October is my favorite month: it’s my birthday, as well as my husband’s! It’s usually when it starts to turn crispy and the leaves start to change, too, which feels like real proper fall. And I snuck away for a little long weekend this month too, so there was a lot going on!
In Books…
- The Killer Angels: I have to admit I wasn’t looking forward to reading this. I’d put it on my list because it won a Pulitzer, but it’s a war book, and a book about the Civil War in particular, so I did not have high hopes. But it turns out not only is it a fantastic read, it was also a reminder of why historical fiction is a genre worth prioritizing. Lately, when facing a choice between a history and historical fiction, I’ve opted much more often for the former than the latter. Why not learn about what actually happened? But historical fiction like this really endeavors to put you in the heads of the people who lived through these events, providing not just context but a sympathetic and deeply felt look at what it might have actually been like to experience. Shaara’s book follows the leadership of the Battle of Gettysburg on both sides, revealing them as complicated people tied to each other through sticky webs of loyalty and friendship both within each side and across the battlefield. There’s some actual battle stuff, of course, but it’s very much a book about people, and it succeeds on a character level, a plot level, and a prose level.
- The Book of Goose: This was a very frustrating read for me, because I wanted so badly to love it and just couldn’t. It’s a book with many qualities that I’m drawn to: clever prose, intense adolescent female friendship, an English boarding school. But as a reader who loves characters, I found the central pair of friends (teenagers Agnes and Fabienne, living in rural poverty in France after World War 2) challenging to connect with in different ways. Agnes, the narrator, is a void where a personality should be. She’s mostly defined in opposition to Fabienne, but in ways that feel very surface level: Fabienne is active, Agnes is passive. Fabienne is willful, Agnes subsumes her will to Fabienne’s. Fabienne is impetuous, Agnes is reserved. You may think that Fabienne is the more interesting character and you would be right, but we only see her through Agnes’s eyes and Agnes seems to find her inscrutable, or at least inarticulable. The writing almost feels like it undercuts any emotional power the novel threatens to demonstrate, often refusing to let story beats breathe before making a droll comment on them. It just never came together to draw me in.
- Wild: I must be the last white lady interested in reading Wild to actually read Wild. It’s been a decade since it was a smash hit bestseller and Oscar-nominated movie, so the hype cycle has long since died down and I feel like that helped me not find it completely infuriating. As it was, the only way I could read it as to not find it infuriating is as a memoir of a young woman completely determined to destroy herself. Cheryl Strayed, in the wake of her mother’s sudden death from lung cancer when she was only 22, was plunged into so profound a grief that ruining her marriage to a good man through repeated infidelity was not enough. Nor was dabbling in heroin. Her next step was deciding to hike the Pacific Coast Trail, alone, with zero preparation. There were many, many moments throughout the book that I wanted to shake, slap, or scream at her. But her honest, open-hearted writing makes it clear that I could not possibly hate Strayed more than she hated herself at the time. It’s the quality of the prose that made what is otherwise a book about A Sad Twentysomething Lady Being Sad compelling enough for me to keep picking up. Ultimately I enjoyed it, and I understand both why it was so successful and why it has so many haters.
- House of Caravans: One of the things I think I learned way too little about in school was the incredible historical importance of The Partition. It’s such a momentous event, and it’s become a subject I’m really drawn to in fiction. Which is why I was excited about this book, which starts promisingly with two parallel tracks: in one, a pair of brothers is miraculously reunited as they flee the newly-created Pakistan to India, while in the other the grandchildren of one of those brothers are reunited when one returns to India from several years in America in the wake of 9/11. As to be expected in this sort of book, relationships (particularly but not exclusively romantic relationships) between Muslims and Hindus are central to the narrative, with love being just one of the things that is achingly, irrevocably sundered along with India and Pakistan themselves. Ultimately I don’t think the parallel narratives serve the story particularly well: the historical one is much more compelling and I never liked leaving it to return to the modern one, which doesn’t feel like it has a lot of direction. The historical one is also where virtually all of the interesting character developments happen, with the modern characters never really feeling like actual people as much as ideas about what people could be. There’s promise here, but the structure really cheats it of momentum in a way that it just couldn’t recover from for me.
- Wonder Girl: Babe Didrikson Zaharias was one of the most gifted athletes the United States has ever known. She was outrageously talented in sports as wide-ranging as basketball, swimming and diving, track and field (where she was a three-time Olympic medalist), and golf, where she really left her mark for posterity by playing a central role in the founding of the LPGA. She was also a total asshole, vain and often dishonest and not especially smart. Author Don Van Natta, Jr, is much more interested in Zaharias’s life and legacy in sports rather than her personal life, so while he touches on her personality, particularly as she weaponized it against competitors, he doesn’t go into depth about her marriage, her close relationship with fellow golfer Betty Dodd near the end of her life, or her gender identity. What emerges is a portrait of a relentless competitor, always seeking more: more wins, more glory, more money. But honestly as a person without particular interest in the sports in which Zaharias was involved, I found it often rather boring, especially when going into detailed descriptions of golf games. While I do think Zaharias should be better known, it’ll take a more engaging book than this one to raise her profile.
- Cinder: It’s hard to shake a stick near a young adult section of a bookstore these days without hitting a fairy tale retelling, and this one (the first in a quartet) was all the rage among book bloggers when I started my own close to a decade ago. I’ll be honest, I’ve mostly found these sorts of books to not have a lot of substance once you get past the hype, usually full of tropes and flat characters. This one was better than many, retelling Cinderella as the story of Linh Cinder, a teenage cyborg mechanic in a cyberpunky New Beijing who becomes drawn into the simmering tensions between the kingdoms of Earth and the royal family of the Moon when the crown prince of her country stops by her shop with an android needing repair. It’s nothing truly spectacular, but the characters are winning and the major plot elements are referenced in a way that’s original and clever, albeit unsurprising. The prose is not especially inspired, but it goes down easily and quickly enough. It does, of course, end on a cliffhanger to give the sequels a launching-off point, but I was sufficiently engaged that I’ll be continuing on with the series!
- Damage: At 186 pages, this is arguably more of a novella than a novel. Its fundamental plot is straightforward: our unnamed narrator is a man in his 50s who has lived a “correct”, successful life. He’s a doctor, and a member of Parliament on the rise. He has a beautiful wife and their two children are in their 20s, on their way to success themselves. And then he meets Anna, his son’s new girlfriend, and nothing is the same. The two begin an affair, and he becomes completely obsessed with her even as her relationship with his son becomes serious and heads towards marriage. It is not a spoiler to say that tragedy strikes, as the book is narrated from the present about the past and so it is obvious that things have gone badly awry from the outset. It’s definitely a page-turner, with a propulsive momentum that for me could not ultimately disguise the repetitiveness of the narrative. The narrator has an encounter with Anna, reiterates how hollow and empty his “real” life feels away from her, works to deceive his loved ones to preserve that real life even in spite of its emptiness, lather rinse repeat. The character development isn’t very strong and it’s never all that clear what’s so compelling about Anna although she’s clearly meant to be beguiling. The prose is often striking and was really the highlight of the book for me, but overall I found it uneven and wonder if it might have been better if it had been even shorter.
In Life…
- I turned 38: I don’t know which of my aches and pains are because I’m headed towards 40, and which are because I’m constantly hauling a 25-pound toddler around. Probably a little of column A, a little of column B. But while I have some stuff to work on here and there, I’m generally pretty happy with my life and the way things are. It was just a normal day with my husband and C and the dog but there was nowhere else I’d rather be. I’ll have more fun/indulgent birthdays again when I don’t have a toddler.
- Girls weekend in Los Angeles: This year’s girl’s trip was to Los Angeles! We did a Korean spa, a tourist tour of the city (we’ve decided to be okay with being dorky and wanting to see the sights and it’s great!), and a nice dinner out and had a lovely time hanging out and catching up.