Greek for Beginners

I'm reading Beginner's Greek, by James Collins. Mike made a little joke about whether I'd learned any new Greek words from my book about Greek for beginners, and I had to explain that yes, I did, but that was a different book that I've had for years (a first grade Greek language workbook), and that this Beginner's Greek is a different book than that. It was a long, complicated explanation, but I got a chuckle.

Anyway, I'm only halfway through the book. It's probably inappropriate to write a review at this point, right? But I think this is the point where it's easiest to get a handle on what the experience of actually reading it is like. When I get to the end of a book, the ending will often color my experience of the whole thing.

A Curse Dark as Gold is an excellent example of this. I found most of the book to be a drag to read--it's like there was a great book in there for somewhere, but I couldn't find it. Like meeting someone who you think seems really cool, but somehow not being able to get past a superficial relationship, small talk. Then the last hundred pages were so good, I walked away thinking it was a great book. But that's not what the experience of reading it was like.

So: halftime at Beginner's Greek. The reviews I've read are so mixed, I think that the buzz might work against the book. I think it's great, but if I told you it was amazing and wonderful, you'd probably be disappointed.

It's an almost oddly simple book. It's a love story, pretty straightforwardly, with all the nice hurdles to romance that a love story needs. It uses the toolbox of literary fiction, including a lot of attention to details of environment and small anecdotes for verisimilitude. Amazingly, I find these incredibly engaging, I think because they're used very directly. Every word is used to tell you something important, rather than just a huge amount of information that drags the story down in the mundane.

Can you tell how I usually feel about literary fiction?

But what I like about the book--what I think lends to the simplicity, the black-and-whiteness of it--is that it reads almost like a fable. It is, at least in part, about fate stepping in in ways that just don't happen in real life. Coincidence, sudden realization, bolts of lightening, etc. play a huge role in the story. It's almost mythological, with sort of a dreamy solemnity.

Now, some people might say that a story like this should have an unhappy ending, to drag you back to earth. But I have to ask why you'd want to be dragged back? Wouldn't that negate the rest of the experience, the same way a good ending can negate a less-than-stellar reading experience?

I think the only way to end this book is with "...and they lived happily ever after." I'm looking forward to it.

Ready to Burst

I've put off posting so long that I have too many things to say and can't keep track of them all. I guess I'll pick one. Let's see....

Terry Pratchett should write all the books that there are. I just finished The Wee Free Men, which is billed as a kids' Discworld novel. It was so funny and smart and solid, and I couldn't stop talking like a tiny blue Scotsman for days afterward. I'm just amazed by his ability to do everything that goes into a book: language (description and humor), plot (complicated and satisfyingly fitting together at the end), character, world building, everything. Funny, scary, smart, dramatic, everything. I love Terry Pratchett.

Okay, two: I've been meaning to read some Georgette Heyer forever--I have in fact checked several of her books out several times and returned them unread. Finally, finally this time I picked up The Grand Sophy. It's SO good! If you've read all the Jane Austen books and are sad that there aren't anymore, pick this up. It's not exactly like Austen, not by a long shot--because they were written more recently, the characters have a more modern sensibility--but the setting is satisfyingly similar, and the drawing room dramas and comedies are just what a frustrated Austen fan might be looking for.

Also, A Curse Dark as Gold was good, but could have been better. The first three quarters just seemed too long--each scene, and there were too many scenes, ditto paragraphs, everything. The last quarter was fabulously tight and so satisfying.

Okay, now that's off my chest. Maybe I'll keep up with my blogging!

Don't Fence Me In

I can't stand a five point rating system. Goodreads uses a five star system to indicate how you feel about your books, and it just kills me. (Roger Ebert, by the way, whose days revolve more around star counts than mine, agrees with me.) I know five stars is for awesome, and one is for dreck. I don't do zero stars because that looks like I forgot to rate it. But how do you sort out the in-between?

Goodreads offers you rollover text: 5 for "loved it," 4 for "really liked it," 3 for "liked it," 2 for "it was okay," and 1 for "didn't like it." I can handle that, I think--I try to save 5s for things that had me clutching my seat, weeping, shrieking. Anything I just plain liked gets a 4, something I didn't NOT like gets a 3--maybe I just sort of didn't care, but it wasn't bad.

Two holds a lot of, "eh, not really." Two is for a book that I don't think, objectively, is a bad book, but that I didn't enjoy at all. Or, alternatively, it's for a book that objectively is an awful, awful book, but that I enjoyed a little on some level--but not enough to transcend its awfulness. And of course, 1 is just yuck, yuck, don't ever read this. I want those hours of my life back.

But what I find, often, is that I'll finish a book, and I'll feel one way, but then when I look back at my rating a while later, I'll be shocked. I finished, for example, The Queen of Attolia, and called it something I really liked, a 4. But a few weeks later, when I think about that book, I remember loving it passionately. I want to read it again right now. It's SO good. Why didn't I give it a 5?

Or Just Ella, why did I only give it one star? It wasn't totally without redeeming qualities--I saw enough in there to run out and--rather maniacally, I'll admit--read pretty much everything else the author's written. Shouldn't it have at least gotten 2?

I think the problem is, when I'm sitting with a book, I see the complexities. I see the imperfections, the flaws. Isn't that a sad way to be? It's not that I'd always be wishing it was better, but when you analyze something technically, it loses its sparkle. But from a distance of a few weeks, I remember impressions. I remember the big moments, or the big feelings.

So is it better to record my in-the-moment reactions, or what lingers? Is what matters the experience I had then, or the memory I have now?

And for heaven's sake, why can't the scale be more reasonable? Like 1-100? Just Ella gets a 24.

Well, 23.8.

Purchasing Power

I decided to spend my 40% off Borders coupon, come hell or high water. And I got there and I dithered. I found a copy of The Thief, which I'd been wanting, but it only cost $8. Hardly worth wasting a coupon. A couple of board books for Adam, similarly inexpensive. Sure, they add up, but this is indulgence we're going for.

But then, oh then. I don't remember if I wrote much about In the Company of the Courtesan, which was, I think, the last book I finished before having the baby. It was so great. An amazing combination of character and setting, storytelling and writing. A beautiful book about a very high class prostitute in Venice in the 16th century, beautifully written and so compelling.

I have been meaning to read more of Sarah Dunant's books since then. And today, in the bookstore, I discovered that her most recent novel is about NUNS! Sixteenth century nuns. Ladies and gentlemen, it is not often that an author I already love produces a nun book. It makes me feel small in the face of the universe. I am humbled, and thrilled, and now I OWN this book!

O happy day

Pippa Greg

O, Philippa Gregory, how you've failed me! For books that are all so similar, I've had such different reactions to the three books I've read that I can't even tell you what I think of this.

I'm reading The Other Queen, about Mary Queen of Scots. The problem I'm having is that there are almost no scenes in this book. It's told by three narrators, two of whom are the couple who hosted/imprisoned Mary during her time in England on Queen Elizabeth's orders, and the third Mary herself. You follow the large events of the day--armies are amassing, court intrigue is going on--but mostly the narrators get this news through letters and gossip. Each short chapter reads like a dispatch, and rarely is there a conversation, or even an occurrence that actually takes place as I'm reading about it. I'm just not compelled. At all.

This is a far cry from my reactions to The Other Boleyn Girl (Harlequin trash!) and The Queen's Fool (action-packed chick lit!). I didn't love Boleyn Girl, but I really did like Queen's Fool very much. I had really hoped that there would be something in this book of that one. But at this point, I'd settle for a ton of steamy sex. And at least each of those books was immediate--what happened in the book was actually happening as you read about it.

But I'm halfway through. I'm loathe to quit now. I might, though.

By the way and for the record: by the end, I really loved American Wife. I think the best way to explain my change of heart is that, at the beginning, I felt like the author and the narrator shared a sensibility that I couldn't. By the end, I realized that the author and I were the ones with the same opinions; the narrator was the only one who saw things her way. It was good, in the end, to have the author on my side.

American Husband

Curtis Sittenfeld's American Wife is Alice, a bookish midwestern lady living a straight-arrow life. How does she end up with Charlie, a charming rich boy with the world at his feet and no real interest in doing anything with it?

(I'm working on keeping spoilers out of this post, and I'm doing okay with that regarding the specific events of the book, but the emotional path of the narrative is spelled out below, so be warned.)

So this is a novelization of the life of Laura Bush, and I had a hard time with it. I loved the first 100 pages, because she's such a likable character. I wonder, however much the circumstances echo real ones, how like Laura Bush she is in character. Then, she meets Charlie, and his charm and good nature win her over. Unfortunately, they totally turned me off, and I put the book down for a while.

In the meantime, Linden read it, and we had an interesting conversation. I don't want to give too much of the book away, but now that I'm further along (though still not yet done), I can see Linden's side of our argument a little better. I still hold the same opinion, though.

My opinion is that I hate Charlie. It's not just that he's clearly modeled on G. W. Bush, of whom I was and am no fan. I was able to pick the book back up by setting aside those similarities, and I could see, then how his charm could be, well, charming. But I still feel pretty solidly that I was rooting for her to dump him, even when he was still at his most adorable.

Later (seriously, I'm trying for no spoilers here), I understand Linden's assessment that it's a book about her marriage to a very flawed man. It's not about him being great, it's about him being good in some ways and not in others, and how that works in their marriage. I would push that a little further and say it's about her being married to someone who's pretty much an ass, but not such a complete ass---- that she has no choice but to leave him. So I guess I see it as being about a flawed marriage, but a marriage to a man who's somewhere worse than flawed--somewhere in the unlikeable range.

And I stand by my assessment that Alice lives precariously. She's about not rocking the boat, she's about doing things under the table, about keeping her true self--who she socializes with, the causes she donates to--off the radar of the people who populate her life. Because for the most part, her life is populated with people whose values she works very hard to respect, without ever quite getting there. She keeps her head down, she tries to see the good side of things; she wants a peaceable life, and she will hold on to that peace with white knuckled silence. She hates the fact that the country club doesn't admit Jews or blacks, but she doesn't consider leaving it, because everyone belongs there. Not because she wants to see them, or keep up with them, but because she'd have to explain to them why she's taking a stand, offend them, upset them. That pretty much sums up her marriage, too.

I still want her to dump him. I know, of course, that she won't, but I'm still rooting for her.

I think I put in more spoilers than I meant to. Sorry about that.

Welcome Home!

I went on vacation last week. I was going to bring 8 books, and at my sister's insistence ("That's a book a day, and two on Sunday") I winnowed it down to 7. Then I snuck another one in before I went and brought 8 after all.

I finished The Mysterious Benedict Society, which was clever and thrilling. I would say it's more of a sophisticated middle grade book, rather than a young adult book--I think it's aimed at 10 to 12 year olds, but those who are great readers. I read The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, by Joan Aiken. A kids' classic, with some truly, amazingly terrifying scenes of (unsurprisingly) wolf chases. Also Among the Imposters, the next of the Margaret Peterson Haddix Shadow Children series, which was both slight and serious, but managed to be okay.

When I got home, though, that big dent didn't seem like much. There are still 13 books waiting for me here. The good news is that I'm excited to read them; the bad news is that due dates are rolling around.

So, right now? American Wife, by Curtis Sittenfeld. Never read Prep, but this is a very good book. The only problem I'm running into is that I'm not a huge fan of her leading man, but I'm coming around to it. I'll have more to say about it, as I go, I think. The Other Queen, by Philippa Gregory, which is not bad so far. I've found her stuff to be hit or miss, but this is okay so far. A Curse Dark as Gold, by Elizabeth C. Bunce, is a retelling of the story of Rumpelstiltskin. So far it's good, but slow--I'm about a quarter of the way through, and the book so far is just about a tough situation getting tougher, and worse, and less comfortable. No real complications, just money troubles, personnel shortages, unpleasant relatives....I could use some magic.

So, that's where we are now. I returned some books to the library and didn't check anything out at all. I'm feel all discombobulated, being gone so long, so I'm not going to go for coherence, but just post this and try to say something useful later.

Adam's Favorite Books

In honor of a regular reader who's expecting, I would like to present a short post about the books that are most popular with my almost 8 month old son.

1) Bear Snores On, Karma Wilson. For some reason, he's always loved this book. Mike and I do it with different voices, and he loves both versions.

2) Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak. I don't quite know what he loves about this one, but I think it's the pictures.

3) Jamberry, Bruce Degen. Mike reads this one with a deep bear voice, which I've taken up because I think it's why it's so popular. I love the pictures in this one, which makes it something I can read again and again.

These are the top three. He also loves any board book, but mostly to play with, rather than read. I'm a big fan of Sandra Boynton, and we have some of Dr. Seuss's more picture-heavy, word-light books in board form. So when you're shopping, now you have some tips.

And hooray for all you parents and parents-to-be!

With Vigor and Determination

I have rescinded the permission I gave myself to read only kids' books for a while. Why? Well, I was at a party last night with some literary types, and I reached back, trying to think of something even modestly "worthwhile" that I've read in the past few months. Couldn't do it. Then I came home and looked at my lists--Goodreads, my journal--of what I've been reading, and realized that the total number of books that don't fall into the YA category in the past two or three months is about six. And at least two of those are medical memoirs, plus other assorted popular nonfiction. I guess what I'm saying is that they're still pretty light.

So, I've bullied myself into trying again. I think I realized that I'm not in the mood for Confederates in the Attic, and I don't have the intellectual hunger I'd need to get me through the political irritation of The Nine. So I'm going with American Wife, which is a novel, and apparently a good one. I don't know if it has the literary weight that would have made me feel less embarrassed not to have read (or want to read) Atlas Shrugged, but it's what I've got right now.

So, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, wish me luck.

Blurb Wars

On the back of The King's Peace, by Jo Walton, is a blurb by someone named Debra Doyle. It says, in part, "The King's Peace is the novel that The Mists of Avalon should have been."

Way to take a swipe at MZB. I think it's because it's an Arthurian story with a strong woman protagonist, but a little more historically accurate, maybe? Not sure, but great.

I read a contest in a fantasy magazine once for the best blurb that you'd give if you hated the book but didn't want to insult the author. "As tight and fast-paced as Tolkein!" "This author could not have written a better book." Etc. I wish I could think of some more. Anyone?

Reader's Block

I seriously just can't read anything serious right now. Not just serious, but substantial. I have three good, worth reading books that are due back because I've had them nine weeks, and I just can't. Curtis Sittenfeld's American Wife, Jeffrey Toobin's The Nine, and Tony Horwitz's Confederates In the Attic. I really want to read all three, but I can barely concentrate hard enough to keep myself into a 180 page book about a 12 year old hero, never mind a 360 page book about nine (or twelve or fifteen--it covers a stretch of time) Supreme Court justices.

I'm pretty disappointed in myself, especially since I had such good luck getting my hands on these books. But I think I'm going to have to return them and try again another day. I'm trying to aim low for a little while, remind myself that this is supposed to be fun--there's no reason to slog. It's not like I'm getting paid by the page, or the book, or the hour or at all really.

I will say that there is one book I'm giving up out of pure good sense. I like therapy books in general--nonfiction by psychologists who talk about their pet theories and their most memorable patients. I got a recommendation for a book called The Unsayable: The hidden language of trauma, by Annie G. Rogers. I checked it out, and it's very well written and looks pretty good. Then I flipped to a page at the middle and read a few lines about her asking a young patient who she trusted, who made her feel safe. Her horse was the first answer, and how much she enjoyed riding, followed by a neighbor who is kind to her. The author then elaborated on these feelings for the reader, mentioning casually the relationship between the neigh of a horse and the word neighbor. At this point I put the book down and stepped slowly away, and I hope you support me in that decision.

So: more Margaret Peterson Haddix, more Bloody Jack, maybe The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. And maybe, just maybe, I can sneak a Philippa Gregory novel past the blockade. I mean, there's nothing substantial about that, is there?

My Imaginary Favorite Author

You know, like your imaginary boyfriend, who is probably John Cusack, or maybe George Clooney or Hugh Jackman. My imaginary new favorite author is Margaret Peterson Haddix. I think I mentioned her recently--I read Just Ella, and blogged about how princesses are done all wrong. But, though flawed, there was a core of something great there, so I checked out Double Identity. But then I figured out the big plot twist after five pages. I don't know if that was because I'm not the 12 year old target audience, or if this was a flaw in the book, but I put it down instead of reading through to see what else the story had to offer.

But I decided to keep trying, so I got Among the Hidden, the first in her series. Finally, this book was great. It's a lower reading level, but sharp, serious, thoughtful, and fast-paced. The story is about a boy who lives in a world where only two children are allowed. His two older brothers lead normal lives, but he can't leave the farm and, when a housing development goes in next door, becomes confined to the house. The whole totalitarian government thing is also going on in The Giver, by Lois Lowry, which I just finished, and contrasting the two has been very interesting. The governement in the Haddix book is much less tidy around the edges, and it looks a lot more like what a real government looks like--impenetrable, complicated, everywhere and nowhere. Well rendered.

So the next time I went to the library, I went a little nuts. I found the next book in the Shadow Children series, Among the Imposters. I found another book called Leaving Fishers, which is apparently about a girl who joins and leaves a cult. I got Running Out of Time, which looks like a version of the movie The Village, hopefully better executed. And something else called Found that I don't know anything about but that's by her.

So hopefully I'll have something really intelligent to say about Margaret Peterson Haddix in the next couple of weeks. So far, Leaving Fishers is not bad, though it's a little heavy-handed. That might be, though, because the story that cult members tell potential members really sounds like that. I've read enough to suspect that.

Also, I'm going to tack this on the end because I might have a real favorite author. The King of Attolia, by Megan Whalen Turner, is really, really good. She needs to write another book right now so I can read it, please.

Children's Books

As a parent, I read a few children's books. I imagine and hope that those quantities are going to increase over time--right now, I'm lucky if I can discern the words on a couple of pages before Adam gnaws them out of existence, or closes the book just because he can. So while I have some opinions--Bear Snores On holds up pretty well to repeated readings, I love Sandra Boynton, Baby Einstein is drivel--I have not yet felt the need to tell you about this.

But then, I read The Amazing Bone.

When I told Mike about it, I only got that far before he gave me a look that said that the title is the punch line. I don't even want to bother with that. Any humor you find there obscures the sheer AWFULNESS of this book. It's awful on almost every perceivable level--literary, storytelling, and possibly even age appropriateness. I'm almost horrified that it has a Reading Rainbow sticker on the cover. Levar Burton has something to answer for here. The only level on which the book does succeed is illustration; they're pretty. I like the style. End of positives.

Now I have to tell you about it, don't I? Sigh. I'd rather not relive it. Okay, it's a picture book, and all the characters are different animals. Petunia is a little girl pig who skips about enjoying the day. This part goes on a long time and is not unpleasant, though it is undirected. Eventually she finds herself sitting under a tree enjoying the day, and she says out loud how she loves the whole world. A voice answers, "Me too!" Petunia discovers, under a tree, a little bone that can talk and make sounds. It belonged to a witch who dropped it by accident.

Petunia and the bone make friends. She heads home to show her parents. On the way she encounters three robbers, but the bone scares them off with loud scary noises. Then she encounters a fox who decides he's going to take her home and eat her. He's not afraid of the bone's noises, and in fact is excited that he'll own a magic bone. Petunia begins to cry.

Fox locks her in a back room with the bone and starts getting ready for dinner--sharpening his knife, stoking the fire, etc. He's having pork. It's drawn out and pretty scary--this poor pig who's like 8 years old and hoping that he'll kill her quickly before he eats her. The bone doesn't know what to do either.

Finally the fox comes in for her. As he leads her into the kitchen, the bone suddenly starts shouting nonsense words. The bone doesn't know what it's doing, it just feels compelled to shout these words. As it does, the fox begins to shrink. By the time the bone is done, the fox is as small as a mouse and runs away into the floorboards. Neither she nor the bone know how this happened. She runs home and introduces the bone to her parents and they all live happily ever after the end.

Now, say it with me: WHAT??? I don't even know where to start. Why is it a bone, not a pebble or statue or bug? A bone? I really expected to have that explained to me by the end. Also, didn't anyone else learn, in like sixth grade, the term deus ex machina? One of our characters randomly starts shouting magic words that he didn't know he knew, and it solves all their problems. That's totally how an episode of House ended last week. Great storytelling technique, is what I'm saying.

Urgh. I'm turning into a crank. But really, this book is so weird. It was published in 1976, and I have no idea how it got past an editor, except that the author appears to have published a number of books before that. I can't imagine what they look like, but I have to think they must be better than this, for him to have slipped it in the door.

Okay, I'm not all moaning. I'm rereading The Giver, by Lois Lowry, and it's really fabulous. so there's that. I feel like I complain too much, but sometimes, you just have to stand back in awe. So, William Steig, wherever you are, I'm very sorry to be so cranky, but I think you owe me an explanation about the talking bone.

Up For a Challenge

It's not that The Nine is too heavy or serious. It's so well-written and compelling and I could keep reading. It's that the issues that have shaped the Supreme Court in the past twenty years are all ones that it kind of hurts to read about. I have opinions about politics--while I'm not particularly active, they're fairly strongly held opinions. And while I do understand how reasonable people can be on the other side of some of these things, I disagree with them so strongly that it's painful to read about Antonin Scalia tearing into a lawyer with what I consider to be a spurious argument.

The first part of the book discusses abortion a good deal, and while I can see how someone could be under what I consider to be a mistaken impression about when life begins, I can set that aside and see it as a debate. I get outraged when people get violent about it, but that's not an issue before the court today. But I am blinded by rage when people try to pass laws that say that a pregnant woman who is going to die cannot save her life by having an abortion, but must instead die with her baby. Because "mother's health" is a term that needs scare quotes.

This exact issue hasn't come up, but the mother's health clause has been under discussion, and the idea of someone in authority, the lawmakers in my own country saying this to a mother--to a husband and father who is facing this horrific situation--is so staggeringly awful, so evil, that I can't bear to read about it.

And now we're into the 2000 elections, and I know how it's going to turn out. And I know already that it was a travesty, I knew that, but I think reading about the details is going to be more harrowing than I can manage right now. Is that weird? That I don't have the emotional strength to read about the details of a political struggle that ended almost 10 years ago an the fallout of which is just a fact of life by now?

What can I say? I'm a delicate flower.

Now That's Commitment

I've stopped pretending. I'm just reading kids' stuff, light stuff, easygoing stuff. It's a load off my mind.

I just started a new audiobook, Tomorrow When the War Began, by John Marsden. It's an Australian book, and so is the narrator, which accent takes a little getting used to. But so far it's a pretty good camping story, which is going to turn into a story of some kids who come back from a major camping trip to find out that their town and country have been invaded and taken over. It's very Red Dawn, and so far very good.

I'm coming to the end of The Good Husband of Zebra Drive, by Alexander McCall Smith, which is not a YA book, but is sufficiently light in tone for the state of mind I've been in. It always makes me sad when there's conflict between our main characters in these books, but in this one you really feel the theme of patience and tolerance as being the reason a person can maintain such a pleasant attitude. Sigh, Botswana.

The little pile next to my computer contains New Moon, the second Twilight book, by Stephanie Meyer. I checked it out because it's never on the shelf, but there it was on the shelf, but I knew after three pages that I couldn't read it. At least, with an audiobook, you have the narrator convincing you that her love for Edward is true and real. In print, it's just unbearable. After ONE PAGE. I'm so sorry, Twilight fans, please don't kill me.

The reason I found it on the shelf is because it was next to In the Belly of the Bloodhound: Being an Account of a Particularly peculiar Adventure in the Life of Jacky Faber, by L.A. Meyer, which I am absolutely tickled to read. Sometimes, when I can't wait to get started on a book, I have trouble starting it. There's that ramp-up at the beginning when you don't know what's going on yet, there's the little sliver of doubt that it'll be as good as the last three, as good as you hope. There's the dread of finishing it. And there's something else, some other inertia that holds me off.

In this case, there's also the burning question of whether I'll read it before or after The King of Attolia, by Megan Whalen Turner, which I'm ALSO thrilled to have before me. I just finished The Queen of Attolia, and I'm so excited for the sequel. How can one resist following the cleverest character around on his misadventures--even when they're sometimes gloomy and dangerous? Gen has the same appeal as Jacky Faber, and they're due around the same time, and I'm going to have a very hard time deciding which to read first.

That should get me through--that and The Nine, the Supreme Court book that I'm still in the middle of. I figure I can get it back to the library on time if I read five or ten pages a day. Assuming I can renew it. Right?

God bless the simplicity and inspiration of young adult writers everywhere. Thank you all so much.

Parenting, Picoult-style

In Picoult’s fiction we rarely encounter characterologically bad parents. Instead, we meet mothers and fathers who try and fail, baroquely, to meet the current standards of caring for children — people who affect the deepest concern, who have absorbed the therapeutic language of talk shows and women’s magazines but who are congenitally unable to implement the idiom.

-"Jodi Picoult and the Anxious Parent," Ginia Bellafante, NY Times, June 17

Excuse my rusty citation skills. I liked this article, which was mostly an interview with the author. It was an interesting look at how she's built her own ouvre--all her books are pretty much the same, and here's how.

The quote above interested me, though, because the author's take on what she does is so different than what I saw. It's a little embarrassing to admit this, because I think she's right, and by extension I'm pretty blind to a lot of the nuance in the world. But I've always seen Picoult's books as stories in which everyone is doing their best to do the right thing, and yet everything turns out horribly anyway. Human frailty and bad luck conspire to make a mess of everything, in spite of excellent parenting--this is how I would have encapsulated what I thought she was doing.

This author, however, seems to be saying that the message is closer to "bad parenting practice can look a lot like good parenting theory. I can't really argue with that, and looking back, I can see that Jodi Picoult gets a lot more credit if you look at it that way. In my theory, all these people are trying their best, and it's a weakness of the parenting system that that keeps resulting in something awful. In her theory, these parents think they're trying, but really they're being controlling, or gentle but oblivious, or some other innocuous looking but really shattering parenting trait. The concerned, doting mother in My Sister's Keeper, for example, is not making the best of a bad situation and trying to save her children. She's obsessing over the one daughter at the expense of the others.

Here's the thing: I had seen this, and thought of it as a failing of the author. I had thought that she was backing these parents up, that the omniscient third person narrator was looking at them benevolantly, rather than critically. I think I might have been wrong, and, while this might not change my enjoyment of the stories, it certainly changes the reading. It makes sense, then to see, as the Times writer does, that the situation in My Sister's Keeper goes off the rails in a way that is "meant to serve as a cosmic rebuke to the mother’s stilted management."

I don't think that this explanation covers everything, though. All of her stories are based around a major secret that is being kept by one of the characters (as I've mentioned before, sometimes it's being kept for NO EARTHLY REASON, e.g. Vanishing Acts, The Pact). Although sometimes the parents have secrets of their own, the world-shattering secrets in these books almost invariably belong to the kids. I can't help but see in this pattern a statement to the effect of, "even good, concerned parents can't know everything about their kids, and sometimes those secrets are deadly." The secret-keeping on the part of the kids often exonerates the parents--they really were doing a good job, but they were deliberately fooled.

I won't say I was entirely wrong about her, but I will say that I think I wasn't looking deep enough. And as I said, that's embarrassing--I remember, after seeing the movie The Hours, making a comment about being annoyed at how Meryl Streep's character's inability to take action had annoyed me. Someone replied that I wasn't very sympathetic to depression, and I was absolutely humiliated to realize that, though I had recognized that the other two characters were depressed, I had not noticed that that was the whole point of the movie.

Point being, I can be a total moron. I'm amazed that you're still reading this. Thank you for your patience.

Brain Freeze

I'm not sure what it is, but I can't get my brain around any of the big stuff. I've read a lot of YA lately, and I'd been feeling like I should look for something meatier. But I can't seem to keep any of it in my line of sight. I can't read the Jodi Picoult (there was in interesting article in the Times about her, thank you Linden, and I'll have more to say about that tomorrow), fine. But I had to put down The Book of Night Women, which I had really wanted to read after hearing so much about it on NPR a few months ago. But the dialect was just hitting me too hard--it required real focus to read, because every time you picked it up, you had to get back into a very specific dialect. I do too much of my reading in one page spurts for that.

Somehow, though the YA stuff keeps me coming back. I'm not usually embarrassed about that, but right now I'm feeling a little like I've dropped the ball because of this. I'm going to push that aside, though, and just be excited that I have the next Bloody Jack book, In the Belly of the Bloodhound, and Margaret Peterson Haddix's Among the Hidden. I gave up on her Double Identity when I figured out the plot twist on page seven; I assume there's more to it than the twist, but I need to keep moving forward right now. I got New Moon, too, for some godawful reason--mostly because there's usually a long wait and there it was on the shelf. I just finished Bed-Knob and Broomstick by Mary Norton, which was such sweet fun.

Somehow, in the midst of all this, I am very much enjoying The Nine. It'll take me a long time to finish, since I only read about five pages a day, but it's really interesting and dense with information. It's always fun when a nonfiction book has worldbuilding to do.

I had a bunch of other things to say, but my mind is all over the place. Another time, then.

Better to Call It Greatreads

If you're not on Goodreads for the book logging and sharing, then you should at least check out the ads. This one is my favorite, under the tagline "Book Videos." It's a little company that provides do-it-yourself (I suppose) video advertisements for books, based on a series of stock photos fading and panning past behind whatever text you want to move dramatically across the screen. They read like the jokes they make in sitcoms about movie trailers. I can't describe it any better than that, but I can say that their samples are Ponderous with Stirring Emotion and you should check them out.

I, Waffle

Let's start out by saying that I consider myself a Jodi Picoult fan. I'm on record as saying that I can't read more than one of her books per year, because they all bear such a remarkable resemblance to each other. But I've read My Sister's Keeper, Vanishing Acts, The Pact, Nineteen Minutes, and Plain Truth, and I've enjoyed all of them very much. I have had only one consistent complaint, and that is that the big twist that she saves for the end often depends on someone keeping a secret against all reason and everyone's best interests. But this is a relatively small problem, and really isn't too glaring if you don't read two or three in a row.

I'm also on the record with my drive-by concern about multiple viewpoints (and fonts. I can totally understand how a person can become a font snob) in Handle with Care. But that was mostly just bluster--I complain a lot, it's the cheap and easy way to talk about almost anything. I was still looking forward to the book.

Which I started today. And sadly, I put it down and have decided that I'm not going to read it. The beginning put me off in two ways. One will probably not persist through the whole book; the other is, I think another pervasive Picoult peculiarity (God, I'm sorry, I just had to). Couple this with the fact that I have too many books on my list now to persevere with something that I'm only lukewarm on and I'm just going to have to throw in the towel.

Problem one, the simple one, is that, at this point in my life, I have a pretty low threshold for suffering baby stories. Under normal conditions, I have a very high tolerance for such things; you might even call me callous. But that was before I began spending my days with a drooly little creature with a potbelly and a bizarre fondness for Andy Warhol. (Seriously, he'll stare at the soup can print in the kitchen and laugh and laugh. But that's another blog.) Now, I have to stop reading newspaper articles in which tragic things happen to babies. Sometimes, I even get upset when tragic things happen to the parents of babies. And, seriously, I'm incredibly insensitive.

So this little baby born with seven broken bones and in so much pain...well, I wasn't quite able to deal with it. But if that was all, well, she's not going to be a little baby for the whole book.

But the other problem is something that I think I've identified as another Picoultism: the Mystical Nature of Motherhood. Again, I have a drooly little goober of my own now, so I do understand the need to protect him and the love that seems all out of proportion for someone who screams at you that much. But the goopiness of the mother-child bond as described in this book is cloying. If you squeeze the book, sentiment drips out and leaves a puddle on the floor.

There's a passage in the first chapter where the mother is describing the daughter's birth, and she keeps repeating the child's name. I would need to quote a lot to get the point across, but she basically repeats the baby's name like an incantation, and the baby--thirty seconds old and being bustled over by doctors--hears her and stops crying. In spite of the broken bones and the having just been born. This is sentimentality that I just can't stomach.

Couple that with the discussions the parents share before the birth about the daughter's potentially terminal illness, in which the mother does not seem at all interested in the facts of the illness, but only in the fact that her daughter is destined for her in some way, and you just get a character I can't relate to. I mean, yeah, your child is more to you than the symptoms of their illness. But I'm not into the whole 'babies as angels sent from above' thing. Babies are people busy growing into grown-ups, and it's your job as a parent to facilitate that. Which means understanding their health. The fact that she knowingly gave birth to a baby with a very serious genetic disorder without any practical planning--how will we feed her/hold her/carry her?--just makes me dislike the narrator so much that I can't read the book.

Wow, i had a lot to say about a book that I only read 10 pages of. I'll stop now--the book and the review. Sorry, Picoult lovers. I'm still planning to read Keeping Faith.

Self-Referential

I think I might not be in the right headspace for some of these Major Reads I've bitten off. The Nine is interesting, but I read in fits and snatches, and I really think this requires more sustained time commitment. I have a bunch of novels out, but many of them are ambitious reads: American Wife, The Book of Night Women, books that are either going to require attention to appreciate or, God help us, just a huge time investment.

Interestingly, Intern, about the navel-gazing, self-doubting young doctor in training, seems to be peering into my soul and reporting back to me. I wish I had what it takes to be a doctor--apparently so does the narrator, the difference being that he tried. But his self-doubt, his inability to decide what he wants, to be inspired--even just the plain old sense he has that there's a right answer about what to do with your life that he hasn't found yet...well, they are the province of the young, and the confused. I'm not immune to these things.

He's going through some rough times in the part I'm reading, and it's interesting that he describes them exactly the way I would describe some of my own difficulties. I think it's interesting how you sometimes run across something like that, totally accidentally, just at a time when it speaks to what's going on in your own life. I don't believe in fate or anything like that, but sometimes it just all comes together.

Like the time I was reading two books at the same time that both had a character named Stanislaus--one was an alias, the other a nun. Seriously, what are the odds?

I don't think I'm being quite coherent, and for that I apologize. Better later, honest.

What You Can Get Away With

Not all authors can pull off all the risky moves all the time.

No one ever claimed I was anything but picky. I think I tend to sound pickier than I am, because it's easier to dissect what doesn't work than what does, even in something that is overall successful. But two examples of things that tend to work against a book for me are coming up for me right now: multiple first person narrators, and memoirs in which the main character (ie memoirist) is really unlikeable.

It really seems like someone writing a memoir is probably putting their best spin on things. I mean, there's a level on which they have almost no choice but to have some sympathy with the character, if you know what I'm saying. And leaving off the "but I'm majorly reformed now" memoir, presumably most people writing their autobiography thinks there's something worth telling about in their life story. I guess, thinking about it more thoroughly, what I'm really bothered by is a main character or narrator whom the author thinks is sympathetic, but who is really kind of wanker. Maybe they're selfish or mean or cold or rude. It doesn't so much matter why I don't like them; if I don't like them, I have little use for them.

Anyway, Intern, by Sandeep Jauhar, is a memoir of this doctor's internship. Now, clearly he's a respected cardiologist and medical writer at the point where he's writing this book. But he does an excellent job of painting himself as kind of a crappy intern. If you thought JD from Scrubs was self-absorbed, my God, this guy. He's older than his classmates, almost 30, because he had his PhD in physics before he decided to become a doctor. He doesn't like physics because it's too insulated, not "real" enough. So he goes to medical school and finds it very hard, maybe too hard. But not challenging, if you see what I mean, because it's not about ideas. I swear, if this guy got any more involved examining his navel, he's going to turn inside out.

Yet somehow it's a pretty good book. Part of it is the behind-the-scenes at the hospital thing. There's an ER style thrill about the medical dramas. Part is also that, clearly all this "God I don't want to be a doctor, and I suck at it anyway and I sure don't want to marry a doctor and why did I do this and what else could I do? " is going to lead somewhere--he made it through, after all. But part of it I can't explain. I want to smack him when he spins his wheels trying to figure out what he "wants" from life--which of us doesn't wonder that? And how many of us have three degrees and still have a deep well of choices and are still cranky about this? Suck it up and pick a life path. But somehow, I'm following him to these places, waiting for him to find the answer. Good for him for talking me into that.

But Jodi Picoult is NOT going to talk me into the typographical nightmare she's set up for me in Handle with Care.

I am reluctant but not unconvincable on the subject of stories told by multiple first person narrators. Barbara Kingsolver does an excellent job with The Poisonwood Bible, but that feature was the reason it took me over a year to get past the second chapter. Inevitably, the narration switch involves not only getting to know a new character, but leaving off some part of the storyline that you're likely just getting into.

When it's just a couple of points of view, it's not as big an issue--I can often be convinced. When there are five, you're pushing it. But when you commit the visual crime of putting each narrator's chapter in a different FONT, I will be your sworn enemy even unto death. Am I not bright enough to follow which character is which? Do you not realize how UGLY this is? The fact that the fonts have different weights, different relative sizes, serif vs. sans serif....it boggles the mind and offends the eyes. Five different fonts. I don't even like half of them.

The real crime here is how this pulls you out of the story. It reminds you of the reading you're doing, the mental and physical task, the fact that this story is words on the page, not just unfolding in my mind. Reading is something I almost can't realize I'm doing, but oh, you will insist on reminding me, Jodi, you will. And I'll be bitter for it.

I'm not even sure I'm going to read the book, as punishment for this awful crime. And I'm going to look up who her managing editor was and have words with them, too.

Youth Hurts

I'm not going to read 3 Willows, and I think it's at least in part because of the numeral in the title. It's a little precious. Also, the subtitle, which appears to be different on different editions of the book: "the sisterhood grows" vs. "a new sisterhood grows." Come on. You're writing a separate book; is anyone going to pretend that the editor didn't force her to include the part about the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants?

But really, it's for the same reason I had so much trouble reading Just As Long As We're Together. I get so frustrated when characters have certain kinds of troubles, and in this book, Ama is being forced to spend the summer camping when she signed up for an academic enrichment program. I can't enjoy that. I'm outraged on her behalf, and yelling at her counselors in my head, even when she's having fun and meeting a cute boy. "C'mon, Ama!" I'm shouting. "Get ANGRY!"

This is not wholesome. I'm moving on.

Also, re: Survivor. Being Chuck Palahniuk has got to be a miserable experience. There is no beauty in the world he lives in, only sad, cheap, rotting things, people who are shallow and crass or deep and torn and mangled. There is nothing to live for in that world. I wonder what he's like in person.

Five Speed Literary Transmission

I'm blasting through a bunch of YA books lately--already finished 4 this month--but I think I'm hitting a wall, especially regarding the mediocre ones. Good YA is always good, but okay YA is fine when you're a kid, but hard to swallow when you're an adult. When you find yourself snarking at a book for being overly simplistic, you need to pick up something that doesn't have a reading level, something with some heft.

Example: What I Saw and How I Lied, by Judy Blundell. I picked it up randomly, it had gotten good reviews and won an award. And it started out as a nice period piece, a coming of age after WWII story. But it was clearly supposed to be some sort of mystery or thriller, and I got over halfway through and couldn't figure out what it was about. Now, the coming of age stuff was pretty good, I suppose, but I got so frustrated I put it down and gave up. And then I read some more good reviews and picked it back up. And pretty quickly (that is, just past the halfway point), things started to happen and it ended up being a thoughtful and interesting book about how good and bad have a lot of shades of gray. But it hardly seemed worth it to me--wading through something so lacking in nuance for all that.

I already talked about Just Ella and my problem with princesses. Normally I don't think I'd be as ready to throw that book at a wall. I'm thinking of just returning it, but it's such a fast read and I'm already a third of the way through and I think it could be good if the moral didn't seem to be "rich people are vapid--only trust the peasants." Blasted Red Commies.

3 Willows, which Ann Brashares is trying to convince me is the Sisterhood "growing" when I'm pretty sure it's just three more girls who are friends. I mean, I loved the travelling pants. But I don't trust her to make this anything but "middle school girls are growing up and getting bras and that's haaaard." Why am I being so dismissive? I just read a Judy Blume book, and that's all she writes about. And I like those books.

I need meat. I need The Nine, by Gregory Toobin, about the Supreme Court--not a novel, nonfiction. Or American Wife, by Curtis Sittenfeld, which is a novelization of the life of Laura Bush, and doesn't that sound like a sad story. Something dense and mature and full of dry history or sex or...well, just adulthood. Something full of adulthood.

Here I go.

A Very 80s Divorce

Judy Blume went through a really horrible divorce herself. Two, actually, if I remember correctly. She jumped quickly into her second marriage after her first one ended, and moved her two children across the country to be with the new husband. That marriage failed rather spectacularly, and she spent some time single before marrying her current husband.

All this is to say that she sounds like a pretty sucky divorced parent.

Just As Long As We're Together was the book she was working on when I saw her speak, which must have been in 1986. I was a student worker at my school library and the librarian took me with her to a conference where Judy Blume read from her newest book. I've never read it before, but I'm reading it now. It's actually pretty painful--I have a very hard time with books where kids are acting up because they're being treated unfairly, especially when the adults don't see it at all.

Stephanie's father moves to the west coast, but claims he's just traveling for business--her parents are split up for three months before they tell her, mostly by accident. It's ludicrous behavior--you can't keep saying, "I wish I could be there," when you MOVED TO THE OTHER SIDE OF THE COUNTRY FOR NO REASON. Seriously, he didn't need to go for his job, and you can get divorced without leaving, oh, let's say the tristate area. So what he did was abandon his kids. I can totally understand divorce, but that kind of thing really rips me up. You don't have to be in a happy marriage to be two good parents.

But I think this is a very 1987 kind of divorce. Dad disappears, Mom and the kids are still a family, Dad is a vacation destination. It's amazing to me that this was seen as the way to go, normal and acceptable. It's not like I know a ton of divorcees with kids, but those I do know, or know of, are WAY more worried about their parenting than they are about finding their personal fulfillment or introducing the kids to the new girlfriend within days of first mentioning the word divorce.

I can't help wondering if this is Judy Blume's poor divorce skills, the poor divorce skills of an entire generation, or just this one story. Still, it's tearing at my soul. Which, I guess, is impressive in something with a reading level of 4.9

The Truth about Princesses, plus: a Public Opinion Poll

In spite of my total lack of self-control, I managed to check out one fewer book that I returned yesterday, bringing my total count of books out of the BPL system down to 11. This is really intimidating, but I'm doing the best I can with it. The YA summer reading shelf was calling to me.

I grabbed something there called Just Ella, by Margaret Peterson Haddix, and on page 2 I'm already a little disappointed. I love a good fairy tale retelling, and I liked this one--Cinderella is carried off to the palace by the prince and given lots of boring sewing and etiquette lessons, and realizes that the prince may be charming but he's not all that bright. Sounds great, right? Sadly, within the first five pages you can see that the story is going to depend heavily on nobility being snobbish.

Now, I am college educated and read a lot of fantasy, so I have a lot of ideas about being a princess. Before I had a son, I had long since decided that if I ever have a daughter, she's going to understand what it means to be a princess. It means sitting very still for long periods of time and being perfectly polite to everyone. It means not talking back or running around or doing anything fun or interesting most of the time. It means thinking of others--the whole kingdom, in fact--before you think of yourself. My daughter will only want to be a princess if she has an overdeveloped desire to serve her nation/family.

But that doesn't mean that nobles are snobs. The fact is, at the time when there were princesses and peasants, that was not only luxury you were born into, it was responsibility. You were in charge, and running a fiefdom is not going to be easier than running a business. You don't get rich running a lousy kingdom--a good king/queen/noble is going to be thoughtful, problem solving, hard working. Maybe they'll be a jerk, and likely they'll know their place, but in the real world of nobility and servants, there's no need to be a snob. Everyone's working together in the system, and it's no more snobbish to be a noble than it is to be the principal of a school. Do you think the principal turns up his nose if the cafeteria lady needs to talk to him? No, he converses with her, even though they both know that he's in charge.

So when, on page three, the etiquette instructor tells her that when she screams for a doctor to save the life of Lord Reston, she should scream, "His Excellencey Lord Reston is dying!" I was immediately turned off. I think I'll keep trying, because it looks like it could be fun. But I'm sick of the raw deal nobles get in fantasy. Of course, I'm equally sick of the idea that a nice or goodhearted noble doesn't want to be noble, and asks everyone to call them by their first name and doesn't stand on formality. The Queen can't act as a person, she has to act as a head of state, and so it is important that people be reminded that she's queen. Including her.

Wow. Who knew I had a rant in me on that subject? Okay, let's be quick on the public opinion poll: is it okay to go back and change a review? Not in the blog--I can do a new post if I want to change my opinion. But I was cruising through Goodreads recently and realized I only gave three stars to a book that, in retrospect, was better than that. At the time I read it, I didn't understand what the author was doing, but now that I've read more of her books, I get it and appreciate it. I wouldn't change my written review, except to include an addendum, but can I change my star rating after the fact? Discuss.

Edge of My Seat

I literally jumped out of my chair at the high point of The Queen of Attolia. The Thief, by Megan Whalen Turner, is a really good book and worth reading, but most especially so you can get to the sequel. I'm going to run right out for the last one, The King of Attolia. Circles within circles...

I'm determinedly whittling away at the library pile. I need to run to Malden tomorrow to return some things--why do I always pick Thursday for Malden, and then always pick 2:00 exactly somehow, which is when their weekly staff meeting closes the library? Duh. If I concentrate really hard, I can avoid that this time by planning ahead.

I've been adding a bunch of books I read a few years ago to my Goodreads account. I realized I only had about 175 books that I'd read in there, and when your to-read list is 150, that seems kind of pathetic. Fortunately, I've been keeping a reading journal for a while, and I did some backfilling. It's very satisfying, but it starting to feel a little indulgent. I did take the precaution of turning off notifications, so none of my Goodreads friends will get an email stating that I added 75 books and what they are.

Okay, I should have entitled this post "Miscellanea." Bedtime.

Sunny Happy Sunshine

I really love Mercedes Lackey and I don't understand how anyone else could possible. The writing is straightforward and serviceable. She makes every point explicitly and laboriously, enhanced not just by italics, but by emphatic italics. She writes dialect in the most atrocious way I've ever seen; my understanding is that good dialect is communicated 90% through word choice and only 10% through phonetic spelling. She uses phonetic spelling even on words where it does not make any difference. Every to is a t'.

But I think I mentioned recently, the main thing about her books is that everything is so neat. There's actually a passage in this one, Foundation (no relation to Asmiov's), that spells this out. Our main character, Mags, is trying to figure out why the Heralds go around being awesome heroes all the time, and his mentor (I'm not going to get into explaining Companions here; it's way too My Little Pony) says "We try to make things fair."

Mags protests that life isn't fair, and Dallen replies, "'Life isn't fair' is nothing but an excuse people make to justify bad things they do. But why shouldn't life be fair? What's keeping it from being fair? Those same cruel, mean, and evil people." This is said in all seriousness, and I think it's a main theme in her work: things are fair until someone makes them unfair, and it's up to the good guys to bring the fairness back. Nature's fairness.

This is so far off of the way the real world works that I hope nobody needs me to spell it out with words like "cancer" and "tornado." But almost all of her books believe this--that hard work always pays off. That the good guys always win. That plans come to fruition.

And not only fair, things are tidy. She's big on the details that make great worldbuilding, but her worlds actually run way better than the real world. I remember a behind the scenes feature about Star Trek that I saw once, where they showed that the futuristic stool the guy was sitting on was an apple crate with a futuristic cushion. That's what the real world is like, but her world is set with the fantasy world equivalent of futuristic stools made of as-yet-undiscovered alloys.

This sounds like hate, but it's really love. There's a beautiful, satisfying simplicity to her stories--the morality there is the morality of the world we all wished we lived in. And that's why I still read them.

That and the inside references for those of us who have read the rest of her books. I'm a sucker.

I will say, one of my favorite books of hers was The Black Swan, and one of the reasons, I realized today, is that it has the most complicated character--someone who falls in between good and evil, and discovers this. The path to redemption there is far more littered with obstacles--the bad guy is more formidable--than in any of her other books. But the palace kitchen is still run like clockwork.

No Spoilers, No Spoilers, No Spoilers....

I finished The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman, recently, and I loved it and think everyone should read it. But I have an issue with the very last chapter, the ending, that I can't discuss because I will spoil it for everyone. So I'm going to sit here silently on the subject and, in fact, tease you all with this little post.

I also just finished Deep and Dark and Dangerous, by Mary Downing Hahn, who wrote one of my fifth-grade-self's favorite books, Wait Till Helen Comes. Deep and Dark is pretty much the exact same book in many ways, though there are interesting lessons in the behavior of the adults in the book. They pretty much do not have their crap together, any of them. I guess this is often the way in a YA book--otherwise how would the kids be dealing with problems that are way beyond them? but the flawed adults in this book added a really nice layer of depth to what was otherwise an almost painfully predictable ghost story. I mean, really--if I was 13 I would totally have figured out the identity of the irritating neighbor who keeps showing up when there are no grown ups around.

I'd also like to point out that any member of the Babysitters' Club would have handled that situation so much better than the main character. Ali kept yelling at the annoying kid, buying into the dynamic she set up, instead of taking charge like a good babysitter does. Kristy Thomas would have wiped up the floor with that brat, make no mistake.

I'm reading The Queen of Attolia now, which is the sequel to The Thief, by Megan Whalen Turner. I've only read about 40 pages, so I can't really spoil it, can I? I mean, is it spoiling to tell something that happens in the first 40 pages? Because I really want to tell. I mean, it's Eugenides vs. the evil Queen, and something shocking happens, and....okay. I'm restraining. I don't even want to ruin the first sequence for you, the first five pages, which is a wicked chase scene and you should really read it, really.

Bragging

I hit my theoretical average of 8 books already this month. Then I went a little nutty and started 5 new books today. I was trying to decide which to read next, and apparently the answer is all of them.

More later.

Oh, but the Koontz book was a huge disappointment. Just bleck.

More Dean Koontz!

I'm cruising through this book, and while I won't call it astronomically bad, I'm finding it kind of a fascinating ride, in a car wreck kind of way.

First, I am being forced to recall Koontz's fascination with architecture. Most of his books take place in southern California, and he's always talking about Spanish styles, Tudors, neoclassical architecture, with everything surrounded by bougainvillea. I don't quite know what bougainvillea is, but I'm surprised it's possible to see the state of California under the blankets of it that populate Koontz books.

He is also definitely very excited about the research he does. When the guy has blood drawn, the author uses the technical name for the little tube that they take the sample in, as well as for the part of the syringe that it attaches to. I was able to glean what he was talking about pretty easily, but it's such a cute affectation, like an eighth grader using a fifty cent word that he just looked up. At another point, the guy has a little twitch in his eyelid (the girl thinks he's winking at her, which results in a meet-cute), and he uses the technical name for that, too. This one, though, he had to explain, resulting in the sentence, "...on the afternoon that she had met him, thirteen months previously, he had been afflicted with a stubborn case of myokymia, uncontrollable twitching of the eyelid." Learning the word myokymia, I'm sorry to say has not improved my life at all so far.

The other thing he's doing is going HEAVY with the Poe references. We've got a guy with a heart condition who's been hearing a weird tapping noise and having paranoid moments. It's finally come to the point where Koontz writes that he suspects someone of following him around "for the purpose of tormenting him with the rapping, the soft rapping, the soft rap-rap-rapping, only this and nothing more." Followed by a paragraph describing the lub-dub of his unhealthy heart in telltale detail.

Oh, oh, and also! All the trappings of wealth I was talking about earlier? It's one thing to have a private plane and call a limo service all the time. But every time the car service comes to take him to or from the airport, it sends a superstretch limousine. I mean, why? It's one guy, driving to the airport. He spends all the time staring out the window--it's not like he's into the champagne or taking a nap on the huge seats. I really don't think I'm supposed to find this showy wealth as creepy as I do.

On the plus side--the whole thing where I thought he was being paranoid? He was being paranoid. So maybe, at the end, the character will realize he's also throwing his money around conspicuously and having Edgar Allen Poe channeling moments. Maybe this is an intricately crafted, mind blowing roller coaster ride of a novel. Hehe. I'm pretty sure not, though.

The Grown-Up Books of My Childhood

You cannot tell me this is not the worst cover ever. Well, maybe not the worst EVER (I'm accepting additional nominees--with links--in the comments section), but really, just awful.

I read a lot of Dean Koontz when I was young. I remember in seventh grade, he was THE author to be reading--grown up books, novels, come on. Everyone had a copy of Whispers or Watchers or one of his other one-word sometimes-supernatural thrillers on top of their social studies book and notebook. Him and V.C. Andrews, baby; we were not YA readers.

I read almost everything he'd written on through high school, and then a couple of his newer ones in college. And somehow, I've moved on, and he keeps cranking these books out.

I think they're getting worse. It's always tough to go back to something you've read in childhood, but it's even harder to move on with it. Mercedes Lackey and I, for example, have grown apart. I loved her first books when I was a teenager; when I go back and read them now, I still love them, but partly in a nostalgic way. I'm a more critical reader, and they're simple books--satisfying in many ways, childish in many others. Her current books are much more complex and very different, and I have to admit I don't like them as much. She's retained her fondness for a firm grounding in fairness--seriously, her world is so fair that if you get rained on, you're likely to find a quarter in a puddle. I can't count her uses of "she would pay for that later," because anyone could do any physical feat--it's just really tiring. In her older books, this sense of fairness was simple and charming. In her newer ones, the world has to twist itself around to make things work out, and it's just weird.

But I'm talking about Dean Koontz. I just reread a few pages of Watchers, the one about the superintelligent dog. It's definitely still good. Maybe a little overly fond of lavishing you with the details that his research has uncovered on things like how to get a fake ID or how a vet's office works, but overall good and well-paced and charming.

But oh, Your Heart Belongs to Me. It's hard to explain--it's not as charming a story, but a puppy who can spell things with Scrabble tiles is hard to beat. No, it's more that the details, the characterizations, are supposed to be appealing to me, and are failing. He gives you these details about his super-rich main character--his elaborate garage, his swim trunk collection--that I think are supposed to endear me--doesn't he have good taste? Isn't he down to earth?--that actually do the exact opposite. A 12-car garage is not endearing, even if it's charmingly outfitted. Anyone who describes his swim trunks as having "a palm tree motif" is irritating. That's not how I'm supposed to feel.

I'm not yet sure if I'm supposed to think the main character's motivation is nonsensical. I mean, he says himself that he's being irrational, but in the way you apologize to a store clerk for bothering them when you're really requesting that they do their job, thankyouverymuch. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to follow him down this irrational path, or keep thinking that maybe he's going crazy. I hope the latter, because that's what I do think.

Also, almost no paragraph is more than two sentences long. There were four pages of two-sentence-and-under paragraphs in a row just a minute ago. No dialogue. Urgh.

We all remember the good old days, though, right? Lightning, that was great. Dark Rivers of the Heart. Twilight Eyes. Man, those were the days.

Chuck Palnichuck

I have never quite been able to keep Chuck Palahniuk's name quite straight, so I always think of him as Chuck Palnichuck. It's a little embarrassing, but there it is. It reminds me of my friend Becky, who used to make up normal names for all the characters when reading a Russian novel. This makes total sense to me--even in your head, don't you call them "R-somebody" and "the B guy" when you can't pronounce their names?

This is neither here nor there. I'm listening to Survivor as an audiobook, and I was really liking it till it got all Palnichuck on me. The only other book I've read of his was Fight Club, and I liked it. This book seemed somewhat different at first--not a lot, but enough. The story was interesting, and the weird, disaffected main character hadn't totally alienated me yet.

But now we've hit the point where he's reciting long, long lists of factoids that somehow relate to the particular nature of his disaffectation, and it's reminding me very much of the little indignities Tyler Durden inflicted on the world. And of all the violent chemical knowledge he had, and all of the gritty details that he likes to give to make a clear impression of the world. This staccato recitation of how to clean up the remnants of violence with common household substances is...well, it's tedious. It's so stylized, so self-aware. And it's so much more about the author than the narrator.

I guess that's what it comes down to. How much of a book should be about a book, and how much should it be about the author? Not that an author has to do something different every time. But if what I'm watching is the author create something, instead of a story unfold, I have to love the author. And I just don't love Palnichuck. Sorry.

Some Further Points on Food

I'm glad to hear that I don't sound like a reactionary crackpot when I talk about food politics, because I have a little more to say now that I've finished the book. I think I've figured out in a little more detail what's missing from the advice I'm reading, what the hurdle is.

Pollan and Kingsolver both have lots of great advice about what a healthy food culture looks like and how it works. What they have no suggestions for are the steps from here to there. They talk about our broken diet, culture, relationship with food, and I'm all with them, yes, yes. But it is MY culture, the one I've grown up in, and it's no easier to let go of a crappy culture than a healthy one. So yes, I should eat more whole foods and cook more myself. And Kingsolver even offers recipes and menus, which are incredibly useful even if I never use them, because they make the theory concrete. I've eaten out of the grocery store all my life--and I grew up on a vegetable farm--so I can barely picture the day to day of this diet they're espousing. But Animal, Vegetable, Miracle gives you enough examples that you can maybe grasp the concept.

Gardening is a great example. You should plant a garden. According to Pollan, with just a couple of hours a week of work you'll get in touch with your food supply, have access to great food, and have all the fun of gardening which is so much fun! I'm sorry, but did I mention that I grew up on a farm? If I was going to love gardening, believe me, I'd be there by now. My aunt Charli is always trying to convince me, not just that I could learn to love it, but that I DO love it and just don't know it yet. Because it's so innately fun and fulfilling. No, it's dirty and boring. And a couple of hours a week does not take into account the extra showers and laundry because of all the dirt. And the talk of fun does not take into account the work that needs doing even if it's going to rain all week, or be over 90 degrees every day, or if you're just insanely busy.

So yes, I know I should plant a garden. But the hurdles to me planting a garden are more than just 1) space, 2) seeds, 3) go for it! They're about how I live my life and how I want to live my life. The same is true for cooking. I wish I was someone who loved preparing elaborate meals made of fresh, delicious veggies. I wish that was how I longed to spend my free time. It isn't. So is this advice that I should do it anyway, spend my time doing something I don't love because it's good for me? Or is it that I should just love it? I hope it's the latter, but if it is, I need advice on how. And if I could just start enjoying things that are good for me, well, a whole lot of other hurdles would be removed.

Okay, I do sound a bit like a crackpot in this post. I think that the gardening thing got my dander up, because my life has been full of people who love to garden and cannot comprehend that someone might find it tedious. But I think my point is valid: we don't just have bad habits. It's been generations now--we have bad folkways. And they're a lot harder to change. Maybe the best I can do is raise my son differently. I'm just going to let all those gardeners in my life loose on him and see how he turns out. If he eats like my grandmother, he'll smell funny and live to be 95.

(With apologies to Charli and Grammy, who really, really love(d) their plants.)
Edited to clarify earlier that I do not espouse gardening to nongardeners. I am not that cruel.

I Choose To Miss the Point

So I'm reading In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollen, and it's very good. It gets at a lot of the same things that Animal, Vegetable, Miracle did, only through more of a journalist's lens--analysis of the history and science of the thing, rather than personal experience and memoir. I am familiar with the argument, but I do really like his writing style, and he makes some specific points that are interesting.

The idea, for example, that food is a complex system, and by trying to thing of it only biochemically, we're missing a lot of the point. Besides all the cultural and sensual things going on with eating, there is the simple fact that food is not a pile of nutrients, but a complex system. We don't have the capacity to fully understand it, so the rules we've created around it never seem to work.

In spite of all this interesting things I'm reading and learning about, I'm going to address this subject from a different point of view, one he hasn't yet looked at. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle had this problem, and until I get to the end and read his advice on how to eat, I won't know if he does, but I'm curious. This is the lack of direct, practical advice.

Now, it's all about advice. "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Good stuff. Even better: shop at the farmer's markets. Cook whole foods, not processed. These are useful tips. What they won't help me figure out, however, is how to do this without it taking over your entire life. When Barbara Kingsolver did it, it DID take over her life--they spend a lot of time canning, freezing, baking, farming. She's a bestselling author; I'm sure she has the time. Most of us don't.

The whole foods movement is, on some level, a feminist issue. In a lot of the families I know, the men do their share of the cooking, but let's be honest. In most of the households in the US, it's going to be the woman who adds baking bread, freezing vegetables, or any other food work to her list of things to do. And whole food is more work; making chicken stock vs. buying a box of broth? Rolling out any kind of dough, from pie to pasta? Even driving out of your way to pick up your food at the farm or the market, rather than the grocery store (where you still have to get shampoo and light bulbs)? All these things are going to add a lot of time to my already crowded week.

I would really like someone to sell me a more wholesome food lifestyle that leaves some room for the rest of my existing lifestyle. I'd even take an acknowledging nod in the direction of the things I do manage--getting my veggies from the farm, doing more of my shopping "around the edges" of the grocery store, eating out less.

What it comes down to is that the food culture in America needs to change, and that's going to have to be part of a bigger change, a reprioritization. And all I can offer right now, in my life, are baby steps. So--I made quiche tonight. Good for me!

Motherhood Is Kicking My Ass

When you're up at 3am because the baby is crying and you're trying to teach him to calm himself down, so you are only going in every five-ish minutes, so you don't want to go to sleep because getting up every five minutes for two hours is too brutal, so you're reading in bed at 3am--at those moments, you can be somewhat critical of a parenting memoir. That's why last night (technically this morning), I put down It Sucked and Then I Cried, by Heather Armstrong, and finished up Under the Jolly Roger, by L.A. Meyer. That was an awesome book about pirating, which you should read after you've finished the first two in the series, starting with Bloody Jack.

When I came back to It Sucked and Then I Cried this morning, after a short sleep and a shorter nap, I was not quite as ready to sell my beloved son for a pudding pop and a bottle of NyQuil. I read dooce.com, and I love Heather's writing (I feel that I can call her Heather, since I read her blog and that's what she calls herself). And I didn't mind at all that most of the content was from the blog--in fact, I appreciate the amount of work she put into making it come together in chapters instead of keeping it short, distinct essays.

She's hilarious, and a great storyteller/anecdotist. (My spellchecker is accepting that word, so I don't think I made it up.) I'm a little disappointed by the book, though, for a couple of reasons that I think are tied into the Rampaging Wakefulness I went through last night. Mostly, it comes down to this: I wish the book had plumbed a little deeper than the blog posts.

I think I wrote this summer about how I see blogging as a very specific style of writing. Hers are funny--even when she's talking about things that are important and difficult, there's a thread of funny that I don't know if she could lose if she tried, and I think that's great. But I found that the laughs that worked so well online kind of kept the book from coming together. The truth--emotional and factual--of a lot of the stories are hard to get at past the hyperbolic humor and caricatures.

That might be okay in another book. I didn't see the movie Life is Beautiful, but I suspect it's a similar thing--tragedy told through humor. The difference, though, is that we all know the tragedy there--nobody hasn't seen a dozen holocaust movies, nobody doesn't know the horror story. This is why the warmth and humor can be transcendant--it does something different with something familiar.

Her story, the "motherhood, especially early motherhood, can be painful and soul-wrenching" story, hasn't been told enough. I wanted to read that story, I wanted to hear the voice of this person saying, yes, it's that hard. And she says it, but then she giggles because she just said the word "hard," and I feel a little let down.

I think it came together for me in the chapter in which she enters the hospital, near the end of the book. I realized that each of the anecdotes, while told in a sequential and narrative way, is emotionally separate from the others. She says that she cried, threw things, felt a mess. But then she tells other anecdotes that don't have any real emotional weight either way, and you're not sure how this relates to either the glory or the horror that she's going through. When she goes to the hospital, it's almost a surprise, because you didn't feel the escalation coming throughout the story. She talks about her suffering, but the sense of it doesn't permeate it.

Maybe I just had very specific expectations, because I'm a new mom and I've been struggling. I don't have the illnesses that she has always struggled with, but this job is not easy, and sometimes the intensity of my feelings, the question of where my life went, the agony and the ecstasy--never forget the ecstasy, even when someone's peeing on you--is overwhelming. Heather's a great writer, and I was really hoping to read something here where someone wrapped her arms around these feelings without sentiment or dry academic language, but with humor and sympathy.

But she went a different way--this is a humorist's book about a serious topic. And it does that job well. It's just not the job I was expecting.

Verdict

If you lurve Marcus Flutie with the all-consuming lurve that most people devote to their handsome, charming, slightly nerdy dentists, then you should read Perfect Fifths. I've never been his #1FANgrrl, so whatever. There was way too much poetry in this book.

But, if you can read it in three hours, you can mostly skip the poetry (at least skim it). In that case, it might be worth it just to complete the series. I mean, it was only occasionally painful.

I guess what it comes down to is that I was never in this series for the love story, but for the coming of age story. There's pretty much none of that here, just the Great Romance. I am rarely driven by Great Romance.

And thus ends this adventure.

Still at Newark

I can't believe I only just realized that Megan McCafferty must have had an elite liberal arts education. It's the only place where you can come by what I have also just identified as this much postmodern use of language.

The shellfishness of selfishness. Intimidating intimations. Frankenskank. Interwenchions. This dissective use of language--let's not even get into how she constructs sentences, which I can't even pick out to quote--is why the word pomo freaks me out.

And yet, you'll notice I'm still reading. Hard.

Further Dispatches

Ugh, worse again. I don't think I could like anyone over 23 who gets that invested in haiku. Besides the fact that haiku full of clever wordplay is almost an oxymoron--it's supposed to be an image poem, just because you match their rhythm scheme doesn't make it a haiku.

Okay, I'm not actually pretentious enough to believe that. 5-7-5 for fun is fine. But please, Megan McCafferty. Stop. Being. So. Precious.

Sigh. JMLC, if anyone needs me to spoil it for them, I will. Also, I'll admit I'm finding it a fast read--you could skim it. I think the exposition was really irritating because they worked it in as though she was thinking about everything we might want to know about her life in the stretch of time we're following her.

It's a hell of a rollercoaster ride.

Dispatch from the Newark Airport

Okay, I still won't recommend Perfect Fifths yet, but it's slightly less painful another 50 pages in. Slightly. To be fair.

(For those of you who don't know or care about the book but do know and care about me: the characters are at the Newark Airport, not me. I'm at the dining room table.)

It Hurts My Soul

Sloppy Firsts was some good stuff. Megan McCafferty did something amazing and impressive with Jessica Darling, and she sustained it through four books. Not, alas, through five.

I'm trying really hard to read Perfect Fifths, the final Jessica Darling installment, and it's just not happening for me. In fact, it's dragging me down. The interesting thing is that it's told in the third person instead of the first, but uses the exact same voice as the first four books, all of which were in journal form.

This was a major mistake on her part. I understand that she wanted to include the Marcus parts, and doing those in third person would have been fine. But the thing about Jessica is that she's a hyper, emotional, hyperemotional drama queen. Reading things from her point of view is part sympathy, part watching-NASCAR-for-the-accidents fascination. We love her through and because of her weird super-intellectual pop-culture melancoly verbosity. But when it's a third person narrator--presumably the author--talking like that, WE HATE HER.

Hate hate hate. Jessica's having a really bad day in this book, fine. It's kind of her own fault (just get up in time to catch your freaking plane, how hard is it?), but if I was inside her head, I'd be watching her self-flagellate and could forgive her. From outside her head (and yeah, I get a peek at her thoughts, but it's not the same), I have to take up the whip, because man, someone has to talk some sense into this girl.

As for Marcus, he's never quite made sense, but in that way that the male love interest never quite makes sense in stories like this. Because he's so infuriating but so perfect, sigh. He's all Zen and stuff. I actually liked his character (not as a person but as a literary accomplishment) most in Fourth Comings, when we finally see some of his flaws--his drifting through life is not about really being above it all and grounded but unable to find true meaning. It's about thinking you're all that. Anyone that Zen at 24 is an ass.

I read a very interesting story once. It was an English translation of a Czech (if I recall correctly) horror/fantasy story, which basically follows the story of Cinderella, if Cinderella was a dim and unknowing mortal whose stepfamily was older and more powerful than she could possibly imagine. The stepsister, who is the heroine of this story, is virtually immortal, and is often accused by Cinderella of being vain and shallow. The stepsister observes that she spent centuries seeking truth in philosophy and natural science, trying to understand the meaning of things through study and deep thought. And now, millenia later, the only things that bring her pleasure, that get her through the day, are the small vanities: grooming herself. Eating fine foods. Small sensualities that, in the end, mean more than all the meaning mortals search for.

What I'm getting at is that the meditating 25 year old in your sophomore class might be less typical than you are, but it doesn't make him more profound. I'm not Marcus's biggest fan.

Trust

Trust is an weirdly important part of my relationship with a book. On an inanely literal level, that seems ironic when you're talking about fiction--I mean, they're lying to you, kid, that's what they do. But one of the problems with bad writing is that, once you realize that the author isn't going to be filling in all those inconvenient holes (inconsistencies, confusing bits, knowledge gaps), you start seeing every little problem coming from a mile away. When you trust an author to make it all work out, you often don't even notice these problems.

Real life is like that. When something unlikely happens, you don't assume that reality is coming apart. If you found a fish lying in the middle of your driveway, you would not assume that the end of the world was upon us, or that reality had ceased to make sense (I guess you might, but I wouldn't). You would assume that your neighbor's dog stole someone's dinner off the table and dropped it in your yard for some reason. Or that a teenager was vandalizing the neighborhood by throwing fish out of his car window. Maybe you couldn't even come up with an explanation, but you wouldn't doubt the fabric of reality based on this one misplaced fish.

If you trust an author, you can have that same experience--you believe there's an explanation, even if you don't know it yet. In a bad book, though, the possibility exists that no one's going to explain that fish very well. If a bad author needs a fish in your driveway, he'll put one there and not bother to give you an explanation. Or he'll give you one that you can't swallow (teenagers throwing fish out of their car windows is far more believable in real life than in fiction).

I'm reading a book right now, The Compass of the Soul, which is a sequel to something I read a few weeks ago, Beneath the Vaulted Hills. They really should not have been split into two books; because the first one did such a poor job standing on its own, I had come to completely distrust the author. Just this morning, though, one of the characters pointed out what I had considered to be a big hole--why on Earth is this other character following us on these life-threatening adventures? That whole "curiosity" thing is wearing pretty thin.

Seriously, this has changed my whole outlook on this book. Because there was no hint of skepticism about his motivations in the first book, I had assumed that I was supposed to buy the whole thing hook line and sinker. Now that someone's asked the question, a) I have a bunch of theories that I can't wait to develop (Brenda: I suspect RC is in league with the deacon!), and b) I now have a feeling that certain other things that seemed to be leading somewhere might actually be leading somewhere. And now I'm excited to find out.

So let this be a lesson: sequels are not the same as volumes of the same book. If I'm going to have to read the whole thing, I need to know that from the beginning!