Sonnet 87 » The Book List 2010

Finally, a Record Broken: The Book List

WordNerd — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 12:15:01 +0000

Holy crap, I’ve read a lot this year in comparison to other years. Holy crap, I still have a ton on my 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) list.

So I’ve read 38 books this year; with that, I have busted the book list’s previous 2008 record. That’s great, and I don’t plan on slowing down for the year. (Yeah, some people are much faster at this, but this has been fun, so I’m enjoying it.) This is what happens when you don’t have a TV, have a long public transportation commute, have a husband who enjoys sitting next to you in mutual reading silence: you read a shitload of books. Good. Times. And I mean that in all sincerity.

Two of those books have been unpublished; I can’t go into detail, but one book is very promising and I’m hoping this author gets a shot at publication. The other book, well . . . a bit of work is needed, and I’m working on my critique. Interesting premise, execution needs some polishing. I read these books as a reader, not an editor or writer. Beta reading is hugely important and I enjoy doing it a lot. Good. Times. And I mean that in all sincerity.

(On that note, next to the unpublished novels, you’ll see a published nonfiction book that I recently read. I wish to high hell I could say the title and author, but that might drive said author here, and while I did enjoy the book, the last thing I want to do is be identified. Or have more blog traffic come my way from familiar sources. So, suffice it to say: I enjoyed the book and the writing. The end.)

Still, though, I recently had a ton of books wing their way to me from Amazon. Cue excitement from me, woo! I’m quite sure that, these days, I spend more on books than on clothes or electronics. That inspires a weird pride in me. Forgive my geekiness.

When the power went out a few weeks ago (again), I was stranded at home—the intersection leading to the Metro (a mile away) was a lake and the traffic light situation didn’t inspire much confidence (too many people around here don’t treat downed traffic lights as full stops). So, I stayed home, promising to think about work once in a while. When IP and I couldn’t stand the heat in our apartment anymore, we fled to Barnes & Noble in Rockville, where we browsed books for hours. We both ended up writing down several books that were added to our Amazon wish lists—rest assured that they’ll be on the book list in the future.

Ah, books. I love you!

So because I can’t do proper critiques, here’s an update on what’s recommended from the book list’s recent entries:

Total Immersion by Allegra Goodman: Definite recommend, as Goodman’s power to create fascinating characters making their way through all stages of life is amazing. The way that the short stories weave in and out of each other is absolutely brilliant without affecting the quality of the particular short story you’re reading. She wrote this when she was 21. Holy hell, to be able to write like that at 21!

The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte: This one had me scratching my head a bit. I liked it because there were some interesting bits about the rare book trade, and I’m always up for a bit of speculation as to the nature of the devil and the association that the pursuit of knowledge is the core of evil, but the book didn’t fascinate me and the plot strands and their resolutions were baffling. Meh. Atmospheric, but I’ll stick to Carlos Ruiz Zafon for my rare book/Spanish writer fix.

Crow Lake by Mary Lawson: A great read. It started out slow, and I found the narrator to be a bit grating with her initial, not-veiled hints as to what would happen, but the book was a quiet triumph. A powerful portrayal of families in crisis and the resentments we hold onto in spite of the love we have for those close to us.

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
17) The Best American Short Stories 2009: Edited by Alice Sebold & Heidi Pitlor (Series Editor)
18) The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (Translated by Reg Keeland)
19) The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan
20) The Grift by Debra Ginsberg
21) The Help by Kathryn Stockett
22) Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson
23) About My Sisters by Debra Ginsberg
24) Blind Submission by Debra Ginsberg
25) The Prince of Mist by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (Translated by Lucia Graves)
26) Do Not Deny Me: Stories by Jean Thompson
27) Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier
28) Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman
29) Burning Bright: Stories by Ron Rash
30) Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
31) One Day by David Nicholls
32) Published True Crime Book
33) Unpublished Novel—Beta Read
34) Unpublished Novel—Beta Read
35) Total Immersion by Allegra Goodman
36) The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte, Translated by Sonia Soto
37) Crow Lake by Mary Lawson

Re-read:

1) World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks

Currently Reading:

1) Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages by Ammon Shea
2) The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

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) Waiting: The True Confessions of a Waitress by Debra Ginsberg
4) The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Katherine Howe
6) The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff

The Rapture of Being Forever Incomplete*: The Book List

WordNerd — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 17:02:37 +0000

I am a hard-hearted bitch. Why? Because I found David Nicholls’ One Day totally unmoving and rather trite. Sorry, romantics of the world.

One Day is the story of Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew, university students who link up the day after their graduation (July 15, 1988), and the story follows them through all subsequent July 15s up until 2007. A fanciful plot, all the vignettes from July 15 are definitely meant to take place on a movie set.

I picked it up because I had read that it was already speeding towards movie form, and that it was written as if that had been the intention all along: as a not-so aspiring writer at the moment (I’d rather have another job in hand instead), I wanted to see how a book so obviously meant for the big screen plays out. The answer is: take one part Forrest Gump (but set in the 80s, 90s and aughts), add in a dash of When Harry Met Sally, and then sprinkle with a bit of City of Angels and you’ve got the recipe for a book that will no doubt touch some people and a movie that will probably make millions at the box office. And that’s cool—if you can play the market that way, good on you.

I didn’t absolutely despise it, but the writing left me bored (I was seriously skimming toward the end), the story was pretty predictable and I saw the ending coming about two-thirds into the first chapter. I won’t spoil because I think this book will be a touchstone for many, but: I was only wrong about the means of the last third’s big drama. I was mildly amused by the ostentatiousness of the 90s, more than a little bit horrified at the parenting and relationship ineptitude of the 00s, and wasn’t moved much by the tail end of the 80s. Emma and Dexter left me cold, because neither was particularly ingratiating, and there was nothing about their friendship or courtship or buddy status (whatever you want to call it) that made me relate to them. I just kept on thinking, constantly: why doesn’t she move on, he’s a loser! And why does he like this harpy so much? Uh-oh, here comes the reversal of fortune, when he’s doing great and she’s not, then he isn’t and she is! Damn, a baby and engagement are getting in the way, who saw that coming!? I just felt like I was following a path with a view that was uninspiring, unsurprising and void of any heart and soul. It was like “hiking” through Curtis Park in Saline—seen it a million times before, it was novel the first time, but now it’s boring and mildly disturbing being so close to the cemetery, and anyway, it’s goddamn Saline, something I’ll never understand or want to understand, so let’s go home or to another, better park, shall we?

And that’s probably the thing: I don’t understand hanging around for decades, hoping upon hope that someone will notice you, and hoping that the both of you will come to the realization that you belong together, damn it, and that ain’t nothing gonna slow you down. It’s a puzzler for me because I can’t imagine carrying feelings for that long. They fizzle out, they die when you meet someone new, time and distance and attitudes make it all fade away slowly but surely. Nostalgia is one thing, but the inability to move on is another. And that’s how Emma and Dexter struck me: so fixated on that past and so utterly indefinable in terms other than each other, they remained, for me, the dark silhouettes you see on the cover. Without any discernible identities, I couldn’t connect; without the connection, I couldn’t care. And that’s all I feel about this novel, if that even qualifies as a feeling: I just don’t care.

Maybe you will, though.

Onto the book list.

Finished:

Re-read:

Empty

Currently Reading:

1) Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages by Ammon Shea

1) World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks
2) Waiting: The True Confessions of a Waitress by Debra Ginsberg
3) Total Immersion by Allegra Goodman

*Apologies to Alanis Morissette for cribbing from her song, Incomplete.

Sum: Eight Quick Reviews of Nine Books: The Book List

WordNerd — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 12:45:19 +0000

Ah, the promised book list has arrived.

It will be brief, though. I know that I can’t detail entirely all the books that I’ve read since my last review so, like Inigo Montoya, I will summarize:

Three Cups of Tea: Good story, good cause, aggravating main player. Why does Greg Mortenson bug me so much? I feel as if his co-writer didn’t do the story service, too.
Blind Submission and About My Sisters: Both by Debra Ginsberg, her first novel and one of her memoirs, respectively. Blind Submission wasn’t the hardest book to figure out, but it was still a fun read about literary agents. About My Sisters was touching and very impressive; at first I thought I was in for something like How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, California style, but this was better in terms of presenting the sisters as human as opposed to outrageous characters. Recommend for both.
The Prince of Mist: Carlo Ruiz Zafón’s first novel, which was a young adult read. You can see his atmospheric, haunting style emerging, but there was a major plot hole that drove me absolutely nuts. Recommend to see how the good start out, but beware: you might tear your hair out at the end.
Do Not Deny Me: a compilation of short stories by Jean Thompson. I don’t know what drew me toward this collection, but I have to say I was not impressed. I read it so long ago that I can’t even tell you why. I like stories about ordinary, everyday people who live in extraordinary ways just by being themselves, but this one left me cold.
Remarkable Creatures: Tracy Chevalier’s take on Mary Anning, the 19th century paleontologist who found the first ichthyosaur skeleton to be correctly identified and the first two plesiosaur skeletons, among other finds, and Elizabeth Philpot, her friend and collaborator. Great story, but like with Chevalier’s Girl with the Pearl Earring, the writing is slow. Would recommend.
Sum: a collection of forty short vignettes that speculate on what happens in the afterlife. IP hated this, but I found it oddly engaging and charming. Why? Not enough room to answer completely, but briefly: the New York Times review of this book is titled “Eternal Whimsy.” And that’s the best way to describe the book: it’s whimsical in that the afterlives are so focused on the absurdities of this life. The dead of Sum seem to take everything with them, which is unfortunate and ultimately pretty pessimistic. But it’s pessimistic in a nudge, nudge, wink, wink kind of way. In a way that makes this atheist—who doesn’t believe you do anything but blink out like a light when you die—chuckle. Ah, vain humanity. Of course you think everything is about you. Even this paragraph, right?
Burning Bright: another collection of short stories, this time by Ron Rash. Recommend? Hell yes! Rash is a talented writer who does take those ordinary people mentioned above and make them extraordinary. Read this!
Mothers and Others: Empathy, cooperative breeding, the ability to read a person through body language and facial expressions: all this and more constitutes Dr. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s Mothers and Others. A complex book that synthesizes a variety of disciplines to argue its thesis—that from lengthy childhoods springs the need to develop the trust required to allow others to care for a child; and from that springs the roots of humanity’s ability to understand one another. The book was a wonderful read, but it made me even more fretful about the idea of having children. We have no one around us to be allomothers! No one to engage the child constantly, with love being the reward instead of babysitter hourly rates! How could we possibly do it all on our own? Even one would be nigh impossible! Where do I get my tubes tied? IP snipped? Help! Ahem, kidding. Kind of.

That’s all, folks. I have two works that I’ll be reading in the next few weeks that won’t be placed on the book list, so it may be a while before you see another one of these. Keep reading!

Onto the book list.

Finished:

Re-read:

Empty

Currently Reading:

1) Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages by Ammon Shea

1) World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks
2) Waiting: The True Confessions of a Waitress by Debra Ginsberg
3) Total Immersion by Allegra Goodman
4) One Day by David Nicholls

I’ve Been Quiet, No?

WordNerd — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 12:45:46 +0000

Hello, my lovelies!

Apologies for the lack of posts. The past week has seen me kick into sudden high gear for a job search—with some help from IP, I revamped my resume and my cover letter, then began hunting like mad for jobs in the D.C. area. Because of recent developments, we will not be leaving the area anytime soon, and I figure I need to do what I can to do something worthwhile if we’re going to hang out for a bit. Since Thursday, when all the revamping was said and done, I’ve applied to nine jobs. That’s not a ton, obviously, but given that I hadn’t even applied to nine jobs all year, I’m getting myself somewhere. I also ordered a navy blue suit from J. Crew so that I would have something in case I get to go on interviews (and also because I no longer have any nice suits). It felt good to do something, anything, and I haven’t let up since Thursday. I’ve sent in at least one application each workday since, and on Monday I shot four off into the ether. I know it’ll take time for any responses to come through given the economy, but I just have to try. Ever since my work trip, I’ve come to realize that I do want to work in a more active advocacy/outreach role, and I want to do it for a company that values this type of work. My current company does not (one reference I requested confirmed as much, but I’ve seen it with my own eyes).

The other thing is that IP and I are pretty stable financially, and me taking a lower paying job that really motivates me wouldn’t hit us hard. Hell, given the new Metro rates, a shorter commute and a job with Metro benefits would be a nice perk for me. My commute is pretty expensive these days. And if I got to do stuff that actually helped people instead of making sure that some federal employees didn’t have to push the print button on their computers? All the better.

(Sorry, feds. I know some of you work hard. But there are others who have a pension and come to work drunk. Just sayin’.)

IP and I are about a month away from our first anniversary. It’s hard to believe that it’s been a year since our wedding, but . . . well, time flies when you’re having fun. We’ve been debating as to how to celebrate, and a long weekend away is a start. We’re trying to find something in the relatively immediate area—venturing into the wilds of Maryland, Virginia or Pennsylvania is acceptable, but we’re not finding much. Are we just looking in the wrong places? We’d like to find a place where we can a) hike a bit, 2) have lots of sex, and III) swim outside. Any suggestions from the silent readership that may or may not read this blog? Any input would be appreciated because we’re kind of running short on time.

I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading lately and I am so behind on updating the book list—I’m not even sure I could put together a comprehensible post of short reviews. We shall see. But the good thing is that I’ve only read one book lately that I was meh on, and even then it wasn’t completely terrible. When I post the list, I should be at 30 or 31 books for the year; not too shabby considering I ended up with 26 last year. I could use the wedding excuse my poor reading last year, but let’s face it: I was lazy. Hopefully I’ll have a book list entry up for next Monday—I should take some time over the weekend to work on it for the benefit of, well, the book list. I hate seeing it so outdated!

The updates at Casa WordNerdia-IPia so far for July. While it’s bad for the blog, let’s hope there’s more for me to apply to out there, and that it leads to a new job where I’m not just cobbling together PDFs like an idiot and hitting print.

A Not So Distant Past: The Book List

WordNerd — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 13:15:36 +0000

My book club didn’t read The Help only because, by the time we banded together, about a third of us had already read it. Intrigued since this group of ladies have already chosen quite a few good reads in the past months, I picked up The Help and began to read. We wouldn’t be discussing it at our book club, but I knew I could discuss it on the book list.

Enjoying The Help felt a bit like guilty pleasure; here is a white woman writing black women in a thick dialect that rightfully garners some eyebrow raising and criticism; here is an altruistic white character laboring to expose the truths of black maids working in Jackson, Mississippi, doing so on a lark and not realizing the implications that writing these stories may have until late in the book; here are two wise others, who help educate the lost white person, with their folksy, foreign wisdom; yet it somehow works, if only while you’re reading, before the problems of the book come to nag you when you close the cover. I can’t help it: I like the writing, I loved the honesty of Minny and Aibilene (who are the first two maids interviewed by the white character, and also narrate the book), but I eye the book with unease. The way the book plays out is problematic and perhaps a little bit too simplistic.

While reading, the driving force for me was, as always, “What’s going to happen?”, but not in the typical way one experiences when reading. I just couldn’t see how this wouldn’t end badly for Minny and Aibilene, and I knew in the back of my head that the white protagonist, Miss Skeeter, wouldn’t come to harm because she was the author rendered in fiction; no, Kathryn Stockett wasn’t in her early 20s in the early 1960s, but reading her afterword was just confirmation of my suspicions that she is Miss Skeeter, escaped from Jackson to New York (and you know how much I hate the intentional fallacy, but this book absolutely sings it when the focus is on Skeeter). And that’s also why I wonder if Stockett was hesitant to render Skeeter more realistic, knowing that this was a part of her life on the page—reluctant to expose her own family and upbringing to what would probably be rightfully deserved criticism. Because that “What’s going to happen?” hasn’t been consistently good for the black people of Mississippi even though it’s now the 21st century. Things don’t come up all roses for Minny and Aibilene, but both their stories end on a somewhat hopeful note. I do have to ask myself, how realistic is that, even with the “insurance” they gave themselves?

This isn’t to say the book isn’t worthwhile in its own way—I think it is useful as an examination of literary tropes, conventions and the problems with a white person writing minorities; I also don’t doubt that people with the strong racist attitudes portrayed here still exist all over the country, not just in the South, and to make people aware of them and make them think about their own perceptions of whom they may term an “other” is a good thing. The outcomes for all three protagonists might ring a little too perfect and not so real world, but the novel isn’t setting out to be a heartbreaking, realistic rendition of the consequences of the women’s actions; it’s a surface examination of the culture that thrived in Jackson and across the South in the 1960s, and that probably still survives today. It calls attention to how things still need to change, and that change is an active but slow-moving agent that requires many people to propel it forward. (And that applies not only to racism in this country in general, but in literature, too.) This wasn’t that long ago, and there is much that is still wrong with this country when it comes to race relations. I have two words: Tea Party.

Also, it’s good to give reads like this a chance because people should ask questions about authorship, experience and racism. Stockett’s tricky territory is fair game for examination even if people enjoyed the novel. Stockett is a good writer, definitely, but her novel does have flaws, and should Stockett tackle race again, I hope the criticism she received for The Help is taken to heart.

I’d say give it a read. Problematic? Yes. But a book that makes you think about these deeper issues is a good catalyst to encounter.

Onto the book list.

Finished:

Re-read:

Empty

Currently Reading:

1) Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
2) Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson
3) Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages by Ammon Shea

1) About My Sisters by Debra Ginsberg
2) Blind Submission by Debra Ginsberg
3) The Prince of Mist by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (Translated by Lucia Graves)
4) Do Not Deny Me: Stories by Jean Thompson

I See Good Reads in My Future: The Book List

WordNerd — Mon, 17 May 2010 13:15:27 +0000

If you were to tell me that the reading year was suddenly over and say that I had to choose all of my book award winners this instant, first up for best book and best fiction of the year would be an easy choice: Debra Ginsberg’s The Grift.

Good god, I loved this novel.

The Grift was, in one word, charismatic. From the characters to the plot to the setting, the book sang out clearly with a strong voice and style. Marina Marks is a psychic who uses analysis and observation to drive her business; despite an early encounter with a psychic who told her that she had the gift, Marina is a skeptic and cynic whose only goal in life is to have enough money in the bank to retire from the fortune-telling business by the age of 37 and begin anew—and as the novel begins to gather steam, we learn that she has two years to do so.

It’s her 35th birthday, combined with a move from Florida to San Diego that was facilitated by the trust of an elderly woman who sought out bad news, that sets the novel’s workings in motion. Marina’s world introduces us to a slew of characters—mostly her clients—who obsess over the news and remedies that she can provide them (for a generous fee—her clients are anything but hard-up). There’s Cooper, a man in love with a closeted psychiatrist; Madeline, the trophy wife of an engagement ring magnate, struggling to give her husband an heir; Eddie, a lothario who falls for Marina’s mystique; and Gideon, a man who enters Marina’s life on her birthday and imprints himself on her permanently. I realize, as I type out the character descriptions, that you may think to yourself that this sounds like a really bad romance novel, but you’d be wrong. Ginsberg’s writing is sharp, smart, and intricate—the way these characters connect and weave together is not unexpected, but watching it unfold is a fun, entertaining ride with a lot of touching moments and insights into human behavior that left this reader invested in all of them.

Marina’s involvement with these people leads to the main plot point: she develops actual psychic powers at a bad time: thanks to one vengeful person and her own actions in Florida, she’s suddenly thrown not only into a murder investigation, but a life-changing event that leaves her uncertain, scared, and unable to control all of the information that comes to her in unrelenting wave after unrelenting wave (it’s like the first day IP and I hit the beach while in Cancun—I’ve never been battered so hard by the ocean, ouch). How she deals with the information and her struggles to exonerate herself bring the novel to its climax, which is a fantastic convergence of all the characters’ dramas.

And because I think this is a worthwhile book and I will not spoil, I will just say this: the last two pages made me tear up a bit. Sniff. So touching and heartbreaking and yet so hopeful for what’s to come.

I’ve ordered Ginsberg’s first novel, Blind Submission, and one of her memoirs, About My Sisters. Unless something drastically changes, you will probably see her win Best Discovery for 2010.

Onto the book list:

Finished:

Re-read:

Empty

Currently Reading:

1) Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
2) Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages by Ammon Shea

1) The Help by Kathryn Stockett
2) Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson
3) About My Sisters by Debra Ginsberg
4) Blind Submission by Debra Ginsberg
5) The Prince of Mist by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (Translated by Lucia Graves)
6) Do Not Deny Me: Stories by Jean Thompson

It Takes a Village . . . To Die So a Person Can Swim: The Book List

WordNerd — Tue, 11 May 2010 13:15:15 +0000

Zombies. Everyone around here knows how I feel about zombies!

So much so that I bought Carrie Ryan’s The Forest of Hands and Teeth, a young adult novel about—what else?—zombies. I had heard, from various reliable sources (read: not the reviews on Amazon) that the novel was well-written and entertaining. I started reading Saturday and finished on Sunday morn. My overall impression?

I love zombies. I can suspend my disbelief for them. But I can’t quite suspend my disbelief that much.

And remember, people: if it’s a book list at Sonnet 87, there’re spoilers.

The book is written for a younger audience, but to me that doesn’t excuse the a) flimsy plot, 2) the repetitive writing, and III) the characters who fail to grow or evolve (and sometimes even devolve). The single mindedness of the main character, Mary, is astonishing—I know she’s young, but does she have to be such a life-endangering ninny? I understand wanting to see the world beyond what you know, and I definitely see how pondering what’s beyond your boundaries can drive a young person to do foolhardy things, but when you have ravenous hoards of flesh-eating reanimated dead around you? Maybe you should struggle to be a little more rational instead of letting your spirit run free.

What drove me absolutely nuts was the timeline for the events in this book. It’s unclear at first, but this takes place generations after what the characters call “The Return.” In fact, the word “centuries” is used, and I’m trusting that the main character, Mary, knows what a century is even though she’s apparently unfamiliar with Roman numerals. Late in the book, Mary finds a snapshot of the New York skyline, so we’re definitely past the 21st century. Mary’s village is surrounded by a chain-link fence that’s apparently enough to keep out zombies (I’m guessing that the sheer number of zombies can’t knock down the fence because their numbers are diminished? Right? But then Mary says that zombies don’t decay!); “They” (us, maybe?) left enough material to keep the chain-link fence reinforced, so that’s been lasting for centuries? Mary mentions that the fence is rusting in places, which seems to me that of course there are weak links that will eventually be breached—why does everyone in the village act like the zombies pawing at the fence aren’t that big of a deal? And if it’s been centuries yet fresh zombies keep coming (they show signs of wear from the elements, but they don’t decay, which makes no sense to me), doesn’t it stand to reason that there must be more people out there falling victim to the zombies? Yet most of the village thinks that it’d be impossible for there to be more people. Only Mary believes! And she wants to see the ocean.

Has Mary (and by Mary I mean the author) not read World War Z or The Zombie Survival Guide? The ocean is a freakin’ death trap, full of zombies that wander in and don’t come out for years (and bite you during your moonlight swim).

Mary laments throughout the book that her village has been a poor keeper of history, but this seems like a cop-out on the author’s part—it’s like Ryan couldn’t come up with a coherent history (hell, the zombies are barely coherent as mentioned above) and instead let poor knowledge transmission be the culprit. The controlling religious order, the Sisterhood, closely guards history and knowledge beyond the village’s fences, but Sister Tabitha (Mary’s primary antagonist in the first half of the book) strikes me less religiously fervent and more practical—I’m not saying holding back on historical knowledge is a good thing, but tucking away fanciful notions of the ocean might be a good idea in view of a new threat (which comes in the form of an Outsider, Gabrielle, that the Sisterhood turns into a zombie in order to study her for unknown reasons). It just doesn’t make sense to hide away information and technologies that would allow people to survive such a flimsy barrier between life and death. Complacency in the face of a constant siege is idiotic—a breach could always happen, and preparing people for the worst is the only way to survive. That everyone in this book is such a little follower and can’t come up with a basic plan for survival is infuriating. They’re being relentlessly attacked by zombies all their lives—why does that seem to be only background noise to Mary?

And the Gabrielle that I mentioned above—she represents hope outside the fence of Mary’s village, but why Mary feels such a connection to her is baffling. But it’s there, since Mary imagines Gabrielle was a girl who dared to leave her village (it was actually overrun) and is her inspiration to push forth. (Minor sequel spoiler: Mary’s daughter in the sequel is named Gabry—I think this connection is a bit creepy and wonky, naming your daughter after the person who brings about the downfall of your village.)

And it’s apparently too much to have everyone be up to snuff on weapons training—the kids of the village get trained in archery, but beyond that Mary seems pretty useless in her fighting style unless the best defense is wildly swinging an ax or a scythe. Mary survives only through others’ sacrifices, not through her own ingenuity or a clever stratagem. She just wants to see the ooooooceeeeannnn!

Sorry. Can’t sympathize with a whiny little brat when her friends are dying while following her to her dreams. Is this supposed to be a take on how communities don’t prepare children for the challenges of the real world? If so, it fails because this is about basic survival, not testing scores. When everything else crumbles, one’s slightly more important than the other, but the book fails to tell me why the idea of survival isn’t approached with more seriousness by everyone in the novel.

The book ultimately prizes the individual over the community, but it takes the death of the community for the individual to triumph. I don’t know about you, but that seems like a tall order to see one person succeed.

If you want to read a great young adult book about the triumph of the human spirit over evil, and that deals with death in a much more sophisticated manner, and still recognizes the persevering will of the individual but acknowledges that this can’t happen without individual sacrifice and the bonds of a community, read The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. And zombies? World War Z. Still haven’t found something to top that.

Onto the book list:

Finished:

Re-read:

Empty

Currently Reading:

1) The Grift by Debra Ginsberg
2) Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages by Ammon Shea

1) The Help by Kathryn Stockett
2) Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy

Mini Reviews and Upcoming Books: The Book List

WordNerd — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 13:15:36 +0000

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:

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

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

Ay, Estéfano Rey: The Book List

WordNerd — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 17:12:15 +0000

I will admit: in order to make my slog through Stephen King’s Under the Dome, I headed over to Wikipedia for a quick synopsis. I was, after all, just confirming what I already knew to be true about the book’s ending. The book was taking a long time in getting there, so I just hurried up the process for no other reason than to prove I was right. Since I was not enjoying the book, there wasn’t going to be an “Aha!” moment when everything that I thought would happen did. So Wikipedia it was. And yes. I was right.

Stephen King’s writing has been on and off for years now (on: Lisey’s Story, Duma Key for the most part, From a Buick 8; off: Cell, Just After Sunset taken as a whole, and now Under the Dome). I still read his works because a) I’m always hoping for an on and II) I like his characters. For the most part, King is able to create vivid, interesting characters who grow, change and learn in his stories. I also have an unabashed and unashamed love of the supernatural. His characters are usually distinct and memorable, and they drive the story.

So it’s a shame that both the supernatural and the characters fail in Under the Dome. The book is the tale of Chester’s Mill, a town in Maine that, on October 21, finds itself under an invisible dome that lets no one in and out, and barely allows air and moisture to pass through its transparent walls. The book is political allegory: the leaders of the town are Bush and Cheney in miniature, able to rally the town using lies, impossible promises, and escalating infringement on basic civil rights, all the while carrying out their own illegal activities without fear of exposure. While I still delight in a good hit on Bush and Cheney any day of the week, reading 1,100 pages of it was difficult. Why? Because there was no movement in the characters or the story. It was just one bad thing after another happening, built up with heavy-handed foreshadowing (paraphrase: “he was certainly wrong about that”; “he was right about it getting much worse”; “there would be no Halloween”).

The story just ends, too, with a halfhearted explanation as to why the Dome was there in the first place and why it was removed; I mean, I get that it was supposed to be halfhearted because of who put it there, but that doesn’t make the story any more satisfying. I don’t really need a reason for the Dome to be there, but I do need my characters to be distinctive and sympathetic, my resolution firm, my eyes to not be skimming long passages because I somehow know that they’re not relevant to the overarching plot.

It’s really hard to pinpoint one fatal flaw with Under the Dome; there are so many lowlights in the story, but the biggest one I can think of is this: I just wasn’t frightened. It’s not that the supernatural wasn’t present enough (it wasn’t), but it’s that inhumanity of some of the characters was so over the top as to be cartoonish. King can create the horror of detached humanity (Randall Flagg’s followers in The Stand immediately spring to mind), but the Cheney character (one James Rennie, used car salesman) was too detached; there was no conflict in his mind, there was no regret, just a sadism and hunger for control. Rennie was inhuman to the point of unbelievability; Flagg, for example, also has no conflict or regret, but that’s because he’s not human. The human followers of Flagg are responding negatively to things they see as real offenses and injuries and flaws, and the insecurity therein is exploited expertly by Flagg to create his Las Vegas enclave of evil. In the end, though, they think they’re doing things right and that’s why they continue on their path. Rennie and his cronies, though, know that what they’re doing is wrong, know that there will be a day when the Dome comes up and they’ll be accountable, but they don’t seem to care. I suppose that should be more frightening, but when my picture of Rennie resembles a fat Judge Doom from Who Framed Roger Rabbit, there’s some serious trouble with the characterization, motivation and resolutions of the bad guys.

I hope the next Stephen King is an on.

Onto the book list:

Finished:

Re-read:

Empty

Currently Reading:

1) Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge by Eleanor Herman

1) Sex with the Queen: 900 Years of Vile Kings, Virile Lovers, and Passionate Politics by Eleanor Herman
2) The World in Half by Cristina Henriquez

Myth and a Woman I Sing: The Book List

WordNerd — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 16:48:50 +0000

If you look back through my book list posts, Fagles’ translation of The Aeneid makes its first appearance in the October 26, 2007 entry: I mention that it’s in my cart at Barnes & Noble. I then mention that I’m reading it on December 4 of that same year. It stays on the Currently Reading list up until August 26, 2009; somewhere between that date and October 4 (nearly two years after I started it), Virgil’s epic finally makes it onto the Finished list. I had once joked to IP that The Aeneid was the Don Quixote of 2008 (while Don Quixote had been the Don Quixote of 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and probably 2010—I’ll never finish that book, will I?).

Anyway, I found The Aeneid difficult to get through—I was stumped by the funeral games for Anchises in Book V. I had been looking forward to Fagles’ translation very much as I had been a great fan of his translations of The Illiad and The Odyssey; I had tried to read Fitzgerald’s translation and failed (my sister, though, loved Fitzgerald’s rendering), and I thought that Fagles’ translation might resonate more. However, the funeral games knocked me off track sometime in February 2008 and I didn’t get back on the Virgil train until after the wedding this past August. I finally plowed through the last books, enjoying Fagles’ translation and, while I knew it was unfinished, cried out, “That’s it!?” when Aeneas kills Turnus and the screen goes to black.

I mean, what the hell!?

Kidding. I know that Virgil was dying and that his wish that the manuscript be burned was disregarded.

I didn’t expect myself to be writing about The Aeneid or Virgil on this blog anytime soon. After taking two years to read the poem, the idea of reviewing it for the blog seemed like nonsense. After all, it’s The Aeneid; it’s canon and it’s important and it is highly readable. When I committed to it, I enjoyed it, but because it took so long, something I recently read came to mind (and I think, but am possibly mistaken, that it was Harold Bloom who said it): if it takes more than a few days to read a book, you’re not fully committed to it; you’re not taking in the words and bonding to the writing like you should. It could be your fault, or it could be the text’s fault; however, if it takes you an inordinate amount of time (like, say, two years), then you’re not engaging the text as you should, nor should you offer it up for analysis. In this particular case, I agree (though I don’t always think that periods of time between readings renders you unable to analyze a book competently). I did not see myself mentioning The Aeneid again in any other context than an aside, or a joke about my slow reading of it.

In steps Ursula K. Le Guin and her superb novel, Lavinia.

Told from the point of view of Lavinia, daughter to King Latinus and Aeneas’ destined wife, the book follows the text of The Aeneid faithfully, allowing Lavinia to tell her side of the story as she sees it unfold. Le Guin does take liberties, assuming that Virgil got a few things wrong: for example, Lavinia is not a blonde, and does not tear at her hair when her mother kills herself (rather, I think Le Guin’s Lavinia is relieved, but intent on giving her mother the dignity and honors befitting a dead queen). But the text follows myth and legend for the most part, and it is Le Guin’s writing that carries the novel and allows Lavinia to come to life in a way Virgil did not.

The most interesting part of the text is that Lavinia, tuned into the gods and forces of her people and lands (though you’ll find no mischievous gods here), is able to communicate with the man who gave her life, but so little of it that her own telling is needed: Lavinia, in the forest of Albunea, speaks directly to Virgil, who lays dying centuries later aboard a ship. The Virgil of Le Guin’s story is thoughtful, intelligent, and aware that he has greatly underappreciated Lavinia as a person and character with a story; he laments that he did not let her light shine in his work. Their talks are cautious, with Virgil hesitant to give Lavinia too many details of her life, but it is in knowing those details that Lavinia sees her destiny: she must marry Aeneas, Turnus must die, and her descendants will give rise to the Roman Empire. The intersection of author and his myth and how much is will and how much is fate is an interesting conversation to say the least: what might you say to your creator? What might you say to your creation? And what would you say if you were the creator and suddenly found yourself created by another author (thanks to a throwaway line, Le Guin manages to tie in Dante’s Inferno)? The contrast of Lavinia’s myth and her personhood in Le Guin’s novel is a convoluted literary question to dwell on, but it is exciting nonetheless; where does Virgil end and where does Lavinia begin?

Once the war is over, the story is Lavinia’s entirely; she no longer has the writings of Virgil to guide her, or so she thinks. But the rendering of Lavinia’s world, in a Bronze Age glory that treats its inhabitants not as sophisticated Romans but as rough founders, is lovely, carrying the story past Virgil’s Aeneid and into its own realm. It’s a retelling, of course, but it is one done elegantly, seeking to give voice to a character whose importance was underrepresented. It does not attempt to perfect The Aeneid, of course, only expand. The women of Lavinia’s world are more than maneuvering goddesses and mad queens; they are essential to the society, striving to achieve what is best for their kingdom and their futures, bridging the Latin and Trojan ways in order to give rise to the rulers to come. As a character, Lavinia emerges as intelligent, resourceful, and pious; she makes mistakes, of course, but like Virgil’s hero, she strives to do what’s best for what is and what will come. In this, Aeneas and Lavinia are perfectly matched, and the domesticity they enjoy briefly is a beautiful literary snapshot in time.

A definite recommend. And as long it took me to read, be sure to read The Aeneid beforehand if you haven’t done so already. Also? Bernard Knox’s intro in Fagles’ translation is wonderful.

Onto the book list.

Finished:

Re-read:

Empty

Currently Reading:

1) Shakespeare’s Wife by Germaine Greer
2) The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future by Robert Darnton

1) Under the Dome by Stephen King
2) Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge by Eleanor Herman
3) Sex with the Queen: 900 Years of Vile Kings, Virile Lovers, and Passionate Politics by Eleanor Herman
4) The World in Half by Cristina Henriquez