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Book 172: The Idiot



“I wrote her phone number on my hand, while she wrote mine in her daily planner. Already I was the impetuous one — the one who cared less about personal safety and tradition, while Svetlana was the one who subscribed to rules and inherited systems, and wrote things in the designated spaces. Already we were comparing to see whose way of doing things was better. But it wasn’t a competition so much as an experiment, because neither of us was capable of acting differently, and each viewed the other with an admiration that was inseparable from pity.”

Dates read: August 23-29, 2017

Rating: 8/10

Sometimes I feel like I’m learning in reverse: when I was a teenager, I was sure I know pretty much everything, and the older I get, the less I feel certain of. I think many other teenagers are the same way…at least, the ones I’ve known. Sometimes I almost miss that blazing moral clarity, the certainty that I was right and someone else was wrong. But letting it go (for the most part) has made me an easier person to get along with, and a better one overall.

Selin, the protagonist of Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, has the opposite problem. She’s a freshman at Harvard, and she’s overwhelmed by all she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know where her life is going, really, she doesn’t know what classes she wants to take, she’s not sure how to help the students she’s been assigned as a part of her volunteer work doing adult education. She can’t even figure out how to fall asleep regularly, adding exhaustion on top of her confusion. She kind of drifts along, and one of the places she drifts is into a beginner Russian class, where she meets two people that change her life.

One is Svetlana, an immigrant from the former Yugoslavia, who decides she’s going to become Selin’s friend and does so with aplomb, quickly becoming the dominant force in Selin’s social life. The other is Ivan, a senior from Hungary, who becomes Selin’s conversation partner for Russian class, and correspondence partner over the then-new medium of email outside of class in English. Their conversation gradually turns into them spending time together, and Selin develops an intense crush on him. Even after she learns he has a girlfriend (and while he’s giving her very mixed signals), she takes up an opportunity to teach English in Hungary over the summer in the hopes of getting to spend time with him.

This book, like last week’s Stoner, has a very passive central figure. Selin’s unsureness about virtually everything means that she mostly reacts to the world around her instead of being proactive. This makes her simultaneously very relatable (who hasn’t felt paralyzed with indecision, especially in a new situation?) and quite frustrating. If you’ve ever lived through the experience of having feelings for someone who wasn’t quite sure what they wanted, you find yourself wanting to reach through the pages and shake her by the shoulders while telling her that this isn’t going to end well. But you also know there’s no way to learn that lesson except living through it, because you probably ignored the person who shook you by the shoulders and tried to warn you off.

Batuman is an incredible writer…I highlighted so many things on my Kindle that she wrote that just seemed to perfectly capture the essence of being young and lost and desperately self-conscious. And she creates a very real, sympathetic-even-as-she’s-irritating character in Selin. The plot structure, though, could have used some work. While she’s at school, the book meanders along slowly and had a hard time holding my interest despite the lovely prose. Once she gets to Hungary, however, and starts interacting with host families and students, the book gets much livelier and there were several moments that were actually laugh-out-loud funny. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the portion of the book that takes place at Harvard, but I enjoyed the last quarter-or-so so much more. I wish Batuman had figured out a way to disperse some of that levity more equally throughout the book, because it’s like 3/4 a good book and 1/4 a really good book. As is, though, I’d recommend this book, to recent-ish college grads in particular (I feel like if I were too much older than I am now, I’d be too annoyed by Selin to really enjoy what it had to offer).

Tell me, blog friends…did you ever have one of those flirtations with mixed signals?

One year ago, I was reading: Stiff

Two years ago, I was reading: Green Girl

Three years ago, I was reading: To Die For

Book 168: The Sense Of An Ending



“We live with such easy assumptions, don’t we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it’s all much odder than this. Who was it that said that memory is what we thought we’d forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn’t act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it’s not convenient—it’s not useful—to believe this; it doesn’t help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.”

Dates read: August 10-13, 2017

Rating: 8/10

Lists/Awards: Booker Prize, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, The New York Times bestseller

Like many siblings, my sister and I squabbled a lot growing up. One time, and I can’t remember what she said or did that prompted it (if anything), but I was mad at her and I told her that her teeth were yellow. It wasn’t even true, they were pretty much the same color as mine. Years later, I asked her why she usually smiled with her mouth closed in pictures, and she told me that she’d been self-conscious about the way her teeth looked ever since I said that to her. I apologized and told her I was just being a jerk, of course, but I’ve made an effort since she told me that to really think before I snap back at someone I’m upset with. You never know how the words you toss off without thinking can really impact someone’s life.

Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending illustrates the same principle on a much more profound scale. The book tells the story of Tony Webster, a deeply ordinary person. He went to school, worked a normal office job, got married, had a kid, got divorced, and remained on good terms with his ex into their retirement years. But a mysterious bequest drags him back towards most tumultuous time of his life. As schoolboys, Tony and his friends absorbed into their ranks the new kid in town, Adrian. Adrian was different than them: smarter, more serious. The group starts to fracture after graduation, everyone going their own separate ways to different schools or workplaces. At university, Tony meets and starts dating Veronica.

It is this ultimately short-lived relationship that changes lives. Veronica is mysterious and aloof, and Tony has a hard time knowing where he stands with her. They get serious enough that she takes him home to meet her family, but the only one that’s nice to him once he gets there is her mother. They break up shortly after that trip, and not a particularly long time later Adrian writes to Tony to tell him that he’s started dating Veronica. Tony is hurt, and writes back angrily. Then he goes on an extended jaunt to America, and it’s not until he gets back to England that he hears that Adrian has committed suicide. Tony is, of course, upset, but his life goes on fairly smoothly until that bequest arrives: Veronica’s mother has passed and left him a small sum of money and Adrian’s diary. The money gets to Tony, but the diary is with Veronica.

Tony’s journey to try to understand why he was left anything at all and attempts to get the diary comprise the balance of this slim novel. In its less-than-200 pages, it explores powerful themes: the difference between what we chose to remember and the truth, the impossibility of taking back something that’s been said, how we change even though we feel like the same person we’ve always been. Barnes is a talented writer, and reflects on these with clear, emotionally resonant language that puts into words things that we (or at least I) have thought about but never really been able to distill. The mystery behind it all keeps the plot moving forward, but it never feels tantalizing just to inspire page-turning. Rather, the interesting thing is how Tony reacts to each new twist.

Barnes does brilliant characterization work with Tony, by the time things are wrapping up he feels like an old friend who has a way of dropping wistful bon mots about life. Both Adrian himself and Margaret (Tony’s ex-wife) likewise feel realized despite appearing relatively infrequently in the narrative. But Veronica, who winds up being a significant factor, never really came together for me. The “clues” she gives Tony are maddening…if she really doesn’t want to engage with him, she could have avoided him entirely, but for her to make just enough contact with him to drop cryptic references doesn’t make sense. Either tell him what’s going on, because he clearly doesn’t get it, or ignore him. Her remoteness and Tony’s inability to comprehend her are one thing, but I can’t understand her own motives at all, which took away from my enjoyment of the book. As for the final resolution itself, I’m not sure I go all the way there with it. That being said, this is a lovely and powerful book, and I’d recommend it very highly.

Tell me, blog friends…have you ever said something to someone that you wish you could take back?

One year ago, I was reading: Wonder Boys

Two years ago, I was reading: Zealot

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

Book 164: Notes On A Scandal



“People like Sheba think that they know what it’s like to be lonely. They cast their minds back to the time they broke up with a boyfriend in 1975 and endured a whole month before meeting someone new. Or the week they spent in a Bavarian steel town when they were fifteen years old, visiting their greasy-haired German pen pal and discovering that her handwriting was the best thing about her. But about the drip, drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don’t know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the launderette. Or sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can’t bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters.”

Dates read: July 29- August 2, 2017

Rating: 8/10

Arbitrary age guidelines are…well, arbitrary. A person isn’t suddenly mature and responsible enough to drive a car the day of their sixteenth birthday if they weren’t the day before. They don’t suddenly understand all the implications of a contract they sign the day they turn eighteen if they didn’t previously. There’s no magic power to being able to handle your liquor at 21. But since it’s enormously impractical to examine these kinds of milestones on a case-by-case basis, we develop a shorthand. Most 16 year olds are in a better headspace to drive than those younger than them. By the time someone hits 18, they’re more mature and responsible than they were even a few years ago, more able to make adult decisions. And your brain is more developed by the time you get to 21, better able to absorb the impact of alcohol.

One of the more controversial age guidelines (and one that tends to vary depending on place and circumstance) is the age of consent. In the US, it tends to vary between 16-18. Europe skews slightly younger, with most between 14-16. Again, there’s no hard and fast way to assess if someone is “ready” to give knowledgeable consent, so you just have to set a standard and go with it. What is always inappropriate and often illegal is exploiting a relationship of power. So when Sheba Hart, an art teacher at an English school in Zoe Heller’s Notes On A Scandal, begins a relationship with 15 year-old student Steven, she’s clearly in the wrong. Sheba’s story is told through the voice of fellow teacher Barbara Covett, as a manuscript that Barbara is writing in the wake of Sheba’s deeds becoming public. At the beginning of the events that the book recounts, she’s a bitter, lonely older woman who has had no real bonds with anyone besides her cat. When Sheba, lovely and ditzy, makes her teaching debut at St. George’s, Barbara sets out to befriend the soon-overwhelmed younger woman.

Well, befriend isn’t really the right word. She wants to become a necessary part of her life, the way she’d been closely enmeshed with a different younger woman years earlier who got married and will no longer speak to her. There’s an implication that Barbara’s interest is more than platonic, but I think making too much of a “repressed lesbian” angle is overstating the case. As I read it, Barbara’s not trying to get into Sheba’s pants, she’s trying to get into her head and exert control over her. And the way Heller writes it (through Barbara’s not-exactly-unbiased narrative voice), Sheba isn’t exactly in control of her affair with Steven, either. The deeper Sheba gets in, the more he pulls away until he eventually ends it. And then it all comes tumbling down, leaving Sheba cast off from her family with no one to stand by her side. No one, that is, besides Barbara.

Heller has written a book with a lot of moral complexity. Barbara is certainly manipulative, but she’s also desperately lonely, and is understandably very hurt when Sheba throws her over after she’s had to put her cat down to go cavort with Steven. Fundamentally, she wants to be important to another person, which is something most of us want (although most of us aren’t as manipulative as Barbara). Sheba is the one crossing the boundary with Steven, but she met her much-older husband when he was her professor in college, when she was only a few years older than her teenage lover, and Steven proves to be the party less emotionally invested in their relationship. Both women are predators, but neither is purely evil.

It’s a book that may prove difficult for some people to read as it deals heavily with a adult-teenager, teacher-student relationship. Barbara, for all that Heller has given her some sympathetic qualities, is a negative character and given that the book is told from her perspective, I’d classify it as “dark” in tone. But it’s undeniably compelling. Even though I watched the movie (years ago, when it came out) and remembered the “twist”, as it were, I still found it interesting and enjoyable, in its own way, to read. I’d recommend it for people prepared for the subject matter.

One year ago, I was reading: An Untamed State

Two years ago, I was reading: The Wars of the Roses

Three years ago, I was reading: The Woman Who Would Be King

Book 138: Moonglow



“My grandfather never would have lied to exonerate himself, make himself look good, or evade responsibility. Unlike my grandmother, he did not seem to find pleasure or release in telling lies. But while he was a family man and loved us all in his wordless way, he was also, to the core, a solitary. If there was suffering to be endured, he preferred to withstand it alone. If he made a mess, he would clean it up himself. Unlike his wife, he was uncomfortable with make-believe, but his fetish for self-reliance made him secretive. So while it was true that psychiatrists, who got paid to know such things, had instructed him over the years to keep upsetting news away from my grandmother, it was also true that this advice suited his furtive nature. She was always threatening rain; he had been born with an umbrella in his hand.”

Dates read: April 4-9, 2017

Rating: 8/10

Humans love to tell each other stories. It’s a tradition that dates back thousands of years. One of our favorite subjects, of course, is ourselves…we’re constantly shaping the narrative arc of our lives by telling our stories to other people. Our family, our friends, our lovers…they’re all supporting characters in the book of our lives, fading into and out of importance around our central protagonist. Sometimes I wonder how I show up in other people’s stories: am I a villain? A small but important recurring player? Or just an offhand reference at the bottom of page 147?

I’ve always been attracted to stories that are fundamentally about mostly ordinary people and their lives. Michael Chabon’s Moonglow, based in part on the actual recollections of his great uncle, is exactly that kind of story. It’s semi-autobiographical in form as well as function: the main character is a professional writer named Michael Chabon. In the book, Michael is spending time with his dying grandfather while he tells him the story of his life, which took him from the Jewish neighborhoods of Pittsburgh, to a military academy, to Nazi engineer-hunting in Europe, back to the US, to prison, and eventually to a Florida retirement community, where his life finally ended.

But the real main event of his life was his marriage to a beautiful French concentration camp survivor. By the time they met, she’d already had Michael’s mother, then just a small girl, who he raised as his own. That isn’t all that she brought into the marriage, though…she also brought mental instability, haunted by periodic breaks with reality in which she was haunted by a being she called the Skinless Horse. Presented with the opportunity to learn the truth about her life after a bout of hospitalization, Michael’s grandfather chooses to not, and instead goes on loving his wife the way he’s always known her until her premature death.

As might be expected from a book called Moonglow, the moon is a constant reference point and  plays a dominant symbolic role. For Michael’s grandfather, obsessed with rockets, it has a traditionally masculine meaning: he wants to explore and conquer it. But the moon is tied throughout history to the feminine, from Greece’s Artemis to China’s Chang’e. It’s also tied to madness, like that which haunts Michael’s grandmother. Like the fortunes of both parts of our central couple, it constantly waxes and wanes.

This was my first experience with Chabon, a writer I’d heard great things about, and this was a wonderful introduction to him. He created characters that felt real, especially with the grandma and grandpa (the modern-day characters who frame the story, though, Michael and his mother, feel a bit underdeveloped) and created a relationship that felt honest and lived-in. That these two would come together and stay together and have the impact on each other that they did made sense. I’ve always been a fan of the character-driven story, and this is exactly that. But there’s a decent amount of plot in there for those who prefer that, and I enjoyed the way Chabon developed his story. It’s a small detail, but I especially liked the way he left Augenbaugh’s lighter unresolved. Tying everything up with a nice little bow isn’t how life works, closure doesn’t always happen, and I liked that he left that little mystery hanging. I’ll definitely be reading more of his work, and would highly recommend this book.

Tell me, blog friends…do you like full resolution to a story or do you not mind some ambiguity?

One year ago, I was reading: Valley of the Moon

Two years ago, I was reading: The White Queen

Book 107: The Girls



“I waited to be told what was good about me. I wondered later if this was why there were so many more women than men at the ranch. All that time I had spent readying myself, the articles that taught me life was really just a waiting room until someone noticed you- the boys had spent that time becoming themselves.”

Dates read: November 24-26, 2016

Rating: 8/10

Teenage girls are kind of sociopaths. I know that I was. You’re just figuring out who you are and who you might want to be, trying on identities like clothes. Everything seems so black and white: you’re a good girl or a bad girl, a nerd or a popular, a prude or a slut. Male attention is both terrifying and intoxicating, often at the same time. You want desperately to feel like an adult and demonstrate that you’re not a child anymore without really knowing what the consequences of your actions could be. It’s a wonder any of us get out of it with even somewhat-functional mental health.

Emma Cline’s The Girls has been widely billed as a novel about the Manson cult, but that’s not entirely accurate. It does feature a significant portion of plot about a Manson-esque group, but what it’s really about, more than anything else, is the heady experience of being a 14 year-old girl. We first meet Evie Boyd as an older woman, staying briefly in a friend’s beach house when she finds herself between gigs as a live-in nurse. Her friend’s college-age son stops by with his teenage girlfriend, and watching them and her brings back Evie’s memories of that fateful summer when she found herself around the edges of the lives of Russell (our Manson stand-in) and his pack of girls.

Evie’s in an especially vulnerable spot that summer; her father has recently left her mother for a young colleague, and Evie and her longtime best friend are starting to drift apart. She’s fascinated by the group of teenage hippies she sees around town, drawn to their exotic-seeming poverty so different from her own comfortable trust-funded existence (she’s the granddaughter of a never-named wealthy former child star clearly modeled on Shirley Temple). Evie’s particularly hypnotized by their ringleader, Suzanne, and the intensity of her infatuation finds her constantly lying and making excuses to go out to the ranch where the group lives, doing whatever she can (sex, drugs, helping the girls break into homes in her own neighborhood) to fit in and attract Suzanne’s attention and praise. But eventually, as in real life, there’s a grisly murder and the hazy fever dream of that summer ends, leaving Evie back in her old world.

Cline has a real gift for atmospheric, lush prose. She creates a powerful sense of mood, a feeling that every moment is weighed with portent…which goes right along with what I remember from being that age. Everything is so close to the surface, and Cline really captures those feelings of uncertainty and being right on the edge of something meaningful that characterize being that age. She also draws a picture-perfect portrait of the kind of all-consumingness of female friendships in the teenage years. It’s a tricky thing to depict without devolving into cliche, but Cline really gets at the heart of that desperation to please the object of your obsession. The plot moves along fairly slowly, but the careful attention paid to creating the ambiance of teenage girlness and the rich, vivid writing more than make up for it. I don’t know that this is a book that would be as successful if you’ve never actually been a young teenage girl and can’t identify with it, but I personally really enjoyed it and would recommend it highly.

Tell me, blog friends…do you regret some of the things you did when you were 14?

One year ago, I was reading: The Wonder

Two years ago, I was reading: Occidental Mythology

Book 105: Eleanor of Aquitaine



“She had inherited many of the traits of her forebears, and was energetic, intelligent, sophisticated, headstrong, and perhaps lacking in self-discipline. She possessed great vitality and, according to William of Newburgh, a lively mind. Impetuous to a fault, she seems to have cared little in her youth for the conventions of the society in which she lived. Sharing many qualities with that company of ambitious, formidable, and strong-minded female ancestors, she was to surpass them all in fame and notoriety.” 

Dates read: November 15-21, 2016

Rating: 8/10

It’s easy to forget that the world didn’t always look like what it looks like today. Obviously, everyone knows that Egypt now is different than Ancient Egypt, but what we think about tends to be the cultural differences between them. The very borders of what land was considered Egypt aren’t the same. So, too, in Europe. We think about the countries of Europe as being more or less settled, but it wasn’t always so. It took the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella to bring together much of what is modern Spain. And when she married the King of France, Eleanor brought much larger and richer landholdings, in Aquitaine and Poitou, to the marriage than did her husband.

Alison Weir’s Eleanor of Aquitaine brings to life a remarkable (and remarkably long-lived) woman. She married two kings, and was the mother of three more. She went on Crusade. One of the kings she married was the son of a man she’d likely had an affair with before her marriage, and she was rumored to have been a little too close to her own uncle. Despite having been a desirable wife to the kings of both France and England because of her inheritance, she never really ceded control of those lands to her husbands. She actively encouraged her sons to rebel against and try to overthrow her husband, Henry II of England. This is some soap-opera level stuff.

Weir has quickly become one of my favorite historians to read, because she has a way of synthesizing lots of information into an easily readable and understandable narrative. She’s open about when the scholarship is unclear, or there’s more than one version of a particular event, and she tells the reader why she has chosen to take a particular position on what likely really happened. She knows that her reader isn’t as immersed in the subject as she is and provides context for the events she relates…she finds a good middle ground between assuming her readers know too little or too much.

My only real exposure to Eleanor’s story had been the movie version of The Lion In Winter with Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn, which I saw several years ago and remember little of apart from Eleanor being portrayed as a ruthless schemer. Weir never stoops to that kind of caricature of the people involved in Eleanor’s life, especially Eleanor herself: she was a political opportunist to be sure, but she also lived in an era that was especially skeptical of women in power and the accounts of her that survive reflect that bias. I’ve got quite a few of Weir’s books on my TBR, and I always look forward to them and recommend them (including this one!) heartily.

Tell me, blog friends…do you have any family history in areas that have had changing borders? We found my great-grandpa’s immigration records, and he’s actually recorded as being ethnically Polish, but with Austrian nationality, because the area in Poland where we’re from was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire!

One year ago, I was reading: Freakonomics

Two years ago, I was reading: All The King’s Men (my favorite of that year!)

Book 103: Invisible Man



“For the first time, as I swung along the streets, I thought consciously of how I had conducted myself at home. I hadn’t worried too much about whites as people. Some were friendly and some were not, and you tried not to offend either. But here they all seemed impersonal; and yet when most impersonal they startled me by being polite, by begging my pardon after brushing against me in a crowd. Still I felt that even when they were polite they hardly saw me, that they would have begged the pardon of Jack the Bear, never glancing his way if the bear happened to be walking along minding his business. It was confusing. I did not know if it was desirable or undesirable…”

Dates read: November 10-13, 2016

Rating: 8/10

Awards/Lists: National Book Award, Time All-Time 100 Novels, New York Times bestseller, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

I’ve never been followed around a store by a salesperson. I’ve never been afraid when I’ve been pulled over. No one has ever treated me like I don’t belong pretty much anywhere I’ve ever wanted to go. No one has assumed that I speak for all other people that look like me. These, and countless other indignities I don’t have to suffer, are facets of my white privilege. I will never really know what it’s like to live as anything other than a white woman, and in the interest of learning about what life is like outside of those confines, I’ve found myself more and more drawn lately to stories about experiences of people of color.

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man shouldn’t be confused with H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man. While the sci-fi classic deals with literal invisibility, the unnamed black man who narrates his story in Ellison’s novel is only figuratively invisible. We meet him at the end of his story, living in a New York City basement that he’s lit up brightly by siphoning power from the utility. Ellison doesn’t belabor the metaphor…right from the start, the narrator tells us that it’s his status as a black man in mid-century America that renders him effectively invisible.

The novel is made up of his story and how he came to recognize his own non-entity status. And it hits you in the gut right away: the first incident he relates from his life is when he’s awarded a scholarship from a prestigious philanthropic organization in the small Southern town in which he grows up. He’s invited to a country club dinner to make a speech about his scholarship, but once he gets there, he and several other young black men are forced to fight each other and be humiliated chasing for electrified coins. Only after he’s been degraded is he allowed to give his speech and receive the scholarship and the briefcase. It’s a horrifying sequence, incredibly difficult to read, and the book is just getting started.

This experience, and the ones that the narrator has at a black college and then in New York are rooted in a fundamental denial of his humanity. He’s entertainment, or a tool, or an experiment, or just disposable. He struggles and fights and gets up after being knocked down over and over again, but he can’t escape the fact of his race and the broad social structures designed to keep him and other black men firmly in the underclass. And while things have gotten better today, it’s maybe not as much better as we’d like to think.

This is a hard book to read. Not because of the quality…Ellison’s writing is incredible. But it’s heavy and dark and the unending awfulness of what the narrator is subjected to is a lot to get your head around. I usually try not to get heavily into politics on this blog, but I read this book right after the 2016 election, and it really made me think about the racism that persists in our society. Despite the “grab them by the pussy” tape that we all heard, and the many sexual assault allegations against him, a majority of white women voted for Donald Trump rather than the candidate who has worked on women’s and children’s issues for her entire adult life. And while there are lots of factors that motivated people to vote for him, he was an open bigot as well as an open misogynist. It’s hard not to see that as white women “choosing” the interests of white supremacy over feminism. I’m not saying anyone in particular who voted for Trump is absolutely a racist or hates women, I think it’s easy to underestimate your own internal bias or internalized misogyny, a lot of it works on unconscious levels. If I were a black person in America, I have to think that I’d feel pretty invisible (at best) right now too.

Tell me, blog friends…what piece of fiction has especially resonated with you lately?

One year ago, I was reading: Eleanor of Aquitaine

Two years ago, I was reading: Oriental Mythology 

Book 85: Life Itself



“Every time I see a dog in a movie, I think the same thing: I want that dog. I see Skip or Lucy or Shiloh and for a moment I can’t even think about the movie’s plot. I can only think about the dog. I want to hold it, pet it, take it for walks, and tell it what a good dog it is. I want to love it, and I want it to love me.”

Dates read: August 30- September 4, 2016

Rating: 8/10

When I joined Twitter, what feels like a million years ago, I joined for one reason: to follow Roger Ebert. I’ve loved movies for years, and there were no one else’s reviews I enjoyed reading like Ebert’s. He had a way of honing in on the essential truth about a film with understanding and eloquence. When I started reading his blog that he wrote after cancer complications took his physical voice, he brought the same style to his reflections on life. I know there’s this showy public mourning that goes on when someone famous dies, but when Ebert passed, I felt a real sense of loss that I’d never be able to read something new from him again. Before he was gone, though, he wrote an autobiography: Life Itself. It was made into a documentary, which I watched but didn’t think was particularly special. But I bought the book, hoping it would be better. And for me, it was. Not only was it better, it was wonderful.

Life Itself is structured loosely chronologically, beginning with Ebert’s family history and going through to when he was near the end of his life and knew it. The first few chapters, which detail how his ancestors came to the United States and his parents’ upbringings as well as his own early years, are probably the weakest. While most of us are interested in these details for ourselves and sometimes our loved ones, reading about someone else’s is not exactly captivating stuff. Once Ebert gets to his own life, though, the book really finds its footing and takes off. He recounts his life with insight but largely without excess sentimentality: his father’s early death and his mother’s alcoholism, his experiences on the college paper at the University of Illinois, his journalism career, his international travel, his own alcoholism, the joy he found with his wife Chaz, his relationship with Gene Siskel, his meetings with prominent actors and directors, and his own insistence on an aggressive course of cancer treatment that likely lost him his jaw and ability to speak. He clearly knew that this book was his last chance to put his own story out there and it’s obvious that he didn’t want to squander the opportunity. Given that he spent his final years in a painful and uncomfortable situation, it’s remarkable how little bitterness his writing contains. Instead, he uses his last testament to to reflect on a full life, with all the moments of joy and sorrow it contained. 

If you’re thinking about reading this book, you’re probably already interested in Roger Ebert and his writing. But if you haven’t, I recommend going to his blog (still online) and browsing around a little. If you like what you find and enjoy autobiography/memoir style books, this will likely be a win for you. If that’s not something that intrigues you, you may appreciate the writing but find it a largely pointless exercise to read. For me, I found it moving and a likely future re-read, but I could completely understand if it’s not for everyone.

Tell me, blog friends…who would you like to read an autobiography of?

One year ago, I was reading: The Shipping News

Book 83: Bel Canto



“He made what he felt to be wild presumptions in handing over his suggestions, but what did it matter? He was a vice president in a giant corporation, a numbers man, suddenly elevated to be the accompanist. He was not himself. He was no one he had ever imagined.”

Dates read: August 25-27, 2016

Rating: 8/10

As I’ve become an adult, I’ve realized how hard it is to make friends outside of school. Groundbreaking stuff, I know. But there’s something about being regularly a part of the same group of people all the time that gives you the chance to get to know each other, and get past the initial niceties and get to be friends. There’s obviously people that you’re never going to bond with, but there are people who you just need to see often enough to start realizing that you enjoy each other’s company. And the experiences you share give you something to naturally bond over.

The unexpected bonds that can grow between people is at the heart of Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto. Katsumi Hokosawa, a Japanese industrialist, is having his 53rd birthday party in an unnamed South American country. The country has invited him to this party, to be held at the Vice President’s mansion, in the hopes that he will invest there. He has no intention of doing so and declines…until he finds out that they have secured the performance of Roxane Coss for the party. Hokosawa is an opera devotee, and Coss is the world’s foremost soprano. So he and his translator, Gen Watanabe, make the trip. No sooner, though, has Coss finished her performance than all the lights go out. Suddenly, the partygoers find themselves surrounded by young men bearing arms. They’ve come to abduct the president, and when they find out he’s not there, they’re not quite sure what to do but take the 200+ guests hostage.

The hostages are winnowed down over time to the 39 most important men, including the vice president, ambassadors, businessmen, and of course Hokosawa himself (along with his translator) and Roxane Coss. Days go by, then weeks. Gen the translator finds himself very busy indeed as the guests and the soldiers get to know each other inside the mansion. Relationships of all kinds form: one of ringleaders and Hokosawa become chess partners and teach one of the young soldiers, another soldier with a beautiful voice becomes Roxane’s student, romantic entanglements form (it turns out not all those soldiers are boys, after all). Always the question looms: how will this all end?

This is the first time I’ve read Patchett, and she’s a gifted writer: her prose is sensitive, deeply felt, lyrical. She has a strong sense of character, and besides the ending, no action the people she creates on the page (and she creates people, complete with their own emotional truth, rather than just “characters”) feels false. Even the people she spends less time with feel complete and real. The novel is well-paced and plotted…after the initial high drama of the home invasion, little else happens in terms of events and the action unfolds naturally from the unveiling of personalities and the growing bonds between the people at hand.

What keeps this as a very good book rather than great one, for me, is the very end. The action that two people take is…jarring. Trying to contextualize it in terms of what those two have gone through, you can understand that a rash decision might be made, but it still feels off. And it bugged me a lot, because I’d so loved everything that came before and to close on that sour note didn’t feel right. It’s 98% of a great book, but it could have been 100% of one and that is frustrating.

Tell me, blog friends…does a wonky ending ruin a book for you?

One year ago, I was reading: Missing, Presumed

Book 75: The White Tiger

 “If I were making a country, I’d get the sewage pipes first, then the democracy, then I’d go about giving pamphlets and statues of Gandhi to other people, but what do I know? I’m just a murderer!”

Read: August 1-3, 2016

Rating: 8/10

Lists/Awards: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2012), Man Booker Prize

Here’s a weird thing: I am actively pro-spoiler. Which you’ve probably noticed reading this blog…I try not to be gratuitous, but I will spoil things if it’s necessary to talk about what I want to talk about regarding a book. I maintain that if your work (and I’m including movies and TV here) doesn’t hang together if you know the Big Plot Twist, it’s because it’s not very good in the first place: the characterization, the quality of the writing, the dialogue, the pacing…if those aren’t there, you don’t have a well-told story, you just have a plot twist. Discovering the why is always more compelling for me than discovering the what.

Which is why I have a soft spot for books, like Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, that tell you their big plot twist right up front. We know at the end of the first chapter that our narrator Balram, a former servant turned entrepreneur in India, killed his former master. What unfolds over the rest of the book is the story of why. It’s the story of India in the modern day, a place of desperate poverty but also extravagant wealth, where ancient temples are just as much a part of life as smartphones. Balram is born into poverty in a rural area, and even though he seems destined to become a laborer, he resists the forces (including his family) that try to keep him in the underclass as long as he can. He finds himself a position as a driver for an upper-class landowner, and eventually moves with one of the landowner’s sons to New Delhi to be his driver there.

New Delhi fundamentally changes both that son, Ashok, and Balram. Ashok has been educated in America, and treats his servants more or less like people. As he gets more and more sucked into the mire of his family’s business (they’re in the coal industry, and Ashok does a lot of running around with briefcases full of money to drop off with various politicians and officials), he becomes harder and harsher. When Balram is nearly forced to take the fall for a bad accident caused by Ashok’s wife’s drunk driving, Balram realizes that even as far as he’s come from his roots, he’s still not really safe. As long as he’s poor and a servant, he’ll always be expendable. But in order to get out of his situation, he needs money, and the money he has the easiest access to? Those briefcases that he’s driving Ashok around with.

It’s a dark satire, and after reading a lot of Serious Literature, I appreciated its wit and liveliness even more than I otherwise might have. But I would have enjoyed it no matter what. It’s an epistolary novel (Balram writes to the prime minister of China, who is visiting India at the time, to explain India’s entrepreneurial spirit), which allows it to skip around in time a little for maximum impact…we know that he’s committed murder and gone on to start his own business, but how (and why) did he do it? How did he get away with it? What exactly does he do now?  The organic tension propels the book forward without being too mysterious. Balram is an indelible character, and I really appreciated the way that Adiga developed Ashok as well, portraying his moral decay even though we only see him through Balram’s eyes. It’s a quick read that manages to be thought-provoking while still being entertaining.

 Tell me, blog friends…how do you feel about spoilers?

One year ago, I was reading: Enchanted Islands

Book 57: The Winged Histories


“I don’t think writing is sorcery, something forbidden. I think it’s more like a comb, it separates your hair more easily than you could with your fingers. It’s like riding a horse to go somewhere instead of walking. You go to the same place, but you can carry more. I think writing is a horse. Or it might be a knife. An axe.”

Dates read: May 29-June 1, 2016

Rating: 8/10

I am nothing if I am not a creature of habit, and one of those habits is that I refuse to jump into a series from anywhere but the beginning. Books, TV, movies…I don’t care if everyone says the first one is bad, boring, or even just not necessary to understand what follows, I read/watch it. Which makes Netflix dangerous for me…so many TV shows to watch right from the beginning! Usually that just means I get choice paralysis and decide to read instead.

Why this particular quirk of mine matters at all is that Sofia Samatar’s The Winged Histories is technically a sequel, though more in a “take place in the same world as” and less “follows directly the characters from”, as I understand. I wanted to read A Stranger In Olondria, but my local library system didn’t have a copy and so I figured that from what I’d read about the book, I’d probably be okay this once not following my own rule and just picking it up. Which I’m kicking myself for now, because I think I would have gotten more out of The Winged Histories if I’d had some background in that world going in.

Which isn’t to say that I didn’t get anything, or even much, out of The Winged Histories without that background. On the contrary, I found the book beautifully written, and once I got myself grounded in its world, incredibly compelling. It follows four women: the warrior Tavis, Tialon, the daughter of a priest, Seren, a singer and Tavis’s lover, and Tavis’s sister Siski, a noblewoman, as the Olodrian empire is engulfed in war and rebellion, both internal and external. They’re besieged by a neighboring civilization, one of their conquered territories is trying to break away, and a new religion is fighting for dominance with the traditional one…with rumors of people transforming into vampiric monsters growing in the countryside.

I don’t usually read war stories, which tend to be men’s stories. Endless descriptions of battles and tactical maneuvers make me lose interest quickly (they slowed down my reading of War and Peace significantly when I tackled that one in the summer of 2015). But this one was different: besides Tavis’s necessarily martial perspective, the rest of the story dug into how the battles resonate far beyond the fields on which they are fought. The lives of each of these women is thrown into turmoil by the unsettled situation of their world: Tavis flees to the army to escape being used as a political pawn in marriage, Tialon suffers at the hands of her religious fanatic father, who ushers in the new religion and converts the emperor, Seren is a member of the people on whose behalf the civil portion of the war is being fought but who suffer for their “victory” as much or more than anyone, and Siski drowns her sorrow at being parted from the sweetheart of her youth in a hard partying lifestyle. These are technically spoilers, but if I hadn’t read a similar summary as I was getting started I would have gotten completely lost in who meant what to whom and what was going on.

It does take a while to get into it and adjust to the setting and situations of the story. Until then, fortunately, the writing sustains interest. The writing is just gorgeous…lush, poetic, and emotionally evocative. There’s very little “this happened, and then that happened” going on here, each of the four segments is written in loose clusters of interconnected plot points, full of flashbacks and questions raised that don’t get answered until a later part of the story. By the end I could barely put it down. The book is a rich reward for a patient reader.

Tell me. blog friends…do you like war stories?

One year ago, I was reading: Hood

**I received a free copy of this book from the publisher, Small Beer Press, through Edelweiss in exchange for a fair and honest review**

Book 48: Enchanted Islands

“But I found his dedication to the craft a sign that he was an enlightened being, like those monks who spend years crafting sand paintings only to sweep them away once they’ve finished. Now I see he was keeping himself busy, keeping the demons at bay. But demons are not dissuaded by oceans or preferences; they stow away like sea lice, unwanted visitors from another place, coming ashore with you wherever you go.”

Dates read: May 2-5, 2016

Rating: 8/10

I turned 31 earlier this month. I still don’t feel like a grown up. I don’t pick up after myself with any sort of regularity. I eat frozen dinners at least a couple times per week. I laugh at fart jokes. I love T-Rexes and have a model skeleton of one in my office (courtesy of our incredible office manager, who not only got it for me but built it for me as a gift). I can take down a whole tube of Pringles in one sitting if I’m not paying attention. I’ve only recently started flossing regularly, and insist on using the little picks or I won’t do it. My life only vaguely resembles the one I thought I’d have when I was younger: I was going to stay in Michigan and be a prosecutor. But here I am, a lobbyist in Nevada. I don’t think of myself as an adult, even now that I’m married. When are we finally done growing up?

The answer, as gleaned from Allison Amend’s Enchanted Islands, is much later than we think. Frances Frankowski is a shy, bookish girl growing up in a poor family in Duluth when she meets fellow youngster Rosalie at the library and the two become instant best friends. They grow up together, but when Frances learns that Rosalie is being exploited when the two are teenagers, they run away to Chicago. After some time there, Rosalie betrays Frances’ trust, and Frances flees…first to Nebraska, then to San Francisco, where after a stint as a teacher, she eventually winds up as a secretary for naval intelligence when she’s in her late 40s. She runs back into Rosalie and they are reconnecting after decades apart when Frances is offered the chance for marriage to a handsome younger man as part of a secret mission in the Galapagos, and when she accepts it, she alters the course of the rest of her life.

The book is split into four parts comprising two real halves: Frances’ life before she meets her husband Ainslie and goes to the Galapagos, and after. The first half takes us through Frances’ family life and the beginnings of her deep friendship with Rosalie. The book actually starts with Frances and Rosalie together in a nursing home, having both outlived their husbands, so we knows theirs is a relationship that stands the test of time going in. But the seeds of their break are planted early, and when it comes, we’re as saddened as Frances herself is but not really surprised. What is surprising is that they manage to find their way back together early in the second half: a chance encounter in a movie theater in San Francisco, thousands of miles from where they once were girls together. By then, Frances is already contemplating the offer of a sham marriage and an adventure overseas, and it’s as much a vain desire to announce to her friend that she IS married, thank you, that convinces her to go for it as anything else. The relationship she and Ainslie create, which sustains long after their mission has ended, is just as lovely but never more important than Frances’ relationship with her real soulmate…her best and dearest and oldest friend. I’ve always had a soft spot for stories about female friendship, because my relationships with my girl friends have occupied such a central place in my own life.

This was a good book, and I’ve actually gone back and added one of Amend’s previous novels to my to-be-read list, because I really enjoyed her writing, which is sure and strong. It actually struck me as I was reading it that this seems like the book that Sena Naslund thought she was writing when she wrote Ahab’s Wife…minor personage (in this case, Frances Conway was a real person, who wrote two books about her time in the Galapagos, but she’s not notable enough to have her own Wikipedia entry because all the secret spy mission stuff is completely made up), fiercely independent, facing obstacles, adventures, and hardships with strong will and determination. But Amend’s work is far superior: she allows Frances to be flawed: prickly, occasionally small-minded, and petty. In doing so, she creates a beautifully realized character who is sympathetic and compelling. All three of the main characters are, really. Amend is a gifted writer and I would recommend this book wholeheartedly.

Tell me, blog friends…when did you start feeling like a grown-up? Or do you at all?

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

One year ago, I was reading: The Nazi Officer’s Wife

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