Project Project Gutenberg Gutenberg

I am, as Brenda recently pointed out, EXTREMELY COMMITTED to free ebooks.  I will wait months on hold at the library; I will read things that hold only the most tenuous appeal to me; I will cross deserts and climb mountains.

But somehow, I've never made much use of Project Gutenberg.  The main problem is that it's an undiscovered country--the dense and unmapped terrain of classics, histories, and dry-titled tomes by writers I've never heard of, plus the (I'm sorry, but it's true) really basic, bare-bones, non-glossy interface...I've never been able to navigate it.  I see a list of authors, or book titles, with minimal information and my eyes start to cross.

This is why I'm so excited about The Project Gutenberg Project!  Some of my favorite bloggers are participating in this group blog project where they review and highlight cool books from Project Gutenberg.  On one hand, it's a really fascinating glimpse into what's in there, different periods of history, kinds of books I would never have thought to read, and I love reading the reviews just for themselves.

On the other hand, without the Project Project, I would never have found Bab, A Sub-Deb, by Mary Roberts Rinehart, which is KILLING ME with awesomeness.  (Note that the link in the text is to the free Kindle version, but the picture links to a $2 version, because of the cute cover.)

Now, I have to admit that I actually read the review of this on Aarti's blog itself; she hasn't cross-posted it to PGP yet. But the very existence of the project is the reason that this book--and the author, who I can already tell you I'm going to read more of--are even on my radar.  I should also caution you that Bab narrates the stories here in the form of themes that she's writing at her boarding school, and her spelling is absolutely atrocious.  I thought it would be unbearable, but it very quickly became absolutely darling, and it's all very readable.

Bab is about 17, and her older sister is a debutante, while Bab is stuck attending parties with the schoolroom set.  This is cosmically unfair, and her determination to set this injustice to rights gets her into scrapes.  That's the only word for it.  In the first story, she makes up a boyfriend to bother her mother.  But the story snowballs, and suddenly there's a young man at the party who is going by the name that she made up and declaring for her hand to her father.  What's a not-yet-debutante to do?

If Anne of Green Gables was spoiled rotten and boy crazy, this would be her book.  That sounds horrible, though, doesn't it?  If you crossed Scarlett O'Hara with basically any L.M. Montgomery heroine, you would have Bab--determined to have what she wants, really trying to be good, clever with a plan in the thick of things but maybe without the long view of a situation.

She sounds kind of insufferable when I say this, but she's not.  She means no one any ill--it's just that she wants a fur muff and to have some fun, and she really can't figure out why she shouldn't have them.  And when you're in the middle of the book, neither can the reader.  "I am very determined and fixed in my ways, and with me to decide to do a thing is to decide to do it."  The solemn dignity this child brings to bear is absolutely charming.

So thank you, Aarti and PGP, for bringing this bright spot into my reading day.  It is exactly what I need to counterbalance the rather craptastic criminal profiling book that I find myself not putting down for some reason.  And did I mention--FREE!

True Crime Trash

I'm not a huge true crime fan--not really one at all, in fact--but I watch my share of police procedurals, and I have a soft spot for Criminal Minds, which is not a fabulous show, but I like the psychology aspect.  It's clever--not the show, but the idea of profiling.

Sometimes I like to read the memoirs of FBI profilers: My Life Hunting Serial Killer types of books.  When one popped up at the library as an ebook, I jumped on the wait list.  It's actually called The Profiler: My Life Hunting Serial Killers, by Pat Brown, so I know that she's able to write a clear title.  Or at least, the ghostwriter is; I don't hold a ghostwriter against her, though--writing a craft, and if your craft is hunting serial killers, there's no reason to assume you can construct a coherent narrative.  So hats off to Bob Andelman.

At the beginning I mostly called it readable.  The first chapter was pretty good, actually--she talks about being a stay at home mom and getting a weird vibe off a student renting a room in her house at the same time that a murder takes place in her neighborhood.  The cops didn't believe her.  Her interest turned to profiling.

Then, in the second chapter, she backtracks to describe her life.  This is the chapter where I started to kind of dislike her. There's nothing wrong with the actual course of her life as she describes it, but the way she talks about it is kind of dismissive of everyone else.  She went to three or four different colleges and community colleges, but nothing held her interest.  (Okay, kind of ADHD, but that's not a character flaw; she's looking for her place in life).  Then she gets married and becomes a stay at home mom, and thrives.  This is kind of wonderful.  She homeschools her kids, they adopt their third--all lovely. 

Except, when she's describing her decision to homeschool, she talks about sitting in a public school classroom for a while and leaving in disgust at the chaos.  When she adopts a six-year-old and is told that he has a learning disorder, she scoffs (I'm pretty sure that was her word--scoffs) at the people who tell her this, and teaches him to read.  She cosleeps, breastfeeds till they're past two, et cetera--great!  I know lots of people who do these things!  But she talks about them like, I don't know what all you crappy parents out there are doing, but this just felt natural to me.  She refers to having a kid sleep in their own crib as shoving them in a box by themselves. 

So yeah, I kind of hated her even before she started profiling.  But then we get into how she became a profiler; she became obsessed with the unsolved case in her neighborhood and her ex-tenant who she's certain did it.  She's got a very convincing case--maybe not for a court of law, but enough that the cops should have been all over it.  She was dismissed as an hysterical housewife, which I'm sure must have rankled.  From many years later, she tells about what she'd learned about the investigation--a jurisdiction war that put inexperienced cops on the job, a victim's family with enough political ties to put pressure on the DA to close the case, and a local suicide of a troubled man that coincided with the murder--that led to the poor police work.  But she doesn't talk about these things with the "we do our best" inevitability of the seasoned police officer, or with the "we can do better!" enthusiasm of an Atul Gawande of crime.  Instead, she talks with the shrill, "won't somebody think of the children?" hysteria of a nervous housewife.

I hate to sound so dismissive.  It's just that she doesn't sound very professional.  She sounds very anti-cops.  I'm curious how the rest of the book will play out.  Because the next part is where she talks about teaching herself to be a profiler, essentially by reading hundreds of books on profiling and then calling herself a profiler.  Instead of an investigator, or something--it's clear that she wanted to be a profiler, if only from the number of times she says the word profiler on every page.  It's not that she wanted to solve crimes, help victims, investigate, etc.  She specifically DIDN'T want to study criminal justice or forensics, work her way up through an organization, etc.  She wanted to be a profiler, and so she called herself a profiler and set up shop.

Next we'll see how it worked.  I get the impression she hooked up with the press.  I kind of anti-recommend this book, but it's fascinating reading in a train-wreck kind of way.  I mean, the last negative review I wrote was of a book that I slogged through out of duty.  This one I'm reading with shameful avarice, the way you watch a marathon of America's Next Top Model, or Dance Moms.  That's how I feel about this book; I don't recommend it, but I can't look away.

Book Club: So Close!

I thought the worst kind of book club is when you have a meeting that goes very badly, but it turns out that's the second worst kind.  The worst kind is when you read a really great book that you really want to talk about and then no one is able to get together for a meeting.  I want to talk about it!

The book is The Rules of Civility, by Amor Towles. You won't find a lot in the blurbs about the plot, which is as it should be--it's not a book about action and twists, but you never really know quite what will happen, and that's a big part of the appeal.  I'll tell you a little bit more, but first I want to warn you--at the end of this post, I'm going to put some discussion questions that I was going to ask my book club.  They're very spoilery, so you should not read all the way through if you're ever going to read the book.

First the plot, though.  The story follows the narrator, Katey, for a year--1938, to be precise.  At the beginning, on New Year's Eve, she and her boardinghouse roommate, Eve, meet Tinker Gray (I keep wanting to say Tinker Bell, not because of the Peter Pan character, oddly enough, but because of Stringer Bell from The Wire).  Tinker is a well-to-do banker, and their new-acquaintance banter reveals that he's feeling stuck in a rut.  This is the beginning of a friendship between the three that will lead all kinds of places, bring all kinds of new people into Katey's life, and reveal a lot of the world to her.  It's a book that is very much about Manhattan, and about being a woman in the first half of the century.  It's about the end of the Depression, and about class and money and charm.

One of my favorite things about the book is that Katey feels like a mystery to us, even though the story is told in the first person, and even though we have plenty of information about her.  Her life before the story begins is told in bits and pieces, the way you learn about anybody's life--where she grew up, the bones of her family structure, anecdotes here and there that fill things out.  I love that you spend the book getting to know everyone as Katey does, but also getting to know Katey.

Okay, book club questions coming up in a second.  First, to fill space, I'll say that this book reminded me of watching all my favorite old movies--All About Eve, Stage Door, Laura, and The Philadelphia Story.  I wish I could read it again.

But here are the questions.  Total spoilers, I warn you.  But fellow book clubbers, if you want to answer, you totally should. 

1) Did Tinker have to leave everything behind to redeem himself?  I mean, he was a banker, right?  Was the all-or-nothing choice that he makes at the end because he, personally, psychologically had to get away, or because it was really the only thing that could be done, or because that was the right life for him all along?

2) What do you think of Eve's disappearing act? She's such a huge part of the first half of the book, but she's also so different from Katey--did her departure make her feel less like a real person, or just less like Katey's close friend?  I thought it was really significant that she came from money--what she and Katey admire and are looking for is so different, even if neither of them cares about money.

3) What do you think of Wallace, Dickey, and Tate?  I think it's interesting how Katey triangulates herself around these three men in the later parts of the book.  She's looking for herself, but why does it seem like the men in her life are where she orients herself?  There are plenty of women--Eve, Bitsy, Anne--but the men are so much more reflective of where she is.  Is that because of her self-possession?  Her career-mindedness?  Or just because she's not all about love and romance?  Not that the other women appear to be.  Can't quite get a handle on this one.

4) Did you see Tinker's revelation coming?  What did you think of it, and of Katey's reaction to it?  I actually wasn't that surprised--I thought something like that near the beginning of the book--but my feelings about it really changed once Katey reacted to it.  I mean, I wasn't that surprised but I hadn't really thought about what it said about his character, but as soon as Katey had a reaction, my response was filtered through her reaction.

If you've read the book, I hope you read the questions, and if you do, I'd love it if you responded.  I'm really dying to talk to someone about this--to the point where I asked my husband (who hasn't read it) these questions yesterday and he made a valiant effort at answering.  (Eve represents innocence, and Dickey is the serpent in the Garden of Eden, in case you were wondering.)  Really, if you have any thoughts at all, please do comment.  Thank you, virtual book clubbers!

Observational Humor

One of my favorite pastimes is poking around the library's ebooks website to see what's new.  If you check frequently, you can get the books before the waitlists get too long.  The problem is that they usually acquire in batches, and these batches are often thematic and not particularly interesting.  It makes you wonder what kinds of requests the librarians got to put in these orders, or if the ebooks come in packages.  You'll get the entire back catalog of a certain author (Ann Perry or Jude Deveraux), or a whole slew of books on spicing up your love life, studying for the GRE, or dealing with hard-to-manage coworkers.  This month, we got romance.

I'm not a very big romance reader, but Sarah seems to go on these binges, and it kind of convinced me to pick one up.  I've got a reviewer copy of something called Almost a Scandal, which is about a woman who disguises herself as a man to join the Navy and falls in love.  I'm a sucker for one of those--can't wait to see what happens. 

In my opinion, though, romance novels are like wedding dresses.  Any individual one looks fine close up, but when you fill a room with them and look around at that room, it's the tackiest thing you ever saw.  Observe:

Okay, so a little sultry, but it's just a book.  But then you get a run of them:



Looked at collectively, they're not delicate beadwork and embroidery.  They're bedazzled polyester.  And that's just the images--look at the titles.  Bad Boys in Kilts; Lady Drusilla's Road to Ruin; Sheikh Without A Heart (which I'm pretty sure is spelled wrong).  Maid for Him. Assassins in Love.  I can't stop--they're all like this!

A few notes on more general themes that I  noticed: highlanders; pectorals; the Amish; ranchers; ranchers holding babies; business executives holding babies; more Amish.

And do you want to know the worst part?  In going back to look up titles for this post, I reread the blurb and found myself--yes, you guessed it--putting a hold on Lady Drusilla's Road to Ruin.  And I kind of can't wait till it comes in.  Curses!

One of THOSE Books

Okay, as promised, my negative review of Does This Church Make Me Look Fat? by Rhoda Janzen.  Let's just get that right out there--I'm not enjoying this book.

So I have a thing for spiritual memoirs, especially of a certain sort.  I'm particularly drawn to the ones that hint at the possibility that the author might be able to explain to me how faith works.  Because I'm fascinated by religion, read a lot about religion, and am very drawn to a lot of the qualities of religious life--community, conscious living, bringing abstract values in line with day to day life--but I just don't understand how to believe in what is essentially a mythology.  Abstract ideas of God, sure, but for Jesus, miracles, and so on, I have no context.

So I'm always reading spiritual memoirs, especially by converts, intellectuals, and people who share my values.  Anne Lamott is a great example of the latter--she's very Christian, but also very liberal, and she does the best job of any modern writer in explaining to me how her relationship with God works and makes sense.  She doesn't spend a lot of time on the notion of the supernatural, just the spiritual.  Lauren Winner is an intellectual, and the accumulation of quotations, anecdotes, and minutia with which she populates her books at least bring an academic, footnoted heft to the argument.  Janzen is a convert; I was hoping she'd be another good example.

But really, she's only kind of a convert; she was raised in the Mennonite church, spent about 30 years as a liberal intellectual East coast snob of an English professor and poet, and then converted to some sort of Pentecostal church--whether it was when she started dating her new boyfriend or when she was diagnosed with breast cancer four months later is a little vague.

In fact, let's start here with the problems in this book.  Let's not start with the theology or rational arguments or her attitude--let's start with the very bare problem of her really patched-together writing style.  I can't follow the timeline to save my life.  I understand that the chapters are organized thematically and that the sections on gratitude and tithing and breast cancer and aging parents all overlap in various ways.  But even within a chapter, it's very unclear when she started tithing vs. when she was cured of cancer, or when she got married vs. when her fiance/husband tried to teach her to shoot a gun.

There are also a LOT of anecdotes that are vaguely amusing but not related to what she's getting at.  Using anecdotes like parables is a tried and true way to talk about faith, construct a memoir, or just fill pages of a book (ding ding ding!), but these anecdotes are not at all thematically related to any of the things that are supposedly the point of the book.  In fact, they are often topically related without being thematically related.  She'll tell a story about a really great shopping trip she once went on where she bought some fabulous shoes as a segue into a story about going to church in which she happens to be wearing those shoes.  The story has nothing to do with shoes, shopping, materialism, or anything remotely related, but she remembered the shoes and so told the whole story because she thought it was an amusing anecdote.  Wasn't.

Okay, so that's the reason I don't think it's terribly well-written.  And this post is already super-long.  But I'd like to spend some time on why I don't like the narrator.  We'll start with that racist quote from the book that I posted about before.  We'll move on to some of the things she realized about herself in the discussion of tithing.

She was amazed at how tithing made her feel more relaxed about  money, made her feel like she had more even though, by definition, she had less.  The example she gives is of a time when a church acquaintance--a newly married 20-year-old woman with a toddler--mentioned that her family of three slept in a single bed and wasn't getting much rest.  It just so happened that our narrator had just moved in with her new husband and so had a bunch of extra furniture to get rid of.  She shocked herself by deciding to give it to these people instead of donating it to Goodwill, which would have given her a tax deduction.

Jesus Christ, you have a bed you need to get rid of an a bedless person enters your life, and you are stunned at your own generosity when you feel the urge to give her this bed?  What kind of a person are you?  I'll tell you what kind--the kind of person who is really amazed by her own tolerance at hanging around with people who are so much less intellectual than she is.  She's so proud of the fact that her boyfriend/husband isn't an academic, thinks Sylvia Plath was kind of a whiner, and hasn't read any literature.  He's a big, muscled studly man.  Isn't she wild marrying him?

There's all kinds of weird, magical, crappy theology (when you tithe, extra money magically shows up, like the secret!  When you convert, your breast cancer is cured between one MRI and the next, as if by magic).  It's like The Secret.  She's always having very heavy feelings at important moments; she's always feeling moved to do something and then finding out her husband was moved--CLEARLY by God--to do the exact same thing!  Like, OMG, I was just thinking that!  LOL.

Let's see, healing, giving, magic, racist, confusing, not funny.  Was there anything else?  Oh, yes, I  didn't want to forget to mention her discussion near the beginning of the book about how one of the things that kept her away from church (especially the Pentecostal church she eventually joined) was their position on a lot of social issues, like gay marriage (well, really, gay people in general) and ordination of women.  But then she decided to see what they had to offer without judging.  She never mentions the issue again.  Does she continue to hold this concern?  Or does she realize they've been right all along that gay people will burn in hell?  Oh, who knows--not relevant to the narrative, right?

Is that enough?  I mean, this is clearly enough.  But I've been suffering through this because I wanted to talk about it, so I need to make sure it all gets out there. No, I think we've hit the high points.  There's definitely more, but there's no need to get further into the nitty gritty.

I do want to point out, though, that this is one of the books that I have a review copy of.  Now I have to go post this review on NetGalley for the publisher to look at if they want.  I'm a little afraid big goon-types are going to show up at my door tomorrow night.  If they come looking for me, tell them I'm at the library, checking out something by someone who's been dead 100 years.

Not To Get Greedy

The whole theme of this blog is greed, avarice, and book gluttony, so I don't know why I keep pretending that I can protect myself from this problem.  The library has been a big problem lately, but there's a new player in the gluttony game.

I've recently started getting a few books from NetGalley, which is a service that allows reviewers (including bloggers) to request electronic advanced reader copies of upcoming books directly from publishers.  For a while there I couldn't figure out the system and wasn't really using it, but more recently I've made a few requests and gotten some ARCs.  Code Name Verity was the first one, actually, and I loved that book inside out.  Since then, I went a little wild with the requests, and now I've got a new glut to handle.

There are a few problems with this.  First, while there's no official obligation to read and review them, there's a personal obligation.  They're trusting me to behave like a real reviewer, and that means reading the books promptly.  From a more self-centered angle, people who post reviews are more likely to get approved for future copies.

But the real reason this glut is a problem is this: I rarely pick a book based solely on its cover and blurb.  Usually there's a personal recommendation, a preference for the author, and/or the ability to skim a few pages.  Here, there's almost nothing--the cover, the blurb, possibly some info about the author's other work.  Some of the publishers are mainstream, others are niche.  There's no way to know what you're getting into.

And I got into some baddish places.  In my desperate quest for something to fill the need left by Sarah Tolerance, I grabbed a Regency mystery called Hawkwood.  I realized pretty quickly that it was not a book for me.  I won't say it's a bad book--it might be, it's a bit hard for me to tell--but it was just not great.  The writing was a bit cliched.  The plot was a bit hard to grasp.  The characters were a bit pat.  It was all just a bit blah to me. 

So: do I could that paragraph as a review and post it to NetGalley?

You see my problem.  I'm clearly not going to write a dishonest review just to be nice.  I like to think that, even if a good friend wrote a book, I'd at least abstain from reviewing it before writing a fake rave.  (Or go with the classic "As readable as Tolkein!" which an unnamed author provided as a blurb for a friend's book, keeping his dislike for Tolkein a secret.)  But it seems kind of wrong to write a rant about how bad--or even how mediocre--a book is.  I guess I kind of blame myself for choosing poorly.

Anyway, I've spent a week kind of agonizing about it, trying to write this post, but I think I've gotten past that.  Mostly this just means that I'm just over my initial flush of flatter at being acknowledged as a reviewer by NetGalley.  I've got plenty to read without claiming random stuff there.  And I'm still working my way through three or four books I got from them.  There's another one that I'm hating, but that one is worth a post to itself--THAT'S a negative review I'm going to write, just because I read the author's previous book from the library, and I have a reasonable amount invested in spiritual memoirs, so I want to get it right.

So: goodbye, Hawkwood.  I appreciate that the circumstances surrounding your presence in my Kindle made me think, even if the characters, plot, setting, and language did not.  I move on with a free heart and wish you all the best in your future endeavors.

Ad Nauseum

Have I mentioned my feelings about teen romance before?  Because I feel like I rant about it all the time. 
I think of myself as a YA reader, but--God, this is depressing to write--the older I get, the less patience I have with it.  I don't mind this very much, except that I think I'm in a period of growing pains, where I can't tell from a book description or a sample whether it's going to be a pleasure to read or annoy the hell out of me.

Case in point: The Catastrophic History of You and Me. While I realize that it's a love story, the whole sense that the WHOLE WORLD depends on this TRUE LOVE between these two sixteen year olds just exhausts me.  At least, in this book, it's not literally the whole world--if you look at books like Matched and Delirium, you'd think the actual fate of the actual world was in the balance.  But here, it's just life or death for the young lovers.  No biggie, right?

I couldn't finish it. Bree has died of a broken heart--apparently there are X-rays to prove it.  This demonstrates to me a lack of perspective on the part of this 16-year-old.  And even if she learned perspective by the end, I wasn't ready to spend my precious reading hours watching her get there.  She's hanging out with a hot guy in the afterlife/pizza joint, haunting her family and friends, maybe messing with the guy she loved so much who broke up with her.  But I'm sorry--your high school boyfriend not loving you forever is not life or death, and there is no level on which I can even pretend that anymore. 

But then there was The Fault In Our Stars.  My faith has been restored by this book.  There is life and death here--the teenaged characters all have cancer--and the love story is the absolute center of this book, and it still manages to be perceptive and sad and funny.  The teenagers are all overly educated and overly articulate, but you can buy that from kids who have spent most of their lives around adults, reading, resting, and thinking about the meaning of life.

I may no longer be as moved by the problems of youth, but I have a new appreciation for books that recognize that young people are also people, and treat them like that.  Catastrophic History is an ABC Family show of a book. (In my day it would have been a WB show. Yes, I'm a codger.)  Stars is a really good prime time drama.  Maybe by Aaron Sorkin, directed by Stephen Spielberg doing a rare stint in contemporary YA television.

My analogy is going off the rails.  It's okay--I'm out of blogging practice.  I'll get back on the wagon, I promise!

Someone Else's Blog

Cultural Literacy Rant over at Excavating the Relic.

I thought she made some very interesting points.  I've always thought that there's a powerful history component to high school English, but it's definitely focused  passing The Canon on to the next generation.  You get critical tools along the way, but it really leads you to believe that those tools are only for use on The Canon.  It wasn't till college that I really learned a lot about how to approach any kind of art/performance/media with an eye toward how it's constructed, and I still wish I was better at it.

Getting This Out There

I'm in the middle of writing a post about the dark side of Advance Reader Copies and my first struggles with the moral and ethical complexities of them.  But I had to get this out there, because it's so awful that I can't seem to turn the page till I share it.

Remember Mennonite In a Little Black Dress?  It's a memoir by Rhoda Janzen, about leaving her liberal academic secular lifestyle behind to live with her Mennonite parents for a while after being injured in a car accident in the same week her husband leaves her.  I read it a while ago, and it was pretty good, particularly as a going-back-to-the-family memoir.

So I was thrilled to get an advance copy of Does This Church Make Me Look Fat?, the author's next memoir.  It threw me off a little at the beginning, because she starts with some blanket statements about her own faith that seem to pretty directly contradict the impressions given (if not outright statements made) in the first book.  But I'm willing to give it a try--I enjoy spiritual memoirs, and if that's the direction she's heading in, I'm willing to follow her.

But right up front, when she accompanies her boyfriend to a Pentecostal church service, there is this scene:

One Indian dude--pardon me, one representative of the First Nations--wandered up to the altar and did a spirit-led interpretive dance.  I later learned that his name was Allen, but I preferred to think of him as Dances on Shrooms.

Now, I'm looking past her metaphorically raised eyebrow at the behavior of these folks in church--this is part of a passage about people running around, shouting, and dancing in the service.  But does anyone else think this passage is just a TEENY bit racist?  From her ironic "politically correct" reference to First Nations to the cheap joke about Native American names--I mean, I'm not that easily offended, but I am really much less willing to follow this author wherever she's going at this point. 

I mean, I know I read a lot of Yo, Is This Racist (hint: the answer is usually yes), but I'm not wrong, right?  This is not cool. 

Which brings me back to the ethical conundrum of review copies, which I'll get to in an upcoming post.  Assuming I can ever get my thoughts in order.  Any readers with opinions on this, or who have written or read posts on the subject, feel free to comment with advice or links.  I'm floundering a bit.

ps. I think I mentioned this, but to be clear: I got an advanced review copy of Does This Church Make Me Look Fat? from the publisher.

The Pudding and the Terrier

That's right, kids--let's talk about Yorkshire!

The other day I was reading All Creatures Great and Small, and I realized the author was talking about a mountain range whose existence I had only recently learned of, the Pennines.  They appear to stretch almost half the length of the country--how had I never heard of them until I read Code Name Verity? 

Especially because this is not all the time I've spent in Yorkshire.  I remember walking around the house doing my best imitation of the Yorkshire dialect when I was about ten years old, after my fifth or sixth reading of The Secret Garden.  In fact, when I even think about that book, I have a hard time not calling people thee and tha, and it is never impossible that I'm going to walk up to my husband and say, "Canna tha dress thysen?" like Martha does to Mary when she learns that Mary's nursemaid dressed her.  You know, just because.


So: The Secret Garden.  Here is where I learned about moors, and Yorkshire accents.  And for a long time that was it, until, like everyone else (including Mr. Bates), I fell in love with Anna, the head housemaid at Downton Abbey.  Downton, of course, is in the North Riding of Yorkshire (because Yorkshire is divided into ridings, don't you know).  And Downton is, of course, graceful and beautiful and English, and etc. 

But Anglophilia is not a particularly unusual or special obsession--I'm not even close to the most passionate practitioner of my own acquaintance.  But then, as so often happens, things began to pile up.

First, of course, Code Name Verity, with its loving detail of Maggie's childhood, of the airfields and the war effort, of flying over the Pennines during the blackout and the Blitz.  And somehow, at the same time, James Herriot's veterinary career began in the fictional town of Darrowby, which, according to Wikipedia, is based on a place called Thirsk.  I can only imagine that, if I took a vacation to Thirsk, I would be able to take a pint at a pub with James Herriot's picture on the wall, in much the same way that you can have a drink at Cheers in Boston.

It seems like I already love the north of England, and I know almost nothing about it.  I know that it's close to Scotland, which is somewhere I'd like to go.  I know that a lot of my favorite British actors have northern accents.  I know that Daughters of the North is a fascinating novel that I've just started reading.  I like to imagine I know what it would be like to go there; I imagine that Yorkshire is what I picture when I picture England.  Look at that photo; look at Downton Abbey.  Listen to Dickon tell Mary, "tha munnot lose no time." 

I love Yorkshire, and someday I'll go there.  Let's call that a resolution.

Dear Bloggary

I've missed you in the days since I've been gone!  So much to tell, and yet so little.  I've had all these little thoughts that I've meant to post, but no time at all--and now is no exception, since my power cord is on my desk at work and I'm a ticking time bomb here.

I'm hip-deep in State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett, which is quite interesting.  I thought about "wonderful" or "entertaining," but neither of those words really describes it (and besides, isn't "wonderful" a little punny?).  It's meticulous and dreamy and all about being poised and not quite knowing what to do.  Things are happening half a world away, in a place where you don't speak the language, up the river in the jungle.  The world is not quite as sensible as it seems.

Being a book whose plot revolves entirely around the idea of a cult of personality and a character whose sheer magnetism leaves those around her inadequate and confused in her wake, it's interesting that I wouldn't call the book a character study at all.  The characters are realistically drawn and very well-portrayed, but in the artless way of true talent.  This is not a book about observing one individual person as she exists distinct from the rest of humanity.  It's more about the states (ha! title again!) that people experience.  It's not about Karen, it's about grief.  It's not about Marina, it's about inertia.  It's not about Dr. Swenson, it's about ambition and focus and all that that excludes.

I want to be more detailed, but Mike's keyboard is tiny and some of his keys feel like they're in the wrong place.  (Fun fact: my typing was timed at about 86 words per minute today.)  I'll have more to say as I get deeper into the book--as soon as we get into the actual jungle I'm sure the humidity alone will cause me to have strong opinions that I need to shout from the rooftops.  Books with intense weather patterns always confuse my internal thermostat.  And it's raining!  So Brazilian!

For My Review

So I have this copy of Elizabeth Wein's Code Name Verity that I got for review.  It's being read by all the bloggers right now, so I'm not ahead of the curve or anything, but it's also really, really wonderful, so I'm excited to get to be part of the chorus.

I'm afraid I'm intimidated by others' reviews, but I've been putting off writing this post because I really just want to keep reading the book all the time.  I sat down to write about it right around the halfway point, at which point I was enthralled.  I actually wrote the sentence, "But everyone says that something mind-blowing is about to happen."  And then I kept reading and my mind was blown, and I haven't put it down.

You know, mind-blowing isn't really the right description--it's misleading you into thinking that no, you're not really in World War II France, you're in a mental hospital on the moon and dude, it's all imaginary!  But no, the story is very much grounded in its time and place, and it's frantic and dreamy with the energy and strangeness of a world at war.

In this world, a shopkeeper's daughter whose grandfather taught her to love engines might become best friends with a sophisticated daughter of a noble Scottish house, whose name is shared by royalty.  These women might train together and find their completely opposing natures to be complementary, and be able to bolster each other up when the war is hard on each of them.  A girl might become a pilot, an aristocrat a spy, and those language classes you took in college might actually come in handy.

Our narrator has been captured by the Nazis, and she has been tortured into writing a confession.  She writes the story of a young woman named Maggie and her piloting career with the British Air Force, relating all the details she can remember of her childhood, training, and meeting her unlikely aristocratic best friend.  The fear and horror of a Nazi prison are fenced out by happy memories of the two of them becoming friends during wartime.

And then, as everyone says, there is a shift in the middle of the book.  Instead of the prisoner's first person account, we have a different viewpoint, and a whole new set of information that changes, elaborates on, and even rewrites the first part.  It's a completely separate story, and yet the same story, and yet a complementary story that weaves together a better picture of the truth than either of the narratives could have given.

And that's all I'll say about that.  What's amazing, though, is that no matter how thrilling the spy story is--and let me tell you, it's pretty thrilling--what's just knocking me over is the friendship between these two women.  Again, I'm not the first to make this observation, but the emotional detail that shines through in this book is just astounding.  There's no elaborate telling, no gushing rhapsodies about how much the two love each other.  They just DO--they're each in their role, playing their part, but they support each other and need each other and love each other in a million small ways that add up so quickly.

The "opposites attract" friendship is pretty common in literature--and in real life, I suppose.  The plain one and the pretty one, the smart one and the funny one, the serious one and the loud one.  But there are no stereotypes like this for Maddie and her friend.  They complement each other in absolutely essential ways--experts at people and machines, composure and sincerity, simplicity and complexity, thought and emotion.  But they trade off--is Maddie the emotional one, or the clear thinker?  Is she deceptively simple, or elusively complex?  Like real people, they can't be pinned down, but they play off each other in the most interesting, thoughtful ways.

I'm over-intellectualizing this experience, though.  Really, this is about reading the book and oh my god, what happens next?!  I do caution you, one of my pet peeves makes a minor appearance, which is a novel that is written in the form of a letter or someone's actual writing, but reads very much like a literary novel.  That bothered me for about five pages, before I came to understand the character who was doing the writing.  After that, it was a breezy pleasure to follow her on her elliptical story through wartime England.

I suppose the Nazi commandant felt the same way. And how often do you say that about your reaction to something?  I'm loving this book--you really should read it.

(Note: I was provided with a complementary copy of the book for review.)

On Fire

I mentioned that I'm reading The Shape of Desire, by Sharon Shinn.  I'm almost done, and I'd say this is probably a B-list Shinn book, but that's not an anti-recommendation.  I think her real-world-based books tend to be a little less rich, a little less encompassing than her books set in other worlds, like Samaria or the world of The Safe-Keeper's Secret.

I'd call this a domestic fantasy, actually.  It's about the life of a woman named Maria, an accountant in St. Louis.  The book revolves around the fact that her boyfriend of many years--her lover, her life partner--is a shape shifter.  His transformations have a pattern, which he can't control, and he's out of her life more often than she's in it.  There's a plot, a structure, a mystery, and some tension, but really, this is a story about being a strong, independent woman who is so passionately in love with someone that her life is shaped around him, even when that is hard and unsatisfying.

It's also a story about secrets, and how we keep them and why.  And it's about the ugly things we put up with and do for love.  These themes are a bit heavy-handed sometimes--the battered wife coworker, the office gossip about a secret affair--but the characters aren't heavy-handed at all, and I think that's what makes the book.

Maria's responses to the things that happen are familiar and understandable, but they're not cliche.  People who love each other have arguments that don't ominously foreshadow something; people who admire their friends are also annoyed by them; people who are keeping secrets carefully tell them, and then regret their moment of weakness.   The breadth of believable experience here gives a texture to the story that fiction doesn't always get as it moves quickly from one event to another or lingers over lavish descriptions.

I think the most intriguing thing about this book is the extent to which it feels to me like it was written as a response to Twilight.  I have no idea if this is true (and, for the record, I read only the first book in that series and really didn't love it)--maybe it's a whole "In Love With a Monster" genre. It really feels like Shinn sat down to write about what life would really be like if you loved someone who was not fully human.  How would his other life affect you?  How would you live in the world on a day to day basis?  Would you be lonely?  Scared?  What would it be like to have a whole life built on a relationship that is about passion and distance, where you can never have as much of each other as you'd want?  I love the reversal of the Destined Romance and Passion That Knows No Bounds that she brings here, and I'm thrilled with her for thinking to do it.

There will be a sequel, according to her website: Still Life With Shape Shifter, coming out this fall.  It's about the sister of a shape shifter, and I wonder what themes it will address.  I can't quite imagine, but as I've said, the author relationship is about trust, and I trust Sharon Shinn with my precious reading time.

One more exciting bit of Sharon Shinn news: her next book will be a sequel to Troubled Waters.  I'm really excited about that--this one I'll buy on day one.  Sometime next year.  Sigh.

Binge

Okay, first, yesterday was May 1, the day of many releases.  I hopped right in and bought Bitterblue and The Killing Moon, just like I thought I would. 

But that's just the tip of the iceberg.  Sometimes you just get an itch, and you end up driving all over town to get all the books you're thinking of at all the different libraries that have them, just so you can hold them in your hands RIGHT NOW.  And sometimes those books are ones that barely registered on your radar months and months ago, and suddenly you HAVE to have them right now for no reason you can quite figure out.  You know what I mean?  This is what a compulsive shopper or gambling addict feels like--it's a craving that almost itches till you scratch it.

Which is how I ended up at Malden last night, because I needed a copy of You Against Me, by Jenny Downham, for some reason.  This was the trigger, the book I needed, for some reason.  It's a teen love story (I wouldn't call it a romance, but still,  not my wheelhouse) about a guy whose sister has reported a rape, and the girl whose brother is accused.  I get the impression there's a strong element of "what really happened, and what does that mean about the people involved?" which seems like a really interesting question.  But at the bottom, it's a high school love story.  I kind of hate high school love stories.

So why, in particular, did I need to get The Catastrophic History of You and Me?  If anything, it's MORE of a goopy romance--narrated by a girl who died of a broken heart after being broken up with, I don't see why I think I'm going to like it, except that all the people I know who've read it have said they cried.  And these are people whose taste I generally trust, so here we are.  The reason I desperately needed it right now, though is--let's not kid ourselves--because the title sounds slightly like the first book I was obsessing over, and I have a very twitchy stream of consciousness.

At the COMPLETE other end of the WTH? spectrum is A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812.  I've flipped through this book before, and while the premise sounds cool, it reads like what it is--a nonfiction book about history based around a very dry journal kept by someone with a brusque writing style.  I believe the original journal was part of the inspiration for The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, but the original lacks any juiciness that the novel may imply.  So years ago, I flipped through this, and it didn't really go anywhere.

But then Aarti reviewed it recently.  And she has convinced me that this is just what I'm looking for in good nonfiction--someone has done all the hard work of research, putting together and fleshing out the details of this dusty-dry diarist's life.  She completely convinced me that I want to read this book.

I had to run to a different library to get Daughters of the North, by Sarah Hall.  I can't even remember why I wanted to, though I'm glad I did.  It's a literary dystopian novel that has something to do with feminism and maybe Scotland?  Anyway, it's in my head, and now it's in my hands, and it's actually quite good.  I'm having a little fun reading it out loud to myself--the narrator has a very strong voice, and I like to imagine myself as the audio book reader.

Wow, that might have been a little TMI.

This is getting long, so I won't go into the impulse check-outs that I picked up while I was at these many libraries.  I'll only say that there were some, and I'm set for--well, ever.  I have so very many good books that I want to just curl up with them all and sink down into a sweet jumble of stories.  In fact, that's what I'm off to do--ta!

I Want To Go To There

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2012/04/a-dome-of-books/

Like a Real Blogger

I have been insanely excited to read Code Name Verity, by Elizabeth Wein, ever since I read this review at Things Mean a Lot.  In fact, I spent a few minutes yesterday poking around to see if I could get it at the library before I went to Amazon and realized it's not set to release till the middle of May.

But then, dear reader, but then! In my inbox appeared a message from Netgalley, which is a venue for book reviewers and bloggers to connect with publishers who might want to distribute reviewer copies to them.  Generally I don't qualify, as you, dear cherished readers, are few in number.  But it turns out Code Name Verity wants some buzz, so they're handing out reading copies to the likes of little ol' me!

I'm incredibly excited and will be reading this book as soon as I get home (because I FORGOT MY KINDLE TODAY, which is a whole post in and of itself about the agony I'm experiencing right now). 

What I know about this novel is that it's from the point of view of a spy who has been caught in France in World War II.  I believe the first part is the story she tells her captors, and the second part is a more removed, third person story.  I'm anticipating something personal and intimate and yet historical and exciting.  I really can't wait!

I also started The Shape of Desire today, by Sharon Shinn.  We'll see where it goes; I'm not really excited about werewolves and shapeshifters, but Sharon Shinn always makes the little things so engaging that I'd read her writing about someone reading the phone book.  As it were.

Score!

Okay, I'm not Jon Ronson's biggest fan in the whole world.  I read bits and pieces of his book Them, and to be honest, he seems to take a teeny bit too much delight in his subjects' weirdness.  It wasn't bad, just a little odd to me.  Plus, there's this story from This American Life (don't you love their new searchable archive?), which, while honest in a vulnerable way, is also not completely charming.

Which is why I've had The Psychopath Test in my reader for ages and not read it.  Haven't even listened to the TAL story about it (I'm a plug machine today, right?).  Not sure why I picked it up, except that it seemed like the right combination of light and informative for my mood right now.  And OMG, it's awesome.

Now, wait, that's not exactly true.  It's a fun, interesting, personal-journalism-type story that so far is only just coming to the actual topic of the story in a roundabout account of the Ronson's introduction to the world of psychology.  What's awesome about the part I'm reading right now, though, is the Scientologists.

Now, what I know about Scientology has all been shouted by Tom Cruise on daytime TV, but I'm as intrigued by it as I am by any insular group with unusual beliefs.  Ronson, of course, has a lot of experience with such groups, and I think that makes him the right man to tell this story.  Because if there's one thing he can do it's strike a balance between respect and skepticism, between elbowing me and giving me an "isn't this nutty?" eyebrow waggle and falling lightly under the hypnotic spell of whoever he's listening to--really the best a lot of fringe types can hope for in the mainstream media.

I'm not very far in, but I'm tickled pink by this book so far.

In other news, my collective officemates are enabling me by talking me into reading Bill Bryson's I'm a Stranger Here Myself.  Because the delightful distinctions between England and America, coupled with Bill Bryson's quirky charm, and how can I go wrong?  My new coworker Harriet is reading it, and she's English, so if I can get it from the library fast enough, I can pick her brain as I'm reading it!

Purchase

Tomorrow I get to go to the bookstore and pick up Sandra Dallas's True Sisters, which I'm crazy excited about because I've read bits and pieces about the great Mormon handcart migration and how kind of nutty and dangerous it was, and I'm really excited to get into the meat of this story.  Also, buying a book!  I hope I read it soon.  Doesn't usually work that way, but I think, with determination, I can do it.

My elaborate February line-up has been foiled by the snail-like pace of the public library system, as well as my perhaps-too-high hopes for some of those books.  Magic Under Stone is one of the few books I've already gotten my hands on, and it started annoying me about 10 pages in.  There was some heavy-handed reminder exposition from the first book, some references to things I couldn't piece together because I couldn't remember them from the first book, and some wild coincidences.  Basically, it just feels more juvenile than I'm interested in right now.  I don't think I'm going to read it, and I don't really have any regrets about that.

The Shape of Desire is finally on its way, which fills me with glorious hope, because Sharon Shinn, love you!  I think its about werewolves, which gives me pause, but only a little.  Author trust is such a huge element in my enjoyment of a book, from anticipation of the book right up through the reading and into the potential anticipation of the sequels.

Overall, though, I'm poking through a few things to see what catches.  I was devouring Buddha In the Attic until it got to the part about having children, at which point the sadness of the story just overwhelmed me and I found myself not picking it up as often.  I picked up All Creatures Great and Small, which is really fun in the way that you might expect anecdotes about a vet in the 1930s English countryside would be fun--like watching PBS, which I fully intend to go back and do (on Netflix, most likely) when I finish the book.  I finally started reading Jon Ronson's* The Psychopath Test, which did itself a huge favor by starting off with an intriguing anecdote that doesn't clearly relate to the topic of the book, keeping me reading to see what the heck is going on.

And today, I finished up Tuesdays at the Castle, by Jessica Day George.  I'm not sure if it was just the right book for the mood I was in, but I loved, loved, loved it.  I loved Celie, and how she was brave and smart and yet so very, very eleven.  I loved how much the characters took care of each other, and was excited every time we found out someone was on their side.  I loved the castle, and I got a little teary--yes, really!--when something bad happened to it.  I don't usually feel this way about books at this age level (middle grade, maybe?), but I really wish I could have written this book. 

So this is the state of the union.  I feel like I've put all my thoughts down here, so I can't imagine what I might have to say tomorrow, but I suppose that's what tomorrow is for, right?

*Incidentally, doesn't his name sound vaguely dirty?  I can't quite figure out why.

Book Hangover

You know those book hangovers when you wake up in the morning after finishing the book the night before and the FIRST thing you think about is the book, and then you have all these feelings still and you don’t know what to do with them, and no one around understands, and it feels like reality is still moving around you but you’re stuck in that book hangover and still cannot make yourself care about anything in the real world because FEELINGS.

-Always An Original

Yes.  Yes, I do.

Adoption Reading: Flashback

Lately I've been reading a bit about adoption, for no particular reason except that I've become more aware of some of the issues involved lately, and because an online friend of mine brought her two gorgeous new kids home recently.  I reviewed Baby, We Were Meant for Each Other a while ago, which was an interesting analysis of adoption by someone with a modern parent's viewpoint.

Now, though, I find  myself in the middle of Find a Stranger, Say Goodbye, which I happened into because it's by Lois Lowry and it's an ebook that was available at my library.  Lowry's novels have been reliably awesome kids' and YA books throughout my lifetime (Number the Stars, The Giver, A Summer to Die, even The One Hundredth Thing About Caroline).  It wasn't until I started reading it that I realized it was a novel about adoption.

The most interesting thing I'm finding about it is that it was written in 1978, so the default picture of adoption is incredibly different than the world I understand today.  Everyone is shocked when Natalie wants to find out about her birth mother (who is frequently called her "natural mother").  Her parents are hurt, and many people take it to be an attack on them.

Everyone's speculation is filtered through a cultural lens that's completely different from the one I'm used to.  Admittedly, most people I know have either gone with international adoption or open adoption.  But Natalie's boyfriend asks what she'll think if she finds out that her mother is like Brenda who works at the factory in town--sweet and simple and easy?  Natalie says that that's a terrible thing to say, of course that won't be true.

Then she tries to imagine how someone could give up a baby.  She pictures them coldly saying they don't want her.  She pictures them sobbing when they learn that the husband is dying of a horrible disease and the wife can't care for a child on her own, so they sadly sacrifice the child.  She doesn't seem to picture the obvious situation, where both parents are teenagers.  I assume this is because it's a YA book from 35 years ago, and we still believed that Nice Girls Don't Do That--presumably someone will mention it at some point, but the fact that it hasn't crossed anyone's mind is really telling about the angle of the story.

In a slightly different book, this dating--which takes more subtle forms, too; Natalie's family is kind of perfect, which I think is intended to avoid complicating the issue of why she needs to find her origins--might be off-putting, or at least boring.  But first, I love these pristine YA books from my childhood--Judy Blume and Lois Lowry and how they wrestled with hard issues in a more constrained world.  And second, the introspection really balances out all the external anachronisms.  Sure, no one around her understands why Natalie would care at all who gave birth to her.  But much of her confusion is internal, and I really think that a lot of that is much more personal, and timeless, than you might expect.

It's a short book; I suspect it will take a few hours to read in total, over the week or so I'll be working on it.  It's such an interesting perspective; I think I'll be picking up China Ghosts after this, to follow up on the thread.

Recovery Books

My therapeutic post-Children's Hospital reading list has been jumping all around, because I will NOT push through anything without joy right now.

I flipped through a few pages of Michael Northrup's Trapped, but it was just too high school.  I mean, that's not a criticism--it's a young adult book about being trapped in a high school during a snowstorm.  Some days that's what you want, but not today.

And I read a chapter or two of Jaqueline Dolamore's Magic Under Stone, but it was just too clunky.  I guess the first one wasn't exactly High Literature, but this one is starting where it ended up and so it's already a confusing jumble.  I think it's also struggling with second-book syndrome, with a little less polish and a bit more of a rush to move the big story along.

Where did I land?  The Buddha In the Attic, by Julie Otsuka.  It's been on my list for a long time, and when I started reading the first few paragraphs, I was completely caught.  It's lovely and short and a little poem.  Not exactly a story, but a portrait of Japanese brides who traveled to the US in the early part of the 20th century to meet their arranged husbands.  I'm really enjoying it, and after spending a week on about 250 pages that didn't even get me halfway through That Other Book, something short is most welcome.

I'm also into Hate List, by Jennifer Brown.  It's another high school book, and it's not as upbeat as I expected to want.  But it's actually quite intriguing--after a school shooting, the girlfriend of the dead shooter has to return to school.  Is she a hero for the bullet she took pushing someone out of the way?  Is she an accomplice for keeping a hate list with her boyfriend and not knowing he was going to do this?  Already the characters are more real and feeling than in That Other Book, and I'm definitely caught up.

I'll either pick up China Mieville (did you know he's a dude?  I was surprised!) Kraken or Mary Robinette Kowal's Glamour in Glass for my other/next/further reading.  They look very different, and I'm very intrigued by both.  I'm feeling my way for now, treating myself gently to recover from the emotional stress.   And book club chose Ann Patchett's State of Wonder for our next read, which should be good, and if not, at least won't be an endless experience in suffering like certain other recent reads.

Release Me

I am pleased to herein offer my firm anti-recommendation for Chris Adrian's ambitious novel, The Children's Hospital. I am backed up by the members of my intelligent, insightful, and currently enraged book club.  I'd love to write a detailed and balanced review that explained the flaws of the book, but a) they are too many and too thorough to describe, and b) I didn't actually finish the book because it was so painful and so very, very long.

Almost none of us finished it.  Those who did had no extra insight to offer the rest of us.  In fact, they may have been even more confused than the rest of us.  The first act of the book, after all, was a poorly-imagined apocalypse story told through the plodding guise of an overly-detailed hospital procedural.

Now, I've read about the end of the world plenty of times--YA, adults, kids, natural disaster, war, zombies--and I have never read a more passionless, meaningless, emotionally vacant version of the end.  People in this book cry sometimes because their loved ones are dead, but they're doctors, so they soldier on.  Really, they take a minute to cry in the bathroom between rounds.  Our main character, who has lost many loved ones before the disaster, doesn't even respond that strongly.  No one finds themselves stripped of their entire understanding of reality, throwing off everything they thought, believed, and were, living--I don't know--naked in the hallway, or ranting about the end times on the roof.  No one goes wild, or shuts down.  People occasionally contemplate it as though it were a really upsetting political situation on the other side of the world.  None of them really even stop doctoring.

The world ended in an apocalyptic flood; the hospital was preserved through the divine intervention of angels, one of whom now occupies the hospital and answers requests and speaks words of saccharine support from the walls.  Angels and a flood, magical changes to the building, magical production of food and things you want.  The end of the world.  Is there any explanation or consideration or questions for the angels or speculation about the nature of God?  Is there any concept that if there are angels (and they're narrating the book, mind you--the whole thing is technically from their point of view) there must be a god?  Heaven is mentioned, as is being sent.  But who did the sending, his/her/its intent, purpose, aims are not only not revealed to us, they are barely speculated about.  One character has a running list of reasons the world had to end--things like irritating commercials and silly products.  Not even she thinks about who might have been making this judgement.

And that's the problem with the whole thing: lots of angels but no God.  Lots of doctors but no healing (or dying, either.  Why is everyone panicking when nobody seems to die?)  It's like the author thought that putting all these things into a book was the same as having something to say about them.  Having an end of the world flood with angels is the same as wrestling with the notion of God.  Watching doctors do their rounds is the same as saying something about the medical profession.  But it's not.

I haven't even gotten into the parts of the book I didn't get to; I read just over 1/3 of it.  For the record, here are some spoilers of the parts I didn't read but was told about:  the main character gets healing powers, someone discovers the journal of a promiscuous little kid, adults die and children take over the world.  Apparently none of them make any more sense than the parts I read, or seem to have any more meaning, or are any more intellectually stimulating or emotionally pleasing.  It's just a bunch of random stuff stuck together that's supposed to mean something, like an electronic poetry generator.  It's not abstract--abstract is a hard, complex, subtle, emotional way to create art.  This is like a parody of abstract.

I could go on forever, but maybe I'll write another post someday about the thoughts and conversations I've had about literary fiction versus "upscale popular fiction" from reading this book, or about Girlfriend in a Coma, which this reminded me of and I also really hated.  This is enough for now.

And if anyone's read the book and can tell my why so many reviewers really loved it (Maya Goldberg even spoke of how he resisted turning characters into symbols, which is EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE of how I would describe the book I read) , I'd really appreciate if you could explain it to me.  There were plenty of great books that I didn't enjoy or didn't get; I don't think this was one of them.  I think, as Sarah said, this was a case of "the emperor has no clothes."

(PS. Also the names: Dr. Tiller, the calm one.  Dr. Sashay, the crazy one, Dr. Sasscock, the sexy one.  And on and on and ON AND ON.  Also, it was published by McSweeney's.  Of course.  I feel this way about a lot of McSweeney's stuff.)