Mini Reviews and Upcoming Books: The Book List

My reading from March to April slowed considerably; I had been positively gobbling up books up until early March, when I found myself scoffing at Eleanor Herman’s Sex with Kings (and later at her next work, Sex with the Queen). I then read my reading club selection during my raging cold (which I mistook for allergies), then petered out. It wasn’t until IP and I were setting up to travel for our honeymoon that I became in finding something readable for the flights to our destination.

And then thing is, even though I’ve read three novels that I could discuss in great detail, I am feeling lazy about producing full-fledged book list entries for them. So, as I am wont to do when my book list snark or praise isn’t gassed up to full, a quick summary:

The World in Half by Cristina Henriquez: A nice little novel that walks the tense line between being Latina and American. I felt myself relating more to Miraflores, whose quiet, understated ways mirrored my own life, than the bombastic characters of novelists such as Julia Alvarez and Cristina Garcia. Like Miraflores, I desperately want to maintain a firm connection to my Latino origins, hoping that people recognize that this is not a wholesale rejection of my American upbringing. Miraflores is seeking out the father she always thought did not want her or her American mother; while reconciling herself to the new truth that he desperately wanted to be a parent (and the lie her mother—who is in the beginning stages of Alzhiemer’s—told her), Miraflores explores the duality, limitations, and expectations of her life, and the choices her parents made (or those that we made for them). The novel, which takes place mostly in Panama, has some rough spots, but the characters, history, and setting make up for the moments when the prose trips lightly. I have Henriquez’s short stories on my Amazon wishlist.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy: Another Pulitzer prize winner that makes me wonder who in the hell is in charge of selecting the Pulitzer Prize winner. Not that it was terrible; it wasn’t. It’s just that almost all Pulitzer Prize winners I read tend to leave me disappointed with a feeling of “That’s it!?” Remember me and my zombie obsession? That stems less from fear of zombies and more from a fascination with the idea of an apocalypse. What happens when society degenerates thanks to natural or man-made causes? Sparsely written with characters who are never named, The Road does a great job of presenting a bleak future in which every single day is a basic struggle for survival, but the lack of personalization distanced me from the characters and made the apocalypse less real. Even the boy, whose compassion and humanity is an emblem of hope for the post-apocalyptic world, didn’t draw me in as much as I’d hoped. I knew the ending, as anyone with any kind of analytical skills does, but knowing endings hasn’t ever stopped me from fully enjoying a novel. As it was, though, I could only half-enjoy it. I get that, in a post-apocalyptic world, things like names and histories are more or less meaningless, but as a woman who bases her identity on the components of her name (and can add something else, but now fears it may be too easy to figure out the new name if I give a direct translation), I missed knowing who they were beyond the instinct to survive. It’s not that I needed to know the father was John Smith and the son with Bob Smith; what I wanted was a more direct line to them as people. Perhaps therein lies the success of the story—the erasure of all markers and identifiers of personhood—but while I got it, I didn’t fully like it.

The Hidden by Tobias Hill: All I can say about this is “What? Where? When? How?” Ben Mercer so needs to join Facebook instead of running away to Greece.

I must say, though, that traveling did jump-start my reading: I got through The Road, The Hidden, and halfway through The Best American Short Stories 2009 before coming home. In that time period from early March to late April, I had also begun Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages by Ammon Shea. The short stories, so far, are engaging, but I still think that Stephen King rocked the short story selection in 2007. Dear Heidi Pitlor: have him guest edit again very soon, please! As for Reading the OED, I was expecting something a bit more erudite and interesting than A.J. Jacobs’ The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World, but so far I’m remembering Jacobs as much more readable. Shea has some good insights, observations, and chuckles here and there, but for the most part the book is stiff. It’s going so slowly that it prompted me to come up with a new category for the 2010 Book Awards: The Don Quixote of XXXX. The award will go to the book that I either a) can’t finish or 2) get through with only the most valiant of efforts. I’m not saying Shea will win, but when you prompt an award category like that, you’re front-runner. But the year, she is not even halfway through just yet!

After that, an Amazon book order is winging its way toward me—this shipment includes my May reading for the book club I’m a part of, and I was very happy with the selection considering I dodged the Jodi Picoult bullet. She had been a suggestion for next month, and thinking of her as a lowest common denominator kind of writer (appeals to nothing but emotions without compelling characters, interesting plots, intelligent denouements, appealing tones, or—and here is her biggest crime—competent writing; she’s just out to get a sob and buck), I was glad to see she was nixed. I already have Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s Mothers and Others on hand. I’ve been wanting to read Hrdy’s book for a while now thanks to 1) an article in The New York Times that IP sent me over a year ago and b) I will honesty admit that I vacillate terribly between wanting a child and not wanting one (with IP on the same boat as I am), and I want to read about them and see them before making a decision, so much so that I might make IP take me to see Babies in May because the babies in the trailer are so. fucking. cute. This would, by the way, break our eight-year streak of not seeing a movie in a theater together. Hmm. We shall see.

Onto the book list:

Finished:

1) The Broken Teaglass by Emily Arsenault
2) The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield
3) The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peal Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
4) Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron by Jasper Fforde
5) Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Antonia Fraser
6) Unaccustomed Earth: Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri
7) Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher
8) Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin
9) Shakespeare’s Wife by Germaine Greer
10) The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future by Robert Darnton
11) Under the Dome by Stephen King
12) Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge by Eleanor Herman
13) Sex with the Queen: 900 Years of Vile Kings, Virile Lovers, and Passionate Politics by Eleanor Herman
14) The World in Half by Cristina Henriquez
15) The Road by Cormac McCarthy
16) The Hidden by Tobias Hill

Re-read:

Empty

Currently Reading:

1) The Best American Short Stories 2009: Edited by Alice Sebold & Heidi Pitlor (Series Editor)
2) Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages by Ammon Shea

Waiting To Be Read (Already Purchased, Got as Gifts, Borrowed from My Husband or Otherwise Accessible without the Use of Funds, But Not an Assurance That I Will Read These Before I Buy More Books):

1) The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (Translated by Reg Keeland)
2) The Help by Kathryn Stockett
3) The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan
4) Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy