will be similarly donated) and brought together local bookstores, restaurants, and schools. It's (argh, the pun CANNOT BE STOPPED) a novel idea: direct access to the writing process for the audience, collaboration between a diverse cadre of area writers (poets and YA novelists, romance and mystery scribes, even historians and a cartoonist), all attempting to strike a balance between individual voice and cohesive narrative.

So how'd they do? I shan't shock, I don't think, by saying that the brilliance of Hotel Angeline lies more in the concept than the execution; and yet that's not as left-handed a compliment as it might seem, since the half-mad method is brilliant indeed, and the finished artifact is, in fact, a solid piece of writing. The essential narrative arc, sketched in advance by an editorial committee consisting of Garth Stein, Jennie Shortridge, Elizabeth George, Robert Dugoni, and Maria Semple, is the story of fourteen-year-old Alexis Austin, thrown into situations far beyond her years by the death of her mother, as she struggles to keep the death (and the body) hidden, manage the titular residence and its population of colorful misfits on her own, and deal with the murky revolutionary past and present of father figure LJ and her own sexuality.

One of the best things about Hotel is the sense of place--and for once the place isn't New York City. Seattle landmarks, neighborhoods, and (naturally) weather are all an organic part of the tale, as is the tension between its counterculture history and the usual de-eccentricizing force of moneyed "progress." Other highlights, for me: I love Stephanie Kallos's chapter, told from the point of view of a pet crow who's flown in and out of the story; Matthew Amster-Burton's descriptions of food; David Lasky's and Greg Stump's graphic chapter making visible the inky puddles of a Northwest evening.

I wasn't as much a fan of the hotel's inhabitants, who seemed a bit by-the-numbers quirky, and I am really pretty sure that no one has ever died from breaking a mercury thermometer, which is what does in Alexis's mom. Too, I think the hardest thing to nail consistently is dialogue, and the character's fluidity of speech varies widely--I thought the YA authors (like Deb Caletti and Suzanne Selfors) and the mystery writers (Elizabeth George, Robert Dugoni) did it best. And there's a central character for whom I lost all sympathy, which made later references less than compelling.

Evaluating the project by its own sui generis standards, though, Hotel Angeline succeeds: good cause, fun times, new way to think about writing and authorship. A lot of great author interviews here. Have a look!

Ella Minnow Pea (Mark Dunn)

2011-05-09T11:14:00.000-05:00

I read Ella Minnow Pea right before Embassytown, actually, but I like to hold off writing up book club reads until after the club's met...nothin' shakes out my thinking like a solid book nerd confab. 'Twas an unexpected serendipity reading these two so close to each other, though, as they both play out thought experiments in language in darkly fun ways.

Ella Minnow Pea's elegant subtitle is "a progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable," which I will now ruin the elegance of by explaining: epistolary just means "in the form of letters" (of course, one can also use emails or texts or instant messages), whereas a lipogram is a piece of writing artificially constrained by not using certain letters. The story also includes several pangrams, sentences written using all the letters of the alphabet, the most famous of which--and that upon which the plot hinges--is "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." Dunn attributes the coining of said phrase to one Nevin Nollop, revered to near godhood on an invented island bearing his last name, somewhere off the coast of South Carolina. Underneath his statue, his economical yet exhaustive sentence is spelled out in tiles--tiles, it turns out, inadequately adhered, for one day the Z falls off. The all-powerful island council takes it as a sign to be yet more careful in their language, and soon the use of the letter is banned in writing and in speech, with the first offense meriting a warning, the second the choice of the stocks or public flogging, and the third outright banishment. Then, a second letter falls...

Since the novel's told through letters, subject to island law, as more of the alphabet becomes verboten, the more carefully worded the missives become. It's a lively project: one imagines Dunn surrounded by lists of words he can no longer use, and often having to write around a common word with a forbidden letter results in awkward beauty, as synonyms are chosen from further afield. When the "d" is lost, Nollop's inhabitants lose the easiest way to express the past tense. And the days of the week. And God.

Yet for all the word-game playfulness, the book is hard to call light-hearted, as it deals with the systematic dismantling of a people's ability to express themselves. Control of language is an attempt to control thought, and it's a very real technique, from extreme examples like Saparmurat Niyazov, former president-for-life of Turkmenistan, whose cult of personality extended to changing the names of the months (April was his mother's name. That alone is wading into a psychological mire on a truly epic scale), to modern marketing's casual appropriation of terms that can render everyday words useless (say, "quality"). Language is pulled in multiple directions: by technology, by respect for the past, by culture and by convenience; it's simultaneously static and dynamic. And I think it's worth fighting for.

[One tiny, tiny nerd quibble: link above goes to the edition I read, the original 2001 hardcover by MacAdam/Cage--it's since been released in paperback by Vintage--and omigosh, I hated the font. It's too jaunty somehow, and way too noticeable, a particular fault in a book where the reader pays so much attention to individual letters. So read the paperback, is what I'm saying.]

Embassytown (China Miéville)

2011-05-06T15:15:00.003-05:00

YES THERE IS A NEW MIÉVILLE NOVEL HUZZAH
May 17!! I dithered a bit about blogging about it before the on-sale date, since it's not strictly kosher, but c'mon, the New York Times Book Review does it, and they've got waaaay more cred/clout than I do. Not that they'll review Embassytown, cause, you know, aliens. Their freakin' loss. [UPDATE 6/9: Okay, so they did review it, and this post is now only the third hit for "embassytown nyt." Please note, though, that this is their "Summer Reading" issue, so thankfully it's in a nice ghetto away from the Serious Books. Also note that fully half the review is about his other books, and that the review's author feels compelled to note that there are neologisms. In a sci-fi book? GET OUT]

Still, I'm not sure I can really call this little write-up a review, since those usually roll out rather more plot summary than I find appropriate for a novel as charily plotted and prone to epiphany as Miéville's are. Me, I find 90% of the joy and awe of reading a work of speculative fiction lies in finding things out at the moment the author deems appropriate, and I loathe reviews (or cover flaps, even) that give away much beyond, say, the first 50 pages, so I'll arbitrarily stick to that.

Suffice it to say: yup, aliens! Embassytown is more "obviously" sci-fi than his previous works (accepting the sci-fi=robots'n'aliens fantasy=dragons'n'magic dichotomy, which is reductive but useful), taking place in a distant future of the post-Earth human diaspora. The eponymous colonial outpost occupies an atmosphere-controlled niche on a planet whose double-mouthed natives speak a language unique in the universe: it is non-symbolic, i.e. the words are not different from the thoughts that produce them, and as such, these aliens (respectfully called "the Hosts" by Embassytown's residents) are incapable of lying. In her youth, the human narrator, Avice Benner Cho, went through a strange and uncomfortable experience to help the Host bring into reality a simile they wanted to use--which they could not without the events actually occurring--making her a living part of their Language (later Hosts will twitter to her "I use you all the time!") Hosts also can't understand speech removed from mind, hearing even the proper tones as nothing more than noise unless produced by a single consciousness; this has necessitated the creation of identical-twin Ambassadors, whose two human voices are urged together by technology and empathy into the closest approximation of one Host voice. The novel's events ravel out from the arrival from off-world (the "out") of an impossible Ambassador, made up of two entirely unrelated men.

While the book clearly touches on issues of colonialism, Miéville avoids the easy route of interplanetary noble-savagery--despite unintended consequences, his humans really do their best to integrate with indigenous culture. Instead, he's interested in what should be a paramount concern for any writer: what is language? What can it accomplish, and what limits it in doing so? The exploration of the Hosts' asemiotic speech directly addresses the sometimes maladroit intersections between words and truth. And there is so much cool shit along the way.

I am deeply indebted to Robin Lenz, managing editor of bookseller-required-reading e-letter Shelf Awareness, for passing along her ARC to me!! I'm also SO GORRAM EXCITED that WORD is hosting the NYC event of this book tour!!!!!!!<==this is an inadequate number of exclamation points. (Hopefully they'll need volunteer help, cause $25's more than I have to my name right now. So sad, so true.)

Free book roundup!

2011-04-28T15:31:00.005-05:00

One of my most favorite things about springtime in New York (I'm sure it carries over to other big cities): the convention of divesting oneself of books no longer wanted by just setting them out on the curb to be snatched up by passersby. Over the past couple of weeks I've gained a passel of new reads this way:

Delicate Edible Birds, Lauren Groff: Found on Graham Avenue on the way to my friend Ash's, IIRC. Amazing title, gorge cover design. Wasn't blown away by the stories, though, which fell very much into what my friend Jason calls "the Iowa pattern": the modern MFAish trope of "everything was X until Y changed everything." It's not a bad plot outline, really, but it's overused by the keepers of realistic literary fiction, and it make me kinda tired--especially in a collection of stories, where the trope repeats itself every 30 pages or so. I would give it a C, which I hasten to add is not an outright condemnation: as an old professor of mine liked to point out, a C is average, and most people are average at most things. This one went back out to the curb.

Jenny Lind and Her Listening Cat, Frances Cavanah: OK, this wasn't on the street--Chris picked it up at a friend's I-have-too-much-stuff giveaway. But it was free, is my point. Just a charming and inconsequential 1960s children's book about the Swedish soprano (I say this like I knew who she was) and the story that she got her start singing to her cat. Awwwww.

The Horse in the Attic, Eleanor Lowenton Clymer: See above for provenance. Review = ehn. Maybe if I was eight and really into horses? Which I wasn't, when I was eight, or ever, really. Horses are big and smelly, and I fell off one once. (Yup, I did get right back on.)

Moon Over Manifest, Clare Vanderpool: This one was free because it came from the library, which most of my recent reads did. Really, I guess the "books on the street" intro was kinda misleading (though I am excited to see what the spring and summer will bring in that regard). Anyway, the shameful truth is that I didn't read this book as an ARC despite my curiosity--I worked with Vanderpool at Watermark Books--because I didn't like her, and was vocal about it, which at the time I attributed wholly to her job performance but in retrospect was largely my being a twerp, and really I owe her an apology. Clare? If you're reading this, I'm sorry I was mean to you. Then this book won the frickin' Newbery, which a debut novel hasn't done since the 80s, and so I HAD to read it! It is, in fact, a lovely and solid piece of historical fiction. Abilene Tucker, a 12-year-old who's ridden the rails with her father her whole life, has now (1936) been sent to live in the small southeastern Kansas town of Manifest (based on Vanderpool's grandparents' hometown of Frontenac). She misses her father and doesn't understand why he picked this place to abandon her, why she has to stay put. As she searches the town around her for traces of her father--spurred on by a cigar box full of keepsakes she finds hidden in her room, and the stories of Hungarian diviner Miss Sadie--she's plunged into the history of Manifest itself in 1917, when it was a community of new immigrants kept in check by the owners of the local coal mine. There are elements of mystery, and a lot of overlooked history, both in the 1917 and 1936 threads: anti-German sentiment during WWI that led to PC terms like "Liberty cabbage" for sauerkraut, the agony of the Dust Bowl (knowledge of which seems not to be taught in history classes outside the Midwest). Manifest very much reminds me of the historical-fiction Newbery laureates I loved as a child: Sarah, Plain and Tall (1986); Jacob Have I Loved (1981); Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1977); The Witch of Blackbird Pond (1959); Strawberry Girl (1946) (AGH I could just keep listing, and now I want to read all of those again). Definitely worthy to join their ranks.

Sin in the Second City, Karen Abbott: Also from the giveaway (the other books Chris selected for were Arnold Lobel's Whiskers & Rhymes cause KITTIES, a novelization of the X-Files episode "Eve," and a 90210-expanded-universe Christmas story. If I read those last two, you're not hearin' about it). He picked it cause of its old-timey Chicago setting a la Devil in the White City--it's a very similar endeavor, spinning the interwoven stories of the Everleigh sisters, keepers of the swankiest turn-of-the-century brothel in Chi-town; the South Side Levee red-light district where they and the whole price range of prostitutes (from their $50 minimum to the $1 cribs on Bed Bug Alley) made their home; and the reformers and lawmen who crusaded against them, bringing the topic of "white slavery" into the public eye, eventually leading to the Mann Act and the quashing of more-or-less-official vice districts in American cities. Fascinating stuff, and another reminder that debauchery wasn't invented in the 1960s--but the writing just doesn't quite get there for me, with a lot of unevenness of tone and too many unanswered questions: e.g., was the "white slavery" panic overblown? Certainly sex trafficking did and does exist: but how prevalent was it, really? Abbott can't really figure out where her sympathies lie--with the folks trying to rescue harlots or the admittedly glamorous Everleighs--and the book's a bit mushy because of it. Still, I do like my history titillating, and I remain interested in reading her latest, American Rose, on the life of Gyspy Rose Lee. (Oh, and I was completely mistaken about her having written A History of Celibacy--that's Elizabeth Abbott--but that book is gangbusters, and y'all should read it.)

Another stalled story.

2011-04-22T12:10:00.000-05:00

I am soliciting feedback, queries, compliments, whatever--I know where this is going eventually, and I like what I have, but have been stalled for MONTHS. You'd think unemployment would be good for my writing, but it turns into one more failing. (P.S. Yup, it's sci-fi. V. excited by the prospect.)

They knew they weren’t the first. They were graduate students, after all, in an unpopular department at that; all the really exciting research went to the tenured and their lovers and lackeys, so all that was left for their group thesis was recapitulation. “The last botanical survey of the Forest was six decades ago,” Archon Venk had said, “and that wasn’t at all a proper one—they just sent some seercraft overhead, snipped some cuttings from the canopy.” Which they knew; there was a sickly bleakblade bush sitting in Venk’s office, brought back by a former dean and watered maybe once a semester. “It’s been two centuries since Fintzer’s original expedition.” Which was how they knew what the bleakblade was supposed to look like. Back then, seers could only draw their observations, and so almost all scientific illustration was an unsettling mix of crude and passionless; but one of Fintzer’s seers had had real talent, and she’d produced the inky, sleek images that gave the shrub its modern name. “You’ll have all the latest techniques, you’ll be able to study the biosphere as a whole, alive, instead of relying on recordings and specimens! It has the potential to be very exciting.”

On the lips of an administrator, potential was a sweet and hopeful word. Jaina, Lett, and Inar, however, were scientists (or hoping to be), and thus couldn’t help but be ruefully reminded of the physics sense of the word—how the politely-sipped cups in their hands, held against gravity, were full of potential energy as well as overbrewed tea; how that energy could indeed be dispersed with a crash and spill and shards, but instead simply whispered away as they filed out and placed them back on the cart. Similarly: sure, a modern expedition to the Forest might result in discoveries and prizes and professorships. More likely, they would only confirm previous data, cobble together a lackluster thesis, receive the lowest possible passing grade, and go on to work off their debt in windowless offices.

“Maybe I’ll have a garden,” Lett said morosely. “Or my co-workers will just come to me to diagnose their houseplants.”

“Like Venk’s bleakblade?” snorted Inar. “Nids. Hardy ones, too. I’ll bet they only ever get a drink when someone pours out that godawful tea.”

Jaina pushed open the door to their shared office, biting back her natural inclination to see the bright side. It was improbable that their trip would turn up anything new, anything to build a career on. Still, the Forest! She’d had a book of indigenous folktales as a child, and all her favorites took place there: Tej and the Flowerbird, the Five Lost Monks, the leave-the-light-on stories of the Blind Tiger and its deadly glare. The part of her that was still a little girl (the same part, she suspected, that had led her into botany because she’d enjoyed picking wildflowers) was thrilled at the prospect of standing among those ancient trees, listening to birdsong not heard for hundreds of years.

It was called The Forest not because it had never been named, but because it had been named so often; native records from as far off as Iothia spoke of dozens of attempted and failed settlements on its peninsula. Before that, folklore and ballads and proverbs referenced the Forest in unmistakable terms: bordered by a mountain range in the east, the ocean to the west, it was hard to reach and, it seemed, even harder to remain. Historians puzzled over this—indeed, the journey was difficult, but the soil was rich, and the easy access to the sea should have meant thriving trade for a port colony. Yet cultures and tribes had tried for millennia to establish such a town with no success, and though the documentation existed, it proved little logical help.

“Most of the legends are nonsense, of course, all monsters and massacres out of the blue.”

Hello Kitty Boyshorts

2011-04-21T09:55:00.004-05:00

The start of an abandoned short story. Let's call it a character sketch:

Lately she’d found herself invoking adulthood more and more, but in the most childish of ways: ice cream for breakfast, for one. A child’s urge to fill up on Rocky Road in lieu of food groups or the food pyramid or whatever they were supposed to be teaching in elementary school now but weren’t because there were standardized tests every week or so, right?—this was an irrational desire, predicated solely on the anticipation of pleasure. Whereas her early (not that early, to be honest) dairy intake was the result of sober and thoughtful decision-making, to wit: Cereal and milk is a totally legitimate Complete Breakfast, even when sugar is involved. What is ice cream, then, but a novel and creative substitute, and Rocky Road in particular, with its marshmallows and almonds, providing in addition good proteins and the fats they actually tell you to eat? The absence of grain is hardly a mitigating factor, as the modern American diet is lousy with carbs. But really, nachos, combining thus dairy AND grain, are an even more adult and responsible substitute for said cereal. Nothing immature about it at all.

Nor, she maintained, was there immaturity to read into the seven or so pairs of Hello Kitty undies in her drawer: for one thing, they were mostly boyshort style, giving more coverage to the early-thirties female buttock than silly college-girl thongs. Also, the prevalence of Ms. Kitty on household décor and appliances (like her toaster, or her shower curtain) pegs her as part of adult culture. Also, the fact that increasingly she’s grown out of or given away her HK outerwear—hoodie, T-shirt, she thinks she had a skirt once—is definitely a sign of Maturity and Grown-up-ness, as she moves this beloved character into the realm of accessory (thus signaling her ancillary status) and privacy. She’d be less mature if she didn’t wear Hello Kitty underwear.

Molly Fox's Birthday (Deirdre Madden)

2011-04-19T14:54:00.000-05:00

Almost nothing happens in Molly Fox's Birthday. The unnamed narrator--a playwright on writing holiday at an old friend's flat (Molly Fox, a stage actor of some renown) in Dublin while her friend is in New York--dawdles, dines, thinks about her history with Molly, her own family, her similarly longstanding friend Andrew, breaks a pitcher, receives three callers (all looking for Molly and a bit disappointed), and doesn't get a lick of work done on her new play. There is a cat, and a hedgehog, and an olive wood bowl from the Holy Land.

It's a novel that calls to mind Virginia Woolf for me, in the quiet interiority and domesticity of its narrative and the forthright, liquid beauty of its prose. And, too, that Madden is aware that the "smallness" of these things belies their great importance. The book is about memory, and connection--with family, friends, lovers--about the benign and necessary falsehoods of love, protection, and the theater. So I take it back--it may be that almost everything happens.

Weekend quickies.

2011-04-18T10:08:00.000-05:00

The Great Perhaps, Joe Meno: Sometimes a book is pleasant and competent, and that's perfectly all right. I enjoyed reading The Great Perhaps, I enjoyed the characters (the Caspers, a Chicago family of four all with their own quirks and fears). I especially enjoyed that they got a happy ending, because beforehand there was too much of a whiff of Great American Novel, a ridiculous notion that usually means OMG the Suburbs Are So Devoid of Hope or Culture, and the way this played out felt much closer to my experience of life as it's lived.

A Shore Thing, Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi: No, I haven't watched Jersey Shore, and I shan't; I'm only one-quarter Sicilian, but my late grandmother Josephine Zaffiro Perleberg was proud of her heritage and active in the Italian-American community in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I can't help but think she'd be disgusted by the show's portrayal of her cultural companions as the worst and laziest minority stereotypes (sex-obsessed, drunken, materialistic), particularly since she could remember a time when Italians weren't yet "white." I can't imagine such a show being aired with Hispanic or African-American casts without a national hue and cry--which of course there SHOULD be.
That aside, from my position as pop culture outsider, I am fascinated by ubiquitous ephemera like the Shore phenomenon--and while I may not be willing to waste my time watching the show, I'm always willing to waste my time reading a (free) book. And this "novel" is both exactly as bad as you think it is and better than you think it is. The gender politics are repulsive, as are all the characters--simultaneously debauched and naive--and the plot is negligible except when it's laughable. Somehow, though, I had a good time reading in. I have to credit Snooki's "collaborator," Valerie Frankel (who seems to be a prolific chick-lit/romance/mystery/disposable fiction powerhouse, judging by her Amazon page), with the froth and lightness of tone and voice that keeps the book moving. No, of course it's not good. Yes, of course it's silly it got a hardcover publication. And true, I discovered my reading-on-the-subway shame threshold, as I took off the dust jacket and hid the spine in my lap. Allow me, though, to paraphrase the A.V. Club's intro to their brilliant "I Watched This on Purpose" feature: "Sometimes, even I'm not impervious to the sexy allure of ostensible cultural garbage."
(P.S. I gave this the same amount of stars on Goodreads as I gave Anna Karenina. This is a) hilarious, and b) a demonstration of the limits of star-based rubrics for evaluating literary achievement. To be perfectly honest, though, I had more fun reading the Jersey mind candy than the Russian classic.)

The Devil in the White City (Erik Larson)

2011-04-16T13:17:00.001-05:00

I don't know how many copies of The Devil in the White City I've sold, or how many people have recommended it to me. Approaching a kajillion, I suspect. Allow me to be kajillion and one: if you haven't read this book--and your taste in history runs less towards Great Men and troop movements and more towards the outré--DO EET NOW. I'll wait.

Wasn't it great?

Two stories, related by time and place, are told here: that of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago and its primary architect, Daniel Burnham, and serial killer H.H. Holmes, who operated a "hotel" of his own design just a few blocks from the fair. I will admit without shame that at first I powered through the fair-plannin' chapter to get to the murderizin' ones; but as pages wore on, and silkiness of Larson's prose drew me in, I was just as fascinated by the tale of the logistical triumphs necessary to design, donstruct, landscape, and run the Columbian Exposition (named for the quadricentennial of Columbus's voyage)--an event that drew the largest crowds ever assembled in peacetime and left legacies as diverse as Shredded Wheat and the Ferris wheel. Too, the story of Holmes, a relentlessly charismatic con man and butcher who managed to build an edifice specifically planned for murder and easy corpse disposal (with windowless, airtight rooms that could be filled with gas at the flip of a switch, and a crematorium in the cellar), is haunting in its incredibility. Both are examples of the breadth of human ingenuity, for beauty and delight or terrifying darkness. First-rate!

Aurorama (Jean-Christophe Valtat)

2011-04-13T10:54:00.000-05:00

You know how a book can seem like it's going to get good any minute, and then it's over and it hasn't? Aurorama is one of those books.

The setting really should work. The book takes place in New Venice, a metropolis stubbornly carved from marble in the wastelands of the Arctic (deduction says Ellesmere Island, just west of Greenland). The time period is vaguely Victorian with steampunk trappings and the culture British Imperial, with a drug-induced aristocracy and good old-fashioned oppressin' the natives (the local Inuit). It's ruled by a Council of Seven who take the names of the days of the week and glean their power from the Seven Sleepers, the city's cryogenically frozen founders; they are, of course, corrupt to the core. Various forces are gathering to challenge their authority: Brentford Orsini, a disgruntled duke in charge of the Greenhouse; Gabriel d'Allier, an ostensible professor and true wastrel caught up in forces beyond his control; the mysterious black airship hovering over the city; the garbage-collecting, plague-mask-wearing underclass known as the Scavengers; and the perhaps-protective but slightly menacing semi-mythical beast known as the Polar Kangaroo. It's a good melange to start with, and there's a lot to like in the details of everyday life in a place attempting to preserve genteel society in a climate where "inhospitable" is an understatement.

But it fails in too many ways. First, I was distracted throughout the whole book by when this was supposed to take place: there are gas lamps coexisting with electric guitars, occasional very modern turns of phrase--is it Victorian? Is it society-imposed retro-Victorian, but if so, what's going on in the rest of the world? Is it proceeding as usual? The year is once given as 1908, but it's also said that the city's founders decided to count the years backwards, and there's a reference to a paper founded in 1927...does this mean it's 19 years after that, 1946? If so, is this a post-WWII world? The tale's scope is so narrow it allows for none of these questions, but in a story taking its cue from the real world, they are questions that must be asked.

I was also irked that all the female characters are muse figures in some way or other: living or dead, shamanic or sybaritic, they serve only to lead the male protagonists on their journeys, dropping convenient clues along the way. None of the characters are compelling, to be honest--but the women are just passive plot elements.

The denouement is kind of hilarious, too, in that the overthrow of this entrenched power structure consists mostly of one ever-so-nice soundwave bomb and then everybody just laying down their arms and getting drunk together...honestly, I get the feeling that Valtat just couldn't write a good fight scene, so he wrote a bloodless coup instead.

And the biggest shadow hanging over the book for me? China Mieville's Perdido Street Station. There are endless similarities between New Venice and New Crobuzon, none of which reflect well on the former. The imagination isn't as fertile, the characters aren't recognizably...crap, I can't say "human," because a lot of Mieville's best characters are recognizable without being human at all, and some of them are, conversely, so alien that they defy recognition. Whereas all of Valtat's are simply standard.

The best part of the book, really, was that it made me have a dream about seeing the Northern Lights. Turns out my subconscious has zero clue what the Northern Lights look like...but its analogue was pretty!

The Master & Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov)

2011-04-11T11:58:00.000-05:00

I'm so in love with WORD's Classics Book Group, you guys. To wit: dragged myself the three-mile roundtrip up and down Greenpoint last Saturday--despite battling nigh Week Two of a too-sick-for-a-cold, not-sick-enough-for-the-flu ailment (I think I'm finally OK now. Thanks for asking!)--because I wanted to talk about The Master and Margarita SO BAD. And it was worth it, despite the truly ferocious exhaustion that ensued.

Stephanie had sold this book pretty endlessly and noted that everyone who bought it seemed to be getting a copy as a present for a friend. Since it's a very particular kind of book that's propagated like this--one can love a book and even urge people to read it without taking the step to put it in their hands--her curiosity was piqued. Generalizing hastily: I think it's a book that's either beloved or culturally important; Master and Margarita is both. It's also surreal, thought-provoking, funny, tender, and subversive. AND THERE IS A CAT THAT DRINKS VODKA. (Awww, man, I just wasted several minutes trying to find a LOLcat pic of him. I mean, there's a LOLcat "The Waste Land"...my faith in the Internet is shaken.) (UPDATE: THERE, I FIXED IT.. YOU'RE WELCOME, UNIVERSE.)

The novel is, in unranked order, 1) a satire of Stalinist Russia; 2) a retelling of the trial and death of Christ centering on Pontius Pilate; and 3) a love story. You can haz explication:

It's that peculiar kind of satire bred by terror and oppression, where you laugh and then gasp in horror...the devil and his minions come to 1930s Moscow and wreak trickster-god havoc, but they're not at all the evil at work in the city. Dreams and magic stand in for the surreality of an "ordinary life" marked by survival-instinct-bred mistrust and constant disappearances. The book itself wasn't published contemporaneously, of course--apparently its publication (albeit still in censored form) in 1966-7 represented a huge step forward in literary freedom in the Soviet Union, and it's a favorite of many Russians who lived through the Communist era, faithfully and obliquely detailing what it was like to do so. Without being, you know, The Gulag Archipelago (an obviously amazing and important work, but one of the worst birthday presents I can think of).
Interspersed with the Satanic antics--starting as a tale told by the devil himself and following through in dream and novel-within-a-novel--is an absolutely beautiful (though unorthodox) version of the prosecution and condemnation of Jesus by Pilate. (Sidebar: I was amazed that there was more than one person in the group who had to look up who Pilate was!! Cultural currency varies so much.) For me (and for Bulgakov, I think), Pilate is a crucial figure in Christianity because he represents the challenge of living in the world, the impossibility of always doing the right thing, that faces every human being. He had to sentence Christ to death. Muscovites had to protect themselves and their families while their neighbors were denounced and executed. There are always saints, yes--but one can be a good person without being a saint. One can be a good person and have done bad things.
AND there's also the Master and Margarita! And they are about love, and art, and loving an artist, and what love and art can and cannot do. And selfless deals with the devil.

So: yes, you should read this book, and then give it to your friends. Next up is Dead Souls, Gogol's only novel. Hooray!

Oryx and Crake (Margaret Atwood)

2011-04-04T15:17:00.000-05:00

So I guess I read these books in the right order (i.e. Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood) (also i.e. in the opposite order from which they were written)--had I read O&C first, I probably wouldn't have bothered to read YotF. Left me pretty cold.

It's set in the same world, a nightmare near-future of corporate-sponsored genetic engineering, climate-changed landscapes, widening class disparity, executions on reality TV, and porn, porn, porn...gosh, when I type it out it really sounds like every single other "nightmare near-future" universe churned out in the past ten years, doesn't it? Really, subtract the climate change and it's every nightmare near-future since the 70s. Huh. So, OK, neither novel was original. But where O&C failed for me was in the choice of its protagonists: Oryx really seemed more of a vehicle for Awareness of Child Prostitution (not that it's not a horror that people shouldn't be aware of, of course) than a fully realized character; Crake was a similarly one-dimensional mad scientist, and Jimmy, the lover of the former and adolescent best friend of the latter, was honestly too dumb and cowardly to care much about--as the bulk of the novel is from his point of view, it was slower going for me. And the Children of Crake just annoyed the HELL out of me--genetically engineered Noble Savages are Noble Savages nonetheless. (Seriously, how are people still into Rousseau?!? Dude was a) wrong and b) a horrible human being even had he been right.)

I will say that it was neat seeing the asides and mentions that became characters and plot points in YotF--I'm impressed with authors who can smoothly interlock different stories. And both novels were that ol' standby "compulsively readable." Still, I shan't be waiting with bated breath for the purported third related novel (publication date who knows, really?).

You should still follow Ms. Atwood on Twitter. Because she is adorable. Like your grandma, if your grandma were the grande dame of Canadian fiction.

Stoner (John Williams)

2011-03-31T10:12:00.000-05:00

I've been surrounded by raves for Stoner since someone (I do not remember who, sorry) recommended it to the lovely, lovely Bookavore sometime last year and she became a relentless evangelist for it. Yes: it is simple and tender, and unique in its being a sympathetic portrait of an ordinary Midwesterner. (Whereas your average "flyover"-set book is all about the Canker at the Core of America and whatnot...*cough* Sinclair Lewis *cough* Franzen...with no representation of the world I grew up in or the virtues thereof.)

Here is what happens in this book: In 1910, William Stoner leaves his father's farm for the University of Missouri, ostensibly to study agriculture; but he falls in love with English literature and steadily pursues a Ph.D., going on to teach at his alma mater until his death. He is never more than an assistant professor. His marriage is an immediate failure, his academic career thwarted by vicious intradepartmental politics, and he admits to only sometimes being a good teacher. He has a love affair that dissolves under threat of scandal. His wife sabotages his relationship with his daughter, who eventually escapes through unwed pregnancy and alcoholism. It's all very sad...but in an everyday way, meaning so little in the grand scheme. At his daughter's hurried, defeated wedding in December 1941, he

was gripped by what he could think of only as a numbness, though he knew it was a feeling compounded of emotions so deep and intense that they could not be acknowledged because they could not be lived with. It was the force of a public tragedy he felt, a horror and a woe so all-pervasive that private tragedies and personal misfortunes were removed to another state of being, yet were intensified by the very vastness in which they took place, as the poignancy of a lone grave might be intensified by a great desert surrounding it.

And yet, while you won't put down the book humming the theme song (to borrow a phrase of my father's), there is so much love in its pages--not between Stoner and his wife, or even his lover, but between the author and the man whose quiet life he chronicles. Williams communicates the pain and small triumphs of his character plainly and with little intrusion, but with infinite tenderness, communicated powerfully to the reader. Let's make it a classic, shall we? (It can replace Main Street. God, I loathed that book--never read an author with such contempt for his characters.)

Reading in the Brain (Stanislas Dehaene)

2011-03-30T10:42:00.000-05:00

The boyfriend's brother and sister-in-law got me Reading in the Brain for Christmas, theorizing that since they didn't know my favorite authors but knew I loved books, a meta-book would work. And they were so right, because this book was awesome.

Studies into the neuroscience of reading, says Dehaene, have identified a particular part of the brain that handles word forms: the "brain's letterbox," in the left occipito-temporal region; one of his central questions is how this is even possible...reading is too recent an invention for the human brain to have actually evolved the ability to do so, and yet the brains of readers the world over show that this "letterbox" is where written words are processed before being semantically understood. He hypothesizes a process called "neuronal recycling," in which the incredible plasticity of the primate brain repurposes "old" neurons for novel uses.

The real strength of this book is that it manages to be accessible without seeming at all dumbed down. Dehaene lays out the case for the brain's letterbox in exhaustive detail, starting with its discovery in the 19th century in the autopsy of a man who--after a stroke--lost the ability to read, though he could still write, still understand letters traced out on his hand, and even read out strings of digits: but letters were lost to him. This condition is called pure alexia, and it's beaten out alien hand syndrome on the list of incredibly rare malfunctions I am petrified of getting. Through ever more sophisticated imaging technology (PET, MRI, electrodes implanted in the brains of epileptics), neurologists have stacked up loads of evidence for the existence of this specialized brain area. There's repetition in this section, but that's science, you know? Confirming and reconfirming.

Dehaene also goes into the invention of writing and the development of alphabets, the process of learning to read and how it literally changes the brain, and what dyslexia can tell us about how reading works. It's all fascinating stuff: like how children often confuse letters with left-right symmetry (p & q, d & b) or mirror-write easily, because our brains are so used to generalizing from that kind of symmetry (that's why we can see a person in right profile and still recognize them in left profile, even if we haven't seen them from that angle before) that we actually have to unlearn this incredibly useful skill to understand the alphabet. It's a book that just makes you want to buttonhole people on the subway and share facts with them, and a great, great gift for anyone bookish in your life.

Animal Magnetism (Jill Shalvis)

2011-03-21T12:43:00.000-05:00

At Eloisa James' book launch, there were not only cupcakes and champagne, there was swag: a ferociously pink little tote full of bookmarks and such, and free books: the previously mentioned paranormal Captive Heart, which continues to entertain Chris & me as he reads it out loud; and my first contemporary romance, Jill Shalvis' Animal Magnetism (you should click through for the cover, as it is hilarious--sleek buff boy back and adorbs puppy giving eponymous eyes). I kind of saved this one for last since the synopsis wasn't that appealing: lady with a duck and piglets in her car rear-ends parked car of pilot/photographer/ex-Army/Ramblin' Man, passion and lack of suspense about whether he'll leave town ensues. As I expected, it didn't do much for me. (Yeah, the sex scenes were good, but if you only like the sex scenes it's porn, right?) Here are some reasons. They are not all admirable, or even consistent.

1. I am completely over the Love of a Good Woman Makes Peripatetic Dude Settle Down trope. Yes, even though it's one of the cornerstones of romantic fiction (including film). And even though I have enjoyed some books with this essential plot (I contain multitudes blah blah). I fundamentally don't believe love changes people, is the thing. I believe that people change themselves, and that makes them more able to find or keep or deepen relationships--but in this book, Brady's eventual putting down of roots happens despite himself, he's helpless before it, all "what is happening OMG." It's maturity externally imposed rather than blossoming within, as if his attraction to Lilah is literally a magic spell. It's unreal, and hence not satisfying.

2. Hero and heroine spend the whole damn book misinterpreting each other when all they had to do was have an adult conversation. Yes, I'm aware this happens. It's a difficult conversation to have. And yup, the same mutual misunderstanding drives many historicals. But it's easier to take in stories set in previous centuries: gaps in education between men and women and societal taboo often made these discussions unfeasible or even impossible--Anna Karenina, for example. We're supposed to have moved beyond this, though. Be good role models, romance protagonists!!

3. Too many cute animals. I'm aware this may be the most ridiculous thing I have ever written: I've watched that video where the corgi goes nuts when her owner talks like the Beatles half a dozen times. I'm currently watching season 2 of a BBC doc called "Big Cat Diary," which follows leopards and cheetahs and lions AND THEIR BABIES about in Kenya. And I try to get my cat to watch it with me. My "birthday present" to my sister was a link to a friend's photostream of a kitten he & his wife found on the street. I AM A SUCKER FOR TEH CUTE. In Animal Magnetism, though, the animal characters--three-legged cat! rescue puppy named Twinkles who cries at night unless you snuggle with him! duck on a leash!--just felt like manipulation. Like pandering to the stereotyped single cat lady romance reader. Like reading a Cathy collection. Almost.

4. This is the shameful one: I'm really skeptical about dudes who have been in the military. Which pretty much means I hate America, I know, and indeed the few gentlemen I know personally who've been in the Army or Navy are perfectly nice guys...but my first impulse upon finding out a guy I'm interested in was an ex-soldier would be to assume that we don't have much in common. This totally idiosyncratic and unfounded and embarrassing prejudice meant I had absolutely zero investment in the hero. This is death to enjoyment of a romance.

Floodgates.

2011-03-19T16:17:00.000-05:00

Finished Anna K. ten days ago--I've read six books since then. Several of them in 24 hours (A Visit from the Goon Squad, Other People We Married, Antonya Nelson's Bound, of which more below). Twin forces of unemployment-induced free time and relief at making it through that Russian brick, I suppose.

Took me a couple of days to read Margaret Atwood's latest, The Year of the Flood, a woman-centered dystopian novel (for Freebird's Post-Apocalyptic Book Club next week, though I'll actually miss the meeting) which I quite liked--although the last fourth was haunted by my friend Noah's comment that he threw Oryx and Crake (set in the same world, shortly previous to Flood) across the room, because he hates the anti-humanist tone of contemporary dystopia. He's got a point--there are aspects of the modern environmental movement that resemble a secular apocalypse cult (which in Flood becomes a quasi-Christian sect, the homesteading, recycling God's Gardeners), in that the upcoming doom is about humanity's errant behavior--the sins are different, but the disapproval of the elect feels the same, doesn't it? I'm fascinated to know whether the current future visions of a climate-changed wasteland will seem as dated in fifty years as nuclear-winter novels do now.

I liked Year of the Flood a lot, though, and Noah's irritation helped me clarify my own thinking about dystopian fiction: I don't really care what brought about the catastrophe. Human action, unforeseeable act of nature, magic, fine--what interests me is the aftermath, the scrabble for survival and cobbling together of new societies with the detritus of the old. Improvised lives and operatic emotions. I've ordered Oryx and Crake from the library as well--see how the pandemic whose survivors populate Flood came about!

Next I read Bound, which was only OK. Antonya Nelson is a fellow Wichitan, and Sarah Bagby, who owns Watermark Books where I used to work, was a big fan--and most of this novel takes place there, during the surreal period when BTK, a serial killer active in the city during the 70s (right after my parents moved to Kansas from Wisconsin, so my dad could go to grad school), resurfaced, sending taunting notes to the media as he'd done 25 years before, and linking himself to two previously unsolved murders. As it turned out, he hadn't died, or been incarcerated--he actually went dormant, throwing a lot of serial-killer psychology out the window. There's a line a few pages in about a character "feeling a prickling pride in being from the city where he'd killed people, the curious emotion of by-proxy notoriety."

By-proxy pride is all I could really get from the novel, though, just the "Hey, I went to East High too!" experience that must happen to New Yorkers all the time. The story was all right (two-sentence summary? A woman's high school best friend dies in a car accident, and after years of silence, she discovers the woman had long ago named her as guardian to her now 15-year-old daughter. Also, her much-older husband is cheating on her with a much-younger-than-her woman, because he is just a total asshole), but I couldn't stand the paragraphs...the complicated, list-heavy, often verbless sentences were quite lovely on their own, but then the next sentence would also be complicated, list-heavy, and verbless--and the next one too. Just too much--nowhere to breathe, no rhythm. Or maybe too much of a rhythm, so little variation? It just did not taste good. Example? OK:

"He was attracted to the old-fashioned sign, the black and white tipped top hat, the unrenovated sleazy aspect that said the motel proprietor would rent by the hour, would take cash, would understand the idea of parking in the back. Like Joyland [hey, I've been to Joyland!!! awesome amusement park, now sadly closed and increasingly like a horror-movie set], the motel was a fading piece of the former city. For Oliver, this imagined seedy locale was part and parcel of his second life, that simultaneous existence that was a lurid undercurrent beneath the one on top, the nocturnal answer to the broad and reputable daylight."

Do you see? Three sentences, three lists, all simply repeating the same idea without adding to it or deepening it. Don't they teach you not to do that in MFA programs? Am I taking crazy pills?!?!

Invitation to Sin (thanks, Theresa!)

2011-03-17T10:57:00.001-05:00

I don't know how I won things before the Internet--in addition to my awesome Twitter scores, my needlessly snarky comment on Theresa's February contest post got selected for signed-swag goodness from Sally MacKenzie, who writes a "Naked Nobles" series. Invitation to Sin is a four-novella anthology (Romance: Preserving the Novella Form since Whenever): MacKenzie's entry, "The Naked Prince," is definitely the best--funny and naughty and we're-in-love-cause-we-both-love-translating-Latin. Awwww--Regency nerds are the best.

Of the others, I most like Jo Beverly's "Forbidden Affections" for its Gothic-novel props, and kudos to Vanessa Kelly for an older-woman (OK, 32, but in 1813 that was superannuated) tale called "The Pleasure of a Younger Lover." Kaitlin O'Riley's "A Summer Love Affair" was pretty standard, but I do like it when the hero is inspired by the heroine to become a responsible adult.

And thanks to Gothamist's awesome "Ten Best Indie Bookstore of NYC" post, I was introduced to TWO Brooklyn bookstores I hadn't heard of: Book Thug Nation in Williamsburg and Unnameable Books in...uh...Park Slope or something? Welp, nope, Prospect Heights, I guess. Anyway: neither is hiring, more's the pity--but both had charming, friendly staff and awesome selection of used (both) and new (Unnameable). Definitely on the list for future purchases! Book Thug had a first American edition of Brideshead Revisited I've got my eye on.

Other People We Married (Emma Straub)

2011-03-16T15:21:00.001-05:00

I am writing around my own head today--sleep, elusive at the best of times, has been a particularly harsh mistress this past week, and last night I managed to both spill Benadryl all over myself AND take twice as much as I meant to, so I feel like death warmed over, a non-bloggish state of mind. I believe this is what they call a "first world problem."

Still, I can't let my case of ick (used as a metaphor and not the yes-it's-really-called-that fish disease) keep me from putting a forth a happy, purring, sunshiny endorsement of Emma Straub's short story collection Other People We Married. And I am not just saying this because she has been impossibly sweet on the few occasions we have met, or because she makes the BEST brownies (and you can, too!)--these are just the sprinkles on the icing of the writerly cake. (Yum.)

Because she's one of those writers who makes me want to use the word "formidable," but then reconsider because that is far too forceful a word for the slyly humorous ease with which she writes. Like many of my favorite short stories, these do not have earthshaking stakes, and that's how I like it: ordinary moments, Aristotelian unities, crystalline ending sentences that mean you have to put the book down and look at something else for a while before you start the next piece, just to let them settle into your brain, make some hot tea, and put their feet up. Where it's not all Benadryl-hangover up there, it is Emma-sentence-tiffin-town, believe me.

Some of my favorite details reminded me of myself (not sure if this means I'm an egomaniac or that the characters are relatable? likely six-a-one-half-dozen-of-tother)--the TA in "Some People Must Really Fall In Love" with a hopeless and embarrassing crush on a freshman in her intro to creative writing class (oh, Scott, high school guest student of mine six years back, 17 at the most but a better flirt than I was); the woman in "Rosemary" who points out to her husband that she's been sleeping with the eponymous cat for ten years longer than she'd been sleeping with him (15 years for me, one reason it's so distressing Julie has taken to wandering the apartment yowling at night rather than curling up next to me like she used to); the bird-watching widow in "Marjorie and the Birds" who "send[s] her check in the mail with a slip of paper wrapped around it. It was the sort of thing her children made fun of her for, but Marjorie liked to do things properly"--oh yeah, I absolutely do that, as I learned from my own mother, and the older I get, the more things I mocked her for in my callow youth that I find myself espousing as Sensible and Meticulous.

The collection also gives me a chance to stump for a weensy indie press, which I theoretically love to do but often fail in the follow-through. It's one of the first two books published by FiveChapters, whose website features a short story in five parts every week (the other is Nobody Ever Gets Lost by Jess Row, who read with Emma at McNally-Jackson the night I bought the book and ate the brownies). Buy them both and the shipping is free! Because indie press folks are sweet like that.

You all already knew this, but...

2011-03-14T13:09:00.000-05:00

...Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad is ZOMGawesome.

I am approximately the gazillionth person to say so--partial list of honors and best-ofs etc. here--and among the least influential, but what I can say? Hardcovers are expensive, and I think I was hold 75 or something at the Brooklyn Public Library, so I didn't get to read it till this weekend. Or rather, in two bursts Saturday afternoon and last night--it is an OM NOM NOM of a book. Less a traditional one-narrative novel than thirteen interlocking, interdependent, inter-informing short stories, Goon Squad is about (in an oversimplified way, natch) the power of music and the power of time, to inspire and wound. The chapters--many of which previously appeared as stand-alone stories--are carefully ordered to shed light on characters, events, motivations backwards & forwards through the book, so that something mentioned in passing becomes a sudden lurch of heartbreak and/or beauty later on.

I did feel that the last chapter, "Pure Language," set in a social-network-global-warming near-future dystopia that's pure Super Sad True Love Story territory, was by far the least compelling--kind of an meh note to go out on. But right before that is the Powerpoint chapter, which can only be called brilliant. The book really is as good as everyone says, you guys.

Would I have picked it over Skippy Dies in the Morning News Tournament of Books? Nah. But Anthony Doerr, who did, admits that "because I’m in the absurd position of saying one very good book is better than another very good book—I’ll say that A Visit From the Goon Squad was a slightly more relevant book for this particular reader at this particular moment." As another particular reader, I simply leaned an inch or two the other way.

[P.S. Hey, you see those book title links that go to IndieBound? It's the trade organization for U.S. independent bookstores, and makes it super simple to buy from awesome stores all over the country and strike a blow for local, loving, bricks-and-mortar booksellers. If you spend a little extra to get the best produce at the farmers market, why not spend a little extra buying your books from someone who cares? Also, I think I get a couple cents. WOOOOO]

The Eight (Katherine Neville)

2011-03-12T14:13:00.000-06:00

Gosh, I wanted to like this book. Despite the Code-that-shall-not-be-named-or-linked-to, the quasi-historical Earth-Shattering Secret thriller is not an illegitimate genre--Foucault's Pendulum is the exemplar, of course, and Borges can do labyrinthine mind-boggling in short-story form with books and languages that don't exist. So The Eight--a double narrative between the 1790s and 1970s, following the battle for control over a cursed chess set that somehow encodes the mysteries of the universe--could have been fantastic.

Sadly, it wasn't. The writing wasn't great--authors, you are just not allowed to use sentences that start with "Little did I know..." more than once in a novel, OK? And the conspiracy surrounding the chess set just got kitchen-sinkier as time wore on, cycling through music and math and physics and oh also alchemy and the Freemasons and maybe becoming a god or something? The E-SS similarly seemed to be about half a dozen different things, and ended up being the least interesting. Oh, and there was this romance that just came outta nowhere--irritated me no end.

Props are at least due for writing this kind of book with women as the main characters. But it would have been nice if they were main characters in a better book.

I'm a failure as a classicist, I guess.

2011-03-11T11:42:00.001-06:00

I just didn't like Anna Karenina, you guys.

I did like the writing. Many of the similes were striking--I remember particularly Stiva's "almond-butter smile," just a perfect fit for his jovial smarm. And I loved Levin's saying in regard to his upcoming wedding that "he was as happy as a dog that has been taught to jump through a hoop and, having finally understood and done what was demanded of it, squeals, wags its tail, and leaps in rapture on to the tables and windowsills." And I liked Levin's dog Laska a lot.

But I didn't like any of the people--OK, not quite "didn't like" even, I felt little for them at all. (I just learned the word cathexis, "mental or emotional investment in a person, object, or idea," and that's exactly what I didn't have.) When I felt (almost universally negative) things towards the characters--irritation with Anna, contempt for Vronsky, disgust towards Stiva--there was always the knowledge that I was rather feeling these emotions towards Tolstoy himself, thinking, "Really, dude?" And while I can intellectually appreciate the novel as a snapshot of its time--politically, economically, philosophically--I was hopelessly bored every single time the conversation turned to 1870s Russian issues. And that happens a lot, so I was hopelessly bored for most of the book.

Reading a Classic Novel and not liking it can feel like a personal failure, can't it? That the book must be good, that it's me, that I'm missing something. Then my St.-John's-primary-source-bred tendencies kick back and say, "No, each individual must evaluate each work from themselves, on their own terms. One must never be intimidated by authority into acknowledging value you don't find." Then my mom-instilled-politesse counters: "True, but don't be the grouch in the corner at the book club meeting tomorrow, OK? If everybody else loved it, let them love it."

So that's the plan: unusual levels of self-effacement in tomorrow's discussion, then Ms. K goes back to the library. And now? I can say I've read it.

**POST-BOOK-CLUB UPDATE** OK, that was an amazing discussion. And it turns out my feelings about the book were in keeping with everyone else's, so I feel absolved of all guilt!

An experiment.

2011-03-04T21:27:00.000-06:00

As I'm pressing on through Anna Karenina (I'm on page 217, and so far I don't like anybody. But I am assured it gets better) and so don't have new review-ish ramblings, I'm instead gonna once again take inspiration from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books: specifically a feature entitled "Help a Bitch Out," in which readers share memories of a plot and commenters try to come up with the title of a book.

There is a horror novel I read in elementary school, possibly middle school (late 80s, early 90s). I remember almost nothing about the plot, but it featured one image I've never forgotten: there was some kind of magical maze(?), at the heart of which lurked a huge, vaguely demonic, white big cat (cougar-type, no mane). It had a name, which I've forgotten, and it killed people. GRAPHICALLY.

I'd thought for a while it was a Peter Straub novel, but looking through his bibliography didn't jog my memory (his website has a nice little display of all the covers). I don't think this is something I'd want to read again--but DRAT, I want to know what it is? Little help?

Blessed (Cynthia Leitich Smith)

2011-03-02T13:37:00.000-06:00

Since this book's third in a trilogy, whyncha read my reviews of the first two? Meet you below.

Tantalize by Cynthia Leitich Smith

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A funny, sexy read for older Twilight fans, Tantalize is the story of high school senior Quincie Morris (named after Texan Quincey P. Morris, one of Lucy's suitors-turned-hunters in Dracula) and the two things she cares about: her hybrid-werewolf almost-boyfriend, Kieren, and her family's Italian restaurant, about to reopen as Austin's first vampire-themed eatery, Sanguini's. Both are suddenly threatened by the brutal murder of beloved chef Vaggio in what looks like an animal attack. Quincie's in charge of whipping their mysterious new chef into culinary and wardrobe shape before the grand opening. But he keeps pouring her wine and warning her away from Kieren, and the local body count keeps rising.

Smith creates a world at once familiar and bizarre - for instance, werewolves aren't the only "shifters" who can take human form: there are werebears, werecats, werevultures, even a werearmadillo. And vampires aren't just a gimmick, though Quincie tells us "the last reported sighting of one was around the time of the Kennedy assassination." Bloody awful puns, social injustice (werefolk don't have the same legal rights as humans, and they're commonly lynched), mouthwatering cuisine (mozzarella, Gorgonzola, and parmesan ravioli in wild mushroom sauce? yes, please) - and a startling twist - make Tantalize a treat.

Eternal by Cynthia Leitich Smith

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Cynthia Leitich Smith’s Tantalize was my favorite young-adult vampire tale of last summer (yeah, I’m coming out: totally not Team Edward), so I was pretty Beatlemania’d to hear she’d written a sequel (and eventually, a trilogy! Squee!). While Eternal doesn’t share an overarching narrative with Tantalize (nor, sadly, the mouthwatering Italian menu—though we are treated to an unorthodox dip for fresh-baked pumpkin bread), it’s set in the same world, where both vampires and all manner of werefolk exist (though the former keep a low profile, while the latter struggle for civil rights).

Here, Smith also introduces a new supernatural angle, in the form of guardian angel Zachary, who’s watched his charge Miranda grow into a sweet but awkward teenager with dreams of dramatic greatness. She ends up on a larger stage than she’s meant for one night when Zachary’s unauthorized interference keeps her from her destined death: he’s stripped of his wings, while she awakens as not only a vampire, but the adopted daughter/bride of the latest Dracula himself, royal head of the entire undead—sorry, “eternal” is the preferred nomenclature—population. Suddenly, Miranda is clumsily navigating the political machinations of the bloodsucking elite, desperately trying to stay on the unstable monarch’s good side, and oh yeah, drinking human blood. The fallen-but-still-immortal Zachary, on the other hand, is recruited from a slough of despond to accomplish a divine mission that remains unclear: but soon he’s Miranda’s new personal assistant, trying to balance his disgust for her lifestyle—and that of the other human servants, who somehow reconcile their duty to their masters with the presence of cell-bound “bleeding stock” in the basement—with his love for the girl she used to be, and maybe still is.

Told in Zachary’s and Miranda’s alternating voices, Eternal is a great addition to the ever-expanding vamp canon, switching up the usual outside-looking-in viewpoint and creating realms of Whedonesque moral ambiguity within the paranormal framework. Apparently Smith’s forthcoming title Blessed will feature crossovers between the casts of both Tantalize and Eternal. Here’s hoping the mozzarella, parmesan, and gorgonzola ravioli makes an appearance.

AND WE'RE BACK!! Unavoidable spoilers featured below.

Blessed returns to Austin and brings back the food (yes, I'm obsessed with that ravioli. WHAT OF IT), as Quincie deals with her new forced-undead status and struggles to find a way to save others once she realizes her former chef, Brad, dosed dozens of Sanguini's patrons with his own blood in an attempt to raise a vampire army. And not just any vampire army--turns out Bram Stoker's Drac was not only real but a bit of a visionary, creating his own race of uber-powerful vamps, and his own formidable powers are stored between the knives used to kill him the end of the original (non-fiction) novel. She's aided by GA Zachary, who hopes he can do for her what he could not for Miranda--save her soul. It's a fun, fast-moving Macguffin race of a book, returning to much of the humor of the first installment, and there ain't nothin' more than kissing, so you can give it to a 10-year-old when she asks for Twilight. Just pretend you heard her wrong.

Adieu to romance (in book form).

2011-03-01T12:47:00.000-06:00

Eight books later, I've brought Romance February to a close with Sarah MacLean's Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake--which I liked but didn't love. It is perhaps the inevitable weariness of immersion in a single genre? I will say that this had the BEST sex scenes of what I've read. In a omigoodness-I-hope-the-person-next-to-me-on-the-subway-isn't-reading-over-my-shoulder kind of way. Howevs, I found the premise--spinster decides to throw caution to the winds and indulge in the harmless vices the men around her take for granted (fence, drink Scotch, smoke a cheroot), winning the heart of a hopeless libertine along the way--historically implausible. I know, I know, the anachronistically feminist heroine is a tried-and-true romance trope, but I felt like Callie would have suffered some kind of consequences risking her reputation, whether major or minor; I mean, she goes alone to a public house and no one hits on her but the hero?!? And again, the reformed-rake hero is par for the course, but I didn't really like this guy, and I don't think that, even today, most gentlemen are attracted to uppity women. (Except for my boyfriend, of course--but it took ages to find him.) I'm also kinda tired of the lady-virgin dude-slut pairing: I liked that in Proof by Seduction and Delicious the women had some experience. I get that in historicals it's more accurate to have an unmarried man have slept around, but it's still infuriating. Are there romances, I wonder, where the heroine has been around the block a few times, and the hero is the blushing man-maiden? Contemporaries, maybe? Or, ooh, like a medieval one where he's a former monk? That would be hot.

Meanwhile, the bf, who loves reading aloud, has taken up a paranormal thriller romance called Captive Heart, about the world's only water Sybil and a tough no-nonsense cop. It is goofy shit, I have to say--every sentence sounds like a tagline, which lends itself well to Chris's reading style. It's not good, but it's fun to share.

I'm now moving on to some other TBRs, but will leave romance in the mix. Next up is Cynthia Leitich Smith's Blessed, third in the trilogy that started with Tantalize--YA vamp fic with just an edge of sexiness and malice. Then I start Anna Karenina! And finish it in a week! I have total faith in myself.

Delicious (Sherry Thomas)

2011-02-26T10:24:00.000-06:00

Another winner--is romance just awesome, or are my friends awesome recommenders? Little from Column A...

Delicious is a story about hunger, figurative and literal. Verity Durant becomes cook to Liberal MP Stuart Somerset after the unexpected death of his half-brother (and her former lover), Bertie; what he doesn't know is that she was the nameless woman he thinks of as Cinderella from a single ardent night ten years before. She remembers, though, and from the shadows cooks him meals full of passion and memory--his early childhood in the slums of Manchester, his friendship with Bertie that turned sour as they aged. He's got an inconvenient fiancée, she has a son she won't acknowledge and a hidden past. It's a lovely story of rediscovery and forgiveness...and omigoodness, the food! Anyone know where I can get a cheap madeleine mold?

[P.S. Nobody remembers the 1999 Sarah Michelle Gellar-Sean Patrick Flannery vehicle Simply Irresistible, a romantic comedy about a gal whose cooking is literally magical, right? No? Uhm, me neither.]

Silent in the Grave (Deanna Raybourn)

2011-02-24T11:41:00.000-06:00

One thing I'm learning for myself about the romance genre--which any frequent reader will greet with DERR--is that it's huge, encompassing many historical and alternate-historical periods and settings, levels of explicitness from hand-holding to threesomes and moresomes, divergent writing styles. The throughline, as far as I can see? People fall in love. In other words, the romance "genre" is really most of the stories ever told, filmed, or written. (The others? Probably war stories.)

I started thinking about this whilst reading Deanna Raybourn's compelling and well-written Silent in the Grave--recc'd to me on Twitter by the lovely Sarah Rettger--and wondering, "OK, why is this a romance?" It has the trappings I've grown to love about historicals: faithfully detailed fashions, vocab, and manners (down to uncomfortable class and ethnic distinctions); a heroine who doesn't fit into her society, and a plausible explanation for same (Lady Julia Grey was raised by her crazy family and a succession of Radical tutors); a broody, prickly hero for verbal sparring and unbidden sparks. Lady Julia is certainly attracted to Nicholas Brisbane, a private inquiry agent hired by her late husband, and there's a good ol' Crushing Kiss 2/3rds of the way through; as the first in a series, I think the romantic arc will play out over multiple books, which could be very gratifying (and again, as a measure of how much I enjoyed the book, I am TOTES reading the rest...at...some...point...TOO MANY BOOKS). Still, the driving plot of the novel is not the attraction but a mystery, a very good one. The library I got it from emblazoned "MYSTERY" on the spine...so which is it? Mysterious romance or romantic mystery? While I'm tempted to just say, "Ehn, who cares? Good book," in the reality of publishing and bookselling, what "genre" a book is relegated to is vitally important for reviews, audience, sales, even cover art. (Read Lionel Shriver's wonderful essay on the ladylike covers for her brutal novels.) Romance is an almost exclusively female genre, making it easy to dismiss; mystery, on the other hand, is in my selling experience fairly equally split, though as another huge genre, there are pockets that are more stereotypically feminine or masculine (series set in yarn shops--yes, there's more than one--vs. geopolitical thrillers, e.g.). Then again, a depressing number of men aren't that interested in reading anything with a female protagonist, so shelving this particular title in mystery might not widen its gender audience. Then again again, plenty of women turn up their noses at romance, and I'd hate for them to miss books like this.

Great first lines: "To say that I met Nicholas Brisbane over my husband's dead body is not entirely accurate. Edward, it should be noted, was still twitching upon the floor."

Following her husband's death, ostensibly the result of a heart complaint that's prematurely killed men in his family for generations, Lady Julia is appalled by Brisbane's revelation that he'd been hired by a terrified Edward over poison-pen letters, and his suggestion that the death might not have been natural. She throws him out. Then, a year later, while clearing out Edward's study, she finds one of the notes...and the two embark upon an investigation frustrated by the length of time that's passed. It's wonderfully full of danger and dark secrets, as well as Lady Julia's gradual embrace of her widowhood as freeing--an excuse to explore the unconventional and forge her own path--and a satisfying, surprising ending. (For me, the #1 test of a mystery's success.)

Inspired by this reading, I'm thinking of doing a Mystery March to follow my Romance February. Recommendations, of course, accepted!

The Iron Duke (Meljean Brook)

2011-02-22T13:30:00.001-06:00

This is the romance novel China Mieville would write, body horror and all.

It's set in a steampunk alternate England, nine years after the fall of the two-century regime of the Horde--yup, the Mongolians have nanotech in this world, and they were ruthless about using it, infecting and controlling the population of Britain with radio-operated "bugs" that suppress the emotions (except when whipped up into an occasional mating frenzy, the issue of which were taken from their parents and raised in centralized crèches). They also cyborged (not that that's a verb) thousands of laborers: pneumatic hammers for miners' legs, arms modified into sewing machines--reminiscent of Mieville's Remade, though less Dantesque.

After the former pirate Rhys Trahaearn destroyed the Horde's control tower, acquiring the titular dukedom for his trouble, the slowly reconstituting society finds itself divided between "buggers," the nanoagent-carrying former subjects, and "bounders"--those with ancestors wealthy or lucky enough to have escaped to the New World before the occupation, now returned to a country they still consider their own (yes, I love that these terms are repurposed insults!). Relations between the two groups are strained at best--bounders are obviously resented by those who suffered under Horde control, and they in their turn distrust buggers who can be controlled by technology. And bounders and buggers alike often view our heroine, police inspector Mina Wentworth, with disgust or hostility: she is half-Horde, the product of a Frenzy at which her mother was raped. (Her mother, in fact, gouged out her own eyes upon seeing her daughter's telltale features. Though she seems to have come to terms with it over the 30 years of Mina's life, and has awesome new prosthetic eyes.)

Mina meets the Iron Duke (to what extent that moniker is literal I shall leave as an exercise for the reader) investigating a dead body found on his estate--a man who seems to have dropped from the sky. They have the expected Sudden Overwhelming Hot Pants for each other, but their mystery-solving airship-voyaging ass-kicking boot-knocking journey to Happily Ever After is fraught with some really dark and complex issues: not only is Mina the product of rape, she was forced into a Frenzy shortly before the fall of the Horde and equates her own sexual desire with loss of identity and control, leading to a really excruciating scene where Rhys mistakes her struggling during oral sex as arousal, and essentially assaults her by accident. I KNOW, RIGHT?!?! And it's a believable scene, too, not the now-squick-inducing "forced orgasm" trope found in 70s romance novels (ever so pithily summed up by the Smart Bitches as "rapetastic"); his shock and horror at realizing what he's done are backed up by his own history, sold into prostitution at the age of eight.

Again: I KNOW, RIGHT? This is not a fluffy book, and I have to applaud its audacity.

(Also? I am pretty sure there's some kind of 9/11 allegory going on, though I can't really tease out direct equivalents. But it takes place nine years after the fall of a tower, and sometimes the buggers are referenced as being sleeper agents for a foreign power, echoing some anti-Muslim rhetoric...I might be COMPLETELY reading too much into it, though.)

Soulless (Gail Carriger)

2011-02-18T16:16:00.001-06:00

I am ever so pleased to announce that I did, in fact, re-finish Anathem, in a week even! And I liked it again, even without the #mindblown of the first go-round. A nice chat with the Freebird book club, as well--I may have been too shy to stick around and introduce myself, but I can yammer about books anytime.

Still, fun as nerdatron me found it, Anathem is Heavy, and thus Gail Carriger's almost impossibly breezy Soulless, a hybrid steampunk-Victorian-comedy-mystery-romance--with werewolves'n'vampires!--was a most welcome digestif, perfect for reading in McGolrick Park on a teasing taste-of-spring day (a balmy 67 degrees). It features a plucky, acid-tongued, too-smart-for-her-own-good heroine, Miss Alexia Tarabotti, who cannot forgive her father for having the poor taste to be both Italian and dead; in addition to an unfashionable olive complexion and a formidable figure, he bequeathed a most peculiar genetic defect (OK, I can't stop talking like that, because the whole book is written in the elaborate deadpan of Austen crossed with Wodehouse. Also I need to stop comparing folks to Wodehouse until I've read some, jeepers). Miss Tarabotti was born without a soul. This gives her an advantage over London's supernatural population, as any vampire or werewolf she touches loses their powers during contact. And one particular werewolf, Lord Maccon, Alpha of the capital's pack? Well, they do a lot of touching. It's a funny and silly little confection of a book, and I liked it well enough I plan to suss out the rest of the series at the first opportunity.

Two cents.

2011-02-16T12:07:00.001-06:00

So the huge news in the book world today is Borders filing for Chapter 11 and closing 200 stores (including the one half a mile from my house in Wichita, where I bought most of my books in high school. And, uhm, made out with my boyfriend in the parking lot). Might as well add my tiny voice to the din of blogging. Here's what I said to a friend on Facebook who asked "Why is it bad that a mega-chain bookseller is closing?":

Well, it's bad news for the thousands losing their jobs, certainly, and for the publishers large and small who'll never see the millions of $$ Borders owes them. And it's bad news for communities whose only access to bookstores is a Borders.... It's bad news for all bricks & mortar bookstores because pundits will use it as an example of Why the Bookstore is Antiquated, and because it will drive even more traffic to Amazon, which will use the money to further its monopoly-seeking corporate agenda. Finally, it's bad news for me personally because it's going to flood the already nonexistent bookseller job market here with competition, some with more experience than me, and I don't have a resume good for anything else.

The Comedians (Graham Greene)

2011-02-11T10:13:00.002-06:00

Speaking of twentieth-century British Catholic novelists (because I was. Waugh, remember?): finished Graham Greene's 1965 Haiti-under-Papa-Doc novel, The Comedians, another that's hung out on my TBR list for ages--two years, in fact, as I added it after reading this wonderful collection of Greene's letters. And considering Baby Doc's recent return to Haiti, this is the closest I come to topical.

It's the story of three unremarkably-named men who meet on a boat to Port-au-Prince: Smith, an American presidential candidate, who ran against Truman on a vegetarian platform, and proudly polled 10,000 votes; the clearly pseudonymed Jones, a trickster of mysterious origins (a trope no one does better than Greene); and Brown, our narrator, another Greene archetype, this one the rootless, jaded, aging British expatriate who becomes caught up in the fruitless idealism of others. 1960s Haiti, the worse for its people, exemplifies another fascination of his, the society in decay. Like 1930s Mexico in The Power and the Glory, postwar Vienna in The Third Man, or colonial Vietnam in The Quiet American, it's a minefield of shifting alliances and sudden violence.

Most interesting, I think, are the Americans. Smith and Mrs. Smith ignore the warnings of experience and book a room at Brown's hotel, once glitzy with glamor and famous for its rum punch, now emptied out by fear. They're stubbornly trusting and optimistic, staunchly anti-racist, willing to jump through mental hoops to explain away or justify the corruption and terror of Duvalier's government and secret police (the Tontons Macoute). Yet they are thoroughly good people, without the fatalist core of so many Greene characters, and the only mutually supportive and happily married couple I can recall in Greene's work, sympathetically portrayed despite the charmingly archaic use of "vegetarian" to mean "flaky."

The Comedians is more of a piece than it is unique, in the prolific scheme of Greene's work (after all, he wrote steadily for 60 years)--but by this I mean that it's part of a wide, deeply moral--and very readable--vision of the twentieth century that can't be missed.

An Evening of Long Goodbyes (Paul Murray)

2011-02-09T11:33:00.002-06:00

Paul Murray's Skippy Dies was my arbitrarily chosen favorite novel of '10 (or maybe it was Perdido Street Station? GAH do not make me make this decision!), and I am so very, very pleased to report that his first novel is every bit as good. Reviewers (including me) have thrown around comparisons to Wodehouse, but--and I say this while shamefacedly hanging my head for never having read Wodehouse, just totally watched all the Fry & Laurie Jeeves & Woosters--I think Evening also partakes greedily of the spirit of Evelyn Waugh, at his vicious, darkest, funniest best.

The narrator, Charles Hythloday, is a willfully retrograde country gent, living the Brideshead dream of leisure and far too much wine, watching Gene Tierney movies and ignoring the world outside, i.e. fin de 20e siecle, awash in new money and Eastern European refugees. His father (a cosmetic chemist) is dead; his mother in rehab; and his actress sister, Bel, has brought home an absolutely appalling gentleman friend (described by Charles as"bulky and distended, grotesquely so, like one of those self-assembly IKEA wardrobes I'd seen advertised on TV"). Also, his Bosnian-or-something housekeeper is acting a bit batty, and furniture seems to be disappearing. And those dull-looking envelopes Charles has been stashing in the string drawer for Bel to look at at her leisure are, in fact, increasingly dire mortgage notices. Without a Jeeves, what's a Wooster to do?

Charles's voice is so constantly quotable, so hilarious, so affected, so willfully oblivious to reality--of his family, of Ireland, of, indeed, modern society as a whole--just the perfect viewport on the often gritty and terrible truths of the world. This is what reminds me so much of Waugh: the mix of utter frivolity with societal chaos and decay, tragedy and farce cheek to jowl.

There is also, I have to say, some of the BEST worst dialogue I've ever read, from an oh-so-socially-conscious play performed in the erstwhile Hythloday ballroom: "Don't you see? My addiction was a cry for help. Heroin was replacing the love that you, and at a larger level society, weren't giving me." Priceless!