Book 24: The Guest Room

Dates read: February 25-28, 2016

Rating: 6/10

"He realized how much he was dreading the sunrise: it would illuminate just how much his world had changed since yesterday- and how damaged was the little bark that carried his soul, how far it was from the shore, and how menacing were the waves in between. No one, he knew, was ever going to look at him quite the same way again."

As someone getting married soon (about a month after this post will go live, but about three-ish months from when I'm writing it), reading a novel about a bachelor party gone horribly wrong is...interesting. Not that I'm worried about Drew having the kind of party that goes on in The Guest Room. If I were, I wouldn't be marrying him.

In The Guest Room, Richard Chapman is just trying to be a good best man when he agrees to host his little brother Phillip's bachelor party at his home. He sends his wife and young daughter away for the weekend, expecting the usual kind of bachelor deal: drinking, carousing, maybe strippers. What he gets are two young Eastern European women in his living room that are clearly more than "just" strippers: they're prostitutes. What he doesn't realize until much later is that they aren't "just" prostitutes, but women who are being trafficked for sex. After he comes close to but ultimately stops himself from sleeping with one of them, his entire world is turned upside down when they violently kill their "bodyguards" and take off. The story splits and follows two tracks: what happens with Richard as the ramifications of that night spiral out of control in both his personal and professional lives, and the story of Alexandra, the girl Richard almost slept with, both before and after that night.

While author Chris Bohjalian does a great job of making Richard a sympathetic character, using him as a lens to show how even fundamentally decent men participate in and perpetuate a culture that treats women as commodities, Alexandra's is the more dynamic story. An aspiring ballerina in Armenia, she is lured away from home after both her parents die by her mother's former employer with promises of dance training and a career. Once she's taken, the 15 year-old is repeatedly raped, groomed to become a high-class call girl over the course of a few years in Russia, and then comes to the US, where the bachelor party is among her first assignments.

There's a distaste, if not recoil, by "normal" people when they think about the idea of a woman having sex for money. What kind of person would consider something like that? Why on earth? I was among them, but over the past couple years, I've been reading Maggie McNeill's excellent blog, and I've come to understand that plenty of women willingly chose the sex trade for lots of perfectly understandable reasons. While sex slavery does exist, it's MUCH less prevalent than most people would believe. So while the story told by Alexandra might be true for some small number of women, your average escort has a much more prosaic background. And while I think Bohjalian chooses to make her story dramatic for the purpose of impact, it still perpetuates a mythology that a lot of people cling to which is ultimately harmful for sex workers.

As I whole, I found the book decent but not great and ultimately forgettable. There's a good amount of suspense built in Richard's storyline, wondering how things are going to play out for him, and even more in Alexandra's storyline once it gets to the "after the murder" part. But the ending felt...undercooked, for lack of a better way to describe it. It seemed like Bohjalian wrote himself into a corner and kind of flailed his way out of it. On a final, nitpicky note, I've never had to Google as many words in the course of one book as I did with this one. I think of myself as having a pretty extensive vocabulary, but there were many words I'd never encountered before. Which is great on one level, because I'm always down to add a new word to my trove. But it struck me as a little pretentious, since most of those words were used when a simpler, more accessible one would have been perfectly appropriate.

Tell me, blog friends...what's your favorite pretentious vocab word?

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

Note: Review cross-posted at Cannonball Read

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Book 24: The Guest Room

Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Websites I Love That Aren't About Books

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week's topic: non-book websites that we love! Being a bookworm is a pretty big part of my identity, obviously, I started a book blog and everything. But I like lots of other things too, so I'm excited to share some of my other favorite places on the internet outside of bookworld!



A Model Recommends: Ruth was an actual fashion model, and although it seems like she's retired from the runway at this point, she has a ton of experience getting makeup slathered on her face and took that experience and turned it into a really enjoyable beauty blog! She just had her first child and has a companion blog, The Uphill, about her experiences with pregnancy and motherhood that's just as wonderful as AMR.

Blue Collar Red Lipstick: I like fashion and style and reading about those things, but from, like, real people. Not that the various 5'10" 120 pound girls living in NYC and wearing head to toe designer clothes that seem to be the popular fashion bloggers aren't people, obviously, but you know what I mean. Adina is a lawyer living in Edmonton and a mother of two who posts her work and weekend outfits and I love seeing what someone of a similar life station to me actually wears in her life. She's got a great sense of style and has also written some books (under the name Aren Piada) which I haven't gotten a chance to read yet but I'm looking forward to reading when I get the chance!

Hacker.Ninja.Hooker.Spy: Aussa's life would be too bonkers to be true except it is true, and while she's gone through some awful situations, her determination to look at her life with a sense of humor rather than what would be deserved self-pity makes this one of the funniest blogs I read. I don't think there's a single post that hasn't elicited actual out-loud laughter.

Go Fug Yourself: Heather and Jessica actually started out as writers for Television Without Pity (where I once haunted the America's Next Top Model boards daily), and not only do they run GFY, they are YA authors themselves (all their books are on my TBR). But I started reading GFY back in 2004 when I was a sophomore in college and haven't stopped since. That's over ten years, so this is good stuff.

Budget Bytes: I like looking at food blogs and pretty food photographed in pretty ways, but the reality is that I'm not a very adventurous eater. I like mostly pretty basic stuff. Beth posts recipes that are both totally doable for a basic home cook (which is where I'd consider myself to be) and as the name of her blog suggests, affordable to make! Not everything she posts is vegetarian-friendly, but there's plenty that is and I've never made a dud from her.

Pole Dancing Adventures: In my spare time, when I'm not working or reading (or hanging out on the couch drinking beer, let's be real), it's as likely as not that you'll find me at Epic Pole Fitness. I've been doing pole for exercise for the past couple years (very off and on, but I've been going consistently for the past 6 months now) and I LOVE it. It's so much fun and a great workout, but there are definitely downsides (falling, brusing), and Leen's well-drawn and funny comics about pole are something I really enjoy!

Pajiba: I first found them when they were mostly a film review site. Those days are long in the past for them, but as they've grown to encompass generally entertainment and cultural news (which is almost their sole focus these days), I've kept up with them. Their writers are smart and insightful and funny (not 100% of the time, obviously, because that just doesn't happen, but most of the time) and it's one of my favorite sources of information on the internet. 

MGoBlog: I'm a VERY proud Michigan alum. Ask anyone who has ever met me. Especially Michigan athletics. And there's no resource on the internet for Umich sports like Brian at MGoBlog. I've been reading since college and although I kind of peaked with the post-Carr coaching search when I was in law school, I still do a glance at MGoBlog daily just to see what's going on.

Modcloth: Here's a story about me: I never had much of a sense of style (read: I was not at all good at dressing myself) until my last year of law school. I had an off-and-on relationship that went off again, and instead of getting back together with me like he always had before, my ex started dating one of our classmates. I was angry and heartbroken, and in a fit of pique, I vowed that he could date whoever he wanted, but I would never show up at the law school looking less cute than she did. And she was a Southern girl, so she dressed well. I had to step up my game. Enter Modcloth, where I found the kind of pretty dresses that would become my trademark when I moved back to Michigan and then out to Nevada. I have coworkers that have literally never seen me in pants even though winter definitely happens in northern Nevada because I love my dress collection so much I refuse to wear anything but dresses.

Tumblr: I've been on this site since...2008? Geez. I started out being much more active in terms of actually posting myself, but I haven't done much of that in the past five years or so. At this point, I'm mostly just keeping up with my favorites. There's so much content on tumblr, which is one of the great things about the site: you can curate your own feed to be exactly what you want to see, and there's something to see for pretty much any interest. It's pretty much my only connection to what the cool kids are up to anymore.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Websites I Love That Aren't About Books

Book 23: The Twentieth Wife

"These last two months had been slow and uncomfortable. They were all waiting for something. Waiting for Akbar's death. Waiting to see who would win the throne. Waiting- yet not wanting the Emperor to die, for either possibility seemed frightening."

Dates read: February 22-25, 2016

Rating: 4/10

Sometimes I wonder how much the liking of a book is tied to the time when you first read it. I wonder if I would still love some of the novels I first read in high school as much as I do if I'd been older and had a more developed critical eye than I did then. I started reading the Twilight series in the wake of a bad breakup, and I remain fond of the series (especially the breakup arc in New Moon) despite knowing full well that they're not high-quality literature. It would stand to reason, I think, that some books I've read right after something wonderful seem particularly lesser-than in comparison, and sometimes books that followed a dull and plodding one seem even better than they might actually be.

So I wondered if The Twentieth Wife following the double punch of two brilliant novels in a row might have been contributing to my disappointment with it. Was I being entirely fair to the novel on its own merits? If I'd read it, say, after one of the Masks of God books would I have liked it more? Ultimately, I feel like the answer is that no, I'm not being harsh because it doesn't measure up to the two amazing books I just read, it's honestly not very good.

To start on a positive note, it did introduce me to an era of world history I know precious little about: the Mughal Empire of India. I'd only really known two things about it previously: the rulers of the Mughal Empire were Muslim, and that the Taj Mahal was built as a memorial for a Mughal empress, Mumtaz Mahal. That's pretty much it. So the details that this novel provided about the empire and its courtly life were new, interesting information, and I particularly enjoyed the way each chapter opened with a quote from a historical source about the characters and events to be presented.

What didn't quite work, though, was most of the rest of it. The writing quality isn't particularly high...it was difficult to find a highlight quote because there were few bright spots. That's not to say it's especially poorly-written either, because it isn't...it's just mediocre. The novel tells the story of Mehrunissa, the daughter of a court official under the rule of Emperor Akbar. Although she is married to a soldier as a young woman, she and Akbar's heir apparent, Prince Salim, fall in love and eventually marry after her first husband's death. He becomes the the Emperor Jahangir, and she becomes his twentieth but most important wife, Nur Jahan, one of the most powerful women in the history of the Muslim world. She must be quite the interesting woman, eh?

Not really, as author Indu Sundaresan paints her. According to Sundaresan, when an eight year-old Mehrunissa catches a glimpse of Salim's first wedding at court, she decides right then and there that she will one day marry Salim. For no reason made particularly apparent, she attracts the interest of Akbar's most powerful wife, Ruqayya, as a companion, and spends her time at the palace thinking about how to attract Salim's attention so she can one day become an empress herself. Indeed, she spends her time at home thinking about the exact same thing. Even after she is married to another man, she keeps dreaming of a future with Salim. Mehrunissa is given no other real characterization besides "beautiful, educated woman completely obsessed with Salim". There's no depth or interest to her character. She has no close friends. Her first husband is presented as a one-dimensional brute who does not appreciate her or treat her very well. When the narrative shifts, as it does at times, to present Salim's story, he's presented as a weak-minded but ambitious man, easily manipulated, who is just as obsessed with Mehrunissa at first sight as she is with him. Neither of these people is given much of an inner life, nor are they at all compelling.

Which is disappointing, because from the Wikipedia-ing I was inspired to do, she led a very interesting life and a book about her should be fascinating. But a complete lack of character development and clunky writing have doomed this one to the donate pile.

Tell me, blog friends...what's one area of world history that you wish you would have learned more about in school?

Note: Review cross-posted at Cannonball Read

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Book 23: The Twentieth Wife

Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Childhood Characters You'd Love To Revisit As Adults

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week's topic: ten characters from childhood that you'd love to revisit as adults. This was a trip down memory lane, as I spent time thinking about the books I loved growing up, which was a lot of them. Here are the characters I'd most like to connect with:

The Babysitters Club: I read what feels like it was probably close to 100 of these books as a kid. Of course I desperately wanted to start a club of my own, and of course I didn't, but I lived vicariously though the girls' adventures. I wanted to think I was a Claudia, but I was totally a Mary Ann. I'd love to see an adult novel that followed up on their lives...maybe a mystery set at their 10 year reunion? 

Meg Murry (A Wrinkle In Time): After being the main character of the first two novels of the Time Quartet, the focus shifts off of Meg and onto her brothers. We see a little bit of her, but we don't really get to focus on her and her life. We know that she ends up married to Calvin and the mother of a large family, but I want to see a follow up with Meg from her own perspective. It looks like such a novel was in the works when Madeline L'Engle had a stroke and stopped writing, which bums me out. 

Georgia Nicholson (Angus, Thongs, and Full Frontal Snogging): I loved this silly series and in my head, Georgia grows up to be more-or-less Bridget Jones, but I have a feeling she'd even put Bridget to shame sometimes in terms of getting herself into messes. I'm going to have to keep on with my own ideas, though, because Louise Rennison sadly passed away earlier this year. 

Harry Potter: And the rest of the Potter gang, obviously. We've gotten little glimpses through Rowling's ending of the final book and updates on Pottermore, and I'm hoping Harry Potter and the Cursed Child shows us even more of who Harry, Hermione, and Ron have become as adults. 

Ella (Ella Enchanted): Cinderella may be a classic, but the Disney movie was never a favorite of mine because Cinderella is so boring (I quite liked Drew Barrymore's Ever After, though). This retelling makes our girl a much stronger and more interesting character, and I'd love to see what happens in her happily ever after...I have a feeling it's much more complicated than that. 

Matilda Wormwood (Matilda): I loved this book so much as a kid...probably because I identified hard with its smart, book-loving heroine. I have a whole rant about the movie and how much I hated it, but that's neither here nor there. After a childhood full of abusive parenting and magical powers, I really want to know what a grown-up Matilda is like after her telekinesis vanishes and she gets to live with Miss Honey. You have to think those early experiences would leave some pretty significant scars...

Jess Aarons (Bridge to Terabithia): This book made me ugly-cry as a kid, and after the death of his best friend, I wonder what happened to Jess. Thinking back on it as an adult, imaginative and artistic Jess seems to be written as potentially quietly gay, and I want to read about him going back home to visit small-town Virginia after moving to New York or Chicago or LA and becoming an artist.

Karana (Island of the Blue Dolphins): I'm pretty sure everyone read this in elementary or middle school, right? What we don't think about is what happens when a young woman who has lived alone on an island for years not only re-encounters humanity, but finds herself in a completely different culture. What does she do? How does she live her life? I'd love to read about Karana's post-Island life. 

Miyax (Julie of the Wolves): I remember reading the sequel, which presents Miyax/Julie's life when she leaves her wolf pack and struggles to readjust to a world that's changed in her absence. But she's still just a teenager in Julie, and I'd love to see her continue to learn and grow and see what she decides to make of her life and continue to deal with culture clash 

April and Melanie (The Egypt Game): I know, there are other characters, but these two unlikely friends were my favorite. After a childhood of imagination games, I picture the girls going to college and growing apart, but reuniting in a chance encounter and slowly reconnecting. Anyone else want to read that or just me? 

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Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Childhood Characters You'd Love To Revisit As Adults

Book 22: A Tree Grows In Brooklyn

"The last time of anything has the poignancy of death itself. This that I see now, she thought, to see no more this way. Oh, the last time how clearly you see everything; as though a magnifying light had been turned on it. And you grieve because you hadn't held it tighter when you had it every day."

Dates read: February 19-22, 2016

Rating: 9/10

Lists/Awards: NY Times Bestseller

Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In today's world, it's ground zero of the hipster renaissance. It's more expensive to live in Brooklyn lately than it is to live in Manhattan. But it wasn't always that way. A century ago, when A Tree Grows in Brooklyn takes place, Williamsburg was where the immigrants and/or poor people lived. People like Francie Nolan and her family.

If you're a fan of plot-driven novels, this probably isn't going to be the book for you. Nothing much really happens...two young people, the children of Irish and German immigrants, meet, fall in love, and marry. They have two children, a girl and a boy. The father, Johnny Nolan, is charming and sweet-natured but fundamentally weak, incapable of holding down a steady job because of his alcoholism. The mother, Katie Nolan, is strong-willed, hard-working and tries but fails to hide her preference for her son over her daughter. The family lives in poverty, barely scraping by, as the children grow up. Francie, the daughter, is the center of the story, and the plot is largely about her poor but otherwise mostly unremarkable childhood.

But for me personally, I didn't even really notice that there was less in the way of plot, because the characterization and quality of writing were so strong. The shy and bookish yet resilient Francie and her world were apparently an only thinly veiled version of author Betty Smith's own childhood experiences, and a feeling of lived emotional truth resonates throughout the novel. Smith's prose isn't showily beautiful like Vladimir Nabakov's, but she strikes home keen insights about childhood and growing up with elegance and sensitivity. The characters are all people that exist in the real world: the good-natured and lovable but ultimately feckless overgrown child, the harried parent who has to stay strong enough to keep it all together at the expense of their own emotional wants and needs, the standoffish person who holds themself apart and pre-rejects everyone else before they can be rejected, the younger sibling who manages to get away with more than the older sibling would have ever thought to try. It may be set 100 years ago, but the story it tells is still meaningful today.

It was pure coincidence that I read this book right after The Namesake, and a minor plot point got me thinking about immigration, second languages, and class. In A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, both Katie and Johnny, despite being the children of immigrants, speak only English. Their parents are determined that their children will be American, and to be American is to speak English. It actually reminds me of a story my dad has told me about my grandfather, who is 100% pure Polish but speaks not a lick of the language. When my dad asked his grandpa about it, he said something similar: we're Americans now. We speak English. The Gangulis and their friends in The Namesake, on the other hand, make an effort to preserve their Bengali language and culture with their children. Their offspring hold oral fluency, at least, in their parents' native tongue along with their spoken and written English. When I was at the University of Michigan, I had friends whose parents were immigrants from the Middle East or Asia, and it wasn't uncommon to hear them answer calls from their parents in Mandarin, Hindi, or Farsi. There was never a sense of judgment attached to it. But there's a real hostility to Latino immigrants and their children speaking Spanish with each other, although their children brought up in America speak English just as well as anyone else. The perception of immigrants and their children who speak a second language seems to be tied more strongly to the social class of the speaker than any value judgment about having a non-English home language.

Tell me, blog friends...do you or anyone you know have immigrant parents? Did they speak a second language at home?

Note: Review cross-posted at Cannonball Read

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Book 22: A Tree Grows In Brooklyn

Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten Bookworm Delights

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish!This week's topic: top ten bookworm delights, so ten things that make my reading soul happy. This isn't something I ordinarily really even think about, so it was a little work to flesh out this list, but here are ten things I love in my bookish life!



Finding the right spot on the couch to get cozy: The eternal struggle! Find a spot that makes your back happy, realize it's making you lean on your arm funky. Then your neck starts to ache from looking downward all the time. So you readjust, and your back starts to hurt, so you move again and lather rinse repeat. Finding that perfect spot is the greatest thing.

A new bookstore: That feeling of walking into a brand new store full of books to explore and run your fingers over and figure out how it's laid out is an exhilarating feeling! When we travel and are out exploring, I like to find a local bookstore to poke around in. You never know what you'll find!

Snagging that book you've been looking for secondhand: When there's a book you've had your eye on and you stop in a secondhand store and there it is...it feels like fate. I recently picked up an apparently new hardcover copy of Seveneves, which has been on my TBR list for a while now and even the Kindle book is like $13.99, for $1 at the SPCA thrift store and I couldn't stop grinning triumphantly to myself for hours.

Finding someone to talk to who loves the books you love: It's pretty rare for me to meet an actual real-life person (I know all you lovely book bloggers out there are also real life persons, but I mean in my own real life) who enjoys books like I do. So when I meet someone who tells me that they've enjoyed The Virgin Suicides or The Secret History, my eyes light up like Christmas morning.

Quiet time to read: I love my fiance with my whole heart but he enjoys playing video games and watching TV. While I can mostly block out the noise, some uninterrupted quiet time (well, quiet besides the weird noises my pug makes) to get my read on is just lovely.

A gift certificate to buy books: Money to spend at a bookstore, for books only (not like Amazon where the temptation to replace a dying hairdryer can be hard to resist) is a rare treat. And I hardly ever splurge on new books, so it's a double treat!

Bookish decor: I've been looking for a print of Arya Stark's lesson from her dancing master Syrio- "Fear cuts deeper than swords"- for forever (I actually found one I liked and then as I dinked around deciding whether or not to pull the trigger, they stopped making it). But finding quotes that I loved from books that I loved as decor or coffee mugs makes my heart sing.

Someone loving a book you recommended to them: For most of us serious readers, the books that we love are more than "just books", they're little pieces of our heart. So recommending one feels like revealing a long-held secret...it's so personal, and if they're not receptive it just feels like a slap in the face. But when they love it? You feel so on top of the world and bonded.

Finding out they're making a movie/TV show of one of your favorite books: This is delightful and also frightening. Some book adaptations are the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and some...are The Hobbit. It's hard to tell until it hits the screen but casting announcements and director choices are so fun to react to and talk about!

Little Free Libraries: The actual library is the bomb, but it can be located at quite a distance from your house or have restrictive hours that makes it hard to get there at the right time. Which is why neighborhood-based little free libraries are such a thrill to find in the wild! Just people sharing books with other people. It's fantastic.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten Bookworm Delights

Book 21: The Namesake

"He hates having to live with it, a pet name turned good name, day after day, second after second. He hates seeing it on the brown paper sleeve of the National Geographic subscription his parents got him for his birthday the year before and perpetually listed in the honor roll printed in the town's newspaper. At times his name, an entity shapeless and weightless, manages nevertheless to distress him physically, like the scratchy tag of a shirt his has been forced permanently to wear."

Dates read: February 16-19, 2016

Rating: 9/10

Lists/Awards: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, Time Magazine Best Books of the Year

One of the quirks I've noticed since I've been living in Nevada is how proud people are of how long their family has been in Nevada. If someone is a third, fourth, or fifth generation Nevadan, that will be one of the first things out of their mouths when they meet you. Growing up in Michigan, I never heard someone proudly call themselves a third-generation Michigander. It never would have occurred to anyone to say. Part of it, I think, is the immigrant culture of the other side of the country. Plenty of people aren't even third-generation Americans.

When I went to school at the University of Michigan, it it felt like all the Indian kids knew each other. They had built-in friends as soon as they walked on campus. Good friends, not the "that girl who graduated a few years ahead of me and we were in the National Honors Society together" friends. Their parents knew each other, they would explain. But I didn't really get it...with some exceptions, I wasn't necessarily close to my parents' friends' kids. And then I read The Namesake, and it clicked.

Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake is the story of Indian immigrants and their children in America. It begins when Ashima and Ashoke Ganguli are about to have their first child, recounting a bit of their individual histories in India and how they came to have their marriage arranged. When the boy is born, the pet name his parents give him while waiting for an Indian grandparent to send a letter with his "real name" ends up being recorded on his birth certificate out of confusion. Their child is named Gogol, after a Russian writer who is meaningful to Ashoke. Although his parents eventually settle on Nikhil to be his real name, Gogol sticks until he gets to college. Gogol hates his name, the way it sounds, the way it stamps him as unmistakably "other" in his American life. He changes it legally to Nikhil once he becomes an adult, but it is not quite so easy to deal with the uneasy internal tension between the Indian culture of his parents and the American culture he was raised and lives in, between who he was/is, and who he wants to be.

Although the novel takes turns, illuminating the story briefly through the eyes of Ashima and Ashoke, it mostly follows Gogol/Nikhil as he navigates childhood, college, and his adult relationships (curiously, it never follows his sister Sonia, who remains on the periphery, although it does very briefly follow the woman who becomes Gogol's wife after their marriage). Lahiri's prose is magnificent...it's rich without being flowery, and her words beautifully illustrate the dilemmas the characters face in a way that shows you without telling you. The characters themselves are well-rounded, multi-faceted, and face their entirely normal lives and problems in a way that feels like actual people you might know rather than characters on a page. Lahiri doesn't need to put them through incredible obstacles to show you who they are and why you should care. She just writes them with such humanity that it wouldn't even occur to you not to care. It's a wonderful book and I loved it.

Tell me, blog friends...do people tell you how many generations they've lived there in your state, or is that just a Nevada thing?

Note: review cross-posted on Cannonball Read

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Book 21: The Namesake