Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week’s subject is villains, which is an interesting stretch for me because I don’t read a lot of book with clear-cut “bad guys”. The kind of literary fiction (which makes me feel so pretentious to say) to which I am drawn tends to find its drama in the conflicts of people who don’t fall super neatly into “hero” or “villain” categories. But here are the ten I chose!
Elphaba (Wicked): I know, this is cheating. The villain in the book is the Wizard, Elphaba is our protagonist. But the Wicked Witch of the West is one of pop culture’s great villains, and Gregory Maguire’s book examining the story from her side is a classic in its own right that spawned several sequels (none of which I’ve read).
Amy Dunne (Gone Girl): Also mostly not a villain, she’s much more accurately an anti-hero. But also, she’s a lady who faked her own death and framed her husband for her murder, which is pretty damn villainous. But damn if ladies don’t understand her rage at a world that tried to shove her neatly into a box she had no desire to fit into and broke out of to forge her own deranged path.
Miranda Priestly (The Devil Wears Prada): Most of us have had a bad boss or two. But Miranda Priestly (allegedly based on Anna “Nuclear” Wintour) takes the cake: she’s demanding, demeaning, virtually impossible to please. Or is she just a woman who’s had to become that person in order to get to the top of her profession?
Mrs. Coulter (The Golden Compass): Much like our protagonist Lyra is, we’re both drawn to and repulsed by the beautiful woman with her shiny hair and the golden monkey who accompanies her everywhere. She may be ultimately redeemed by her love for her daughter, but she’s still a hateful and fearful person and a worthy adversary.
Cersei Lannister (A Song of Ice and Fire): She’s such an asshole (you know, cheating on her husband with her own twin brother, giving birth to several of her brother’s children and passing them off as her husband’s, the way she treats the Starks, etc). But when Martin starts giving you her POV chapters, she’s still terrible but much more understandably so. A ruthless and ambitious person who is neither given the opportunities she wants because of her gender nor nearly as smart as she thinks she is, she’s very rootable-against.
President Snow (The Hunger Games): The detail that Collins includes about the smell of him, his heavy rose perfume not quite able to mask his oral bleeding, is the kind of thing that lodges in your mind even if you have no real frame of reference for bloody roses. His ruthless rule over Panem is just the icing on the cake.
Humbert Humbert (Lolita): Probably the best example of a sympathetic villain in modern literature, Humbert’s sophisticated excuses for his own behavior and passion for Lolita can overwhelm, on first read, the fact that he’s a child rapist who preys on and attempts to dominate a vulnerable youngster who has no one else to turn to.
The Volturi (New Moon): A powerful Old World ruling court of vampires with superpowers is sort of cheesy but also sort of awesome. Once they start getting more developed in later books they lose a lot of their mystique, but when they’re a shadowy force in the second book, they’re a compelling adversary for Bella and Edward.
The Overlook Hotel (The Shining): I love both the book and the Kubrick movie of this story, but they’re definitely different. The hotel is a far more malevolent force in King’s original work, slowly poisoning Jack Torrance’s mind.
Grandma (Flowers In The Attic): Saved the cheesiest for last, because this lady is totally over the top and awful and just the most ridiculous villain. Will any of us ever forget about arsenic-laced powdered donuts? Or when she poured TAR in Cathy’s HAIR?
Book 44: Dune
“Somewhere this night he had passed a decision-nexus into the deep unknown. He knew the time-area surrounding them, but the here-and-now existed as a place of mystery. It was as though he had seen himself from a distance go out of sight down into a valley. Of the countless paths up out of that valley, some might carry a Paul Atrides back into sight, but many would not.”
Dates read: April 18-23, 2016
Rating: 6/10
Lists/awards: Hugo Award, NY Times Bestseller
For some reason, I’ve always preferred fantasy to science fiction. They’re similar genres, it’s not for nothing that they’re usually shelved together: new worlds, usually some sort of hero quest narrative, human stories peppered with imaginative twists that let you see them in a new light. If I’m being honest, usually the most significant different on a fundamental level I notice is that if the story is set in space or has robots, it’s science fiction. If there are elves and dragons, it’s fantasy. But even though I know intellectually that the differences between them are as much cosmetic as anything, I’d chose fantasy over sci-fi any day. That being said, one of my all-time favorite books, Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep?, is science fiction, and Battlestar Galactica is one of my favorite TV shows. Frank Herbert’s Dune is the best-selling science fiction novel of all time, so I figured I owed it a try.
Dune drops you right into the story without easing you in with world-building before the plot picks up, which I personally found alienating and made it hard for me to get into it from the beginning. It’s the story of a young nobleman, Paul Atrides, whose family is entangled in interplanetary intrigue. The Atrides family is given control of a planet called Dune, notable for being the sole source of a precious substance, the spice melange, which allows people to tap into enhanced mental abilities. When the Atrides are betrayed by their enemies, the Harkonnens, the Duke Leto dies but his consort Jessica and son Paul escape into the desert planet, where Paul (the result of a breeding program by a religious/philosphical/political sect) taps into extraordinary abilities and becomes a religious icon among the native population. Of course, he has vengeance to bring upon the Harokkens and a final battle for power between the families looms.
Having read Joseph Campbell’s Hero With A Thousand Faces, it was pretty easy to recognize Paul’s story as the Hero’s Journey. There’s a reason this particular narrative is so popular across time and cultures: when done well, it’s really compelling. Was this done well? Not especially, but it wasn’t bad or even mediocre. It just didn’t do a lot for me, personally. Like I said, it took me a while to get into it and it’s kind of a space opera…it starts at like a 7 in intensity and waxes and wanes from there, but it’s high drama throughout. I’d have liked a chance to warm up to and get emotionally invested in the characters before they started being put in peril. And on a shallow note about the characters, it bothered me that some of them had fairly standard-issue names: Jessica, Paul, Duncan, even Leto. Then there are some named Thufir, Gurney, and Irulan. I tend to feel like an author should either “go there” with mostly unusual naming patterns or not, but the in-between doesn’t really work.
Once I got about a quarter of the way into it, I got a feel for the world and the novel as a whole and I enjoyed it more, but at the end of the day it wasn’t really for me. Assuming for the sake of argument a continuum from entirely character-driven stories to entirely plot-driven stories, I tend to prefer things on the character side and I’d slot Dune on the plot side. I’m a big movie-watcher when I’m not reading, and there are plenty of movies that I’ve seen that I recognize are high quality, but that I don’t really like. This is the same kind of deal…I can understand why it’s been so popular and sold so well, but I don’t know that I’d read it again or recommend it to anyone.
Top Ten Tuesday: Books On My Fall TBR
Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! I’m fairly certain that this post is meant to highlight books coming out this fall that are on our TBRs, but I’m going to take it super literally and talk about the books that are up next on my TBR list! Since I actually did a fairly similar topic recently, there’s actually a little crossover: the first two books are the same but if you missed that one, here they are again with eight more alongside!
The Circle: I’ve never read David Eggers, and this book about an internet company that grows to emcompass more and more parts of the lives of its users feels super relevant to today. This was a bit of a flop, and I’m curious whether I think that’s fair.
Sophie’s Choice: I’ve seen the movie so I’m spoiled on the “twist”, but I’m interested to read the source material. The book isn’t always better than the movie, so we’ll see how this one actually works.
The Mothers: This (and the following two) are ARCs…advance reader copies, for which I am owing a review. This one is an inter-generational story about mothers during three different periods of Australian history. I don’t read much Aussie lit and I’m curious to see how I like it.
The Life Of The World To Come: When your story is about a high-strung law student/lawyer, I tend to be game because that has been my actual life. This about the aforementioned lawyer-type, who feels like his life is over when his girlfriend leaves him and his work on a death penalty case that throws him even further off-balance.
Border Child: Some of the rhetoric surrounding immigration today makes my blood boil, but I do think that the underlying issue we’re wrestling with is an important and complex one. What gets left out all too often, though, is the remembrance that these are people we’re talking about. This is a story about a family that attempts to leave Mexico for the United States, but along the way the small daughter is lost and the parents return home…but years later, information about their missing child is revealed and they won’t stop at anything to find out the truth.
The Executioner’s Song: The death penalty has been a long and abiding interest of mine. When I was in law school, I took a course on it, did research on it for the professor that taught that course, and was in a death penalty focused clinic. This enormous (1000+ pages in my mass-market edition) non-fiction novel deals with a death penalty case in Utah and even though I’m sure it’s going to bog down my reading pace I’m stoked to get to it.
The Confessions of Saint Augustine: I’ve always wanted to read this, and that hasn’t changed even though it’s been well over half my lifetime since I’ve been to Mass. It’ll be a definite change of pace for me!
Invisible Man: With the goings-on recently, racial issues have been top-of-mind for me. This is a classic story about prejudice and the way we divide ourselves from our fellow humans and I’m really interested to get into it.
Paper Magician: This was a Kindle sale pickup…I don’t know if I just saw the cover enough that it wore me down, but I definitely bought it inexpensively. I tend to be drawn to fiction about magical worlds, so I’m interested, but if I’m being honest the reviews are mixed so my expectations aren’t particularly high.
Eleanor of Aquitaine: I read Alison Weir’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII a while back (review upcoming…my book backlog is crazy right now, y’all!) and loved it…she presents well-researched history in a very readable and enjoyable way. So now I need to read the rest of her books, and luckily for me she writes a lot about royalty: one of my favorite nonfiction subjects! This one is about a royal I don’t actually know as much about, so I’m looking forward to sinking my teeth in!
Book 43: The Hangman’s Daughter
“Drums rumbled, cymbals clanged, and somewhere a fiddle was playing. The aroma of deep-fried doughnuts and roasted meat drifted down to the foul-smelling tanners’ quarter. Yes, it was going to be a lovely execution.”
Dates read: April 16-18, 2016
Rating: 3/10
Whether one agrees with it or not, there’s no denying that the death penalty has a long history. Modern day executioners push a vial of potassium chloride into an IV line and, if everything goes right, wait for the heart to stop. But once upon a time, a death sentence meant beheading or hanging (or worse, like drawing and quartering). The Hangman’s Daughter begins with a messy execution in 1600s Bavaria (in modern day Germany): young Jakob Kuisl is supposed to be helping his father, the hangman, with a beheading that ends up terribly botched. It’s a grim, moody scene that sets the stage for a dark story.
But after the opening prologue described above and the first scene of the story, in which a young boy is rescued from a raging river at great danger, only to be discovered to be already dying from a blow to the head, the plot stalls out considerably. The boy has a crude tattoo that the townspeople decide indicates witchcraft, so the local midwife is promptly accused and imprisoned awaiting torture and execution. Jakob, now himself the hangman (and torturer, and proto-pharmacist…he wears a lot of hats) is convinced of her innocence and joins forces with Simon, the town doctor’s son, to figure out who actually committed these crimes (the murder of the first child is followed by the murder of two other children and some property destruction to boot). They’re racing against time as hysteria and pressure to convict and burn the witch grow daily.
Where is the titular hangman’s daughter in all this, you might ask? Excellent question! Magdalena is very much a secondary part of the story, and the book could easily be rewritten without her character being missed for a second. She’s having a love affair with Simon, which we’re continually reminded cannot end in marriage because her father’s profession renders her unclean. In the scheme of things that don’t quite work about this book, though, the title is small change.
While Jakob Kuisl, as a hangman who studies science and works as a healer when he’s not torturing and executing, is an interesting character, no one else in the book has much depth. Simon and Magdalena are flat “young lovers”, and the various townspeople are even more one-note: officious, or anachronistically fair-minded, or superstitious, no one is a whole person. And speaking of anachronisms, holy smokes is the language in this historical novel completely out of whack. Obviously as a non-German-speaker I read it in translation and I hope the issue was poor translation, otherwise there’s just not even an attempt to make language the slightest bit accurate to the time. There’s also a ton of repetitious phrasing, of phrases that are unusual enough that it’s really noticeable. These writing/translation problems are so jarring that they take you straight out of the world of the novel. Other than that, there are about 100 more pages of the book than there is plot to fill it, so it drags on pretty badly. At the end of the day, it’s just not a very good book.
Tell me, blog friends…do you think a book’s title character should be a major part of the story?
Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Songs
Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week’s topic is an All About Audio chose-your-own. I don’t listen to audiobooks (I know that for a lot of people they’re enjoyable, and I know this will spark dissent but I just don’t feel like they’re real reading…it’s not “cheating”, that’s silly, it’s just not the same thing as reading words on a page), so I chose to go in a different audio direction: music! I love music and actually buy quite a bit because I’m not into streaming (I like to own things). So here are ten of my favorite songs.
Just The Two Of Us: This was our first dance at our wedding. We did not practice at ALL beforehand so it was delightfully awkward.
High For This: Ah, the song that started my Weeknd obsession back in 2012, when I actually saw him on tour about two weeks before I moved to Reno. And that was the last actual live music I’ve seen (outside of the orchestra), unfortunately enough. Reno does get shows, but not usually what I want to see.
Billie Jean: Michael Jackson is an amazing musician. Whatever you believe about his personal situation and failures, he made incredible music that stands the test of time. This song is just…perfect. The entire Thriller album is one of the greatest ever made, so for this to be a highlight says something.
If You Seek Amy: I remember buying Britney Spears’ first single (“…Baby One More Time” with the “Autumn Goodbye” b-side) when I was just a little high schooler. I’ve been a fan ever since, and I NEED to see her Vegas show before she closes up shop. This is one of my favorites of hers, with that sing-song “la la la” and the not-even-hidden double entendre of the title.
Back To Black: The loss of Amy Winehouse and her incredible talent is something I still mourn, honestly. She had her demons, obviously, but she was so gifted and this entire album is a masterpiece (her first album, Frank, is also very good).
Wonderwall: The Ryan Adams cover, not the Oasis original (which is a classic in its own right). But this was my introduction (via The O.C., back when that was a thing) and remains my favorite from my all-time favorite artist. I’ve seen Ryan live four times and can’t wait until I get to again!
Pour It Up: Every girl needs a song that makes her feel like a bad bitch (or maybe not, maybe that’s just me?). And no one does it better than the Queen Bad Bitch herself: Rihanna. There are a ton of songs I could have gone for here, honestly, but this is the one that really gets me in peak sassy mindspace.
Bittersweet Symphony: I’m a child of the 90s, okay? If you can hear this song without thinking of a young Reese Witherspoon driving a convertible with the top down and her hair swirling around in the breeze, you probably aren’t. But I highly recommend turning this on when you’re going anywhere, it makes a walk to Starbucks feel EPIC.
Got To Give It Up: Remember how “Blurred Lines” was catchy as hell but also totally rapey and gross? This the original version of the song (a court even held that “Blurred Lines” was a total ripoff) and has all of the booty-shaking funk with none of the awful overtones!
Purple Rain: Prince was a formative influence in my house. I grew up singing along to “Cream” before I had the slightest idea what it was about. Purple Rain is the product of a brilliant musician at the height of his creative powers; a timeless, soaring anthem.
Book 42: Dead Wake
“A Cunard captain was supposed to be much more than a mere navigator. Resplendent in his uniform and cap, he was expected to exude assurance competence, and gravitas. But a captain also served a role less easy to define. He was three parts mariner, one part club director. He was to be a willing guide for first-class passengers wishing to learn more about the mysteries of the ship; he was to preside over dinner with prominent passengers; he was to walk the ship and engage passengers in conversation about the weather, their reasons for crossing the Atlantic, the books they were reading.”
Dates read: April 11-16, 2016
Rating: 9/10
Sometimes I find myself wondering about historical what-ifs. Like, what if Adolf Hitler’s art career had taken off and he’d never gotten involved in politics? What if Joseph Stalin had gotten in a bar brawl as a young man and been killed? What if Lee Harvey Oswald had gotten a bad stomach flu the day that JFK visited Dallas and spent the whole day in the bathroom? Our history, our whole world would have been a very different place. But different is not necessarily the same as better, and you never know if that alternate history would have ended up even worse somehow (although it’s hard to imagine so in some cases).
Since it came so close to not happening at all, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand is one of the most tempting what-ifs of all. Do we look back on World War I now and see Europe as a powder keg ready to blow, with the assassination as just the spark that happened to ignite it? Sure. But maybe there never would have been a spark at all. Maybe there would have been a diplomatic solution to the problem. Maybe not, and maybe it very well could have been something else that pushed it all over the edge. But we live in this world, where World War I did happen, and in the course of that war, the Lusitania was torpedoed and sunk.
I didn’t know anything about the ship (or honestly, much about the war or the players) before I started reading this book. My history major husband was able to fill in some of the blanks for me, but most of what I now know about the time period and the Lusitania and the circumstances that led to it being torpedoed and sank came from Erik Larson’s Dead Wake. The information is well-researched and well-presented. Larson takes multiple threads: the ship, its captain and crew, some of the passengers, the u-boat that sunk it and its captain, President Woodrow Wilson trying to keep America out of the war, British naval intelligence, and draws them together, weaving the story slowly and surely towards the sinking. You know it’s coming, but Larson masterfully creates tension with his narrative and the torpedoing feels like a shock.
Oftentimes historical non-fiction (especially when it’s about military events) feels academic, but Dead Wake reads like a story that just happens to be real. I was glad to get the opportunity to read more about World War I in a way that was engaging and compelling…it’s piqued my interest in the time period, and isn’t that what good writing should do? Make you want to learn and read even more? I know I’ll be looking to acquire copies of the rest of Larson’s work (I already have a few, but I want them all!) so I can enjoy his wonderful storytelling. This is a true non-fiction novel and honestly a joy to read.
Tell me, blog friends…what historical what-if really gets your brain going?
**I received a free copy of this book from the publisher, Broadway Books, through Blogging for Books in exchange for a fair and honest review**
Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten ALL TIME Favorite Coming of Age Books
Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week’s theme was a fill in the blank: top ten books in a particular genre. I don’t do much “genre” reading (literary fiction is probably the biggest through-line), but I have read a lot of coming-of-age novels. Even as an adult, there’s something so universal and compelling about these kind of stories. I think we’re all still carrying around the psychic scars of our own growing-up process, so they’re easy to identify with. Or maybe that’s just me. Anyways, here are my ten absolute favorites.
The Last Picture Show: Small-town Texas high school senior Sonny doesn’t have a lot of direction. Over the course of that year and the couple months following, though, he plays his last season of football, covets his best friend’s girl, loses his virginity to his coach’s wife, experiences the death of his father figure, has a brief fling with the aforementioned best-friend’s-girl, and another person close to him dies. At the end, he finds himself at a high school football game and feeling desperately alone on the sidelines. His innocence in just about every sense of the word is lost and McMurtry writes it with beautiful poignancy.
The Lords of Discipline: Will McLean is on the cusp of graduation from The Institute, a prestigious military college when he gets assigned the task of protecting the school’s first black student. It takes him back to his truly hellish freshman year hazing experience, which did a number on him, and the situations he finds himself in during his final year (first love and loss, the death of a roommate, a fight against a shadowy group) rob him of any last vestiges of childhood. He’s a man, for better or worse, by the end. This book is seriously amazing.
A Tree Grows In Brooklyn: This book follows Francie Nolan from her childhood through to her early adulthood. Any bookish soul will see themselves in library-haunting, education-loving Francie, and while there are few “big events” in the book, we read along as she goes from a little girl to a young woman, ready to go out into the world and conquer.
To Kill A Mockingbird: We’ve all read this one, right? I don’t know that I’ve ever met someone who’s read TKAM who doesn’t love it. Scout is a little younger than your usual 16-20 year old coming-of-age protagonists, but what she goes through as her father defends a black man accused of rape and she digs into the mystery of her neighbor, Boo Radley. Things get pretty real for Scout, and if she’s not quite a woman by the end of it all, she’s not a little girl anymore either.
The Cider House Rules: Homer Wells is raised in an orphanage run by Wilbur Larch, a kindly abortionist (long before the procedure was legal). Homer is trained in the performance of but vociferously opposed to the termination of pregnancy, and moves away to begin a new life in on an apple farm. It’s there that he learns that the world isn’t always as neatly black and white as he would like it to be and he’s forced to come to terms with the reality that his father figure is a better man than Homer gives him credit for.
The Giver: It’s an oldie (I read it in middle school), but a goodie. At the age of 12, the members of Jonas’ dystopian sameness-oriented society have their professional futures chosen by their elders. Jonas is picked as the receiver of memory, the one who holds all the accumulated memories of the past, good and bad, that have been denied to the populace as a whole so they can be more numbly content. Joy, and hunger, and despair, and delight turn Jonas from a normal boy to an adult who makes difficult and hard choices.
Sabriel: On the more fantasy side of things, Sabriel is a young woman about to graduate from school, who is thrust into adult responsibility when her beloved father dies, leaving her an orphan. She’s called upon to fill his role as a sort of anti-necromancer and keep the world safe from the dead and those who would manipulate them to their own ends. A young schoolgirl becomes a powerful woman, and that’s always catnip for me.
The Golden Compass: Oh man Lyra Belacqua is the best. A tough-as-nails little wildcat of a girl raised by scholars in a parallel world, she longs for nothing more than a real family. When she finds out who her parents actually are and what they do, she becomes a leader of a rebellion against them and all they stand for. This book is crazy amazing (as are its sequels) and Lyra is awesome.
White Oleander: Figuring out one’s relationship with one’s parents, is, to me, a hallmark of actual adulthood. Astrid only has the one parent she knows, but Ingrid is enough to deal with for any one person. Astrid’s experiences in foster care and the various mother-types she encounters help her come to terms with who she is, who her mother is, and their overlaps. I haven’t re-read it in years but it still sticks with me.
Harry Potter (the whole series): I know, this is cheating. These are seven books. But taken together, they tell one entire and incredible coming-of-age story, so I’m giving myself a pass here.