Book 198: Rebecca

"Unconsciously I shivered, as though someone had opened the door behind me, and let a draught into the room. I was sitting in Rebecca’s chair, I was leaning against Rebecca’s cushion, and the dog had come to me and laid his head upon my knee because that had been his custom, and he remembered, in the past, she had given sugar to him there."

Dates read: December 24-29, 2017

Rating: 8/10

Lists/awards: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2012)

We've all felt like an imposter at some point, right? Like, I don't think "imposter syndrome" is even a thing, I think it's so commonplace as to be just a part of the human experience. It's an ugly, scary feeling, to be so full of doubt about yourself. It feels especially endemic in that late teens-early 20s time of life, when everyone even five years older seems impossibly glamorous and adult and you still feel like a kid. You just were a kid, after all, and now you're expected to set your own alarm and remember to take your vitamins and schedule your own haircuts. "Adult" feels so far away even though you're already there.

I've never read a book that feels as steeped in that feeling of being an imposter as Daphne DuMarier's Rebecca. Our heroine is a never-named middle-class young English woman, in her early 20s, who's earning her living as a traveling companion to an crude older woman. On a stop in Monaco, she meets Maxim deWinter, who her employer is all too happy to repeat gossip about and try to kiss up to: he's the owner of the famous and magnificent country estate of Manderly, and his beautiful, stylish wife Rebecca recently died tragically. The young lady and Maxim have a whirlwind courtship, and before she knows it, she's married and honeymooned and off to her new home and new life as the mistress of a great house.

But when they get to Manderly, things go quickly south. Being middle-class, she's barely been in a place like this, and hasn't the slightest idea how to make it her own. Her husband is suddenly distant and moody. Her only real friend is the spaniel dog that she takes her walks with. The head housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, all but openly sneers at her and constantly reminds her that she's not anything like the charming and passionate Rebecca. And it's not just Mrs. Danvers...even the locals she goes to visit tell her over and over again how exciting things were when Rebecca was around, how beautiful she was, how delightful. The shy, quiet second Mrs. deWinter begins to despair of ever being good enough for the role she's been handed, and is talked into putting on a costume ball (like the ones Rebecca used to have!) that changes everything.

If you've ever heard about super fast marriages Back In The Day and wondered if people even really knew each other when they go married, Rebecca answers that question with a resounding no. A major part of the drama comes from the fact that the young wife can't understand why Maxim married her and is afraid to share her fears and feelings of inadequacy because, well, she barely knows him. She tortures herself by imagining that he's constantly comparing her to Rebecca, and she's sure she comes up short. She can't even hide from the imposter syndrome that's consuming her...the very place she lives reminds her of the ways in which she feels inadequate. This book is often billed as a gothic romance, and while the former is accurate, the latter isn't really, in my opinion: there's a marriage at the center of it, but not really a romance per se.

Instead, I'd call this a psychological suspense novel. We know from the beginning that the deWinters no longer live at Manderly, that something bad happened there. How exactly this happens unwinds over the course of the book, with the inner lives of the characters and their relationships with each other being driving the action. And the story is well-told and well-paced, but it's still a classic rather than a modern-day thriller, so while it's certainly gripping it's not really a page-turner that'll keep you up all night. And for me, that's preferable anyways. I really enjoyed reading it and plan to add more duMaurier to my list of books to read. I'd recommend Rebecca to just about anybody, it's a tightly crafted and engaging story that'll appeal to anyone who's ever felt like they were playacting at being a grown-up.

One year ago, I was reading: The Silence of the Girls (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: Valley of the Dolls

Three years ago, I was reading: Smoke

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Book 198: Rebecca

Top Ten Tuesday: Books On My TBR I’m Worried Won't Live Up To The Hype

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're talking about books on our TBR that we're avoiding reading. The way I read (on more-or-less a schedule system) means that I actually don't avoid reading anything...if it's up next, it's up next. That being said, there are books that I'm a little worried to read, because the hype has been huge and it's so hard for a book to live up to it.

My Brilliant Friend: This is the first in a series that got such glowing praise from people I look to for recommendations that I went and bought all four of them. So I better like the first one...

Throne of Glass: I'm not super into YA series, but Sarah Maas's devoted fanbase has convinced me this is one that will get and keep my attention.

Cinder: Same kind of deal here, and I've always liked stories based on folklore/fairy tales, so this one especially seems like something I'd enjoy but my expectations have been set really high!

The Golem and the Jinni: The second of three here in the "based on folklore" realm. As soon as you say you like this kind of thing, this is a story that pops up as a recommendation immediately. I can only hope it's as great as everyone says!

Uprooted: Besides all the good things I've read about it, this book just seems so up my alley as a reader that I'll be crushed if it's not amazing.

Fangirl: I wasn't especially into the one Rainbow Rowell I've already read (Landline), but I've heard over and over that her books that are more YA-targeted are her best ones. This is supposed to be wonderful, so hopefully the hype is real.

The Stand: This book is looooong but so many people love it. Since I never put a book down, it better be amazing or I'm going to be mad I spent so long on it.

Bad Feminist: I love Roxane Gay's social media presence, and I enjoyed her novel An Untamed State, but this essay collection got such amazing reviews that it's got me thinking it's her best work so I'm keeping my fingers crossed!

Parable of the Sower: I've heard amazing things about Octavia Butler, and I'm really looking forward to reading her work, so if it's not great I'll be super bummed.

Pachinko: I don't think I've heard more than one or two people say it didn't work for them, and heaps and heaps of praise otherwise. Basically everyone can't be wrong, right?

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books On My TBR I’m Worried Won't Live Up To The Hype

Book 197: The Power

"Women and men who were willing to sell him food or fuel for his little camping stove became fewer and farther between. He started to develop a sense for those who might be friendly. Older men, sitting outside a house playing cards—they'd have something for him, might even find him a bed for the night. Young men tended to be too frightened. There was no point talking to women at all; even meeting their eyes felt too dangerous."

Dates read: December 19-24, 2017

Rating: 6/10

About a year and a half ago, I was out walking the dog on a Friday around 8 P.M. I noticed someone get dropped off by a car a couple blocks down, who then started walking towards me. I registered this as odd, since most people get dropped off in front of their house or reasonably close to it. I kept walking the dog down the road, and looked back to notice the person (almost certainly a man, by build) continuing to walk towards me. Now I was really unsettled. I pulled my headphones out and began to hurry the dog up. I rounded a corner, and about halfway down the block he started to resist and pull back, and since it was a well-lit section of sidewalk I let him sniff. I looked back the way I'd come and the guy was standing there on the corner, standing partially obscured by a light pole. I practically dragged the dog the rest of the way down the block until I got to a busy road. The guy never re-appeared, but I was afraid.

As a small woman, I can't remember the last time I was out in public without at least some baseline level of apprehension for my safety. I'm not walking around constantly terrified by any means, but I am just always aware that there's the possibility that I could be anything from verbally harassed to followed to grabbed. Most of my female friends feel the same way. It's just what it means to be a woman in the world. Naomi Alderman's The Power, though, imagines a different world entirely. It begins in the world as it exists, but there's a sudden change: women have developed an organ that generates electricity inside them, electricity they can shoot out through their hands. In a matter of weeks, the world goes from one in which men are the most powerful, physically and otherwise, to one where that balance isn't the same anymore. The Power changes everything.

Alderman explores this new world through four people: Roxy, the daughter of a British crime boss, whose Power is exceptionally strong; Allie, an abused teenage foster child who turns the voice she hears in her head into a new religious movement; Margot, an ambitious politician; and Tunde, the only man, a Nigerian journalist chronicling the changes in the world since the Power emerged. There's chaos, initially. No one knows what to do, what it all means. But things change quickly, all the way from men needing to learn how to protect themselves against violent women, to women dominating the military, to women toppling oppressive regimes. Eventually the storylines all converge in a fictional Eastern bloc country, now ruled by a woman as a dictator, that's the center of a proxy war between the powers-that-be in the old world against those of the new.

This is a fascinating idea to consider, how the world would change if something like what Alderman describes happens. And I think the failure of the book (as you can see from my rating, I didn't think it was especially good) comes from trying to capture too much. Roxy and Allie's perspectives dominate the book, and while I understand why Alderman included Tunde, to give an idea of what it would be like to come of age as a man in the world as we know it and live through the way it changes, I think Margot's storyline was weak and could have been cut to develop Tunde better. There's some good characterization going on with Roxy and Allie (particularly the former), but it's inconsistent, and it seems almost like Alderman was so excited to really dig into what she thought might happen in her new world that she didn't really think about the people who would be living in it beyond broad strokes.

That being said, it's an effective exploration of the way that power corrupts. At first, many women lash out at men in revenge for the ways they themselves have been hurt, which is an understandable reaction. The reader expects it to settle down after a while, after some wrongs have been righted, but it doesn't. Women begin to objectify the men around them, use their superior position to commit emotional and physical violence against them. While it's easy, living in the world we do live in, to imagine that women would wield large-scale power more effectively and humanely than men have and do, Alderman punches through that fantasy by remembering that women are, after all, human, and human beings do not have a great track record when it comes to the way we mistreat each other when given the opportunity to do so. I do think that as a novel, there are significant weaknesses, but as a piece to engage with intellectually, there's a lot to think and talk about here.

One year ago, I was reading: Sing, Unburied, Sing

Two years ago, I was reading: Boys and Girls Together

Three years ago, I was reading: The Bridge of San Luis Rey

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Book 197: The Power

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Enjoyed That Are Outside of My Comfort Zone

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're talking about venturing outside our literary comfort zones to discover that sometimes, the kinds of things we think we don't read turn out to be pretty delightful after all! I struggled with this subject, because while I think my reading comfort zone is mostly "highbrow" contemporary fiction, I do tend to read pretty broadly across styles. But here are ten that I put together that I was maybe not super comfortable with the idea of before I started that I actually had a good time with!

The Rosie Project (romance): I usually feel like love stories are mostly interesting to the people inside them, and feel too manipulated by romances to get into them. But even though I could see the strings being pulled on my heart as I read this, I didn't care. It was a treat!

The Hate U Give (young adult): I know plenty of adults read and enjoy YA, but I generally find it too straightforward to really engage me. This story about a black teenager who watches her friend get murdered by a cop, though, really grabbed me.

Battleborn (short stories): I am by and large not into short stories (I read way more of them for my book club than I would ever pick up on my own). I like sinking into a full-length narrative! And maybe it's because I live in Nevada, but this collection set in and around the Silver State are truly excellent.

The Nazi Officer's Wife (WWII memoir): I'll be honest, I tend to steer away from World War II memoirs, finding them emotionally taxing but often treading very similar territory to work already available. This one, though, had a perspective that was new to me and was very well-told.

The Lords of Discipline (military fiction): War stories are a big snore for me. This book is set in a military academy, but it's a beautifully rendered coming-of-age story that I'm so glad I took a chance on, because I love it.

The Girl With All The Gifts (horror): Usually telling me something has zombies in it is a ticket to a quick "no thanks". I heard this recommended so often that I decided to pick it up, and really enjoyed the tale it told about the relationship between a zombified girl and her teacher.

The Sky Is Yours (science fiction): This book is bananas. There are dragons, there's genetic engineering, there's all kinds of bizarre stuff. On paper, it seemed like something that would not at all do it for me but I couldn't put it down.

The Bear and the Nightingale (fantasy): I'm actually fairly amenable to fantasy if it's done well, and this whole series was a magical romp through Russian folklore.  

In The Woods (mystery): I love books that are character-focused, and most mysteries are plot-focused, so that tends to leave me out of them. I appreciated that some things were left unresolved, but I mostly really enjoyed reading about the people.

Lincoln in the Bardo (experimental fiction): This is written like a play rather than a novel, and initially I found it off-putting but once I got past about halfway through, I was suddenly all in and wound up loving it.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Enjoyed That Are Outside of My Comfort Zone

A Month In The Life: August 2019

August always has that feeling of being The End of Summer. In Michigan, we always started school after Labor Day, which meant that the end of August was (basically) the end of our break. I actually liked going back to school because I was a nerd, but that feeling of August being the last hurrah has never quite left me.

In Books...

• Money Rock: Journalist Pam Kelley tells the story of the titular North Carolina drug dealer...and through it, the story of Charlotte, drug policy, housing policy, and the consequences of incarceration. Smart, insightful, and very accessible.  
• Marie Antoinette: There's a reason this is subtitled "The Journey", because Antonia Fraser skillfully traces the path the young Austrian archduchess took to become at first one of the most fashionable women of her time and eventually the subject of hatred so violent it culminated in her execution. The depth of research on display, without forgetting storytelling, is very impressive.
• Calypso: I always enjoy David Sedaris's work. This collection was generally less funny and more poignant than I typically expect, but as with any essay collection, there were ups and downs. 
• Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: You Must Remember This is one of my favorite podcasts, so when host Karina Longworth mentioned this book as a source for her excellent episode on Lena Horne, I was curious. It paid off! This book is as much about the social environment of Black Hollywood back in the day as it is about the movies, and it's a fascinating look at a time and place that still has relevance to the way our own world works.
• Gilead: This is one of those books that makes me glad I don't DNF books, because it took until about 1/3-1/4 of the way into this for it to really grab me. But once it did, I was hooked. I was worried that this story of a minister looking back on his life would be a little more religious than I was comfortable with, but it was as much philosophical as anything and the beauty of Marilynn Robinson's language kept me rapt. 
• The Forgotten Sister: My second straight month with an Austen retelling! This one is more traditional, focusing on the life of the middle Bennett sister, Mary. Sandwiched between two pairs of tightly bonded siblings, Mary often comes off as a bit of a prig in Pride & Prejudice. While Jennifer Paynter's tale doesn't erase those schoolmarmish tendencies, she gives context for why Mary turned out that way...and gives her a compelling love story of her own.
• Death Prefers Blondes: It's been described as a heist movie meets RuPaul's Drag Race, and that's not inaccurate! Teenage heiress Margo Manning steals fantastic treasures along with her best friends...four drag queens. But when she experiences a personal tragedy, it's no longer for fun and profit, it's for revenge. It's silly, light, and enjoyable, perfect for a vacation or the beach, but don't expect anything special.

In Life...

• Girls trip to the Bay: This year, I got to pick the location, and I chose to beat the heat of northern Nevada by heading over the hill to San Francisco. We got to do some things that I'd never done before (like the Alcatraz tour!), and just hang out in a super-cool city. I love getting to spend time with my best friends and had a blast!

One Thing:

If you've never heard the phrase "Imma let you finish...", you probably have very little interaction with anyone hip to pop culture. It's taken on a life of its own, surpassing the moment at MTV's Video Music Awards a decade ago that launched it into the world. But the impact of that actual moment has spiraled beyond what anyone might have expected, and this deep dive about it at The Washington Post is fantastic.

Gratuitous Pug Picture: 

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A Month In The Life: August 2019

Book 196: The Lady of the Rivers

"Through the night we hear the clatter of hooves down the village street, and occasional shouts. The girl, the woman, and I cower like frightened children together: this is what it is like to live in a country at war. There is nothing of the grace of the joust or even the inspiration of great principles—it is about being a poor woman hearing a detachment of horse thunder down your street and praying they do not stop to hammer on your frail door."

Dates read: December 15-19, 2017

Rating: 6/10

When people talk about the history of marriage (a subject I find really interesting), they tend to talk about how the idea of marrying for love is relatively recent. Which is mostly true! Most marriages until just the last couple of generations were at least partially arranged by family. This has some advantages (like fostering stronger social connections within communities), as well as some obvious disadvantages (like getting stuck with someone you might not necessarily even like, much less love, for the rest of your life). But the idea that love matches never happened isn't exactly true, either.

There were two love matches, in fact, that were influential in the English Wars of the Roses. In one, Queen Catherine, widow of King Henry V, married a Welsh commoner and her grandson from that union became King Henry VII. In the other, Jacquetta of Luxembourg, who had been married to King Henry V's brother briefly before his death, secretly married one of the knights of her deceased husband's household, Richard Woodville. This productive marriage (they had 14 children, including future Queen Consort Elizabeth) is explored in Philippa Gregory's third novel in her Cousin's War series, The Lady of the Rivers. As is relatively common with Gregory's historical fiction, this book isn't the first in the series, but does take place first in the timeline, so while it explores much of Jacquetta's life, it ends where the first book written (The White Queen) begins.

Gregory begins Jacquetta's story with a meeting between our heroine and Joan of Arc as pre-teens, while Joan is being held by Jacquetta's uncle. This is used to establish the plot device of Jacquetta's family's claim to be descended from water goddess Melusina, and set up Jacquetta's interest in fortune-telling, primarily through tarot cards. When Jacquetta grows up, she's married off to much-older John, the Duke of Bedford and brother to the King of England. Gregory paints this marriage as never consummated...the Duke is mostly interested in using Jacquetta to further his interest in alchemy and believes she must remain virginal to do so. They never develop much of a relationship, but she does develop a big old crush on her husband's chamberlain, a handsome young knight called Richard Woodville. When John dies, she and Richard wed...in secret, at first, because technically Jacquetta needs the Crown's permission to remarry and knows they'll never allow the match.

From there, Jacquetta and John join the English Court, under the rule of Henry VI and his high-spirited French bride, Margaret of Anjou. Jacquetta becomes Margaret's maid of honor and closest friend, and is by her side through most of the events of the early period of the Wars of the Roses...at least, when she's not having children, because she's basically constantly pregnant. She tries to protect the Lancastrian Royal Couple from themselves (pious, timid Henry lets powerful-minded nobles run him roughshod and drain the royal treasury, and his lack of marital attentions to his lively wife leads to an affair), only to mostly be unsuccessful. When her husband is captured in battle with the Yorks and has to swear to set down arms against them to be freed, Jacquetta is relieved to leave Court behind and settle down to life as country gentry...until, of course, her oldest daughter Elizabeth comes to the door hand-in-hand with Yorkist King Edward.

Since this book provides much of the backstory for The White Queen, I was afraid it would be just as immersed in the kind of silly mysticalism that's all over the previous book and made it so hard for me to enjoy it. Happily, though, there's much less of that in here, and it's integrated into the plot in a way that feels organic. My biggest issue with The Lady of the Rivers is that Jacquetta herself is a fairly passive character who mostly reacts to the events around her. Margaret of Anjou is the one who drives them, and I kind of wish she'd been the protagonist instead, because she seemed BONKERS in a delightfully dramatic kind of way.

Look, I like Philippa Gregory's books. I don't think they're super high quality, but they're enjoyable to read and as much as I like to be pretentious about my taste in novels, sometimes something that's fun and easy doesn't have to be more than that. But if you've read her work before, you know what you're getting into: high drama and questionable historical sourcing. Sometimes they're a little better, sometimes they're a little worse. This falls on the mid-point for me...it's fine. It's not amazing, it's not terrible. I liked reading it and I'd read it again if I do a read-through of the whole Plantagenet-Tudor cycle like I'm planning on one day. I'd recommend it if you like Gregory's work, but if historical fiction is not your thing, it's not unmissable by any means.

One year ago, I was reading: Paint It Black

Two years ago, I was reading: The Year of Magical Thinking

Three years ago, I was reading: Inamorata

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Book 196: The Lady of the Rivers

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Don't Own Yet But Would Like To

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week's topic is books we don't own that we would like to. I am a dedicated secondhand book shopper so I actually own most of the books I would like to own, but I found an angle on this one! The ten below books are ones I've listened to and enjoyed so much on audio that I'd like to have a hard copy!

The Lady in Gold: This was so good! It's about how the Klimt painting "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer" came to be painted, how its connection with its Jewish subject was erased by the Nazis, and the story of how members of the Bloch-Bauer family survived the war and were able to eventually reclaim the painting.

Marie Therese, Child of Terror: The only child of Marie Antoinette to survive to adulthood and the only member of her family to survive the Revolution, Marie Therese lived through some very interesting times.

China Road: A reporter who has covered China for several years takes a ride along a major road before leaving the country for his next assignment, relating stories about both the history of the country and its present in a way that feels fresh and held my interest.

The Gulag Archipelago (Volume 1): I've gotten very into Russian history lately, and the gulag system of Stalinist times a fascinating piece of the story. I've only listened to the first volume of the three, but it's very good and I'm looking forward to getting to the next two.

Carthage Must Be Destroyed: I knew virtually nothing about Carthage beforehand except that it was one of Rome's great enemies, and I learned some new stuff listening to this book. Honestly, though, this was a hard one to keep track of via audio, so I'd like to go over the material again on the page.

This is the Story of a Happy Marriage: I'm not super inclined towards personal essays, but this collection from Ann Patchett really grabbed me in a way I wasn't expecting. It's excellent.

Being Mortal: This book, about meaning and dignity as the end of life approaches, really made me re-evaluate the premium our culture places on the extension of life, even at the expense of purpose and the desire of the person themselves.

A Crack in the Edge of the World: We've obviously all heard of the Great San Francisco Earthquake, but I learned so much about the history of the Bay Area that gave a lot of context for that event in a way that was really engaging.

The Future is History: This was honestly not as good as Masha Gessen's book about Putin, but gave a broader look how authoritarianism has reclaimed Russia.

Nixonland: A not insubstantial amount of the way politics has changed (for the worse) in America over the past several decades can be traced back to the presidency of Nixon. This look at the man, why he was the way he was, and the effects he had on the way the country operates is something I'd like to revisit in print.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Don't Own Yet But Would Like To