Saturday, December 31, 2016

A Month In The Life: December 2016


Today is the last day of the year! 2016 has been a crazy year: I started out the year in January with a trip back to Michigan for my best friend's baby shower (she had the baby in March and he's the cutest!), I got married, went to Chicago on our honeymoon, I made my first (hopefully not last!) trip to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, and read, well, a lot (101 books at final count)! This month in particular hasn't been especially hectic, but here's what I've been up to:

In books: I spent most of this month doing my annual holiday re-read of a book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series...this year, I re-read A Storm of Swords. Maybe by the time I catch up, The Winds of Winter will finally be out, eh? Anyways, it slowed my pace a little as I went back through it while I was reading my new books, too!
  • Freakonomics: How much you buy into a lot of these statistical quirks depends on how much you buy into the idea of behavioral economics as a whole. It's all about the hidden incentives that act upon our decision-making, and while the theories are interesting (his linking of abortion access to crime rates was something I found myself nodding along to), I regarded much of it with skepticism. 
  • Seating Arrangements: The writing quality was wonderful, and I enjoyed it overall, but I wished this story of New England rich people behaving badly over a wedding weekend had focused less on the father character. I found him mostly irritating and wished the story would get back to virtually anyone else when it centered on him (which was, sadly, most of the time). 
  • The Wonder (ARC): This was our book club read for the month, and while I had high hopes for it, I didn't end up liking it much at all. I found that it had pacing issues that significantly undermined characterization and plot development, by my standards anyways. I know other people liked it, but it wasn't for me.
  • The Red Queen: I wasn't super hot on the first entry in Philippa Gregory's series on the Wars of the Roses, The White Queen, because I found Elizabeth Woodville's characterization completely boring. But this book, focusing on Margaret Beaufort, did a much better job creating an interesting-if-not-really-likeable character, and I enjoyed it much more.
  • The Moonlight Palace: This book is pretty light and fluffy, about a young royal descendent living in a decrepit palace in Singapore in the 1920s. It was short and while it wasn't good, per se, it was pleasant enough.
  • The Guineveres (ARC): So many books get compared to one of my all-time favorites: Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides. This time, though, I thought the praise was legitimate. A delicate yet powerful story about four young women, all improbably named Guinevere, who end up in a convent in their teens for wildly different reasons is sensitive and well-told. An auspicious debut.  


In life:
  • Went rock climbing for the first time: The indoor kind, of course. One of my work friends and I have been trying to get together to do lunch and activities every so often, and after I took her to a pole class, she took me rock climbing! I've never done it before and wasn't quite sure what to expect. It was HARD! But I liked it and think I want to try it again.
  • Holiday parties: 'Tis the season, after all. Drew's work had their holiday party, and then of course we had our holiday parties with my in-laws. Lots of togetherness and happy feelings and wine (and missing my own side of the family on the other side of the country).

One Thing:
  • After having been a longtime audiobook resister (I just don't think it's reading, for better or worse), I found my niche: nonfiction! So this month I've been really getting into Overdrive through my local library system, and have listened to some really interesting stuff, like the official biography of the Queen Mother and a chronicle of Basque history. 
 
Gratuitous Pug Picture:

Thursday, December 29, 2016

Book 57: The Winged Histories


"I don't think writing is sorcery, something forbidden. I think it's more like a comb, it separates your hair more easily than you could with your fingers. It's like riding a horse to go somewhere instead of walking. You go to the same place, but you can carry more. I think writing is a horse. Or it might be a knife. An axe."

Dates read: May 29-June 1, 2016

Rating: 8/10

I am nothing if I am not a creature of habit, and one of those habits is that I refuse to jump into a series from anywhere but the beginning. Books, TV, movies...I don't care if everyone says the first one is bad, boring, or even just not necessary to understand what follows, I read/watch it. Which makes Netflix dangerous for me...so many TV shows to watch right from the beginning! Usually that just means I get choice paralysis and decide to read instead.

Why this particular quirk of mine matters at all is that Sofia Samatar's The Winged Histories is technically a sequel, though more in a "take place in the same world as" and less "follows directly the characters from", as I understand. I wanted to read A Stranger In Olondria, but my local library system didn't have a copy and so I figured that from what I'd read about the book, I'd probably be okay this once not following my own rule and just picking it up. Which I'm kicking myself for now, because I think I would have gotten more out of The Winged Histories if I'd had some background in that world going in.

Which isn't to say that I didn't get anything, or even much, out of The Winged Histories without that background. On the contrary, I found the book beautifully written, and once I got myself grounded in its world, incredibly compelling. It follows four women: the warrior Tavis, Tialon, the daughter of a priest, Seren, a singer and Tavis's lover, and Tavis's sister Siski, a noblewoman, as the Olodrian empire is engulfed in war and rebellion, both internal and external. They're besieged by a neighboring civilization, one of their conquered territories is trying to break away, and a new religion is fighting for dominance with the traditional one...with rumors of people transforming into vampiric monsters growing in the countryside.

I don't usually read war stories, which tend to be men's stories. Endless descriptions of battles and tactical maneuvers make me lose interest quickly (they slowed down my reading of War and Peace significantly when I tackled that one in the summer of 2015). But this one was different: besides Tavis's necessarily martial perspective, the rest of the story dug into how the battles resonate far beyond the fields on which they are fought. The lives of each of these women is thrown into turmoil by the unsettled situation of their world: Tavis flees to the army to escape being used as a political pawn in marriage, Tialon suffers at the hands of her religious fanatic father, who ushers in the new religion and converts the emperor, Seren is a member of the people on whose behalf the civil portion of the war is being fought but who suffer for their "victory" as much or more than anyone, and Siski drowns her sorrow at being parted from the sweetheart of her youth in a hard partying lifestyle. These are technically spoilers, but if I hadn't read a similar summary as I was getting started I would have gotten completely lost in who meant what to whom and what was going on.

It does take a while to get into it and adjust to the setting and situations of the story. Until then, fortunately, the writing sustains interest. The writing is just gorgeous...lush, poetic, and emotionally evocative. There's very little "this happened, and then that happened" going on here, each of the four segments is written in loose clusters of interconnected plot points, full of flashbacks and questions raised that don't get answered until a later part of the story. By the end I could barely put it down. The book is a rich reward for a patient reader.

Tell me. blog friends...do you like war stories?

One year ago, I was reading: Hood

**I received a free copy of this book from the publisher, Small Beer Press, through Edelweiss in exchange for a fair and honest review**

Tuesday, December 27, 2016

Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten Best Books of 2016

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week's topic: the ten best books of 2016! I don't read a bunch of new releases, but I read enough this year that I was able to pull together a list of my ten favorites. Many of these aren't up yet and won't be for quite a while yet, but they are all books I've read this calendar year that were published this calendar year!


The Last One: This story of a woman who doesn't know that there's been a massive pandemic while she's struggling to make it on a big-budget wilderness survival show is well-written and totally unputdownable. One of those books where you promise yourself just a few more pages before bed and then it's 3 in the morning.

Enchanted Islands: I loved the lifelong female friendship that formed the emotional core of this novel, and that it focused mostly on a woman's life after 40 and the adventure she had then. It's not a compulsive page-turner, but it's subtle and wonderful.

The Serpent King: I don't tend to read extensively in the YA space, but this novel about three outcasts going through their senior year in small-town Tennessee sucked me in and broke my heart.

The Guineveres: I'm still working on this debut novel, about four young women named Guinevere all being raised in a Catholic convent for different reasons, but I can already tell that it's magnificent. Such fantastic writing and well-developed characters.

And After Many Days: The deterioration of a Nigerian family when their oldest son disappears is paralled with the destruction that Western corporations wreak in Africa in this well realized,

Mr. Splitfoot: I didn't actually rate this book that highly when I first read it very early this year, but it's stuck with me in ways I didn't anticipate. It's weird but beautifully written and haunting.

The Big Rewind: I've plugged this book a million times this year, but I loved it so I'll plug it again! A female-centered High Fidelity-esque novel (with a little mystery story nestled in there too) for the millennial set, it's a really fun, charming read.

Private Citizens: This dark, biting satire of the Silicon Valley tech boom scene features brilliant young people totally ruining their lives in a way that's half hilarious, half horrifying.

The Queen of the Night: This book, about the life of a European opera singer, is totally insane and totally awesome and I've been recommending it to everyone lately.

The Girls: Less of a novel about the Manson cult as it's often billed and more of one about the painful experience of being a 14 year-old girl, it's full of passages that resonate with anyone who's ever lived through that particular hell.

Thursday, December 22, 2016

Book 56: Shylock Is My Name


 "I the Jew, they the Christians- no two ways about it, no weasel words. Was it better like that, he wondered. A naked antagonism. No pretending that fences could be mended. An unending, ill-mannered, insoluble contrariety. Did it mean that all parties at least knew where they stood? That at least you knew your enemy. And would go on knowing him until the end of time."

Dates read: May 27-29, 2016

Rating: 2/10

When something is written about 400 years ago, it's likely that however good it is, it's also problematic. So even though Shakespeare's classics have endured over time, there are some portions of them that take your breath away a little reading it in modern times. Like in one of my favorites, Much Ado About Nothing, a couple we're supposed to be rooting for as endgame has a man who publicly humiliates his fiancee on their wedding day because he has been misled into believing she's no longer a virgin. After she's been dumped at the altar, her own father believes the man over her and tries to do violence to her and to himself for the shame of it all. These two do marry at the end of the play and we're meant to be pleased by this reunion. Um, what? And then there's The Merchant of Venice, which contains both one of the most poignant speeches on our shared humanity I've ever come across as well as an astonishing amount of anti-Semitism. But in England in the 1600s, anti-Semitism was par for the course.

Howard Jacobson's Shylock Is My Name is another entry in the Hogarth Shakespeare series (like Vinegar Girl), updating the just-mentioned The Merchant of Venice. This presents a definite adaptation challenge...while open hatred of Jews was common in Elizabethan England and Italy, where the play is actually set, and anti-Semitism is definitely still alive and well today, it's not really the same world we live in anymore after the Holocaust. There's some interesting ways you could go with the sentiments underlying The Merchant of Venice, probably most obviously anti-Muslim sentiment in a post-9/11 world, or any country with ethnic disputes over a contested border. But Jacobson chooses to set his work in modern-day England and keep the play's original dynamic in place. Not only that, he wholesale imports the original character of Shylock the moneylender himself.

During most of the book, it's unclear whether Shylock is a hallucination seen only by Simon, our protagonist, but eventually other characters interact with him as well. How exactly this works is never explained, which is confusing because Shylock is a pretty major character. Why Jacobson chose to gloss over this detail while including an entire section about Simon's failed first marriage to a Gentile woman is a choice I found confusing and kind of off-putting. What I found far more off-putting though, was Simon's relationship with his daughter Beatrice, which is at the center of the plot. He spends an awful lot of time thinking about his daughter's sexuality, whether it's the boys she's sleeping with (and whether or not they have a foreskin) or thinking about his daughter's body in ways that seem way too close to the line of impropriety for a father. I'm a reader who really looks for character-driven dramas, and none of the characters, including Simon, Shylock, and Beatrice were particularly well-developed or interesting.

Ultimately, I just felt like this book wasn't for me. And by that I mean that besides my own quibbles with the writing choices, it was very concerned with Jewish male identity, particularly as it relates to fatherhood. As a childless Gentile female, the long discussions between Shylock and Simon about their shared religion/culture and their struggles as fathers to young Jewish women were just things I have no frame of reference to appreciate or understand. Since that was a central conceit of the novel, I never connected with it and unless those are issues that are relevant or appealing to you, I can't imagine that many people would enjoy reading it. I pushed myself to read it as quickly as I could so I could move on to the next thing.

Tell me, blog friends...do you need to connect with the characters somehow to enjoy a novel?

One year ago, I was reading: Still Occidental Mythology

**I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review**

Tuesday, December 20, 2016

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Wouldn't Mind Santa Leaving Under My Tree

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week's topic: books we wouldn't mind seeing under the tree! While my house is filled to bursting with books as it is and I'm really trying to slow the progress of more books into the house, there are always books that I'm looking to get my hands on a physical copy of. Here are ten books that I'd figure out a way to make room for.



Elizabeth's Women: I'm 100% here for all things Tudor, and this book, examining the various women who played a role in the life of Queen Elizabeth I, seems pretty much right up my alley.

My Own Words: Ruth Bader Ginsberg is my HERO. I love her. This book collects many of her writings and speeches and I want to read all of them.

Thug Kitchen 101: Fast as F*ck: I've got a handful of cookbooks, but I find as much of my cooking inspiration online as in pages these days. I know there's a whole backlash with these people since we found out they're actually white, but their recipes are tasty and totally vegan...even if I'm not and sometimes have to reverse-engineer flax out of recipes because I'm allergic, I'm always down for a quick meal!

Version Control: I actually read much more non-fiction than fiction in hard copy, but this is one of those relatively few novels I actually want to own on paper. I actually don't know too much about the plot, just that it's about time travel and living in the age of the internet and it's gotten great reviews from sources I trust and I want it.

Strangers In Their Own Land: I grew up in small-town, quasi-rural Michigan and spent three years of my life in college-town Alabama, so I've been surrounded by Republicans for most of my life. Like most Democrats, most Republicans are decent people, and this book taking a coastal elite liberal sociologist to Louisiana to meet and understand the people on the other side seems like something I'd get a lot out of.

White Trash: America likes to pretend like it doesn't have a class system, and while it might not be as rigid as the one in the U.K., we definitely do. I'm really interested in reading this book that looks at white American history and really examines the way society has been organized, and who ends up at the bottom of the ladder.

Pit Bull: The Battle Over An American Icon: I've known pit bulls who leave me wary, and I've known pit bulls like the one my pole studio owner has that think they're a lap dog. There's a lot of fear out there about this breed, and as a long-time dog nerd, I'm really curious to learn more about them.

Goldenhand: I've written about how much I love the Sabriel series more than once, and this is the fifth book in that series, so obviously I need to own it like I do all the others.

The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: My fondness for books about royalty should make it pretty obvious that I've got a soft spot for books about out-of-touch rich people. This look at Huguette Clark, who inherited a massive fortune and died alone, seems totally fascinating.

Bad English: One of the great things about English, in my opinion, is its rapaciousness...the way it grows, absorbing parts of other languages and changing with the times. People like to get fussy about using "proper" English, completely ignoring the way that the English they speak would have been regarded with abject horror only a few generations back. A book about the way people try to keep English from evolving is something I think I'd just love.

Thursday, December 15, 2016

Book 55: The Devil In The White City


 "Every day he saw them stepping from trains and grip-cars and hansom cabs, inevitably frowning at some piece of paper that was supposed to tell them where they belonged. The city's madams understood this and were known to meet inbound trains with promises of warmth and friendship, saving the important news for later. Holmes adored Chicago, adored in particular how the smoke and din could envelop a woman and leave no hint that she had ever existed, save perhaps a blade-thin track of perfume amid the stench of dung, anthracite, and putrefaction."
 
Dates read: May 20-26, 2016

Rating: 7/10

Lists/awards: NY Times Bestseller

Even growing up in so-called "flyover country", I still lived just a 5 hour drive away from the third largest city in the country: Chicago. I'd been there a handful of times, but never for more than a weekend and not for quite a while (I actually had plans to visit with one of my good friends before I impulsively decided to move to Reno in 2012). I've always wanted to go there with more time to explore, and so when Drew and I were trying to figure out where to spend our honeymoon (he's not into the lazing-on-the-beach scene, I'm not into the sleeping-in-a-tent-in-the-woods scene), we finally settled on Chicago as a place with lots to see and do and eat. It was a wonderful time and it's a great city and I can't wait to go back and see even more of it someday!

Well over a hundred years before our trip, though, Chicago hosted an event of arguably more importance: the 1893 World's Fair. The Fair brought to America for the first time things that we still use today: alternating current, the moving walkway, and the Ferris Wheel (which was actually created to rival the prize jewel of the Paris World's Fair four years before: the Eiffel Tower). Almost 30 million visitors passed through its gates to see its wonders. It was also home to H. H. Holmes, a serial killer who preyed on young single women. Erik Larson's Devil In The White City takes the stories of how the Fair came to be and Holmes' activities and winds them together to create a book that looks at the at the Fair but also outside of it.

I was super looking forward to this when I started it: with the huge amount of praise it got, and how much I enjoyed Larson's most recent Dead Wake, it seemed like it was going to easily be a new favorite. But I just didn't get really into it the way I was hoping. Which doesn't mean it wasn't good! It was, quite good in fact. But Larson's threading together of the different stories wasn't quite as skilled as it was in Dead Wake. Since I was in the middle of being stressed out about planning my own event as I was reading it (less than a month before my wedding), the long recounting of the delays and problems of planning and building the Fair just gave me anxiety. But I think even without my personal baggage, I would have found this portion of the book a little overlong. I get what Larson's trying to do: you know it did come together and was successful in the end (he tells you that much right from the beginning), and as he recounts mishap after mishap, it's supposed to keep you hooked and wonder how in the world it got pulled off. But at a certain point I just wanted to the Fair to start already because I knew it was going to and I was tired of hearing about how it almost didn't.

The part of the story about the Fair is so dominant that the part about the serial killer (which was honestly the part I was most interested in) gets a little bit of the short shrift. Holmes and his story kind of lurk around the outside edges, which I suppose is appropriate since lurking around the edges of the Fair is exactly what Holmes did in real life. But every time the book turned back to the Fair from Holmes I groaned a little inside, because I found the latter so much more compelling. The book effectively ends by devoting itself to wrapping up Holmes' plotline, and it was the first time I felt reluctant to put the book down since I started it. On the whole the book is well-written, interesting, and definitely worth a read, but don't go in expecting it to be mostly about one of America's first serial killers or you might be a little disappointed.

Tell me, blog friends...have you ever been to Chicago?

One year ago, I was reading: Occidental Mythology

Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I'm Looking Forward To For The First Half Of 2017

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week's topic: books I'm looking forward to in the first half of the new year. I'm going to take this as most-anticipated books being released from now-end of June 2017...as I'm sure you've sussed out if you read here somewhat regularly, I'm not much of a new-release reader, so these are very unlikely to be books I personally read in the first half of 2017. But some are books I have an ARC for, and some are books I'm going to want to get around to one of these days!



Selection Day: I loved the brilliant dark wit of Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger when I read it earlier this year (review forthcoming), so I'm definitely excited for his follow-up!

Young and Damned and Fair: I love stories, both fiction and non, about Henry VIII and his wives. Anne Boleyn tends to be the one that gets the most attention, but they're all worthy of interest in their own right. This book examines Katherine Howard, his fifth wife, who is usually dismissed as very young and rather empty-headed, so I'm curious to see what the take is on her this time.

The Road to Jonestown: Cults- how they form and the personalities at the center of them- are fascinating to me. Jim Jones and the People's Temple are well-known enough, but I've never read a full book-length treatment about that situation and I'm desperately curious.

The Death and Life of the Great Lakes: You can take the lady out of Michigan, but you can't take Michigan out of the lady. I'm a sucker for anything Great Lakes.

Nabokov's Favorite Word is Mauve: This is basically analytics applied to literature, so dorky interest one meets dorky interest two. Sold!

Four Princes: I've always enjoyed non-fiction about both royalty and general history. This one brings them together, focusing on the reigns of Henry VIII of England, Francis I of France, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and Ottoman ruler Suleiman, and how their actions and interactions have played out over time. 

Our Little Racket: When you hear about pyramid schemes and other kinds of white collar crime, you always wonder (or at least I do) about the families. Did they know? Did they just turn the other way? This novel explores the ramifications of the downfall of a finance world bigwig on the women in his family, so I'm intrigued. 

Different Class: I've always enjoyed a good boarding school novel, and Joanne Harris' Chocolate remains among my favorite books, so I'm looking forward to reading her take on it!

The Leavers: I've read a few articles fairly recently about Asian adoptees raised by white American parents and how they feel about their stories now that they're grown up. It's an interesting tension, and this novel promises to explore it.

In The Name of the Family: Medieval corrupt religious institutions are something I tend to like reading about, so the Borgias (who are the focus of this novel) are always compelling to me.

Thursday, December 8, 2016

Book 54: Hidden

 

Did people's lives really change this quickly? Years of sameness, and then a few hours, a few moments, and everything's different? But yes, of course they can. It happens all the time."

Dates read: May 18-20, 2016

Rating: 3/10

I have never, to my knowledge, been cheated on. Given that I'm getting married less than a month after I write this, I hope I never will be. But that doesn't mean I haven't thought, over the years, about what I would do if I were to find myself with a boyfriend who cheated. When I was young, I was sure I would want to know right away. As I grew up, though, I became less and less sure: an emotional long-term affair was one thing, but what if it was an isolated incident (drunken hookup with someone we don't know or something like that), unlikely to recur and less likely to result in a breakup? Like I said, I've never had to put it to the test, but I wonder what I would really actually want in a situation like that.

Catherine McKenzie's Hidden puts this dilemma in front of the reader: how much do we really want to know? The novel kicks off with Jeff Manning being struck by a car, stressed out and not thinking about looking both ways before crossing the street after a bad day at work. The news of his demise devastates two different women: his wife Claire, and his colleague Tish. It's obvious quickly, from the depth of her grief, that Tish has a relationship with Jeff that's above and beyond just coworkers or even just friends, but what was actually there between them? Just some flirtation? Actual romantic feelings? Sex?

The story is told in alternating chapters from the points of view of Claire, Tish, and a pre-death Jeff himself to explain just what is going on here. Before Claire was Jeff's wife, she was his older brother Tim's girlfriend. Although he's aware of that (obviously) going in, even long after they've married and had a son together, Jeff never quite gets over his jealousy. When one of Tim's rare trips home results in him making a move on Claire during a low moment in their marriage, when she's vulnerable, all of Jeff's old suspicions that he's merely the consolation prize come roaring back and fault lines open up between them. And when he meets Tish, who drifted as aimlessly into her own marriage as she did into her job in HR, their attraction sparks something more. When Claire discovers a text message from Tish on Jeff's broken phone before it dies completely, she finds herself putting together little pieces of evidence, seeing a picture that she can't be quite sure is there.

The whole point of the book seems to be whether or not Claire will find out what exactly there was between Jeff and Tish, a question for which the answer is held back from the reader as well until it's wound up in the epilogue. Which isn't really enough to sustain interest, honestly. McKenzie adds in a bunch of extra characters and situations to flesh it out, but at the end of the day, none of them contributes much to the actual story. I got bored with it and read quickly through the back half of the book so I could just be done with it already. Because once the level of Jeff and Tish's emotional entanglement becomes apparent, the question of whether it ever got physical was almost beside the point: they were cheating, whether or not they'd slept together. The book also suffered for McKenzie's failure to take advantage of the alternating narrators structure to create three different voices for the three people involved. They all sounded similar, Claire and Tish particularly so. And for this kind of story to actually resonate, all of the participants have to be sympathetic or at least interesting. But no one is all that interesting, and only Claire is remotely sympathetic. There's nothing especially rewarding to the reader to be found in Hidden: the writing is just decent, the plot drags, and the characters are one-note. It's not awful, it's just kind of a waste of time.

Tell me, blog friends...do you think emotional cheating is "better" or "worse" than physical cheating?

One year ago, I was reading: Oriental Mythology

Tuesday, December 6, 2016

Top Ten Tuesday: New-To-Me Authors I Read For The First Time In 2016

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The BookishThis week's topic: authors I read for the first time in 2016. I try to read a wide variety of books and so I've read a lot of different authors over the years. But each year brings new ones, and so here are ten authors that I'd never read before.



Malcolm Gladwell: On recommendation from my husband, I started listening to his podcast, Revisionist History earlier this year and really enjoyed it. And then I read David and Goliath, and it offered the same kind of interesting perspectives on conventional wisdom. I'll definitely be looking to read more of his stuff in the future!

Dave Eggers: I know a lot of people love him, but I'd never read him before. I'd been intrigued by The Circle when I read a description of it, so I picked up a secondhand copy and got to it. And while I found the ideas behind it interesting, I actually thought the writing was pretty bad. I've got a copy of another of his works already, so I'll read it, but unless I like it a lot more I'm not going to keep reading him.

Ann Patchett: I'd heard praise for several of her books, but Bel Canto is what I found in a local secondhand shop, so that's what I read. And it was really good: she creates well-rounded characters who relate to each others in interesting ways. But this book fell flat for me at the very very end. I enjoyed the reading of 99% of it so much that I'll definitely be looking to read more of them in the future.

Pat Conroy: Conroy writes a lot of books with a military theme, which doesn't tend to be my wheelhouse. But Lords of Discipline was a Kindle sale book that I bought on a whim, and I was happy that I did. Conroy's writing is powerful, and I found myself deeply invested in the story about a cadet at a military college simply through how well he told the story. I'll definitely be reading more of him!

Helen Oyeyemi: I'd heard wonderful things about Boy, Snow, Bird, and that one is on my shelf to read, but my book club's first read was her collection of short stories What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours. I found it to be a more intellectually stimulating than necessarily enjoyable experience, but I did come away wanting to read her novel-length work!

Alison Weir: I'm finding myself drawn more and more to non-fiction as I get older, and there's no subject I enjoy more than royalty. The Six Wives of Henry VIII has an intimidating length, but Weir writes their stories with such clean, readable prose that it all but flew along. She's definitely among my favorite historians!

Don DeLillo: He's an incredibly renowned author that I'd just never come across before. But then I got an ARC of Zero K and while he's got magnificent command of language and the ability to create a strong sense of mood, I just didn't get it. I'm still interested in reading White Noise, because I've heard it's his best, but it's always good to remember that just because "everyone" likes an author doesn't mean you have to.

Erik Larson: Devil In The White City has a great reputation, and I read that one too, but I actually started with Dead Wake, in which he tells the story of the sinking of the Lusitania. Of the two, I actually prefer Dead Wake, but both are well-researched narrative non-fiction stories well worth the read!

Lionel Shriver: I remember seeing the trailer for the movie version of We Need To Talk About Kevin and being interested in maybe seeing it someday (I haven't yet). And then I came across a secondhand copy of it and figured I might as well read it. It's incredible, and I've got a couple other of her books on my TBR now that I know what a great writer Shriver is.

Jhumpa Lahiri: I've actually had a copy of The Namesake on my shelves for YEARS...it's a little torn up in one of the corners because one of my mom's dogs tried to eat it at one point. But it wasn't until this year that I actually sat down and read it and I just loved it. I'm far from the only one raving about Lahiri, but she's worth it, y'all!

Thursday, December 1, 2016

Book 53: We Need To Talk About Kevin


 "I'm no longer sure whether I rued our first child before he was even born. It's hard for me to reconstruct that period without contaminating the memories with the outsized regret of later years, a regret that bursts the constraints of time and gushes into the period when Kevin wasn't there yet to wish away." 

Dates read: May 14-18, 2016

Rating: 10/10

Columbine happened when I was in the eighth grade. I remember how it rocked all of us (the students, our parents, the teachers) in the small town I grew up in, the kind of place (like Littleton, Colorado, probably once thought) where it seemed like bad things just didn't happen. There was a brief security craze, where we had to have our backpacks searched on our way into school every day for a few weeks or a month or so, but eventually that died down and normality more or less resumed. I know that Dylan Klebold's mother recently wrote a book about her experience with her son before the shooting and what happened afterwards. I've read some good reviews, even, but I can't find much interest in actually picking it up. It seems too raw, too real. Fifteen years later, but it's still too soon somehow.

But I was interested in picking up Lionel Shriver's We Need To Talk About Kevin, a fictionalized account of a mother's life before and after her son perpetrated a hideous act of school violence. There's just something about real life actual tragedy that's harder to read about, even if it's much less graphic than a fictionalized account. I've read one book about a sexual assault survivor's experience (Alice Sebold's Lucky, which was mandatory reading for a college class or else I likely would never have thought about reading it), but several novels about the same kind of thing without blinking an eye. Fiction, it would seem (at least for me) draws a veil between the reader and the story recounted that insulates it a little, even when the book is about things (like rape) that are horrifyingly commonplace and may well have been inspired by an author's own experience.

In We Need To Talk About Kevin, main character Eva Khatchourian isn't a very good mother. She would (and does) admit that freely. She never had a burning need or desire to be a mother; she was mostly content with her marriage to Franklin Plaskett, their life in New York City, and her position as founder and CEO of A Wing And A Prayer, a series of backpack travel guides. But all her friends were having kids, and Franklin really wanted one, and she'd been feeling like her life needed a bit extra spark for a while, so she agrees to have a child. It's rough from the start: she chafes at the restrictions foisted upon her as a pregnant woman, she has a long and difficult labor, and when Kevin is finally born, he refuses to nurse or even drink her breast milk from a bottle. She suffers from post-natal depression, and when Kevin proves to be difficult at best throughout his entire childhood, she fails to bond with him. Not only that, but as he grows up, she comes to see malice behind nearly all of his actions and regard him with suspicion and fear. Just before his sixteenth birthday, he kills a teacher and several classmates at school. So she was right about him all along...wasn't she?

Eva, whose story is told by Shriver as a series of letters from her to Franklin a year or two after Kevin's school rampage, is a classic unreliable narrator. While she's unafraid of presenting herself in a negative light or admitting fault, she's also our only source of information about Kevin. The incidents she relates about his conduct are often unsettling and worrisome...but they're hand-selected, by a woman who has had all her worst thoughts about her offspring confirmed by what he did. But while there were plenty of people Kevin alienated throughout his life besides his mother (a succession of childhood nannies, kids in his play groups, school classmates), Kevin did have people in his corner, most significantly his father, as well as a high school teacher who ended up among his victims.

The question the novel raises and never answers (but gives you lots of food for thought in both directions along the way) is the age old one: nature or nurture? Kevin was difficult from the moment he was born, but if he'd been able to bond with his mother, would he have been just plain difficult, instead of a murderer? Eva herself is prickly and sometimes, even often, unlikeable. Maybe he just takes after his mother that way. How much does Kevin's pushing back against her result from her aloofness and reserve from him? On the other hand, if he is truly evil, like she sees him and his own murders tend to indicate, what could she have done to change that? Eva and Franklin cared, were present, took an active interest in him and his life. There are a lot of kids who don't even have that. I found myself changing opinions as I read, sympathizing with Eva, then Kevin, back and forth. Shriver doesn't let either of them off the hook, nor should she. There's plenty of culpability to go around. This sucked me in and haunted me after it was done. I'm sure I'll continue to think about it in the future. It's disturbing subject matter, but it's phenomenally well-written and I highly recommend it.

Tell me, blog friends...nature or nurture?

One year ago, I was reading: All The King's Men

Wednesday, November 30, 2016

A Month In The Life: November 2016

It's the last day of November, so that means it's time for my monthly wrap-up!


In Books: I had a cross-country trip this month, so lots of airplane time (4.5 hours each way with a one hour connecting flight on each end!), which means lots of dedicated reading time. I read more than usual this month...
  • The Confessions of Saint Augustine: From what I knew of the man, he lived a pretty party-hearty life before finding religion, so I was interested in seeing what spurred his conversion. Turns out it was mostly his mom. I had an abridged version, which I was glad of because theological pondering is not my reading sweet spot. 
  • The Queen of the Night (ARC): I finally gave myself permission to skip some of my e-galleys that I'm less excited about and read the ones that I'm actually really intrigued by. This book had gotten a lot of buzz early in the year and it was totally bonkers and I LOVED it. 
  • What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours: I've been wanting to join a real-life book club for a while and now I have, at local indie bookstore Sundance Books. This was the first selection for the club, and immediately pushed me out of my comfort zone because I don't read short stories almost ever. It was an interesting, if not really especially enjoyable, read: I don't usually go for short stories because I like immersing myself in a book and I feel like I'd appreciate the intricate magical realism of Oyeyemi's writing in a long form better.
  • Invisible Man: This I started reading almost immediately after the election, and the reports of racist activity that followed, and although it was coincidence this was a very timely read. Ellison's chronicle of his nameless narrator realizing that he's effectively invisible because of the color of his skin is searing and rich and powerful and a must-read.
  • The Paper Magician: This was a pleasant enough, fluffy little read. The characterizations were pretty thin, but the magic system at the heart of it is intriguing, and the central plot device of being a journey through a heart and what it holds was novel. It was neither great nor terrible, but after the previous book it was nice to read something less substantial.
  • Eleanor of Aquitaine: Alison Weir is a favorite historian of mine, and her account of the incredible life of Eleanor of Aquitaine is, as always, lively and interesting.
  • The Emigrants: This is really more a collection of four short stories on a similar theme than it is a novel. W. G. Sebald spins achingly poignant tales of four different emigrants and the loneliness and dislocation that results from their moves, whether or not they were voluntary in the first place.
  • The Girls (ARC): Emma Cline's book was pretty buzzy this summer, but I didn't get to it until now. Its inspiration in the Manson murders has tended to be what people mention about it the most, but I found that part of the story to really be secondary to the focus on what it means to be a young teenage girl and wanting desperately to be wanted.


In Life:
  • Election Day happened: Apart from my own feelings about politics on the national level (I've outed myself as a Democrat before, so you can assume my disappointment with the outcome), this also influences my professional life since my work concerns the state legislature. Nevada's Assembly swung back to blue from red, and the state Senate did the same. We've got some new faces coming in, so I'm looking forward to meeting and working with them! No really, I like people and relationship-building, so I actually do like getting to know the new legislators. 
  • BFF2K16: My annual girls trip with my best friends since the time I was a kid! This year's destination was The Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Orlando, so we took a long weekend down to the state where we saw more than one person drive in reverse on the highway. It was super fun, we did one day of theme park and one day on the beach (coming from the other side of the country, I had a full day of travel on each end) and mostly hung around and chatted and talked about our changing lives. This is the weekend I look forward to the most every year and I'm already excited for next year!
  • First book club meeting: For all that I'm a die-hard reader, I've never actually been in a real live book club. Like I mentioned above, this one is hosted by our local indie bookstore, Sundance Books, and has a facilitator and everything. It's a good mix of people, and our discussion around What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours was interesting and brought new things to light. Can't wait to discuss The Wonder next month!
  • Family Thanksgiving: As usual, we (me, the husband, and the pug) spent Thanksgiving with my in-laws and their usual holiday crew. Along with the usual things to be thankful for, I'm thankful that the group is mostly aligned along similar political lines, so the most controversial thing was how much food the dog got snuck under the table. No one can resist spoiling him!
One Thing:
  • What's the one thing that I've been particularly into lately? It actually doesn't show in my reading here (yet) as much as it does in my bookshelves, but I am a royalty junkie, and I am loving Netflix's The Crown! Queen Elizabeth has been queen for the vast majority of her adult life, and the look at the human who wears that headpiece and has those duties is well-done and really fun to watch! I already can't wait for next season!
Gratuitous Pug Picture:


Tuesday, November 29, 2016

Top Ten Tuesday: Holiday Gift Guide

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The BookishThis week's prompt is to create a holiday gift guide. As my gift guide, I'm going to tell you about ten books that I've reviewed on this blog over the last year, and who they would make a good choice for this holiday season!



Beloved: Someone interested in the ways that slavery's pernicious evil continues to reverberate. Toni Morrison's classic makes the horrors of slavery, which can almost seem abstract in their scope, personal and real.

All The King's Men: Anyone who is interested in what can be hiding behind a populist veneer. President-Elect Trump is not the first politician to rise to power behind a populist message. There are some definite parallels to Robert Penn Warren's Willie Stark in our incoming administration.

The Creation of Anne Boleyn: Budding feminists. Most of us have heard of and are at least somewhat familiar with Anne Boleyn. Susan Bordo's examination of the myths that have sprung up around her and how they've changed over time is a great primer on variable views of women over time.

The Serpent King: Anyone who has ever felt like they don't belong. Which is kind of everyone, right? Jeff Zenter's story about three high school misfits in their senior year brings that aching longing of adolescence rushing right back in the best possible way.

The Namesake: Someone with a complicated relationship with their parents. In Jhumpa Lahiri's justly lauded novel, Gogol's angst over his given name mirrors the tension he feels with his immigrant parents and their culture as he grows up in America. 

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn: Anyone who's loved someone unreliable. Little Francie Nolan worships her ne'er-do-well father in Betty Smith's coming-of-age classic. The pain that he causes both Francie and her mother, Katie, without really "meaning" to will be instantly recognizable to anyone who has tried to count on someone that they shouldn't.

The Big Rewind: Nostalgic older millennials. Remember mixtapes? If the actual creation of a putting songs on a cassette before your time, Libby Cudmore's witty, entertaining debut probably won't resonate with you very hard. But for the rest of us, it's a treat!

American Gods: Mythology buffs. Neil Gaiman is an incredible writer, and this is one of his most popular works for a reason. It posits a world in which the gods of classical mythology (along with more modern subjects of worship) are actual, corporeal beings...a great mind-stretcher for people who love myths!

The Group: Young women who've just graduated from college. When you graduate, you feel like the whole world is in front of you. And it is! But the struggles that exist out there in the real world: relationships, work, motherhood are the same ones that we've been dealing with for nearly a hundred years. It's comforting to realize we've all been through it before.

Enchanted Islands: Anyone who feels like the later stages of their life are fated to be boring. After a difficult but not particularly exciting life, the heroine of Allison Amend's novel experiences real adventure for the first time in her late 40s, in a way that continues to play out through the rest of her days. Life's adventures never really end.

Thursday, November 24, 2016

Book 52: I Am Livia


 "When I was a girl, I imagined love was a kind of prize for virtuous behavior. That was how the philosophers described it. Love was a tribute that flowed naturally only to those with undivided spirits and pure hearts. It occurred to me now that it was something else, wilder and less comprehensible."

Dates read: May 11-14, 2016

Rating: 7/10

As I'm writing this (in mid-May), Hillary Clinton is on pace to secure the Democratic presidential nomination. However you feel about her (I personally support her, but understand there are plenty of completely valid reasons not to), there's no denying she's raised an issue that a lot of people, including myself, have unexplored feelings about: female power. A woman's rule gives a lot of people pause, and has throughout history. Think about it: how many books and movies have you read and/or seen where a woman with power is a sinister and malevolent force?

Phyllis Smith's I Am Livia is a fictionalized account of a very powerful woman who has been regarded suspiciously by history: Livia Drusilla, wife of the Roman emperor Augustus (born Octavius). I'd actually never heard of her before I read this book, but it was a Kindle First title and I'm into historical fiction, so I picked it up and I'm glad I actually got the chance to read about Livia and her life. And a lady who gets her first husband to give her away to her second husband just days after she gave birth to the first husband's child (true story!) is someone I'm interested in learning about.

Livia was the older of two daughters of a Roman senator, and Smith kicks off her story just as Livia's father is throwing his support behind the assassins of Julius Caesar. Like many historical fiction heroines, Livia is a smart and strong-willed young woman, educated by her father about government and politics. Despite having had a chance meeting with young Octavius in which the two become besotted with each other, Livia's marriage to her older cousin, Tiberius Nero, is arranged for political purposes. Smith doesn't take the easy way out and make Tiberius cruel to Livia to get readers to root against him and their marriage: he's not a bad man or even a bad husband, Livia simply doesn't love him. She tries to be a good wife to him anyways, bearing him two sons and trying to advise him on how to best navigate the complicated world of Roman politics in the era of the Triumvirates. But when Livia and Octavius re-encounter each other years after her marriage (and when she's heavily pregnant with her second of those sons she had with Tiberius), their connection can no longer be denied and Tiberius is persuaded to bow out as graciously as any person possibly could, really, with the whole giving-her-away bit I mentioned above.

Livia uses her status as wife of the First Citizen of Rome to assume some power of her own: she handles his correspondence, gets him to allow her the legal right to make her own decisions about her own property under the guise of giving the same right to his popularly-beloved sister Julia, helps him see the advantages of making sure the citizens of Rome are taken care of and not just focusing on war and conquest. The use of one of my least favorite literary tropes, love at first sight, bothered me like it always does, but I appreciated that Smith drew Livia and Tavius (a pet name for Octavius) as a complicated couple. Besides their ultimately unsuccessful struggle to have a child of their own and the strain that situation places on their relationship, they're both hard-headed and stubborn and there's a point at which their marriage is very near breaking down because of miscommunication and pride. And while Livia loves her husband, she's not so crazy about him that she can't see advantages to their separation, which takes some of the saccharine out of the tired "we've been in love since we first laid eyes on each other" sweetness that underlies their relationship.

Smith does a good job of neither making Livia a paragon of virtue nor a tyrant greedy for ever-more authority as she acquires and uses power over the course of her life. It lets us ask ourselves why we're uncomfortable with the idea that a woman would want the power to make her own decisions even if her husband would never deny her the opportunity to do what she wanted. Livia's mother was content to be in the traditional female "power behind the throne" role, why does Livia want more active power? If she plants ideas with her husband after they've slept together, is it her using her body to get what she wants or simply taking advantage of the time they're most relaxed and are actually alone together to discuss the things that are important to both her individually and them as a couple? The questions the book raises and the strong characterization of Livia overrides some underdeveloped side characters and a workmanlike prose style to create a work that's definitely worth a read, especially if you're interested in Roman history and/or feminism.

Tell me, blog friends...can you imagine a modern-day husband ever giving away his ex-wife less than a week after she had his child?

One year ago, I was reading: Oriental Mythology

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Top Ten Tuesday: Things I Am Thankful For


Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The BookishThis week's topic is gratitude, and I have a lot to be thankful for. Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays...it's about food, and family, and really taking time to take stock of your life and realize how much is good, even if there's also stuff that's less good. This Thursday, we'll be heading over to my in-laws house and celebrating with them and their extended group of friends...the wine flows freely and it's good people, so we always have a lot of fun! Things I'm thankful for this year:

My husband: Getting the cheesy stuff out of the way first. I'm grateful for him in my life because he's the actual best, and also that he's officially my husband and that means the wedding is over, because planning that was one of the most stressful experiences I've ever had (I'd happily take another bar exam before planning another wedding).

Our family: Between my wonderful in-laws and my own adored and missed mom, dad, sister and brother-in-law, I'm fortunate to have so many great people in my life that I love and love me.

My besties: Kailey and Crystal are the best friends a girl could ask for...the kinds of friends that have been there for you since elementary school are the kind you cherish. Our trips are the weekend I look forward to the most every year!

Stanley: Getting our little pugling almost a year ago now was the best thing. He is just a constant source of delight and love.

My health: Apart from a recent unpleasant seasonal flu and my hormonal migraines, I haven't had a major health issue since my gallbladder removal in 2014. I am very, very fortunate that this is the case, many others aren't so lucky.

Having a good job: I have work that I find fulfilling, and my coworkers are all people I enjoy and respect. That hasn't always been the case for me and I'm so glad that it is now.

Reproductive freedom: The development of birth control options means that women can take ownership of our lives and careers without having to constantly worry that we might become pregnant before we want to (if indeed, we want to at all). This is no small feat, when you look at the course of human history, and recent political realities have reminded me how lucky I am that this is the case.

The ability to vote: Speaking of recent political realities...I can feel however I want about the outcome of this year's election (spoiler alert: I do not feel good), but the fact remains that I was able to go to the ballot box and have my say. This wasn't always the case for lady people, so I am grateful to the suffragettes for their work securing the vote for women.

Books: Cliche, I know, but I am constantly grateful that my mother instilled a love of reading and appreciation for the power of the written word in me when I was little. Through books, I get to explore the past, the future, and the incredible variety of experiences that constitute being human.

Living in a post-paper map world: This last one is a little flippant, I know, but I am actually constantly, consciously glad that I live in a world where my awfulness with directions doesn't keep me from getting where I'm going without getting horribly lost all the time.

Monday, November 21, 2016

Dreamcasting: The Great Gatsby



As I've talked about before, I'm super into movies. I've seen more movies (over 1500) than I've read books (definitely less than that), although recently the balance has started to tip in favor of the latter rather than the former. After I finish a good book, I start to toss it around in my head a little...who would I cast in these roles for the movie adaptation? I thought it might be fun to do a little recurring Dreamcasting series here every so often just for something different but still bookish.

I actually loathed The Great Gatsby when I first read it as a high school junior. Gatsby was a moron, Daisy a twit, Nick a fool. But when I was bored a few years later during a summer home in college, I found myself devouring it and relishing the experience. I've continued to re-read it and been grateful that I picked it back up again...while the reading level of the prose is suitable to a high school student, I feel like it's hard to understand before you've loved and lost, before you've drowned in the feeling of wanting another chance, wanting to start over and try again because you messed it all up and you'll do it better the next time, you swear.

And yes, I know, Baz Luhrmann JUST made a new version of this a few years ago. But it wasn't as magnificent as I'd hoped it would be when I first heard about it. Part of it was the casting: Leonardo DiCaprio was too old and had no chemistry with Carey Mulligan, who was competent but not as luminous as I was hoping as Daisy. Tobey Maguire would have been amazing casting as Nick Carraway...except being, again, too old. Here's how I would cast the main roles if I was making it today:



Jay Gatsby: Leonardo would have been amazing casting...if he'd been a decade younger. Gatsby has to be charming, with a willpower that can make you believe he'd make almost anyone believe in him. The one actor that I think could just knock it out of the park? Michael B. Jordan. He's been amazing since The Wire when he was just a teenager...just effortlessly electric onscreen. 



Daisy Buchanan: I think this is one of the hardest roles to dreamcast, honestly. She has to be so beautiful and compelling that you can believe that a man would go to the lengths Gatsby has gone for her, grounded but also floating with deliberate ignorance past the ruins she leaves in her wake. She's the on-the-cusp It Girl of the moment, so how about lovely Haley Bennett? She's actually got kind of a 20s look working for her.



Nick Carraway: For the wide-eyed and relatively innocent Nick, I like Michael Cera. Nick is a reactive character, the events of the novel happen to/around him, and for me he needs to be kind of bland-but-good-hearted-seeming in a way that I think Cera satisfies.



Tom Buchanan: He needs to be attractive but callous, the kind of man that would conduct his affairs openly in front of his well-bred wife and pick up a white trash social climber married to a poor man for his mistress. Jonathan Rhys Meyers has that kind of almost cruel look that I think Tom needs.



Myrtle Wilson: This is kind of a throwaway role, the aforementioned white trash mistress. Someone lovely but with a kind of hardness underneath, sexy but in an almost artificial way. She's as blue-blooded as they come in real life, and a little too young, but once I started thinking about Cara Delavigne in the role, I can't shake the idea...



Jordan Baker: I actually thought Elizabeth Debicki was a perfect Jordan in the Luhrmann version, but if we're recasting, we're recasting. It's a minor role, she really needs to be energetic and charming but capable of casual thoughtlessness. I'm going to go with Nina Dobrev, whose work on The Vampire Diaries had her playing a charismatic sociopath very convincingly.

Thursday, November 17, 2016

Book 51: The Witches of Eastwick

 
"There was so much dirt in life, so many eraser crumbs and stray coffee grounds and dead wasps trapped inside the storm windows, that it seemed all of a person's time- all of a woman's time, at any rate- was spent in reallocation, taking things from one place to another, dirt being as her mother had said simply matter in the wrong place."

Dates read: May 8-11, 2016

Rating: 3/10

Lists/awards: NY Times Bestseller

Sometimes I feel like a fake "serious reader". Which is the most ridiculous first world problem, I know. But there are so many of the classics, so many high-profile novelists, that I haven't read: Murakami, The Count of Monte Cristo, Faulkner, Catch-22. And until now, John Updike. But a secondhand copy of The Witches of Eastwick, which I'd seen the very cheesy 80s movie version of quite some time ago and enjoyed watching, came into my path and I decided it was time to cross that one off my list.

And this is one of those instances where (at least for my money), the movie was better than the book. They both have a similar setup: three socially outcast women living in a small town in Rhode Island become involved with a mysterious stranger, Daryl Van Horn, who comes to town and chaos ensues. In the movie, the women become witches under Daryl's satanic influence, and band together to turn against him when he causes harm. But that's not where the book goes. The book is much darker, and it suffers for it. When you're dealing with heavy stuff like magic and death and the devil, you need a little levity to keep it from dragging.

When Updike opens his novel, the three women (Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie) are already witches. A widow and two divorcees in a small town in the early 1960s, they are outside the conservative social order and each others' only real friends. They aren't especially nice people: they frequently behave spitefully, none of them are at all involved in their children's lives, and are all sleeping with married men. When Daryl Van Horn, the devil hisownself, arrives in town, he doesn't imbue them with power as much as heighten their ambition (and start having orgies with them, of course, because that's apparently what the devil does). While all of the women have romantic designs on Daryl on some level, they share him relatively peacefully until a younger woman, Jenny, joins their group and eventually succeeds in becoming Mrs. Van Horn. The witches are jealous and band together to use their magic to kill her. Van Horn then skips town with Jenny's younger brother and the women each, eventually, conjure up a good man and themselves depart Eastwick.

Like I said earlier, it's a lot of pretty heavy material without much to lighten it up. The women have some small moments of sympathy, but are largely negative people that aren't very enjoyable to read about. You would think that the literal devil would be a compelling character, at least. He's supposed to be interesting, right? Not as Updike writes him. Daryl is never written as even particularly physically attractive, much less the charismatic wily schemer you would expect the Prince of Darkness to be. There was no one to care about, much less identify with or root for. Updike's writing is good (if you're into the flowery-language-and-run-on-sentences kind of writing, which I tend to be), but the story falls completely flat.

Because I didn't like the book, I spent much less time thinking about it and its plot as a story and more time wondering if I thought this was, as it is usually considered, a feminist work. On the one hand, you have women who are close friends, who have discovered and own their power, who have the sex lives they want to have, who are not defined by their motherhood, and who are unapologetic for any of this. While we're often presented with narratives about men who behave in an antisocial manner and asked to consider them the heroes of the story, The Witches of Eastwick is a rare example of this phenomenon for female characters. On the other hand, they aren't given many redeeming features, either: they aren't funny or really all that interesting, they're petty, and they're driven to a murderous jealous rage over...a man. Their "happy endings" only come when they've each found themselves...a man. I think on the balance, it's more feminist than not, but I will qualify that by saying that Updike writes terribly about the experience of being a woman. When he writes about sex or menses, it's cringeworthy. And even if it's mostly feminist, that doesn't mean I have to like it. I didn't, and I wouldn't recommend it. It's just not fun to read.

Tell me, blog friends...what major works or authors haven't you read yet?

One year ago, I was reading: Oriental Mythology

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Movies

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week's topic takes us out of the book zone for a hot second into one of my other fondest hobbies: movies! I'm on a never-ending quest to watch every movie that's ever won the "major" Oscars, as I see them (Picture, Director, all four Acting, Documentary, and Foreign Film). I've actually made it through many of them and let me not recommend it to anyone else, as I've seen some real duds. Also, I worked at Blockbuster in college and I watched a bunch of movies that way, too. Here are ten of my all-time favorites.


City of God: My all-time, hands-down favorite, this movie is definitely worth turning on the subtitles for. Sent in the favelas outside Rio, this movie parallels two stories of growing up: that of Rocket, who is mild-mannered and keen-eyed and looks to journalism to escape, and that of Lil' Ze, a drug lord whose criminal life begins early. It's just incredible film-making and so compelling.

American Beauty: This was the movie that got me thinking about movies as film, as artistic statements rather than just simple entertainment. Looking back, it's less deep or cutting than I gave it credit for initially (suburban dysfunction isn't exactly brand new territory), but it's still powerful, mostly because of really wonderful performances.

Clueless: A witty take on Emma that I think Jane Austen would have approved of, this is a pop culture delight that's aged beautifully despite the dated cellphones. Alicia Silverstone is so perfect as oblivious but good-intentioned Cher Horowitz and it's so fun and vibrant. It's really hard to do breezy comedy well but this is right on the money.

Shattered Glass: Hayden Christiansen might have gotten some well-deserved blowback for his take on Anakin Skywalker, but his kind of whiny, obsequious quality works great for his role as disgraced news magazine editor Stephen Glass. Watching him desperately try to fend off the skepticism of his new boss, Peter Sarsgaard's brilliant portrayal of Chuck Lane, as the walls collapse in around him is just incredible. It's also a triumph of editing...it's quite short and there's not a wasted moment in it.

Lord of the Rings: I'm cheating and counting it as all one movie, because I love the whole series and they really are all one story. There's not a bad casting decision in the bunch, and the real chemistry of the actors shines through.

Election: This is a deliciously dark satire about politics, seen through the frame of a high school election. The ways that power and desire and ambition twist behavior are all front and center, and I still think this is Reese Witherspoon's best work.

Annie Hall: As a general rule, romantic comedies are not for me. I just don't find them entertaining. However you might feel about its maker, Annie Hall's merits speak for themselves. Dazzlingly clever and honest and just so good.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: Marilyn Monroe tends to be thought of as a bombshell alone, but she's actually a very talented comedic actress. And nowhere are her gifts of timing and charisma more on display than this frothy, fun musical. She and Jane Russell are just a hoot together.

Y Tu Mama Tambien: Before Alfonso Cuaron directed the third Harry Potter, he directed this odd, delicate blend of teen sex comedy and exploration of life and friendship and politics. It works, because like this movie, life is not just one thing at a time.

Can't Hardly Wait: A sentimental choice, this is a movie my friends and I have watched and loved and developed drinking games for since high school. It's not great cinema by any stretch, it's just silly and easy to watch.

Thursday, November 10, 2016

Book 50: Vinegar Girl

 
"At such moments, Kate felt like an imposter. Who was she to order a child to take a nap? She completely lacked authority, and all the children knew it; they seemed to view her as just an extra-tall, more obstreperous four-year-old." 

Dates read: May 7-8, 2016

Rating: 4/10

When I was a teenager, "classic literature modernized" movie adaptations were all the rage: Emma became Clueless, Pygmalion became She's All That, and (one of my personal favorites) The Taming of the Shrew became 10 Things I Hate About You. The charm of a very-new-to-Hollywood Heath Ledger, the great quibbling sister dynamic established by Julia Stiles and Larisa Oleynik...and Julia Stiles' totally badass interpretation of Shakespeare's Katherina. I had a pretty big chip on my shoulder when I was that age (I realize this hardly makes me unique among teenagers), so I very much identified with Stiles' Kat and the devil-may-care persona she crafted to fit over her vulnerabilities.

My fond memories of that movie, I suppose, makes me predisposed to be fond of adaptations of The Taming of the Shrew. Anne Tyler's Vinegar Girl is part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series, re-writings/modernizations of Shakespeare's principal plays by prominent authors. Tyler tells us the story of Kate Battista, a blunt and off-putting young woman who cares for her flaky little sister Bunny and maintains the household for her father, a researcher of autoimmune diseases. She's plenty smart, but has dropped out of college after a confrontation with a professor and works as a teacher's assistant at a day care. Her father's research has taken a turn for the promising when he's about to lose his gifted young assistant, Pyotr, to an expired visa...so Dr. Battista asks Kate to marry the fellow so he can stick around.

As much as I'm excited about some of the upcoming Hogarth Shakespeare entries (Gillian Flynn taking on Hamlet is going to be awesome), I'll be honest: I didn't like this one. Perhaps it was the 250 page length, but it didn't feel developed enough. I never bought the family dynamics, or really understood Kate as a character: to me, she seemed almost written as though she's on the spectrum: she's very literal and disinclined to seek out social connection. But I don't know that I think it was Tyler's intention to invite that interpretation. I didn't get her relationship with her father or sister, neither of which seemed very warm or rich. A deep bond with them might explain why an intelligent 29 year old would have been content to work a dead-end job for years on end to take care of them, but that wasn't ever even really hinted at, much less shown. Speaking of unearned feelings that are never actually drawn and apparently just supposed to be inferred, Kate and Pyotr's growing affection for each other after she has agreed to the immigration fraud plan never rings true either. They have a handful of awkward encounters that Kate professes to find discomfiting...and then we're supposed to be on board when she apparently really wants to marry him after all. Skip this and watch 10 Things I Hate About You and swoon over a baby Heath Ledger singing Stevie Wonder instead.

Tell me, blog friends...what's your favorite Shakespeare play or adaptation?

One year ago, I was reading: Kramer v Kramer

Tuesday, November 8, 2016

Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Books I've Added To My TBR Lately

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The BookishThis week's topic: ten books I've added to my TBR lately. If you take a look at my Goodreads account, my TBR is gigantic. And I already have physical or digital copies of many, many, of these books. I try to keep it from getting any bigger, but my TBR has taken on kind of a life of its own at this point. Here are ten books that I'm excited to read someday...you know, after I read the literal hundreds of books I already own.



Candy: This story about drug addiction in modern-day China was banned in China. I'm a sucker for a banned book.

Sweet Lamb of Heaven: I'm not a big horror reader, but I enjoy psychological horror, especially in a domestic drama kind of context. When you add in political campaign elements, I'm intrigued!

Unmentionable: I've always been a nonfiction lover, and this book about what it was actually like to be a Victorian-era lady seems like the kind of thing I'd enjoy!

Girls of Riyadh: It sucks, in many ways, to be a woman anywhere. But especially in Saudi Arabia, where women are oppressed on a level that is mind-boggling to consider. A perspective on Saudi womanhood is something I'd really enjoy reading.

Goldenhand: Although I have a copy of the fourth book in the Abhorsen series, Clariel, I haven't managed to read it yet. But that doesn't mean I don't want to read the recently-released fifth book already!

My Own Words: Ruth Bader Ginsburg is one of my total heroes, and her recent writing collection is something I'm dying to read!

On Such A Full Sea: I've always, since I was a teenager, been interested in post-apocolyptic stories. This one was highlighted by a few of my favorite readers, so I added it my own list.

Brown Girl Dreaming: I'm not a particularly big fan of poetry, and so verse novels make me skittish. But I've heard enough good things from enough people that I'm going to give it a go.

The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: I've actually not read a lot about the Gilded Age (except The Great Gatsby, of course), and this nonfiction about a young woman who inherited a massive fortune and became a recluse seems like it would be interesting and informative reading.

Death With Interruptions: What if one day, people just stopped dying? I loved Saramago's Blindness, and this novel that personifies death seems like it would hit my sweet spot for books that make me think.

Thursday, November 3, 2016

Book 49: The Curious Case of Kiryas Joel



"What a wonderful tribute to the US Constitution that a minority subculture with traditions, habits, beliefs, and practices that are so different from the prevailing culture can flourish and live their lives as they wish, unfettered by the majority."

Dates read: May 5-7, 2016

Rating: 6/10

Before I went to law school, one of the reasons I wanted to go was because I loved reading about and studying the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. I've already outed myself as a big giant nerd, so there's more fuel for the fire, eh? Growing up in a small, conservative town, I felt like an outsider because I didn't go to church on a regular basis (I was raised Catholic but stopped attending mass during middle school, and by the time I hit high school, I identified as agnostic). I studied everything I could about the separation of church and state, especially in schools, and dreamed about arguing the issue in court one day. It didn't work out that way, obviously, but I've retained a real interest in the topic.

Louis Grumet's The Curious Case of Kiryas Joel tells the inside story of one of the Supreme Court's Establishment Clause cases: Board of Education of Kiryas Joel Village School District v. Grumet. That's the same Grumet in both places: he was the president of the New York State School Boards Association at the time a law was passed in the New York State Legislature creating a school district for a small village in upstate New York that was home exclusively to the Satmar, a sect of strict Hasidic Jews. The Satmar, a community that previously lived in Brooklyn but found the modern world to be too intrusive in the middle of New York City, bought up large chunks of land outside a town called Monroe and founded a village that they called Kiryas Joel after their leader, a rabbi who had survived the Holocaust. They shunned contact with the outside, established their own private yeshivas to educate their children, and caused a lot of strife within the larger Monroe community by doing things like blatantly ignoring building codes with impunity, crying anti-Semitism anytime they were challenged. The issue arose because, like any small group that intermarries extensively, there came to be many children with genetic disorders and resultant learning disabilities. The Satmar were not equipped to educate these children, so they sought to take advantage of the legal obligation of the Monroe school district to provide appropriate education to the local children and sent their kids to public school. It did not go well: the children, who already had special needs, struggled in a radically different environment and the district made several problematic blunders. The Satmar kids were pulled out of the district, and an idea was hatched: to give the village its own district, which would be able to take in and spend public money for the education of these children.

That's a problem under the Establishment Clause, because the law was designed to benefit and was exclusive to one particular religious group. So why would this bill have even been drafted? And then passed? And then signed? The answer: politics! The Satmar are a relatively small group, but they're powerful: they vote as a bloc the way their rabbi tells them to...and they don't have an ideological purity test to pass. They support whoever helps steer money and services to them. Politicians like winning elections, and so they're willing to do what they can to lock down those votes. Grumet was there as it all was happening, and guides the reader through the process: fleshing out the details of who the Satmar are, how they came to settle at Kiryas Joel, their conflicts with the local population, why sending their kids to public school failed, and how the bill came to be conceived and passed.

A lot of the political behind-the-scenes stuff was familiar and understandable to me as someone who does this kind of thing for a living, but if that's not you, Grumet lays it out in a way that's logical and easy to follow. I think a lot of people don't quite understand how the sausage is made (I know I didn't before I started doing what I do), and the way Grumet tells the story helps shed light on the process. He also helps illuminate what it actually means to take a case to the Supreme Court: it starts small, with a lawsuit in district court, and goes up from there. The court portion of the book is actually the weakest part...it mostly copies and pastes sections of transcripts to show the arguments made and the decisions reached. 

At the end of the day, this book is almost certain to only be interesting to those already inclined to enjoy the subject matter. Some broader context is provided, but the story is almost entirely about this situation and case and doesn't go out of its way to make it easy to understand the legal issues if you're a layperson. It's not especially well-written, and suffers for Grumet's insistence on telling his own story as much as the case's story. It's not a bad book per se, but it isn't one I'd recommend to anyone but people with some already existing background and interest in the subject matter.

Tell me, blog friends...is there a Supreme Court case you'd be interested in reading a history of?

One year ago, I was reading: Primitive Mythology

**I received a free copy of this book from the publisher, Chicago Review Press, through Edelweiss in exchange for a fair and honest review**