Tender is the Night

What I'm reading now. 

I read it long ago - in high school.  There's something intriguing about re-reading books you haven't read in a while.  It's new and nostalgic at the same time.

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH

My latest book - 

A gift from my cousin's daughter, Jordan - who is my nephew's age.  Jordan is CRAZY about Mrs. Frisby! 

And this is a great book to be crazy about.  I have enjoyed it - thoroughly!

The book was also turned into an amazing movie adaptation, if you haven't seen it. 

Tuck Everlasting

I read Tuck Everlasting last week.

It was so sweet and so haunting.  It's a children's book so it only took about 90 minutes to read.

What would it be like to live forever?  What if you couldn't die?  Tuck and his family drink from a magic stream and find that they are stuck, frozen, unable to age and unable to die and find that their inability to participate fully in life (by dying) is a death in itself.

I highly recommend this for yourself (and if you have them, your kids).

Absalom, Absalom!

I finished it!

I loved it!

It took forever (it was The Boy's fault - he distracts me).

I couldn't explain it if I had a zillion pages - other than to say it is an allegory of the South - tragic and sleepy and beautiful.  And horrible.

I worship William Faulkner.

Paris Books

Just when you all thought I had every book there is to buy about Paris, I get a couple more!

A Literary Paris  is a lovely little book of essays which remind me of being there - something I really, really love. 

Over the years I have really come to enjoy travel books, especially ones about Paris that can make me feel as if I've been on a little visit.  Nothing is nicer than snuggling in my living room on Sunday morning with a good cup of coffee and a little trip to Paris.  

And then we have Paris in Color by Nichole Robertson (of Little Brown Pen fame).

Paris in Color is, in one word, GORGEOUS!!

I've been a big fan of Nichole's work for quite a while - as witnessed by one of her photos hanging prominently in my home...

If you haven't heard of it, check it out!  And if you have the book I'd love to hear your thoughts.

State of Wonder

I am a huge Ann Patchett fan and if you haven't read her books, you really should start.

State of Wonder is our book club's next pick and I just loved it.  And the preliminary reports from the other girls in the club is that no once could put it down. 

If you haven't heard about it, here's a little blurb from Time Magazine:

Mild-mannered Marina Singh is sent by a drug company to Brazil to find her onetime mentor, the imperious Dr. Annick Swenson, who hasn't been heard from in two years. Swenson is deep in the Amazon, studying women of an obscure tribe who can bear children into their 60s and 70s. But Swenson has gone off the rails, and Singh has to play Marlow to her Kurtz in a Heart of Darkness for the pharmaceutical era.

This is a bit of a simplification - but I'm afraid to say more for fear of spoiling it.  There are definitely Heart of Darkness overtones but Patchett has a way of drawing you in and at one point, reading the first chapter while getting a pedicure I found myself choking back tears in the nail salon.  

That isn't a usual problem while reading in public. 

This book is about an expedition into the Amazonian jungle but in my experience, Patchett's books are never about what they're about.... if you get my meaning. 

Maybe you don't -

But in any event, grab this book.  You will not be sorry.

The Night Circus

Oh, my!

I LOVED this book.  LOVED IT!!!

Pure, enchanting, fun, escapist, delightful, romantic fantasy!

How's that for a read in dreary late winter?

If you just want to disappear into a book - grab it.

Death Comes to Pemberly

A couple of weeks ago I read Death Comes to Pemberly by P. D. James. 

I wanted to love it, I really did.

But I didn't love it.

For those of you who don't know about it, this is a sequel of sorts, to Pride and Prejudice and picks up 6 years after Darcy's marriage to Elizabeth Bennett.  Now happy and living at Pemberly, their perfect world is upended when Elizabeth's disgraced sister, Lydia, arrives uninvited and falls out of her carriage screaming that her beloved Wickham has been murdered!  The book concerns the investigation of the murder and the trauma caused to Darcy and Elizabeth as a result of their 'connection' with those involved in scandalous murder.

I found this book disappointing as both a mystery and as a sequel.  

Several reviews have hailed James for brilliantly mimicking Jane Austen when writing the book and frankly, that is what I hated.  I know you're not supposed to type this out loud but I find Jane Austen's books tedious.

There I said it.

Tedious.

I love the stories and I have LOVED all the movie adaptions - but reading the books?  Not so much.

It makes me feel inadequate and stupid, but I find them tedious.  Although I just read that Mark Twain said of Austen that he wanted to 'dig her up and hit her over the skull' so maybe I'm not totally alone in my opinion....

So I found this book tedious as well.  I also found the 'murder mystery' weirdly non-existent.  Actually, it was a big, fat, ridiculous yawn. 

Ultimately, the book is a continuation of Darcy's inner struggle to justify and reconcile his marriage to Elizabeth (outside of his class) and the social price he's paid because of it.  It turns out that Lady Catherine de Bourgh was right and the shades of Pemberly were a little polluted by Elizabeth Bennett and her family.

Perhaps my modern, American mind just has no use for Darcy's struggle or the social conventions of the time.  Moreover, while I bought the book expecting it to Austen-esque, I was hoping that James would provide a more fully rounded picture of the Darcys' marriage and relationship - but I didn't get it.

Although Darcy and Elizabeth separately spend a lot of time thinking about how much they adore each other, their interactions throughout the book amount to little more than exchanging pleasantries across the breakfast table.  They just never TALK to each other, in private, the way a couple in love would.  And then when they do finally have a conversation (in the epilogue, no less) they sound like strangers. 

Yes, they're SOOO in love  - but it's really hard to understand why.

So I give it a couple of stars.  If you're a huge Austen fan you'll love it.

Last Year's Books

This is what I read last year....

There are about 8 books that I only downloaded so they are not included. 

I challenged myself to read 50 books in the Goodreads 2011 challenge and I ended up reading 52. 

Does anybody else have a reading list this year?  Or are you all just gonna leave me out here hanging in my book nerd-dom? 

This Charming Bookshelf

Ok - even though I haven't written (yet) about my New Year's Resolutions (I'm still formulating them - what can I say?  I have no gumption this year although I'm trying) I have decided on this year's book list - from the Time 100 list. 

Here they are:

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold by John Le Carre'

All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren

The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis

Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara

Money by Martin Amis

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

Under the Net by Iris Murdoch

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

I did very well with this resolution last year - finishing 10 of the 12 that I picked and also reading 10 more from the list - not bad - but I'll bore you with all that later. 

In any event - here I go again with an extravagant reading list.....

The Crying of Lot 49

So, as I said a couple of weeks ago, I totally wussed out and refused to read Blood Meridian. 

Instead, I gave it to my father, who likes westerns, and he read it and has now pronounced it awful.  But then again, he couldn't stop talking about it, either.....

Instead of reading Blood Meridian, I read The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, which is also on Time's list.

Here's what Time had to say about it:

Summoned to serve as executor for the will of her ultra-rich former lover, Oedipa Maas is led into the mystery of Trystero, a shadowy band of, of — of what exactly? They have operated for centuries, connecting the dispossesed, the discontented and the strung out by way of their secret underground postal system, a network that may also serve other ends. As she wanders through California in the mid-1960′s, trying to unravel their secret, Oedipa senses for the first time a larger, weirder universe of the disinherited, a scampering, fugitive reality just beneath the placid surface of what she thinks she knows. With its slapstick paranoia and its heartbreaking metaphysical soliloquies, Lot 49 takes place in the tragicomic universe that is instantly recognizable as Pynchon-land. Is it also a mystery novel? Absolutely, so long as you remember that the mystery here is the one at the heart of everything.

I liked this book - sorta....  

I'm not sure I'm deep enough to have fully comprehended everything that was going on but it was an enjoyable read.  It was weird, strange....  I don't know. 

HOWEVER, if you are a fan of Buckaroo Banzai (which I totally happen to be) you will recognize the origins of that movie in this book.  Methinks W.D. Richter is a Pynchon fan.

The Glass Castle

Our book club's latest book was The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls.

Here's what Amazon has to say about it:

Jeannette Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity were both their curse and their salvation. Rex and Rose Mary Walls had four children. In the beginning, they lived like nomads, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains. Rex was a charismatic, brilliant man who, when sober, captured his children's imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and above all, how to embrace life fearlessly. Rose Mary, who painted and wrote and couldn't stand the responsibility of providing for her family, called herself an "excitement addict." Cooking a meal that would be consumed in fifteen minutes had no appeal when she could make a painting that might last forever.

Later, when the money ran out, or the romance of the wandering life faded, the Walls retreated to the dismal West Virginia mining town -- and the family -- Rex Walls had done everything he could to escape. He drank. He stole the grocery money and disappeared for days. As the dysfunction of the family escalated, Jeannette and her brother and sisters had to fend for themselves, supporting one another as they weathered their parents' betrayals and, finally, found the resources and will to leave home.

What is so astonishing about Jeannette Walls is not just that she had the guts and tenacity and intelligence to get out, but that she describes her parents with such deep affection and generosity. Hers is a story of triumph against all odds, but also a tender, moving tale of unconditional love in a family that despite its profound flaws gave her the fiery determination to carve out a successful life on her own terms.

It seemed to me that everyone had already read this book but I had not and I was hesitant to do so.  You see, I grew up in Welch, West Virginia, (the dismal West Virginia mining town) where a large portion of this book is set and Rose Mary Walls was a teacher at my elementary school when I was in the second or third grade.  And I sort of expected a hatchet job.

It was weird reading about the town where I grew up.  About the streets and the stores that I knew or knew of.  The Miss Katona who was Jeannette's high school guidance counselor was my high school guidance counselor, too.

While I did not know the Walls children (who were too much older than me to have been my contemporaries) I did know of Rose Mary.  What I remember about her was how filthy she was.  Although everyone in West Virginia is sort of some level of 'poor', there is a certain level of poor that is remarkable and the Walls family is on that level.  I remember being sort of mesmerized by Rose Mary because I couldn't understand how a teacher could be so dirty, her clothes stained and tattered - she smelled.  I also remember her because she painted beautiful murals on the walls of our elementary school and I couldn't understand how someone with so much talent could be so poor.

Now having read the book, I have to say that I do not share Jeannette Walls' affection or generosity for her parents.  I cannot believe that these people took such poor care of their children while justifying their actions as teaching and growth opportunities.  They allowed their children to go hungry, to be molested, to be in danger, to be cold and unclean - all of which was unnecessary.  I lived in West Virginia back then - when coal was booming.  If Rex Walls wasn't working it's because he was a stomp down, sorry drunk.

I was very moved and inspired by Ms. Walls tenacity and the fervor that she and her siblings exhibited in order to escape the dismal life that their parents provided them.  But I cannot join her in feeling any sort of compassion or softness for her parents.  Shame on them.

Blood Meridian

November's book on my New Year's reading list was Blood Meridian. 

And I tried. 

I read 4 chapters. 

But I couldn't do it.  Or more appropriately, I didn't want to. 

You see, I just don't want to read about evil.  I know that it exists in the world.  But I didn't want to read this book. 

So I put it down. 

Maybe later. 

On Books

"Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared.  It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing."

Philip Roth

Image:  Bookish by Rory Leslie.

The Invisible Man

October's book on my New Year's Reading List was The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison.

I have to tell you that after reading the first chapter of this book, I didn't want to go on.  I was depressed and almost sick to my stomach.  But then I soldiered on.

Here's what Time Magazine had to say about it when picking it for it's Top 100 Novels:

A nameless young black man wends a tortuous path from a southern town — where a local white men’s club mockingly awards him a scholarship to a black college — to the streets of New York City, where everybody, black and white, left and right, man and woman, seems to have their own ideas about who he is and what purpose he can serve. Evenhandedly exposing the hypocrisies and stereotypes of all comers, Invisible Man is far more than a race novel, or even a bildungsroman. It’s the quintessential American picaresque of the 20th century.

After the first chapter, I found that he (our main character and narrator has no name so I'll just refer to him as 'he') sort of bugged me.  I sympathized terribly for him at first but then after a while I found myself sort of wishing he'd grow up.  He floated around trying to be what others wanted him to be but it didn't seem that he gave much thought to what he wanted.   Of course, when I got to the final chapter I realized that was sort of the point.

Although this is a very disturbing book I think it ended on a hopeful note - which I liked.

I also found myself comparing my experience as a woman with his experiences.  Although the book is clearly about racism, it is also about so much more.  It's about being disenfranchised.  It's about trying to meet others' expectations without taking your own thoughts and wishes into account.  I thought a lot about Virginia Woolf's book, Three Guineas, while I was reading The Invisible Man.   Although they are vastly different, they touch on many of the same themes.  That sort of universal truth is I suppose what makes this a great book.

Next up:  Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (This one fills me with dread).

The Perfectly Imperfect Home

My copy of The Perfectly Imperfect Home came last week!

I admit it.  I belong to the Deborah Needleman cult. 

The book is gorgeously illustrated and full of wonderful information as well as philosophy on home making.  I was a little disappointed that there weren't actual pictures of real homes in this book. 

I admit it, I was hoping to see more photos of Ms. Needleman's actual home - I'll try to get over it. 

If you loved the Domino book, you'll love this one, too. 

The Marriage Plot

This week I read The Marriage Plot - after reading glowing reviews and finding it sold out at my local Barnes & Noble (apparently due to a glowing review on NPR which caused a run on it...)

Here's what Amazon has to say about it:

It’s the early 1980s—the country is in a deep recession, and life after college is harder than ever.  In the cafés on College Hill, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels.

As Madeleine tries to understand why “it became laughable to read writers like Cheever and Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about deflowering virgins in eighteenth-century France,” real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes.

Leonard Bankhead—charismatic loner, college Darwinist, and lost Portland boy—suddenly turns up in a semiotics seminar, and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged erotic and intellectual relationship with him. At the same time, her old “friend” Mitchell Grammaticus—who’s been reading Christian mysticism and generally acting strange—resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his mate.

Over the next year, as the members of the triangle in this amazing, spellbinding novel graduate from college and enter the real world, events force them to reevaluate everything they learned in school. Leonard and Madeleine move to a biology Laboratory on Cape Cod, but can’t escape the secret responsible for Leonard’s seemingly inexhaustible energy and plunging moods. And Mitchell, traveling around the world to get Madeleine out of his mind, finds himself face-to-face with ultimate questions about the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the true nature of love.

Are the great love stories of the nineteenth century dead? Or can there be a new story, written for today and alive to the realities of feminism, sexual freedom, prenups, and divorce? With devastating wit and an abiding understanding of and affection for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides revives the motivating energies of the Novel, while creating a story so contemporary and fresh that it reads like the intimate journal of our own.

I have to say that I liked this book - although I was ultimately a little unsatisfied with it.  When I first picked it up, I'm sorry to say that I thought "YAY!  Only 368 pages!"  Because I've been reading some pretty heavy (and LONG) shit this year. 

And then, at the end, I wanted 100 pages more.  I didn't dislike the ending at all, I just thought it felt a bit hurried.

But I loved Mitchell and I liked Madeleine and Leonard ..... well, Leonard is still a bit of an unknown.  He is the third leg in a triangle but he's the shortest one.  His character is the least developed of the three and I wish I had known more about him and I think if we could have really gotten into Leonard, we'd have had another 100 pages and a more satisfying book.

If you pick this up, I think you'll like it.  It was charming and adorable and nostalgic and a little heart breaking.  An excellent romance.  I read it compulsively and with great interest. 

I also loved, loved, loved Madeleine's parents, Alton and Phyllida.... I mean, how could you NOT love Phyllida?  She made me laugh out loud almost every time she appeared.

Mr. Eugenides, can we get a sequel???

The Sportswriter

So this week, I read The Sportswriter by Richard Ford. 

In case you are keeping up (or care) this is my 19th book this year from the Time 100 list. 

Not bad, huh? 

Anywho, my darling friend is taking a class this year and this book was assigned to her so I read it with her as a sign of my love and solidarity. 

*raises little fist*

I liked the book.  I am still not sure if I liked Frank Bascombe, our lead character. 

Basically, Frank is a guy adrift in New Jersey.  Approaching middle age, he is recovering from the death of his oldest child and the demise of his marriage.  Although I think he believes himself be happy, I'm not sure that he is.  He's running from the devastation in an attempt to keep it from overwhelming him. 

Bless his heart. 

I felt soooo sorry for him.  But I wanted to box his ears about half the time. 

The book takes place over an Easter weekend and a particular Sunday that Frank thinks might never end.  In all honesty, I didn't think it would either. 

All in all, an incredibly well written book and the first in a trilogy.  The second book, Independence Day, won the Pulitzer Prize and is on my list for next year. 

I liked Frank, but I need a little break from him for now. 

Empire Falls

This week I read Empire Falls by Richard Russo.

Here's what Publisher's Weekly had to say about it:

In his biggest, boldest novel yet, the much-acclaimed author of Nobody's Fool and Straight Man subjects a full cross-section of a crumbling Maine mill town to piercing, compassionate scrutiny, capturing misfits, malefactors and misguided honest citizens alike in the steady beam of his prose. Wealthy, controlling matriarch Francine Whiting lives in an incongruous Spanish-style mansion across the river from smalltown Empire Falls, dominated by a long-vacant textile mill and shirt factory, once the center of her husband's family's thriving manufacturing dominion. In his early 40s, passive good guy Miles Roby, the son of Francine's husband's long-dead mistress, seems helpless to escape his virtual enslavement as longtime proprietor of the Whiting-owned Empire Grill, the town's most popular eatery, which Francine has promised to leave him when she dies. Miles's wife, Janine, is divorcing him and has taken up with an aging health club entrepreneur. In her senior year in high school, their creative but lonely daughter, Tick, is preoccupied by her parents' foibles and harassed by the bullying son of the town's sleazy cop who, like everyone else, is a puppet of the domineering Francine. Struggling to make some sense of her life, Tick tries to befriend a boy with a history of parental abuse. To further complicate things, Miles's brother, David, is suspected of dealing marijuana, and their rascally, alcoholic father is a constant annoyance. Miles and David's secret plan to open a competing restaurant runs afoul of Francine just as tragedy erupts at the high school. Even the minor members of Russo's large cast are fully fleshed, and forays into the past lend the narrative an extra depth and resonance. When it comes to evoking the cherished hopes and dreams of ordinary people, Russo is unsurpassed.

So I pretty much loved this book.  I found myself comparing it to Freedom because the scope and the feel of both books is similar.  However, I can't say that I loved Freedom.  And I couldn't really articulate why.  Then someone at book club said "How can I love a book (Freedom) when I hate every single character?"

And that was it.  I really liked Freedom (the book) but I didn't like any of the characters.

I loved the characters in Empire Falls.  And the story.  All of it. 

It's slow.  It builds.  And you know something's gonna happen. 

And then when it does - well, it just killed me.

I cried and cried and cried and then I was weepy for 2 days.  I am haunted and grieved....

I've read a lot of books this year.  And I've enjoyed almost all of them and they've been worthwhile.  But this one will stay with me.  At one point while I was reading it I thought "Man, I hope I don't die before I get to finish this book."  I didn't want to miss it.  And I'm so glad I didn't.

Freedom

This month our book club is discussing Freedom by Jonathan Franzen.

I'm not sure who picked this book but I can't wait to thank her.  I'm not sure I would have picked it up if it hadn't been on the Book Club list.

First of all, it's gotten a lot of hype.  Second of all, it's really big (almost 700 pages).

But I really enjoyed it.  It is deserving of the hype.  It was very easy to get into and the writing is very beautiful and accessible.  I found the story engrossing and entertaining. 

Basically, this is the story of a complicated, often unhappy marriage.  The characters seemed very real to me and the portrayal of the marriage was straightforward and deceptively entangling.  It would be hard for me to explain exactly what went wrong between these two, although I know EXACTLY what went wrong.  I think its that way in most things.  There aren't very many people who break up who can point to one thing, one distinct reason as to why their relationship didn't work.  Lots of little things pile up or were never right to begin with.  So it is here.

I like that the characters (Walter and Patty, if you'd like to know their names) eventually find their way back to each other and that the novel ends on an optimistic note.

As a little aside, I also want to mention that portions of Freedom take place in southern West Virginia.  Immediately, the hair on the back of my neck stood up and I prepared myself to be offended.  However, I have to say that Franzen got it really right.  And I think I'm a pretty hard critic in such matters. 

So five stars from me on this one.