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Book 242: Sloppy Firsts

“I told my parents not to even dare throwing me a Sweet Sixteen party. The very thought of ice-cream cake and pink crepe paper makes me want to hurl. Not to mention the fact that I can’t even imagine who would be on the guest list since I hate all my other friends. I know my parents think I’m being ridiculous. But if the one person I want to be there can’t be there, I’d rather just stay home. And mope. Or sleep.” 

Dates read: June 16-19, 2018

Rating: 7/10

I have to admit I’m a little jealous of today’s bookish teenagers. The absolute explosion in the number of books targeted toward young adults, which seemed to start to grow in the wake of Harry Potter and then skyrocket after The Hunger Games, means that they have so many books meant to appeal to them to chose from! I remember the YA section of the library when I was growing up having a lot of Sweet Valley High, and Fear Street, and Louise Duncan (all of which I read, of course) and not a ton else, so I started reading more adult literary fiction early. As much as that’s been a good thing for me, by and large, I wish I’d gotten to experience the kind of peak YA that seems to be happening now.

Since I did like to read quality YA when I got my hands on it, I’m astonished that I managed to miss Megan McCafferty’s Sloppy Firsts until now! The first in a five-book series, it focuses on New Jersey teenager Jessica Darling, deeply miserable now that her best friend Hope has moved away. Jessica’s left with the rest of her honors-classes friend group, none of whom she actually likes very much and who she refers to as the Clueless Crew in her head. Her dad drives her crazy trying to home coach her through track, and her mother and older sister Bethany are too wrapped up in planning Bethany’s wedding to pay Jessica too much mind (not that she wants them to anyways). She’s nursing a desperate crush on a senior who probably doesn’t even know she exists. How is a girl to deal with her sophomore year in high school like this?

With snark, of course. She writes to Hope every month, filling her in on all the new drama…the girl from Manhattan who moves to town but isn’t quite who she seems to be, the pressure she feels to date a guy friend that she doesn’t like that way just to have a boyfriend, how torn she feels when she finds out someone’s boyfriend is cheating on her but she’s supposed to keep it secret. What Jessica doesn’t tell Hope about is the growing connection she has with Marcus Flutie, who’d been best friends and drug buddies with Hope’s brother before his death by overdose prompted Hope’s family to leave town. The closer Jessica and Marcus get, the worse she feels about hiding it from Hope, and the more confused she is by what she wants out of it at all. Add in the family conflicts and it’s no wonder Jessica’s overwhelmed.

Jessica is the kind of character I would have loved as a teenager, and looking back someone who reminds me of myself at that age. She’s smart enough to know that she should buy into “the game” if she wants to fit in more (not to mention please her mother), but too stubborn to actually do it. She wants desperately to feel understood even though she doesn’t even really understand herself. She feels trapped in high school, but the taste of the more adult world she gets working at the Shore during the summer doesn’t exactly thrill her. The life McCafferty gives her, and the issues she presents her with, feel pitch-perfect for a sixteen year-old in the year 2000, which, given that I was myself just a year or two younger, also took me back on a wave of nostalgia. I was worried I would be a little too old for this book at literally twice the age of the main character, but I was completely charmed.

I wonder if the cultural references, which hit home for me, will read as hopelessly dated to today’s teens. They probably do, but we all have easy access to Google these days so I won’t let that stop me from giving a wholehearted recommendation, for adults both young and well, not-young, and particularly of the lady variety (though don’t think there’s any reason a guy couldn’t enjoy this, let’s be real, it’s written for a female audience). It’s easy to read, written with wit and verve, but doesn’t shy away from the heavier issues that high schoolers deal with, like sex and drugs. It neither treats these with kid gloves like Very Special Episodes nor glosses over them entirely, but presents them as just very much a part of life about which decisions need to be made. If the interior lives of teenage girls aren’t compelling to you for whatever reason, this likely won’t be for you. Otherwise, though, it’s an enjoyable read!

One year ago, I was reading: The Man in the High Castle (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: My Own Words

Three years ago, I was reading: Crazy Rich Asians

Four years ago, I was reading: The Shipping News

Book 241: Love Medicine

“You see, I thought love got easier over the years so it didn’t hurt so bad when it hurt, or feel so good when it felt good. I thought it smoothed out and old people hardly noticed it. I thought it curled up and died, I guess. Now I saw it rear up like a whip and lash.”

Dates read: June 12-16, 2018

Rating: 7/10

Lists/awards: American Book Award, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

I’ve lived in Nevada since the summer of 2012. It’ll officially be eight years at the end of this month! This is where I’ve spent more of my adult life than any single other place, and where (assuming nothing major changes) I’ll spend the rest of it. But if you ask me where “home” is, I’d still tell you it was Pinckney. My relationship with the place I grew up is complicated, and I am not upset that it’s not where I’ve ended up, but there’s just something that it has marked on me indelibly, in a way that no place else has ever really been able to replace it in my mind as my home.

The instinct to turn towards home, to seek refuge there in times of strife, kicks off Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine. June Morrissey, drunk and struggling in Williston, North Dakota, decides to head back to the reservation when she was born and raised. The problem is that she doesn’t have proper winter clothes and there’s an enormous blizzard. She dies on her journey, and the book moves both forward and backward in time to tell the story of June, her quasi-adoptive parents Nestor and Marie Kashpaw, Nestor’s childhood sweetheart Lulu Lamartine, June’s children and cousins and nieces and nephews and a whole sprawling cast of others. It’s classified as a novel, but honestly is much more a collection of short stories about a common set of characters. The placement of the stories is obviously deliberate, revealing information about the subjects bit by bit, but the book as a whole doesn’t really have a defined narrative arc.

I think, for a lot of people who grew up far from reservations and didn’t really know many (or any) Native Americans, it can easy to think about them as almost preserved in amber…our idea of what “an Indian” looks like and what their experiences are is rooted in black and white photos and/or stereotypes. Even though some might think it’s less damaging because of its romantic (in the larger sense of the word), it’s still a prejudiced and honestly racist way of thinking. Native Americans still exist. They live in the world. They talk on cell phones. But they remain mysterious to many other Americans, which is why this book isn’t just good, it’s also important, in that it presents a realistic portrait of Indian life on a reservation, showing it to be full of people: some better, some worse, some smart, some dumb, some kind, some harsh. It has its own challenges and experiences just like any other community, but it’s made up of the same kinds of humans we find everywhere.

As might be expected for a book with the word “love” in the title, the bonds we form with others, both those rooted in blood and those created by the body and the heart, is the central through-line connecting the pieces of the story together. Though no one’s story is presented in a straightforward, neatly chronological way, Erdrich creates vibrant characters who resonate with emotional truth over the course of the narrative. She gives us little snapshots of their lives at points in time, pieces that begin to cohere into a whole. That this book spawned multiple sequels doesn’t surprise me at all: the people she creates clearly have long histories that bear further exploration.

This is a book that strongly favors characters over plot. While all of the individual stories have their own little dramas, there’s not a lot of narrative flow over the course of the book. The real interest is in seeing the characters over the course of their lives, meeting a woman when she’s a grandmother and then getting a look at the young woman she was before the rest of her life happened, figuring out how she might get from there to here, getting little glimpses along the way. Erdrich’s writing is beautiful: it tends towards the lush without veering into purple prose territory. I will say, though, that effectively as she does wield her chosen episodic format, the lack of tension or drive to the book was a bit of quibble for me and it was hard to get “sucked in” because of it. Even so, this is a very good book and I would recommend it widely. It might not quite be your cup of tea in the end, but it’s very much worth reading.

One year ago, I was reading: Polite Society (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: The Looming Tower

Three years ago, I was reading: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

Four years ago, I was reading: Under the Tuscan Sun

Book 235: Landline

“Sometimes she lost her place when she was arguing with Neal. The argument would shift into something else—into somewhere more dangerous—and Georgie wouldn’t even realize it. Sometimes Neal would end the conversation or abandon it while she was still making her point, and she’d just go on arguing long after he had checked out.”

Dates read: May 21-23, 2018

Rating: 6/10

My husband and I didn’t meet until our late 20s. While obviously that’s worked out, sometimes I’m a little jealous of people who meet the person they end up with early on in life. Knowing someone in that way you only really can when you watch them grow up and come into themselves is special. On the other hand, though, the 20s can be such a turbulent decade that the person we are near the end of it is very different than the person that began it. And for me, that’s a good thing. I honestly don’t know that my husband and I would have found each other especially interesting if we’d met in college.

Growing together really lies at the heart of what makes a long-term relationship work. In Rainbow Rowell’s Landline, Georgie and Neal meet while working at their campus humor magazine in college, marry when they’re 23, and by the time they’re in their late 30s, they have what looks like on the outside to be a cozy little setup. Georgie writes for a cheesy sitcom, and Neal is a stay-at-home dad to their two little girls. But Georgie and her long-time writing partner, Seth, have dreamed of their own show for ages and they finally get the chance to pitch it to someone who could make it happen. In order to give it their best shot, though, Georgie will need to miss the annual family trip to Nebraska to spend Christmas with Neal’s parents. Her decision to do so, combined with her husband’s growing dissatisfaction, puts her marriage in jeopardy.

Desperate to get ahold of her husband and with a dying cellphone, she drags out an old landline phone to connect with him. Georgie slowly comes to realize, though, that while the voice on the other end of the line is her husband, it’s not him now. It’s him on Christmas break their senior year in college, when he broke up with her but then suddenly showed up on her doorstep with a ring. As she remembers the early days of their love story, and the versions of themselves they used to be, she finds herself thinking about how things have changed over the years and re-evaluating what it actually is that she wants and needs from her life.

Rainbow Rowell is a writer who is constantly recommended on the internet for her sweet, compelling love stories. This one will strike a chord for many women who work and feel stuck between their home/family life and their career. Although Georgie’s probably the more relatable character simply because the story’s told from her perspective, I really appreciated that both she and Neal are painted in shades of grey. She’s not demonized for wanting to be successful in her chosen field, but neither is he for feeling neglected and put-upon. The characters Rowell builds feel real, and so do the situations she puts them in. And, crucial in a book about being on the phone, she’s got a great knack for dialogue.

Now on to the less good. Landline was Rowell’s first adult novel (most of her work falls into YA), and I’d heard it was not one of her stronger efforts. I’m glad I had that warning ahead of time, because while I thought there were a lot of flaws here I wasn’t crushingly disappointed. In order to really buy into the book, you have to be emotionally invested in Georgie and Neal’s love story, and I just wasn’t. I didn’t understand what brought them together in the first place, much less what kept them together. And the tone of the whole thing just felt wonky. On the one hand, Rowell clearly wanted to write something light-hearted and charming, with quirky side characters all over the place to keep the mood up (her mom breeds pugs AND has a much younger husband! And her younger daughter insists on being called Noomi instead of Naomi AND talks like a cat!). But on the other, she’s trying to write something heartfelt about the challenges of making sure you and your spouse/partner are growing together and not apart, and the stresses of trying to keep your family happy and achieve your professional goals. That’s a much more serious book, and in trying to toe the line between them it fails more often than it succeeds. But I liked the quality of her writing, and while I ultimately wasn’t wow-ed by this book, I’m definitely interested in reading her YA.

One year ago, I was reading: Midnight’s Children (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: The Sky Is Yours

Three years ago, I was reading: The Panopticon

Four years ago, I was reading: Shylock Is My Name

Book 229: The Book Of Unknown Americans

“Profesora Shields explained that in English there was no usted, no tu. There was only one word—you. It applied to all people. Everyone equal. No one higher or lower than anyone else. No one more distant or more familiar. You. They. Me. I. Us. We.”

Dates read: April 27- May 1, 2018

Rating: 5/10

When something bad happens, to us or someone we love, there’s a temptation to look back on it and try to figure out what we, ourselves, could have done differently. If only we hadn’t done this or that, maybe the bad thing would have skipped over us. The cold reality is that luck is capricious and misfortune can strike like a tornado that destroys one house down to its foundation while sparing the one across the street any more trouble than an uprooted mailbox. Honestly, though, that’s scarier than the idea that we’re being punished for some previously unrecognized transgression. If it’s about what you do, you can change that. If it’s sheer chance, though, then you never know when disaster could strike.

Self-blame haunts Alma, one of the main characters of Cristina Henriquez’s The Book of Unknown Americans. This debut novel chronicles the experience of a Mexican couple, Arturo and Alma Rivera, who leave their home and come to the United States to seek treatment for their daughter, Maribel. In Mexico, they were well-off: Arturo ran his own construction company and they had a comfortable home. But teenage Maribel, their only child, had an accident that left her with a closed-head injury. Told that some of the best care for Maribel would be in Delaware in the United States, Arturo gets a menial but legal job harvesting mushrooms and they leave behind everything they’ve ever known for a dingy apartment building and the hope of some kind of recovery for their daughter.

Maribel isn’t the same mentally as she used to be, but on the outside she remains just as lovely as she ever was, attracting attention from two boys: Garrett Miller, a white kid with a chip on his shoulder, and Mayor Toro, who lives in the same building as the Riveras and whose mother becomes a confidant for Alma, allowing him and Maribel to become close. Alma is tortured by her guilt over what happened to Maribel, for which she holds herself responsible, and is terrified by her unfamiliar, often hostile new world and the threats that it presents. These powerful and completely human feelings, as well as Mayor and Maribel’s deepening connection, eventually spark an explosive turn of events that prove tragic for everyone.

Henriquez tells her story primarily through three voices: Alma, Arturo, and Mayor, though the first and the last are the bulk of it. She also peppers in brief chapters from the perspective of the other residents of the apartment building, all immigrants and mostly if not entirely from Latin America, telling their own stories of how they came to be there. I found these interludes a real strength of the book, paying tribute to the many paths that lead people far away from home in a novel to which the experience of immigration is so central. But going back to our core storytellers, one of the biggest issues I had with the book is that Maribel herself, the person around whom the action revolves, isn’t one of them. And I don’t know if that’s due to the difficulty of trying to present a brain-damaged teenager faithfully and sensitively, but I spent much of my time reading the book wishing for her perspective.

Doing so might have alleviated something that I could not stop from being bothered by: the way the relationship between Mayor and Maribel is presented as largely positive. I could never let myself get invested in it the way I felt like the book wanted me to be because I could never forget that although they were the same age, Maribel had a traumatic brain injury. Although it was obvious Maribel liked him and felt comfortable with him, not dealing with the issue of the differential between them based on this fact made the romance between them uncomfortable. Combined with what I thought was mostly unimpressive prose quality, I found this book disappointing. There was so much hype around it and besides an emotional sucker-punch of an ending, I found it to mostly fall flat.

One year ago, I was reading: The Fever (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: Sex at Dawn

Three years ago, I was reading: The Children of Henry VIII

Four years ago, I was reading: The Hangman’s Daughter

Book 228: Rosemary’s Baby

“Now, looking back over the past weeks and months, she felt a disturbing presence of overlooked signals just beyond memory, signals of a shortcoming in his love for her, of a disparity between what he said and what he felt. He was an actor; could anyone know when an actor was true and not acting?”

Dates read: April 24-27, 2018

Rating: 5/10

I remember, when I first learned about how babies are made (not the sex part, the pregnancy part), my overwhelming impression was that it sounded like being the host for a parasite. Before it can survive outside of you, it’s just hooked up to your insides, taking your nutrients and calories. And while modern-day ultrasound technology is giving us ever-clearer ideas of what exactly is going on in there, for the most part it’s hidden from view. You feel kicks and punches and the call is coming from inside the house! Yes, yes, it’s the miracle of life and all that, but there’s something just kind of fundamentally weird about it.

I’m not the only one who thinks so, the phrase “body horror of pregnancy” brings up plenty of Google results. If you were to ever ask anyone if they can think of a piece of pop culture about it, the answer you’d probably hear is Rosemary’s Baby. Most people would mean the Polanski film, but that cinema classic (one of the few horror movies even I enjoy!) was based on Ira Levin’s original novel. It’s almost a novella…it’s quite short. It tells the story of young newlywed Rosemary Woodhouse, who begins the story by moving into an exclusive Manhattan apartment building with her up-and-coming actor husband, Guy. A friend from her time in the workforce tries to warn her about the bad reputation the place has, but the couple is excited and moves in anyways.

Rosemary, estranged from her own Midwestern family, is eager to have a child, but Guy is hesitant until he starts spending time around the Castevets, their elderly next-door neighbors, and he gets a promising role when the originally-cast actor is struck blind. The night they conceive, Rosemary’s drink is spiked and while she remembers an oddly demonic evening, Guy claims nothing odd happened. She’s steered away from her first choice of doctor to one the Castevets prefer, who counsels her to not talk about how her pregnancy is going with her friends. After months of agonizing pain (and daily nutritional drinks provided by the Castevets), Rosemary complains to a friend, who starts looking into what could be wrong. He’s struck down suddenly, and his last message to Rosemary is a warning about her new friends. Heavily pregnant and with no one to turn to, Rosemary is suddenly terrified about what exactly she’s going to be giving birth to.

What came through the most strongly to me, from today’s perspective, is a warning about how abusers work. Rosemary is cut off from her family, from the doctor she wants to go to, from her friends and a community of women who would be able to tell her that her experiences aren’t normal. Her husband and neighbors do all of it cheerfully, in the guise of caring about her, but they’re really isolating her so they can better control her. It’s incremental enough that she barely even notices the noose tightening around her until it’s too late. That, as much as the reality that you have no idea what your baby is going to be like until it comes out, is the horror.

Honestly, this is a situation where the movie is better. The book isn’t bad, but it’s unspectacular. None of the characters is all that compelling, the dialogue doesn’t spark, the prose is unremarkable. The performances (particularly Mia Farrow) and atmosphere Polanski was able to render on film flesh out the bones of the interesting idea Levin’s work presents and explores. The book on its own isn’t unworth your time, particularly because it’s so short, but its not anything special.

One year ago, I was reading: The Last Romantics (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: Silent Spring

Three years ago, I was reading: Big Little Lies

Four years ago, I was reading: And After Many Days

Book 222: Outline

“It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves, how enthusiastically they drive you to your own destruction: even the kindest ones, the ones that are most loving, can rarely have your interests truly at heart, because they are usually advising you from within lives of greater security and greater confinement, where escape is not a reality but simply something they dream of sometimes. Perhaps, he said, we all are like animals in the zoo, and once we see that one of us has got out of the enclosure we shout at him to run like mad, even though it will only result in him becoming lost.” 

Dates read: April 6-8, 2018

Rating: 6/10

Every so often, I wake up and am confused about where I am. Why is the sun coming through the windows in that way? Why am I not in my childhood room, in the bed I slept in until I graduated high school? Or the one from my third year of law school, to this day my favorite apartment I’ve ever lived in? It doesn’t happen regularly, but on the occasions it does I have to remind myself that I’m not 17 and needing to get into the shower so I won’t be late for school, or that I’m not in Tuscaloosa anymore, that was literally a decade ago now. That I’m me, the me that exists right now, and I’m exactly where I was when I went to sleep last night.

That feeling of poignant unreality permeates Rachel Cusk’s Outline, which follows Faye, a British woman recently divorced and in Greece to teach a week-long writing course over the summer. The book consists of ten conversations that she has with other people, starting with her seat neighbor on the flight over (with whom she continues to interact during the week) and ending with the next person staying in the apartment she’s been put up in. In between, she talks to old friends, new friends, and her class about subjects ranging from animals to marriage and divorce. Well, more like gets talked at rather than talks to. Faye is not a big participant in these conversations, and so what we get about her is…wait for it…mostly an outline, defined more by what’s going on around her than anything we see of her interiority.

This isn’t an easy book to write about, because there’s not a lot of “there” there. Virtually nothing happens, and since Faye is such a cipher and only her airplane seat neighbor makes more than one appearance, there’s nothing to speak of in terms of character building or development. Instead, we’re left with admittedly lovely writing and a lot of meditation on themes. Dislocation/unreality, processing trauma, illusions, and an unexpectedly heavy emphasis on marital relationships are explored throughout the book, and at the end, Faye heads home and back to her life in the UK without any sense that this week in her life has meant anything.

I can appreciate a book with an unconventional narrative structure, but this one never quite came together for me. Cusk uses language beautifully, you can feel while you read it that each word, each phrase was chosen with care. But the way she sacrificed plot and character development to focus exclusively on theme makes this feel like a writing exercise more than a book. There’s not a story here, really. There are just words.

This isn’t to say there’s nothing of value here. The first section of the book, the first conversation, in which Faye and her seat neighbor discuss his personal life and children and divorces, is by itself a masterful short story. And there are moments of brilliance in her descriptions…Faye finding herself thrown off-balance at the acceleration of a motor boat captured a sensation I’ve personally experienced many times before in a way that resonated powerfully. And some of the people in my book club, for which I read this one, really connected with it. But all I can offer here are my personal reactions and review, and for me, this didn’t work. I can’t recommend it, but if it’s something that intrigues you, I won’t warn you away from it either.

One year ago, I was reading: Going Clear (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: Henry and Cato

Three years ago, I was reading: A Leg To Stand On

Four years ago, I was reading: The Guest Room

Book 221: Sophia of Silicon Valley

“Minutes later, my phone rang. I knew it was Scott calling about the Time cover, so I hesitated to answer—one ring, two rings, three. I knew if I didn’t pick up the phone, though, forcing Scott to hold in his anger, he would really blow an epic gasket when the inevitable happened. Better to let him yell now. As I slowly brought the cell phone up to my ear, I could already hear him screaming.” 

Dates read: April 3-6

Rating: 2/10

I’m always a little skeptical when a book (or movie, or whatever) tries to sell itself as the next [insert popular title here]. I understand why they do it…if you compare your work to a super hit, you’ll catch the eye of people who loved that thing. But it so often sets the consumer up for disappointment. It usually winds up that the thing that people loved about the initial product wasn’t its subject, themes, or plot, but something about the voice, or its unexpectedness, or the style. Even though I’ve been burned, though, I often can’t help myself from picking up something that’s described as an “if you loved” for one of my favorites.

When I saw the pitch for Anna Yen’s Sophia of Silicon Valley as a “The Devil Wears Prada meets the tech industry”, I was intrigued. Silicon Valley, with its constant promises of disruption and reinvention and outsized personalities, is ripe for satire. Yen, like ex-Vogue-assistant Lauren Weisberger before her, has insider bona fides: she came through stints at Pixar and Tesla, and continues to work in the field. Maybe it’s the latter that keeps the book from reaching the heights of Prada, or indeed, any heights at all. This book isn’t just not great, it’s actively bad.

Sophia Young, our extremely-thinly-veiled author insert, is the younger daughter of wealthy Chinese immigrants living in San Francisco. She has type 1 diabetes, which she mentions more often than Stacy does in The Babysitters Club, and is therefore babied by the parents she’s returned to live with after college. She starts work in finance, but when it turns out the glamour she’d hoped for in this field doesn’t materialize, her interest flags and she’s fired shortly thereafter. With the help of a friend, she gets a job as a paralegal at a prestigious law firm for a demanding partner (despite having no training for the role) and finds that she enjoys and is good at the work. Even with long hours, she meets a guy she likes and they find time to build a relationship, and Sophia starts dreaming about their future. Then she meets Scott Kraft, one of the firm’s clients, who’s starting up an animated film studio called Treehouse with a first feature about toys who come alive, and her world turns upside down.

Scott hires Sophia to come on to Treehouse to do investor relations and assist with the launching of the company’s initial public offering. Scott, always in his trademark black turtleneck, is demanding and often unreasonable but a genius at what he does and not without a sense of humor, and Sophia learns from him as she spends a couple years with the company. The first boyfriend dumps her after their relationship deteriorates, but she meets another one not too long after, a handsome doctor who understands her crazy schedule and devotion to her career. The industry moves too quickly for Sophia to settle down in either her personal or professional lives, though, and after two years she makes a jump to an up-and-coming company called Ion, which makes cars and has a side line working on a space launch. Can she develop a relationship with CEO Andre Stark like the one she had with Scott? Will her relationship survive the tumult? Will she ever be like her sister and have a family of her own?

In a book like this, the protagonist needs to be relatable. The reader needs to feel like she’s seeing this strange world through outsider eyes, needs to like and root for the heroine to prevail. And in this, it was an abysmal failure for me. Sophia starts out from a position of enormous privilege: her parents are rich, willing to support her, and their home is literally featured in magazines. She can afford to fail, so there’s nothing really riding on her success except for her own sense of self-worth, which isn’t nothing but also isn’t very high stakes. On top of that, she’s kind of awful. She calls her friends in the middle of their workdays to brag about the opulent hotels she stays at for work and sulks when none of them want to coo over it. Her opposing desires to find a husband and have kids and to professionally achieve at the highest level are understandable and something many women in their 20s and 30s go through, but she doesn’t seem to want both at the same time as much as she wants one and then the other and punishes the men she dates for either not committing or trying to hold her back depending on how she feels that day. I found her deeply irritating.

On top of that, the promised “satire” and “humor” never develops. She doesn’t take the piss out of the Steve Jobs or Elon Musk stand-ins, she hero-worships them (particularly the former) and excuses their bad behavior as a side product of their intelligence and innovation. There’s never a sense that she finds them or the industry as a whole ridiculous. She plays nothing for laughs, nor does she puncture any bubbles. That Yen continues to be a player in the field almost certainly plays into her unwillingness to poke at its uncomfortable spots…she doesn’t want to upset her own apple cart. And while keeping your eye on your own bottom line is understandable, don’t try to sell your uninspired writing as a hilarious send-up if you’re not willing to spill a little tea. I hated this book and do not recommend it to anyone.

One year ago, I was reading: The Silkworm (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: The Selfish Gene

Three years ago, I was reading: Nefertiti

Four years ago, I was reading: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Book 220: Freedom

“This wasn’t the person he’d thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he’d been free to chose, but there was something comforting and liberating about being an actual definite someone, rather than a collection of contradictory potential someones.”

Dates read: March 30- April 3, 2018

Rating: 8/10

Lists/awards: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2012 edition), The New York Times bestseller

Something that seems to come up fairly frequently in profiles of successful people is that they have a daily uniform. Like Steve Jobs’ constant black turtleneck and jeans, many of them report that not having to think about what they’re going to wear every day frees up their minds for “more important” things. It’s a concept called decision fatigue…the more decisions you have to make, the worse (over time) you get at making them logically. For me, deciding what to wear is enjoyable, but I do eat almost the exact same thing every day because food isn’t that interesting to me. Cutting unnecessary choices out of your life does make things a lot simpler.

Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom isn’t very subtle: he tells you the major theme of the book right there in the title. It’s the story of a family, headed by Walter and Patty Berglund, and how it comes to be and how (of course) it begins to fray. It begins with a short, third-party history of their residence in a newly-gentrifying neighborhood in Saint Paul, which begins when they’re young, energetic newlyweds, and continues through their raising of two children, Jennifer and Joey, the latter of whom causes quite a bit of grapevine drama when he takes sides against his own family in a growing border war with their neighbors. Just about as soon as the kids are out of high school and off to college, the parental Berglunds pick up and leave suddenly, and several years later in the newspaper their former neighbors read that Walter’s gotten into a bit of a professional dust-up. So right from the beginning, we know that something is rotten in the state of Minnesota.

We then go back and time and get Patty’s life story, in which she always feels like an outsider in her ambitious upstate New York family, culminating in her parents’ refusal to do anything when she’s raped by the son of a powerful neighbor. She flees on an athletic scholarship to Minnesota, where she develops a friendship with a disturbed classmate, through whom she meets musician Richard Katz and his roommate, Walter Berglund. Though Richard and Patty are interested in each other, Walter is also interested in Patty, and though he “gets” the girl, the attraction between his wife and his best friend lingers. We also move forward to Richard, Walter, and Joey’s perspectives after their move out of Minnesota, and how each struggles with freedom as opposed to stablility, and the consequences of exercising choices that become available.

Jonathan Franzen as a human being is not my favorite. But as a writer, he is undeniably talented. Freedom wrestles with some weighty stuff: 9/11, environmentalism, corporate philanthropy, temptation, infidelity, the way family patterns repeat over generations, sexual assault, selling out, forgiveness. That’s a lot for one book, even a long-ish one, to tackle. But for the most part, he pulls it off. Though I didn’t necessarily always like the characters he created, I almost always found them compelling and interesting. Though some of the plot schemes he tangles them up veer towards the ridiculous, he mines them for emotional truth well enough that they stay on the good side of the line of believability.

There are some missteps, though. I found some of his decisions regarding Patty’s trajectory baffling. Her rape doesn’t seem like a character-informing experience for her, serving rather as an explanation to write her parents out of the book until there can be a rapprochement at the end to bring things full circle. And her college friend Eliza’s obsession with her also seemed underbaked…it never really went anywhere besides serving as her introduction to Richard. The balance of Patty’s story rounded her out, but the way he wrote Connie (Joey’s childhood sweetheart) never made sense to me. She’s not a person, she’s a symbol, as was Lalitha, a young colleague of Walter’s who becomes besotted with him. Maybe our cultural moment just has me primed to see underlying misogyny better than I used to, but I can’t deny that it’s here and it was part of what kept me from being fully absorbed in the novel. It’s good, very good even, and I would recommend it with the caveat that if you’re looking for strong female characters, you won’t find them here.

One year ago, I was reading: Forest Dark (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: Wonder Boys

Three years ago, I was reading: Zealot

Four years ago, I was reading: Ahab’s Wife

Book 214: Exit West

“His eyes rolled terribly. Yes: terribly. Or perhaps not so terribly. Perhaps they merely glanced about him, at the woman, at the bed, at the room. Growing up in the not infrequently perilous circumstances in which he had grown up, he was aware of the fragility of his body. He knew how little it took to make a man into meat: the wrong blow, the wrong gunshot, the wrong flick of a blade, turn of a car, presence of a microorganism in a handshake, a cough. He was aware that alone a person is almost nothing.”

Dates read: March 9-11, 2018

Rating: 10/10

I don’t have to go too far back on either side of my family to find immigrants. On my mom’s side, my grandmother left her native Austria as a young woman, and on my dad’s side, my great-grandfather came over from Poland as a teenager. Neither were what would be considered particularly desirable immigrants: great-grandpa was illiterate in his native Polish and spoke no English at the time of arrival, and grandma was a Jewish woman without higher education at a time when America was not especially welcoming of Jewish immigrants. But arrive here they both did, and carved out lives for themselves, and started families, and here I am a couple generations later, an American writing this blog.

As long as there are parts of the world that experience war, famine, and oppression, there will be immigrants and refugees. Mohsin Hamid’s short, delicate Exit West tells a story about two of them, Saeed and Nadia, with a small magical realism twist: people move between countries through doors that appear, seemingly at random. People go through them, but they don’t come back, so you don’t know exactly where you’re going until you get there. You just know that it’s not where you are, and for many people, that’s enough. Including our central couple, young people in a never-named, seemingly majority-Muslim city. Nadia covers herself from collarbone to toe in a long robe although such attire is not mandatory…but she’s an atheist who smokes pot and is sexually active. Saeed is more traditional, but still far from devout. They meet in a class and sparks start to fly…but then so do bullets as insurgents begin to battle the government in their city, too.

Soon, they’re left with little choice but to flee if they want any hope for the future. As they enter first Mykonos, and then London, thousands of others are doing the same. Hamid tosses little side vignettes of other refugees into his story, showing how people react to the new reality: some respond with fear and violence, but others build unexpected connections. As more and more people come streaming across borders, tension between the native populations of the countries experiencing an inflow and the desperate masses who’ve arrived begin to build. But cracks begin to form between Saeed and Nadia, as they find themselves taking different approaches to life in their new reality.

There’s something fairy-tale-esque about this story, and it’s not just because of Hamid’s absolutely jaw-droppingly gorgeous writing. Maybe it’s in how Saeed and Nadia are given personalities, but still feel symbolic. Maybe it’s the way Hamid “zooms out”, as it were, every so often to give us a fuller view outside of their story. Maybe it’s the familiar beats of love, and loss, and a journey. Maybe it’s the undeniable sense of optimism. Maybe it’s the elegance of the narrative. It’s probably a little bit of all of the above.

I’ll admit that I was wary when I heard that this book has a magical realism element, as that doesn’t usually appeal to me. But I found myself grabbed by Saeed and Nadia, and their growing bond, and their reluctant flight from home, and their struggles to make new lives for themselves. And the device of the doors makes for a certain efficiency that works with the overall flow of the novel…like I said above, there’s a real elegance to it, every word and plot detail seems like the product of a deliberate choice to include it. So using doors allows us to skip all the tedium of the mechanical aspects of getting from point A to point B. I was both charmed and deeply moved by this book and now I need to read everything else Hamid’s ever written because this was amazing. I’d recommend this book to everyone.

One year ago, I was reading: The Cuckoo’s Calling (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: Fourth of July Creek

Three years ago, I was reading: The King Must Die

Four years ago, I was reading: Thirst

Book 211: Henry and Cato

“Fear had entered his life, and would now be with him forever. How easy it was for the violent to win. Fear was irresistible, fear was king, he had never really known this before when he had lived free and without it.”

Dates read: February 24- March 2, 2018

Rating: 7/10

Figuring out what you want should be one of the easiest things in the world, but somehow it’s not. What we actually want is usually buried under a dizzying series of projections: we think we want things, but we actually want the security they represent. Or the status. Or both! We think we want love, but maybe we’re just afraid to be alone with ourselves. Or we just want that head rush that happens at  beginning. The Buddhists think that want/desire is the cause of all suffering, and I think they’re probably right.

The two men at the center of Iris Murdoch’s Henry and Cato, the titular Henry Marshalson and Cato Forbes, are tied together by their failure to have any idea what it is they actually want. They’re also tied together by their shared past, growing up as friends in neighboring English country estates. Their lives have taken them wildly different directions, though: Henry has carved out a life for himself as the third party in a sort of three-part relationship with a married couple, working in academia in the United States, while Cato has had a sudden revelation and joined the church as a priest, ministering to the wayward youth of London. But the two men find themselves in the same place, in crisis, at about the same time.

Henry learns that his older brother, Sandy, his mother’s favorite, has died, leaving him as the heir to his family estate, and so returns to England full of plans to toss out the mother who never loved him and her hanger-on, Lucius Lamb (a useless poet) and sell the property. Instead, he finds himself embroiled in a love triangle between Stephanie, Sandy’s former mistress, and Colette, Cato’s little sister. Meanwhile, Cato has become obsessed with one of the delinquents who visits him, an attractive teenager called Beautiful Joe. Cato’s faith is waning, and he wants nothing more than to abandon the priesthood and run away with Joe. The two men meet up briefly in London to reconnect, and when Joe joins them and learns about Henry’s inheritance, events begin to spiral out of control.

There’s a LOT going on in this book: Henry’s complicated relationship with his mother, his resentment of his brother, his desire to possess his brother’s lover, his relationship to the ancestral home, Cato’s sudden religious awakening and subsequent disillusionment, Cato’s desire for Beautiful Joe although he’s previously believed himself heterosexual. Henry and Cato are set up as mirrors of each other: even just on a fundamental level, Henry had an older brother and his father has died, Cato’s got a younger sister and his mother has died. Both men rejecting what their parents wanted for them: while Henry left the country and pursued a living and was involved with a married couple, Cato renounced his father’s intellectualism and became religious, took vows of poverty and chastity.  The theme of mirrored opposites even plays out in Henry’s two love interests: while Stephanie is lower-class, older, and slatternly, Colette is young, rich, and virginal.

I’d been tossing the idea of reading Iris Murdoch around since I saw Iris several years ago, and this was the first of her works I found discounted for the Kindle. It’s hard to put my finger on exactly how I felt about the book: the characters were mostly well-drawn, the plot proceeded smoothly, the prose was capable, there were interesting ideas toyed with…but the whole was less than the sum of the parts, somehow. I didn’t really ever care what became of either Henry or Cato, both of whom I found frustrating (understandable, but frustrating). Without a connection to a character, I personally find it difficult to get invested in a book. So while there was enough good here to get me to check out some of her other works, and I didn’t hate the experience of reading it or anything, it wasn’t the kind of good that makes me recommend a book widely.

One year ago, I was reading: The Goldfinch (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: The Girl in the Tower

Three years ago, I was reading: The Wonder

Four years ago, I was reading: Occidental Mythology

Book 209: My Name Is Venus Black

“In time, he’d discover that I’m not unlike the planet I’m named for. At a great distance, Venus is beautiful, the brightest of stars in the sky. But what NASA discovered when they orbited her is that she’s actually an inhospitable planet, a boiling cauldron of poisonous gases. Come too close and you’d fry.”

Dates read: February 15-19, 2018

Rating: 3/10

When my sister was only a month or two old, I tried to throw her away. True story! I announced to my mom that she was useless because she wouldn’t stop crying, and tried to bargain that if we couldn’t throw her away, couldn’t we at least return her to the hospital? We fought like crazy growing up, but once I went to college we started to get along better and she’s one of my best friends now. There’s nothing quite like the bond between siblings.

Of course, this isn’t everyone’s experience (although it is the experience of quite a few people I know with brothers and sisters). Some people become estranged. Some are just never close with their siblings. And others have been close their whole lives. Venus Black, eponymous heroine of Heather Lloyd’s My Name Is Venus Black, falls into the last category. Though her brother Leo is six years her junior and is autistic (since the book is set in the 80s, he’s described as having “special needs”, but he’s clearly on the spectrum), and is only technically her half-brother, Venus adores him and nurtures him. But her ability to take care of him is forever changed when, at 13, she commits a serious crime. We’re not sure what it is at first, the book opens in medias res while Venus is confronting her mother at the police station, being interviewed after it happens. It becomes clear pretty quickly that “it” is that she’s shot and killed her stepfather. Why, though, takes a long time to come out.

Only shortly after Venus commits the murder, Leo is kidnapped by his small-time-crook of an uncle out of the backyard of a friend of his mother’s. Venus is devastated when she hears that he’s gone, even trying to flee from pre-trial detention to look for him. But her escape attempt is foiled, and she’s sent to juvenile lock-up until she’s an adult. When she gets out, she wants to just take on a new identity and keep her head down and try to figure out a way to get her brother back. She gets a job as a waitress under an assumed name, rents a room, and is trying to save up to go to California. But she can’t really escape her past…a promising flirtation becomes risky when she finds out he’s a cop and might be able to discover who she really is, and eventually her mother tracks her down too. When they get a lead on Leo, though, everything changes.

By the time this review goes live, this book will have been out for well over a year, so I don’t feel bad about the fact that I’m about to “spoil” the “why-dunnit”. If you’d like to remain in the dark, stop reading. I’m mostly going to spill it because the book builds up to it like it’s some kind of revelation and honestly it is not at all: Venus killed her stepdad because he was peeping at her though a hole in the wall. She tells her mother, and her mother does nothing about it. It makes the rage she feels at her mother feel justified and there’s absolutely no reason it needs to be hidden in the back third of the book. It’s a terrible plotting decision to bury it, but that’s only one in a series of bad decisions Lloyd makes in her debut novel. The characters she draws are paper-thin (with the exception of Leo, who I’ll get to next) and feel not-at-all real. Venus and Leo’s mother is a terrible person, but Lloyd makes her a struggling alcoholic in a way that feels like it’s supposed to give her sympathy (it fails, she’s still a shitty parent). There’s some weird religious overtones that come out of nowhere in the end of the book and it feels shoehorned and unearned. And the ethnicity of a supporting character is constantly referenced in a way that makes it feel almost fetishistic.

The sole bright spot, really, is the portion of the story around Leo. Lloyd’s ability to convey both Leo’s intelligence and his limitations, the way he does love the people in his life but has a hard time expressing it in a way that they understand, is deft and well-realized. Unfortunately, that’s literally the only thing that worked for me in this book. The plot is uneven, the prose competent but uninspired, the characters mostly don’t work. It’s not even a matter of needing a better editor…there’s a story here that could be interesting, but nearly everything would need to be completely revamped to give it the telling it would need to really connect. This is a poor quality book and I don’t recommend it to anyone.

One year ago, I was reading: Messy (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: The Hate U Give

Three years ago, I was reading: Freakonomics

Four years ago, I was reading: All The King’s Men

Book 208: Wonder Boys

“I’d spent my whole life waiting to awake on an ordinary morning in the town that was destined to be my home, in the arms of the woman I was destined to love, knowing the people and doing the work that would make up the changing but essentially invariable landscape of my particular destiny. Instead here I was, forty-one years old, having left behind dozens of houses, spent a lot of money on vanished possessions and momentary entertainments, fallen desperately in and abruptly out of love with at least seventeen women, lost my mother in infancy and my father to suicide, and everything was about to change once more, with unforeseeable result.”

Dates read: February 9-15, 2018

Rating: 6/10

When I was a kid, I was on the “gifted” track…or at least the closest thing my small district had to one. I tested in the 99th percentile for virtually everything except (much to my parents’ chagrin) ability to do basic math in my head. I was in the 99th percentile on the ACT. I read at a 12th grade level in 4th grade. It has a way of kind of getting in your head, when you’re constantly told how smart you are. It makes you feel like you’re destined for greatness, when the reality is that you’ll probably end up working a more-or-less normal job and leading a more-or-less normal life. Which ends up feeling underwhelming even if you’re actually very happy, because what about that greatness that was supposed to happen?

Michael Chabon himself was a young phenom, publishing his debut novel when he was only 25. He found himself stuck when he tried to pen his follow-up, though, and from this experience he found the inspiration for what became his second book, Wonder Boys. The novel tells the story of Grady Tripp, a one-time literary wunderkind who’s published two books to both critical acclaim and popular success but has gotten completely mired in his third. Tripp works as a professor at a small liberal arts school in his native Pennsylvania, and his life is a bit of a mess when we meet him. His agent, who has also been his best friend since college, is coming into town to talk about his book, which he is nowhere near finishing even though he’s written over 2,000 pages. An odd but talented student, James, is exhibiting strange behavior. His wife, the third Mrs. Tripp, has just apparently left him. And his mistress, who is the dean of the college and who is married to the head of Tripp’s department, is pregnant.

It makes for a wild weekend, as Grady tries to keep his agent from actually reading his manuscript in the hopes that he can figure out what to actually do with it, keep track of James, who turns out to be a bit of a pathological liar and compulsive thief, attend a seder dinner with his in-laws (with James in tow) to see if he can patch things up with his wife, and figure out what to do about his mistress’s pregnancy. There’s also a running plotline about the car Tripp is driving, which he won in a poker game and might actually be stolen, and Tripp’s crush on the young student that rents out the basement in his house and is never seen without her red cowboy boots. In the end, somehow, improbably, it all turns out about as well as it could have.

I don’t even necessarily think that’s a spoiler there, because there is a movie version out there of this book and it’s fairly faithful to the text, though it does cut out some plot threads while giving others greater weight. The movie bombed, though I actually quite liked it myself, and I honestly think it might work better in some ways than the book…mostly for its willingness to purge extraneous details. Chabon’s a wonderful writer with a great sense of how to tell a story and clear, insightful prose, but there was really just too much going on here. Too many characters, too many “side quests” (so to speak), too much detail…it feels cluttered and starts to strain the bounds of credulity. How much weird stuff, after all, can happen to one guy over the course of one weekend?

While I’ve loved the two books of Chabon’s that I’ve read before (Kavalier and Clay was my favorite of last year!), this one just didn’t resonate with me. I think part of it was let-down, because what I’ve read from him before has been so good that I had very high expectations going in, and part of it is that I’m just not in a place where stories about overgrown man-children are especially charming to me. The thought of the amount of emotional labor a person like Tripp pushes onto the women in his life because he can’t be assed to get himself together is enraging, so I actually kind of hated him. Comedy-of-errors-style plots like this one aren’t my cup of tea either. I think my lack of connection with this book is as much about me and my preferences as it is about the book itself, though, so while I can’t recommend it, I’m not going to affirmatively suggest avoiding it either. If reading this has made you think that this sounds like a delightful narrative, you’ll probably like it. If not though, skip.

One year ago, I was reading: Dark Places (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: The House of Mirth

Three years ago, I was reading: The Emigrants

Four years ago, I was reading: Oriental Mythology

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