Veronica's Book Lounge

11. Frankenstein

2007-09-02T21:39:00.000-05:00

by Mary Shelley

I’ve read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein at least twice – once for 11th grade British Literature and once since then, possibly twice. It’s been a while, though, so I was quite excited when I looked up the book list for my first class and saw it there. (Gothic Novels was the class…intriguing, no? Actually, it was the only one I could take that met my requirements and was at a time available to me. But I was intrigued, nonetheless.) What surprised me is that I remembered none of it. Nothing! How do you read a book twice and not remember a thing? All I knew going in this time around was that I had liked it before and there was one part where the monster goes off and spies on some villagers. Aside from that it was like coming upon the novel with completely new eyes.

If you’ve never read the story, there are a few things you first need to know. One: Frankenstein is the scientist, not the monster. Two: The story is not scary, as the horror movie re-imaginings would lead us to believe; it’s social commentary, not guts and gore. Three: It’s really quite good and accessible. A self-taught scientist, Victor Frankenstein doggedly pursues the one thing he believes will lead him to fame – the ability to reanimate the dead. In his quest to do so he skulks around cemeteries, stealing limbs and flesh which he sews together to fashion a creature of gigantic stature. After he gives it the spark of life, Victor is so appalled by his creation that he runs away from it, hoping to never see it again. Meanwhile, the creature must fend for himself, running into the forest and feeding on berries. He comes into contact with some villagers who shriek at him and throw stones, causing him to retreat back into hiding. Upon finding a cottage housing a man and a woman and their blind father, the creature is so touched by their willingness to take equal part in the upkeep of their home that he quietly aides them by chopping firewood and clearing snow. He remains in hiding, but increases his knowledge by reading Paradise Lost and listening to the son read history aloud. He works up the courage to reveal himself to the blind father, but when the children return to the house he is, again, violently cast out from the company of humans. The creature’s ensuing resentment leads him to seek out Victor, killing a few of his loved ones in the process.

Did you know that Frankenstein could be read as a feminist work? Neither did I (I don’t believe I’d even heard the word in my high school), but I found that interesting when my professor noted that it had been given extensive study as such, so much so that I wrote my final paper on the topic. Well, the topic was “allegory” to be exact, but in the sense that the monster represents the repressed female who is judged solely on her physicality instead of her potential mental faculties or ability to contribute to society. Okay, that may sound like a stretch, but if you go back and read the story, it’s really all laid out for you. In fact, I was pretty shocked I had never read it that way on my own. I guess that’s what this whole “school” thing is for, huh? But the beauty of this novel is that you don’t need a class to get much of the story out of it. Whether you read it as a commentary on social stratification or a warning of the dangers of self-taught education or the duality of man (there’s apparently much discussion on this topic as well) or just a story about a man and the hideous monster he creates, it’s entirely enjoyable and worth the read.

(By the way, I did do quite decently in the class, my paper having gone over well, and my teacher had not at all suspected that I was neither an English major nor that I hadn’t taken an English class in nearly ten years. How’s that for the worth of reading literature on one’s own?)

10. Lamb

2007-08-26T16:34:00.000-05:00

by Christopher Moore

First of all, let me say that this book was so much more than I expected.

Christopher Moore is a much lauded author over at Chicklit and Lamb is the book most often mentioned, so I always wanted to get my hands on the fictional gospel covering thirty-some years of Jesus’ life not detailed by Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. Told by his childhood friend Levi, whose nickname Biff comes from the practice of being whacked upside one’s head, Lamb offers the events and travels that influenced Jesus’ teachings. Now, this isn’t just fictional speculation – Moore goes way beyond that to include wacky encounters with demons, yeti, monks, and more. He even has Christ learn Judo (“Jew-do” as it’s properly named). And yet, it’s completely inoffensive in every way.

The story really begins on the eve of Maggie’s wedding (Maggie=Mary of Magdelene), when Biff and Joshua (from Yeshua, the Hebrew name for Jesus) sneak off in the night to explore the idea of Joshua being the Messiah. At this point Joshua feels within himself that he’s the Messiah and has had some experience healing small animals and even bringing a Roman soldier back from the dead for a few minutes. But it’s not exactly the easiest thing to go around claiming you’re the son of God, so when the love of their lives is married off to someone else, Biff and Joshua go off in search of the Three Wise Men to learn more about what drew them to Joshua’s birth.

Somewhere around Kabul, the two find Balthasar living in a stone fortress with eight concubines, each named for a different…well…talent. Joy (full name: Tiny Feet of the Divine Dance of Joyous Orgasm) features most prominently, as she befriends Biff and teaches him all about elixirs and poisons. While Joshua and Balthasar are off studying and training, Biff keeps himself entertained with the concubines, trying to gain entrance to the locked iron door Balthasar has forbidden them to enter. Of course, source of comic relief that he is, Biff unlocks the door and lets out a demon with whom Balthasar has made a pact for immortality. Once the demon is banished Balthasar ages his two-hundred-some years and dies, but not without leaving Joshua with knowledge about kindness coming before justice.

After Balthasar’s death, the two seek out Gaspar, another of the Wise Men who is now living in a Chinese monastery. Here they learn to conduct their own heat, are trained to jump nimbly and move quickly, and find out what it’s like to shave a yak (Joshua does this far more adroitly than Biff who ends up with three of his four limbs in splints). After Joshua learns to leave his physical self behind and become invisible, Gaspar takes them on a special meditation pilgrimage into the mountains. They gather food along the way and meditate to keep themselves warm, except for Biff who merely falls asleep and awakens to find himself face to face with a large, white, furry monster – a yeti that the monks have been bringing food to each year. After the yeti dies and Joshua takes with him the lessons of compassion and unconditional love that the monks displayed for the creature, he and Biff travel to India to find Melchior, the third Wise Man. Here they find an extreme caste system, with some men so far down on the social ladder that they literally live in pits and have their children sacrificed to the god Kali. After a little switcheroo wherein Biff dresses up as Kali and the two save some children from certain death, they finally find Melchior practicing yoga on a cliff. Not only does he teach Joshua how to multiply food, he also introduces him to the idea of the Divine Spark, a certain special power that is in everyone (meanwhile Biff busies himself with the intense study of the Kama Sutra).

What I really liked about this book is that while it was pretty funny – Biff is much more than slapstick comic relief and some of the things he says are hilarious in that great sarcastic, witty way – it also melded together really well. When the two return to Nazareth, Joshua begins his teachings and men interested in hearing his word join the group. These become the apostles and we start to see events familiar to all Christians. There’s the turning of water into wine, the multiplication of fishes and loaves, the forty days and nights in desert and the devil’s temptation. Christopher Moore is very respectful of the Biblical writings this way, but he’s also genius in how he’s set up these events in earlier parts. We can see how the three Wise Men’s teachings have influenced Joshua’s own and in doing this Moore is suggesting that the world’s major religions – Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity – don’t exist in a vacuum, but are drawn from each other and could very well coexist in harmony. I’m not saying Moore set out to write a political document on the need for peace between religions, but he does seem to suggest that these religions aren’t as different as we make them out to be. It’s a profound statement for what could be interpreted solely as comedy. (Actually, I’m kind of surprised that there haven’t been any protests against this book.)

The only thing I would have liked to see is more interaction between Biff and the angel Raziel after he’s raised from the dead to compose his gospel – the two of them talking about TV and pizza and modern conveniences was hilarious – and I would have liked to read Biff’s perspective of the Resurrection. Biff’s gospel ends just after Joshua is crucified and dies and, in his anger, Biff seeks out Judas and hangs him. The curtain closes on that point. I suppose we have Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John to go to if we want to find out more, there’s nothing like a little humor infusing the seriousness of religion. In this book, Moore’s teachings would be that it’s okay to laugh a little…and to wonder, “What if Christ knew Judo?”

9. The Bible: Exodus

2007-08-18T10:19:00.000-05:00

[Editor's Note: It's been several months since the last time I posted and while I haven't quit buying books during that time, nor have I read them any less fervently, I did struggle with whether I wanted to continue to post about them. Things like the job and school (Yes! I started school!) and the book club and, you know, my love of TV were getting in the way and the blog got pushed to the side. I even contemplated quitting it. But, like all good things that require some amount of effort, a nice break seems to have helped. As I awoke this Saturday morning, I knew I was ready to come back. So here I am. The next couple of posts are the last ones I wrote, but never posted, before I went on hiatus. And I'll do my best to put down my thoughts on all the books I've consumed in the intervening time, provided I remember all of them (I swear...these days I forget almost as fast as I read). So let me just say: Hello, again. It's nice to see you. Won't you stay a while?]

When I first started thinking about reading the Bible, I checked out a thread on the Chicklit forums where people posted their experiences trying to get through the Great Book. Several people were bogged down in the sheer boredom of the thing and it was suggested that they A) not read it in the presented order and B) pick some of the more interesting, adventure type books to read to get their interest going. I remember one entry in particular that described the person hitting a wall because they could only read about the steps being such and such measure, and the curtains being such and such measure, and the windows being such and such measure so many times. After reading this I dreaded coming upon this section, but little did I know that it would be coming so soon. It’s in Exodus. And it’s as boring as she describes it.

I’ll go out on a limb and say that everyone knows the general Exodus story, mostly because there was a huge movie about it, but if you don’t, here’s the two minute version. When we last left the twelve tribes of Israel, Joseph was right-hand man to the Pharaoh. Being the fruitful man that he is, Joseph thoroughly propagates his seed and, along with his brothers’ children, the “children of Israel” become greater than those of Egypt and the Pharaoh rules that all sons of Israel will be killed and all daughters of Israel will be spared. Levi’s wife bares a son and leaves him by the riverbank where he’s found by the Pharaoh’s daughter. This, of course, is Moses. In time, Moses pleads with the Pharaoh to release his people from enslavement, but the Pharaoh refuses and yada, yada, yada, Moses parts the Red Sea, they make it to the “land of milk and honey” and they build the ark of the covenant, which is only the most ridiculously meticulous recording there is in all of architectural history.

First, I have to take a moment to talk about what happens when the Pharaoh refuses Moses’s request. I yada, yada’d because it wouldn’t fit in the two minute version. I know the Bible’s not supposed to be funny, but it was kind of hilarious how God kept smiting the Egyptians when His request was not met. He’s like, “Not let the people go? How’d you like a river of blood? Bam! Will you let them go now? No? How about some locusts? Bam! Take a rain of frogs, an infestation of lice, a swarm of flies, and fire and hail while you’re at it!” It was a little over the top, but the Pharaoh did keep saying no after all. Me, personally, I’d have run the other way after my first refusal caused all the water in the land to turn to blood. I’m just sayin’.

And now it’s time for Things That Are Actually in the Bible:

- The burning bush. This is how God first appears to Moses to tell him that he must lead the people of Israel out of Egypt.

- Passover. That’s another one of God’s smitings upon the Eygptians, to send a plague to kill all their first-born sons. Moses’s people were “passed over” because they smeared lamb’s blood over their doors as God had instructed them to do.

- The eye for an eye thing. “And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.” (21:23-25)

- The Ten Commandments. Okay, I know they came from the Bible, but the commandments as we know them are pretty much the same as they’re described here. I scared myself a while back because, upon hearing Jon Stewart chide some evangelical type person for knowing only four commandments, I realized I could only remember nine of them myself (although, come on…nine out of ten ain’t bad and it turns out I was combining two of them).

- Old school God’s kind of intense. He suggests that if the people come across inhabitants of a land who observe another god, “ye shall destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their groves: For thou shalt worship no other god: for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.” Now, if I were into taking the Bible literally, I’d be out smiting all my heathen friends.

If I were into taking the Bible literally, I’d also be concerned with my master’s servants and the correct amount of time they are to serve, depending on whether or not they’re Hebrew. And I’d be measuring the pillars for my tabernacle in cubits, seven times over, but I’m not doing that either. And that is why you can’t take the Bible literally. More on that to come in Leviticus.

8. Adverbs

2007-03-30T10:47:00.000-05:00

by Daniel Handler

If you’re a fan of the Lemony Snicket series and think that anything Daniel Handler, Snicket’s alter ego, would write would be similarly weird (writing a children’s series all about death and dismay is, you know, kind of weird), well…you’d be right. I haven’t really decided whether or not I liked Adverbs. I haven’t read anything other than the Series of Unfortunate Events, but have always wanted to read something by Handler, so when I saw the bright shiny Daniel Clowes designed dust jacket in Unabridged’s window I snatched it up. But I don’t know if I liked it.

Adverbs is kind of a collection of short stories that are all somewhat connected to each other, but it’s not a novel. Not really, because while you recognize some of the names from previous stories, it’s never revealed how these people know each other or even if these are the same people and not just people with the same names. We start out with a man leaving his girlfriend, named Andrea, by lying to her about his father’s death. We meet another Andrea in Helena’s story, in which she uses up of all her money and her husband David convinces her to take a job under his ex-girlfriend, named Andrea, at a school in San Francisco. As a teenager Lila works at a movie theater and dates the unscrupulous Keith while her quiet and chivalry-obsessed coworker pines for her. Another Lila – or perhaps the same one a few years older – sits in a bar with her friend Allison, unable to drink or eat as the result of a rare stomach disorder, with her only hope lying in the possibility of an organ transplant. It’s here that they meet a woman named Gladys who seems to have the ability to make anything they ask for happen. We later catch up with an Andrea at a diner who’s questioned by the police in their search for the “Snow Queen,” also known as Gladys.

You get the idea. It was definitely interesting coming across these familiar names and trying to figure out how they were connected, but there’s no resolution for that. We never know if these people are the same we’ve encountered before, or if the author is just reusing names. And we don’t know if the similarities have any meaning either, as they’re presented without any hint of forethought or determination. It’s almost as if the author thought, “Hey…I can use the same names and won’t that confuse people?” I have a difficult time remembering what I’ve read, sometimes even when I’m reading it, so for me it was like, “Did we talk about this person before? What did they do? Does that have any bearing on what’s happening now? Hold on…let me flip back twenty pages and try to find it again.” It was actually a little jarring.

Maybe that’s what Handler intended. Maybe the peripheral character recurrences are meant to mimic how these things happen in life. You’re standing there, the same character you’ve always been, and out on the street you see someone who could be that girl you met at a party and shared a cab with or that guy you almost dated years ago. Someone who never really had a place in your life, but seeing them again jars you just a bit. Maybe that’s what Daniel Handler meant when he wrote his story this way. After all, Adverbs, and adverbs, is/are not about what is done, but how it’s done. But somehow I suspect that’s just me trying to impart some reason on a scattered narrative that works less well than I’d like it to.

I did like the stories, but I didn’t love them like I expected to. Although judging by the Series of Unfortunate Events finale, I shouldn’t be so surprised. It seems that while Handler has a gift for creating a compelling story, he lags a bit when it comes to pulling it all together. I really would have liked to know what happened to some of the characters after the snippet we’re given, if they met unfortunate ends, made marriages work, or lived to overcome their odds. Instead, there are no answers. While that may also mimic the ambiguity of real life, that’s not what I want from my fiction.

Oh, and there may have been some sort of volcanic disaster in the middle of California. Not that we’re told what the deal with that is, either.

7. The Superman Chronicles

2007-03-06T18:33:00.000-06:00

by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster

I am in love with the idea of the DC Archives. Glossy, hard-backed editions of classic DC comics. I am not, however, in love with the price. Even if I slum it and buy them from Amazon, they’re still $35, down from their $50 retail price, and even that would be okay if there were, say, one volume that had all the Superman comics or all the Green Lantern comics. But that’s not the case. How can I commit to upwards of five volumes, $35 each, for all of the superheroes I want to know and love. Now, DC has started doing these “Showcase” books where they reprint a gabillion issues of a particular comic for the low, low price of $10 each, but do you know why they’re so cheap? They’re in black and white! The art, including the coloring, of a comic is at least half of the beauty and meaning and reason for the comic so how can you possibly alter it to state of rendering it devoid of all its original color? How, I ask you? I mean, I’m cheap, but I’m not that cheap.

It looks like DC may have gotten hip to this conundrum with their new “Chronicles” series. So far I’ve only seen one volume of The Superman Chronicles, with one supposedly to be released soon, and two volumes of The Batman Chronicles. What makes these great is that they’re only about $15 full price and they’re in vivid, glorious color. I really hope they start publishing other series…and all of them, too.

What’s interesting about old-school Superman is how mundane his exploits are. So far there’s no Lex Luthor and no other worldly villains to speak of. Instead we see him battling the owner of a dangerous mine, a banker who threatens to do in a local circus, a prison owner who abuses and whips his chain gang, and a crime lord who exploits the stupidity of young boys, among other terrestrial scoundrels. There’s nothing like Brainiac or the Parasite, like in the Animated Series I’m Netflixing. And Superman’s powers are much less super than the mythos has built them up to be. He can still run really fast and his skin is impenetrable and he has super strength, but he can’t fly. He can only jump really high. There’s talk of a distant planet that was destroyed, but Krypton isn’t mentioned nor does Superman come into contact with kryptonite. As far as we know he’s completely invulnerable.

I was also surprised to learn that Lois Lane really hates Clark Kent. No…she really hates him. In fact, she comes straight out and says, “I hate you, Clark Kent.” Whenever they’re on reporting ventures she tries to lose him and scoop the story herself. She’s not even interested in being his friend, let alone anything else, and Clark does little to change her mind. What she hates most is the meek, mild-mannerness we’ve come to associate with Superman’s alter-ego, but really, if you knew Clark, you’d probably think he’s a bit of a pussy, too. He lets people shove him in the face and doesn’t so much as shoot a fighting word back. Even in this day and age, when masculinity can mean knowing which facial moisturizer works best after a shave, an uncontested face shove is a bit suspect.

I liked that these stories were short and succinct, definitely a forebear to the serials that are compiled into graphic novels today. They were clearly meant for an undeveloped attention, but they were simply just fun to read. The art isn’t as sophisticated as the later Superman books, but there’s something quite nice about that. It’s nice to think of a simpler time when all a superhero needed was to don some red panties and a cape and he could fix a bridge, save a circus strongman, or pull a banker out of bed to fly around town and show him his wrongs. And still he had to spurn the advances of the woman he loves.

6. A Long Way Down

2007-02-25T19:28:00.001-06:00

by Nick Hornby

It seems that there’s kind of an anti-Nick Hornby trend, especially after the publication of How to Be Good, the criticism there generally being that he doesn’t know how to write women (if you haven’t read the book, the protagonist is female). I disagree and contend that many women didn’t like his portrayal of the main character because he didn’t write as a typical female, but instead as a thinking, feeling individual. I, for one, identified with that. Which doesn’t mean I really liked that book either, but my problem was more that the story fell apart in the last two pages and that was kind of unfortunate.

Anyhoo – my point is that it’s somewhat “cool” to dislike Nick Hornby these days, most likely because he’s gained a certain amount of popularity, but I still love him and I’ll continue reading everything he publishes (except, maybe, Fever Pitch, but that’s because it’s about sports). I wouldn’t say that his latest, A Long Way Down, knocked it out of the park, but it was still an enjoyable, entertaining read with characters that you sympathized and commiserated with while somewhat despising at the same time. And that’s quite a skill to master.

A Long Way Down is about four people who come together for the purpose of committing suicide. It’s New Year’s Eve and Maureen, Martin, Jess, and JJ have all decided that life’s not worth living and come to the roof of Toppers’ House to do themselves in. Little do they expect to run into each other there – after all, who expects company at your own suicide – but after meeting and hearing everyone’s stories, they delay their deaths to go in search of Jess’s ex-boyfriend. No, the deterrent isn’t all that special or exciting, but it shows that these four aren’t entirely convinced that suicide is right for them. Of the four, Maureen possesses the most understandable reason for despair. Martin is a washed-up daytime talk show host who’s recently been released from jail after being convicted of sexual relations with a minor. He’s lost his wife, his children, and his credibility and is quite a sad sap, indeed. JJ’s come to England with his band and girlfriend and, now that the band has broken up and his girlfriend has left him, he’s realizing that he’ll never be musically successful and, now working in a pizza joint, is doomed to a life of monotony. Jess, just a teenager, is clearly a mess and is sort of person who has no internal filter and spits out whatever she’s thinking, no matter how pig-headed and ridiculous it is and, to that end, she’s easily the least sympathetic character, but when the dynamics of her family life are revealed, her reasons for coming to Toppers’ House are a little bit more evident. Maureen, however, is the mother of a nineteen-year-old boy who’s been confined to a wheelchair, unable to speak or care for himself for his entire life. Maureen’s had sex exactly one time and her singular lover, the father of her son, has never been in her life after that one night. Living in solitude and despair for nineteen years, one can see exactly why Maureen was on that roof. The fact that she’s also the most humble and optimistic of the four makes her the character you’re, surprisingly, drawn to most.

But the story’s not really about who’s worthy of suicide and who isn’t. After they leave the roof to go look for Jess’s boyfriend, because Martin thinks Jess is too young to want to die, they all decide to hang on for a little longer and meet up again after Valentine’s Day. If they still want to commit suicide at that time, then they can. What goes on in that time is a little, well, you can see how it would easily translate to the movie screen. The four meet up for regular coffee chats, except that Martin always has the attitude that he’s above all this and Jess flies off that handle at any moment. The press gets wind of the suicide pact and come after them, putting pictures of Jess and Martin in the paper and hounding them about the supposed Matt-Damon-looking angel that Jess contends provided the impetus to go on living their lives (and you can imagine that when this movie comes out, Matt Damon will indeed play this character). They go on a vacation together, which, predictably, does not go quite as planned.

I’ll admit that A Long Way Down is not Hornby’s best effort. It’s always a little disappointing when it feels like a book is written with the expectation that it will be translated to film, but it’s still an entertaining read and I liked it. Hornby has a knack for accurately capturing both dialogue and inner monologue and reading his words is akin to inhabiting his characters minds. Or maybe it’s more like his characters inhabiting yours. You have to give him his props - there are few contemporary authors who are able to do that.

5. I, Robot

2007-02-11T14:38:00.000-06:00

by Isaac Asimov

I’ll admit that when I, Robot the movie came out, I really wanted to see it. But I didn’t because I thought that at some point I might want to read the book. I read some Isaac Asimov in middle school, but I don’t remember what it was and I haven’t read anything of his since. Essentially, I didn’t know anything about the great sci-fi master’s writing style, but considering my love for Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick, it seemed inevitable that I’d get around to Asimov at some point. Which I have. And…I’m not sure what to make of it.

First of all, let me say that I don’t even know how they made the movie version of this book because I don’t see any character for Will Smith to play. There’s Dr. Susan Calvin, a robopsychologist whose work features greatly throughout the decades the story covers, but there’s no central male lead. I’m guessing they either created a character out of thin air or severely altered a minor character from the book. The book is also not concerned with a robot uprising, like the movie previews lead me to believe, but with the idea of robots taking over the world and assuming complete control over humanity. I mean, not in a violent way, like the previews suggest. More in a subtle, incremental way that’s actually scary when you consider our complete dependence on computers (DSL cuts out at work and all hell breaks loose!).

The book goes through several periods in history during which robots gain more and more power. In the beginning robots are these clunky, non-verbal beings that humans distrust. One of the firsts, whose name was, fittingly, Robbie, was sold to a family as a nanny to their young daughter. When the girl becomes too emotionally attached to Robbie, the parents’ attempts to lose him are done in by the powerful Laws of Robotics. If you’ve been living under rock in regards to the book and movie like I have, these laws are that a robot must not harm a human being or allow a human to come to harm by inaction, they must obey humans, and they must protect their own existence, but only as long as it doesn’t interfere with the previous two laws. Robbie gets to stay with the family because he saves the daughter from a fatal accident. It’s that cut and dry.

However, as robot technology progresses, the laws become a little fuzzy. The ensuing robots – Speedy, Cutie, Dave, Herbie – are more advanced and perform more complicated tasks, but they’re also required to reinterpret the laws. Herbie, for example, can read minds and blatantly lies to humans, not out of malice, but because he believes that telling humans anything other than what they want to hear will cause them harm and directly violate the first law. What we come to at the end of the story is a man who may actually be a highly developed robot with no one able to determine the difference, and the entirety of humanity run by “the Machine.” The paradox here is that the Machine can’t allow humanity to harm itself and destroying the Machine would harm humanity, thus we come to a point where humans are governed by robots and have no hope of breaking free.

While I enjoyed the story and found it to be far more intricate than I had expected, I was a little disappointed with the writing style. Whereas Bradbury handles his words with precision and depth and investment, Asimov is kind of, well, lead-footed in his word choice. I’d go so far as to say that some of it was cheesy. That may be because the ideas that Asimov dreamed up have become so ingrained into pop culture that I’m already over-exposed to them (even Bender owes his existence to Asimov and his positronic brains), but I was just a little bit surprised that I had any criticisms at all for the revered author. I mean, one of the robots is named Cutie, for Pete’s sake! That just doesn’t fly with me. But Asimov is one of a trio of the most famous science fiction writers ever and there’s got to be a reason for that. I plan to continue reading his works and find out exactly why.

4. Fun Home

2007-02-04T11:09:00.001-06:00

by Alison Bechdel

I don’t know if you could have gone through 2006 without hearing about Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and the massive amounts of praise heaped upon it. Now, you know I’m a used or remaindered bookstore kind of girl, but having very little luck finding comics and graphic novels in the stores I frequent, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I’ll just have to purchase these full price. I guess part of my penchant for the used books is that, in addition to being able to steadily add to my library on a budget, when I buy a book that I end up disliking, I’ve only spent five or six bucks on it. I could have easily spent that amount on a frou-frou coffee, if I drank the things. So I’ll have to be a bit more discriminating when it comes to the graphic novels, but I’m happy to say that with Fun Home, it was worth those extra bucks.

Fun Home has received a lot of comparisons to Six Feet Under because it’s about a funeral home and there are gay people in it. I mean, just because someone writes a story about a man with incredible strength and speed and x-ray vision doesn’t mean it automatically has to be compared to Superman, does it? Okay, I guess it does, but my point is that I think Fun Home is getting shortchanged in the comparison because it seems to stop at the dead bodies and the homosexuality and, truly, both the book and the show are about much more than that.

Fun Home is Bechdel’s memoir and focuses on her closeted father as much as it does on her own coming out. It’s not so much a story told from the point of view of Alison growing up, but from her viewpoint as an adult recollecting specific instances. She doesn’t try to remember every little detail about her childhood, but instead reflects on these scenes that stand out to her. I found this aspect of Bechdel’s storytelling particularly effective because that’s truly how we remember things – not in minute detail, but in flashes of sights and scents and touch. The scene where Bechdel describes the memory of her father bathing her as a child – the cup he used to pour water over her head, the feeling of the water as it goes over her and runs down her body – captures all the innocence of a child who can’t let go of all that her father did right.

I also liked that Bechdel didn’t spend the entire book vilifying her father. It’s clear from the story that there’s much for which he could be condemned, like his ability to get angry at the drop of a dime not to mention the homosexual affairs with minors (there’s a reason to hate your father right there), but Bechdel instead tries to uncover what her father must have been dealing with and whether his death was really an accident or self-imposed. Coupled with her own homosexual discoveries in college, Bechdel could have easily taken the usual my-father-was-screwed-up-so-now-I-am-too approach, and there’s certainly an audience for that type of stuff, but the fact that she employs her intellect and curiosity, rather than animosity, shows a level of maturity and accountability that a lot of memoirists don’t possess. It’s quite refreshing.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention the art, which is gorgeous. My first instinct is to call it sepia-toned, which it isn’t, but those words evoke a certain sense of nostalgia and photographic history that Bechdel brings to her illustrations. In truth, they’re washed in blue, but they’re filled with the sorts of details one could usually only expect from perfect pictures. From book titles to handwriting to even her own nude body, Bechdel neglects not one detail, which I find kind of brave. Of course, we’d have no idea how accurate these details really are, but it certainly feels like she put everything out there, even those little inconsequential things that only those close to us know. The point of a memoir is to expose – both good and bad – and we get the best of it here. I’m really glad I spent the money on it.

3. The Bible: Genesis

2007-01-29T19:17:00.001-06:00

The difficult thing about reading the Bible for anyone, I think, is separating what you believe from what you read. I can’t imagine comprehending it as someone who isn’t Christian, let alone someone who is either agnostic or atheistic, but it’s also a little weird reading it as someone who does fundamentally believe in the truthfulness of the writings. It seems somewhat, well, sacrilegious reading it not for its religious value, but solely for its literary value. I was brought up Catholic and still identify as such, so I possess a general knowledge of the Bible and its teachings, but I have no self-discovered knowledge of it. I only know what was taught to me in catechism. In the sense that the Bible is one of the most influential written works of all time, I have no detailed knowledge of that.

I’ve read that reading the Bible straight through isn’t the best idea because it’s not chronological and some parts are dreadfully boring, but my tactic is to read five chapters a night. Eventually, with five chapters a night, I’ll make it through. Right? Well…I’ll try.

So I’ve started with Genesis. Most people are familiar with the creation story, the banishment from Eden, the slaying of Abel by Cain, the story of Noah and his ark, and Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son Isaac. What I found interesting was realizing that those things that have been ingrained in our culture really did begin here. For example, in Chapter 3, after God discovers that Adam and Eve have eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (yep, that’s what it’s really called), He actually does say to Eve, “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” Thy husband shall rule over thee! Could this really be where the root of our patriarchal and sexist society lies? Could this be why, for innumerable generations, women have believed that their place is in servitude to their husbands? I’m three chapters in and I’m already marveling at how far society has come. This is also the first of many times I’ve thought, “This is why you can’t take the Bible literally.”

Some other cultural beginnings I discovered: After the great flood, Noah knows that it’s safe to leave his ark because a dove came to him with an olive leaf in her mouth. In Chapter 11, there was a city that built a tower so high as to reach heaven, but not wanting this God scattered the people and “confound[ed] their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech…therefore is the name of it called Babel.” So there really was a Tower of Babel. In Chapter 13 it’s written, “the men of Sodom were wicked and sinners before the Lord exceedingly,” which is why God destroyed the city. It does not say, however, how these people sinned and why sodomy is labeled as such, but there’s the reason why it’s considered sinful, whether that reason be semantic or otherwise. People were turned into pillars of salt, God commanded that every man be circumcised to keep His covenant with Abraham, the father of many generations, and Joseph, Jacob’s favorite son, really did wear an Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Well, not really, but Jacob did give Joseph a “coat of many colours” which caused his other sons to drive Joseph away in jealousy.

The Joseph story was actually quite interesting. By that I mean, the Isaac/Jacob and Esau/Joseph and his brothers story because it’s all one big entwined story involving all generations. Esau was to be the stronger of Isaac’s two children, but his wife Rebekah loved Jacob more and when Isaac was old and blind and ready to deliver his blessing unto Esau, Rebekah tricked him and Jacob was bestowed with the strength of the covenant. Jacob went on to become Israel and his twelve sons (by four different women, I might add) are what we refer to as the twelve tribes of Israel. Although he’s driven from Canaan by his jealous brothers, it’s Joseph, having become second-hand man to the Pharaoh in Egypt, who saves their lives when famine hits the land and the sons are forced out to find food.

Genesis was actually suspenseful and full of action –- who would have thought you’d find that in the Bible? Of course, that’s just the first book. Something tells me the going won’t always be so easy.

2. Boss

2007-01-21T18:08:00.000-06:00

by Mike Royko

I remember seeing many Mike Royko books on my parents’ shelves when I was growing up, but I never read any of them. Boss was a widely popular suggestion when we were considering new selections for the Book Club, so it was a good opportunity to break my teeth on some Royko and also learn some really good Chicago history. The book focuses on the first Mayor Daley, who ran Chicago for 21 years. His status is legendary and no one in the city could deny his power, even those of us who are too young to have been alive during his reign, but I had no idea that so many of these that I consider permanent city fixtures were actually instituted during his time. The expressways – the Stevenson, the Dan Ryan, the Kennedy, the Eisenhower – were all the results of his efforts. The beautiful city parks, the horrible denial of segregation, O’Hare International Airport, the University of Illinois at Chicago – the good, the bad, and the utterly despicable corruption that has become nearly synonymous with Chicago politics is all a reference to Daley’s six terms in office.

I have to say that I think a lot of the book went over my head and while I do think it serves as an excellent written history of local politics, I had trouble following everything in it. I have no idea what many of the positions in city government do, so when Royko would write about the City Clerk and the Cook County Board and ward bosses and aldermen and county commissioners and so on, I would get kind of lost in all the titles. It made no sense to me why someone in one position taking over another would be particularly scandalous, other than the fact that the Democrats managed to stack the political deck so that their candidates were running virtually unopposed. I didn’t really get the whole thing with a lot of the Republicans being Democrats either, but somehow those running in the Republic party would make it possible for the Democrats to continue leading. In fact, Daley ran for his first position in Illinois legislature on the Republican ballot, but once he was elected he switched sides and worked as a Democrat. I’m unclear as to how this is possible, like, “Oh, just kidding! Not really a Republican!” I’m also still not entirely sure what the term “Machine” means when used in reference to Chicago politics, other than the fact that those in power were able to spin any situation in their favor and get pretty much anything they wanted, right down to passing their positions on to their literal, biological children. While Royko does write very blatantly about what went on behind the scenes of the Daley empire, he does take for granted that the reader is already familiar with this period of political history.

I suppose I wouldn’t recommend Boss to someone who wanted to get some basic, straight history on the city. The book has been criticized as little more than slander (I just learned from Wikipedia that Daley forced bookstores to stop carrying the book, but popular demand brought it back) and Royko definitely takes a side in his biography/exposé, but it’s hard not take a side oneself when presented with the facts. Daley did a lot of amazing and visible things for the city, which makes the racial violence and political dishonesty even more shocking than they’d normally be. I’d like to think we’ve come a long way since then, although it wouldn’t be too difficult to disagree (read Eric Klinenberg’s Heatwave for the more recent antics of Daley the second). I’d recommend a fairly thorough, textbook knowledge of Chicago history before tackling Boss, but I’d still highly recommend it. Lying, cheating, deceit, murder – it’s got all the makings of an excellent story. And it’s one hundred percent true.

1. All This Heavenly Glory

2007-01-15T19:13:00.000-06:00

by Elizabeth Crane

First off, I just want to say thanks to those of you who wished me luck with the grad school thing. It was really nice reading your comments and finding that you enjoy this little blog. I hope I can continue with it to some degree of frequency because, honestly, I enjoy writing it too.

Now...to business! My first read of the year can be found over at the GB Book Club page. I wasn't sure what to make of All This Heavenly Glory when I first started reading it, especially since the point of view changed from first person to third person which is something I usually find unncessary and not well done, but Elizabeth Crane did such a good job creating an engaging and interesting character in Charlotte Anne Byers that I could look past that. I really want to read her other book now, which I've seen in used bookstores numerous times. Crane definitely employs a more modern, almost metatextual approach to this fictional memoir (written as a memoir, but is fiction) which, I have to admit, smacks of Dave Eggers, but which I simply enjoyed. I had a really good time reading this, so I hope we have a good time discussing it at our meeting in February.

Year 3: A Number of Books Over a Period of Time

2007-01-01T13:25:00.000-06:00

My Readerly Friends,

Here we are. 2007. Two years since I started this 52 Books, 52 Weeks project and two years since I’ve completed it. The second year was definitely more difficult than the first, considering I went through a period where no book managed to entice me, I came to realize that I wouldn’t make good on my promise to read more Booker/Orange/Pulitzer Prize nominees and/or books recommended by magazines, and Alice and I upped our efforts with the Gapers Block Book Club. It’s been busy times and this year offers little difference, especially since, and here’s my big announcement, I’ll be starting grad school in the summer.

Yep, grad school. Having gone through the awful, embittering experience that is the University of Chicago, I’ve spent the intervening years proudly proclaiming that I’d never go to grad school, so my decision to go was as much a surprise to me as it was to everyone else. It was something of an impulsive decision, in the sense that I hadn’t really planned for it or spent that much time thinking about it, but once I did start thinking about it I knew that I had to do it NOW or I might never do it. I spent some time freaking out about the application process and waiting for the school’s response, but now that I’ve had my admittance letter for a few weeks I’m actually starting to get excited about it. What continues to concern me, however, is time. Between work and GB, I’m usually busy occupied with some task. Add classes and homework to that and, well, as my friend put it, one day she’s going to realize she hasn’t seen me for a month and find me in my apartment, buried under a pile of books (in the bad way, not the good way). I need to decide what I’m going to continuing doing and what I’ll have to quit. And by that, I mean this blog.

However, after much thought, I’ve decided to keep it. I like writing about the books I read and even though I sometimes bemoan the arbitrary task of keeping up with it, I’m pretty sure I’d miss it if I quit. I’d also miss being a part of this community of writers and readers who share their love of literature. But this is the end of my 52 Books challenge. Before I go through the unnecessary worry of not being able to complete it, I’m just going to say right now that I’ll read what I can and write what I can, with no pressure to reach any specific quantitative goal. I do have certain qualitative goals, though. After reading The Inferno, I developed a keen desire to read the literary source of all literary souces: the Bible. I’ve already started and, even though there are definitely parts that are ridiculously dry, it’s a far more interesting read than I expected. I’ll be blogging that book by book, but I’m not putting pressure on myself to finish the entire thing in one year. I also want to read Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which I read for the first time in my first year of college but retained no information on the text. There were innumerable Biblical and Ovid references in The Inferno and I’d like to get the two books under my belt before I continue with The Divine Comedy. And I want to read more comics and graphic novels, too. I’ve got some Superman and Batman just waiting for my eager little hands.

Thus, in lieu of 52 Books, 52 Weeks, I give you A Number of Books Over a Period of Time. Thanks for continuing with me on the ride.

Yours in Books,
Veronica

(Oh, and it’s a Masters in English, in case you had any doubt. Which means I get to blog my academic reads, as well.)

52 Books, 52 Weeks: Year 2 in Review

2006-12-23T13:58:00.001-06:00

Huzzah! I met my 52 Books 52 Weeks challenge for the second year in a row. Below you can read about everything I’ve consumed in the past twelve months:

2006 Introduction
I made some more specific goals this year as I wanted to read more acclaimed writings, but I found out that it’s impossible to ignore my ever-changing reading desires. I only made it about halfway.

1. Best American Short Stories 2005 edited by Michael Chabon
An excellent collection of short stories, introduced by the wonderful Michael Chabon and including pieces by Tom Perrotta, J. Robert Lennon, and Alice Munro.

1.5. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
My first defeat of the year as I got only halfway through the story before abandoning it. It’s a rambling tale of a man who has no idea what he wants and even though I invested 300 pages in it, I knew it was better to stop there when I realized our reading relationship wasn’t working out.

2. The Know-It-All by A.J. Jacobs
A staff writer at Esquire, Jacobs chronicles his self-imposed task of reading the entire Encyclopaedia Brittanica. A telling memoir, full of random facts and realizations about the author and his family.

3. A Dame to Kill For by Frank Miller
Book 2 in the Sin City series, this one follows Dwight as he breaks free from Ava, a manipulative former lover with less than honorable intentions.

4. Right Ho, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
My first Wodehouse, which was fantastic and left me wanting to read everything he’s done. Bertie Wooster mucks up the romantic involvements of Gussie Fink-Nottle and Madeline Basset and Jeeves has to set everything straight.

5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
Here’s where I became a full-fledged Potter fan. I was floored when Rowling resurrected Voldemort and enjoyed the back-story of the Tri-Wizard tournament.

6. Division Street: America by Studs Terkel
The GB Book Club turns to the godfather of social and oral histories. I only wished Terkel would have included some of his own conclusions about the work rather than leaving it all up the to reader.

7. I Sailed with Magellan by Stuart Dybek
Hands down, the worst book I read this year. I hated the way Dybek wrote sex and women and was grossed out by his seeming obsession with lactating breasts.

8. V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd
Sadly, the movie did not live up to this incredible illustrated story of totalitarianism and intolerance inspired by the Thatcher reign in England. (Not 9/11, as the movie would so sanctimoniously have you believe.)

9. McSweeney’s No. 15 edited by Dave Eggers
A collection of pieces by Icelandic writers and my decision to finally subscribe to the literary journal. Although, truth be told, I have yet to do this.

10. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
I loved this book about a conniving young woman who befriends a dying rich American in order to marry her penniless love. Things end disastrously with the protagonist winning neither money nor husband (neither of which her hateful self deserved).

11. Memory Mambo by Achy Obejas
Juani Casas is a young lesbian living in the northwest side of Chicago. She has a tempestuous relationship with her sister’s abusive husband and is swept up in a hurricane of emotion with her girlfriend Gina. The story describes Juani’s attempt to find the truth behind her family as Cuban exiles and herself as a woman.

12. Hotel World by Ali Smith
A weird story about five lives that affected by the death of one, told from the viewpoints of each of those five (including the dead girl). Smith was nominated for a Booker and an Orange prize for this book.

[I started reading The English Patient by Michael Ondjaate right around here, but didn’t finish it and didn’t even blog about it because it was so incredibly boring.]

13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling
Not as great as the fourth book, but Harry finally stepped up and took an active role in his life. Sirius Black dies, Snape is confirmed as a former Death Eater (or is he a current one?), and Dumbledore and Voldemort do battle in a scene that I can’t wait to see translated to film.

14. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
While I very much enjoyed this story about a young man who essentially sells his soul to always remain beautiful and young, I was surprised by just how gay it was. Everyone talks about it as a classic, but, oddly, no one ever mentions the homosexual overtones.

15. Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal
An excellent memoir that truly finds the ordinary in the extraordinary. In addition to signing my book, Amy also very cutely referenced herself by writing “see page 83,” which makes immediate sense if you’ve ever seen me in person.

16. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro
A reread that pushed me out of my reading slump. Munro writes women amazingly and puts the chick lit genre to shame.

17. Instant Love by Jami Attenberg
An interesting book of short stories about different girls as they grow up and learn about love. I was surprised by how much I really liked it, but I guess I tend to assume the worst about contemporary stories about girls learning to love (hence the chick lit comment above).

18. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling
I finally got caught up on the Harry Potter books before being accidentally spoiled for the death in this volume. Although, I did guess it before I even started reading. Harry’s on his own from this point on, so it’ll be interesting to see how Rowling finishes him off.

19. Coffee Will Make You Black by April Sinclair
Another GB Book Club read. It’s a young adult story about a black girl who deals first hand with racism, sexism, and homophobia in her neighborhood and high school.

20. Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld
Whenever I think about the best book I read this year, Prep stands out as the one. It’s a coming of age story about an Indiana girl in a New England boarding school, written in a way that while fully allowing the reader into her head also makes the reader remember their own school experiences. I loved it.

21. Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett
Ann Patchett’s memoir of her intense friendship with fellow author Lucy Grealy. While I reserve commenting on what their relationship was actually like, I couldn’t identify with the written relationship of codependence and drug and alcohol abuse.

22. Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
If Prep was the best read of my year, then Watchmen was a very close second. This graphic novel gives superheroes an accessibility and humanity that elevates the entire genre. Highly enjoyable.

23. The Minority Report and Other Classic Stories by Philip K. Dick
A fabulous collection of science fiction stories that was better than any of Dick’s full-length novels I’ve read. (To tell the truth, I’ve only read two, but I still liked the stories better.)

24. Best American Essays 2005 edited by Susan Orlean
Includes pieces by Jonathan Franzen, David Sedaris, and David Foster Wallace.

25. The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
A book I would have never read were it not for the GB Book Club, but despite its immense popularity I was highly impressed by this non-fiction account of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and the deranged murders of America’s first serial killer, H.H. Holmes.

26. What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal] by Zoe Heller
Nominated for a Booker prize, this book is written in a clever way so that the story is really more about the narrator than the object of her writings. Excellent character development.

27. The Luck of the Bodkins by P.G. Wodehouse
Another mess of romantic relationships involving Monty Bodkins, the object of his affection Gertrude Butterwick, two brothers Ambrose and Reggie Tennyson, an American filmmaker, and his actress employee. An amusing tale of bumbling idiots.

28. Sons of the Rapture by Todd Dills
Reviewed for a Book Club feature, I didn’t truly love this book, but it had many elements and qualities that I think other people will enjoy. Not quite my taste, but by no means bad.

29. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
A retelling of the Jane Eyre story, but from the viewpoint of the first Mrs. Rochester. This book is one of the Modern Library 100, but it’s confusing and lacking in direction, so I don’t know how it made the list.

30. The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
A wonderful little treat of vignettes, detailing narrator Esperanza’s coming of age. I bought Caramelo shortly after finishing this.

31. The Penultimate Peril by Lemony Snicket
Here the Baudelaire siblings are picked up by Kit Snicket and taken to a hotel that’s really a mirror of an underwater library chronicling all of VFD. Not that we finally learn what VFD is.

32. The Inferno by Dante Aligheri
Although difficult to read, owing to tons of historical and cultural references that are outside my knowledge, the highly annotated version I bought made it much easier to grasp the story beneath. This was one of my big, personal reading goals met.

33. Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005 edited by Dave Eggers
Featuring pieces by Jhumpa Lahiri, Jonathan Tel, and Kate Krautkramer. An all around enjoyable collection of short works.

34. Bitchfest edited by Lisa Jervis and Andi Zeisler
A celebration of ten years of Bitch Magazine featuring some of their best essays and new essays written just for the book. I got some weird looks when reading this on the El, but I really couldn’t put it down. This renewed my love for the magazine.

35. The Unauthorized Autobiography by Lemony Snicket
I thought this might give me some answers to the infernal questions in the Series of Unfortunate Events, but it was really just more misdirection. Cute, but not very informative.

36. A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
I love Sherlock Holmes! I never knew how great these stories were until I actually started reading them. I now understand why this character has been so greatly incorporated into pop culture.

37. The End by Lemony Snicket
The end of the series, yes. But answers to everything Snicket’s built up over the past twelve books? Not so much. A little less than satisfying, but perhaps I’ll enjoy the series more on a reread.

38. Seven Types of Ambiguity by Elliott Perlman
An awesome, long story told from seven different viewpoints all centering on an obsession, a kidnapped child, and the man mixed up in it all. A disappointing ending kept this from being my favorite read of the year.

39. The Big Fat Kill by Frank Miller
Third in the Sin City series, this is the portion of the movie featuring Clive Owen, Brittany Murphy, and Rosario Dawson. Much better in book form, of course.

40. The Anxiety of Everyday Objects by Aurelie Sheehan
Somewhat born of the chick lit genre, this book is so much more worthy. The narrator is a filmmaker who must deal with the discrepancy between her dream and her actual career as a glorified secretary in a law firm. The ending’s a bit too clean, but still a good read.

41. Larry’s Party by Carol Shields
The fact that I didn’t enjoy this story as much as I thought I would made me realize that I shouldn’t force myself to read books I’m not ready to read. I hope to return to this one day and find the story of ordinary man Larry Weller as extraordinary as I suspect it is.

42. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller
My first superhero comic, a dark look at an aging Batman as he redefeats the Joker and some weird mutants that I didn’t entirely understand. Perhaps not the best first choice.

43. Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman
A cute little book about books whose only downfall is how short it is. I could read about Fadiman’s bookish quirks for much longer than the one day this took me.

44. The Sign of Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Sherlock Holmes solves it again! This story is about a stolen treasure, mysterious letters sent to a young woman, a pygmy, and a one-legged man.

45. Native Son by Richard Wright
The second of only two rereads this year, I liked this book so much more than the first time I was forced to read it in my general humanities college class. The extreme racism inherent in the story is depressing when you realize it was once present and not past.

46. The Turn of the Screw, The Aspern Papers, and Two Other Stories by Henry James
Despite loving The Wings of the Dove, I didn’t even really understand these stories. I had to look up online summaries to grasp the plotline of the supposed gothic ghost story.

47. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
And surprisingly, I did like this story of a dying woman and her family’s attempt to honor her final wish. I didn’t entirely understand it, but I can certainly fathom rereading it to get more out of it.

48. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
A simple story of a preacher’s life as he writes down his memories as he comes close to death. More about the powerful ties of family and the importance of forgiveness, understanding, and love than about any specific religious doctrine.

49. It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken by Seth
Seth’s autobiographical comic focuses on his obsession with an artist who had one panel printed in a New Yorker before seemingly falling off the face of the earth. As always, Seth’s illustrations and narrative are stunning.

50. Woe is I by Patricia T. O’Connor
A cute book about grammar written for those who haven’t thought about grammar since elementary school. Would have been better if it were written for those who still care about grammar and want to learn how to improve their verbal prowess.

51. So Many Books, So Little Time by Sara Nelson
A book about books that is so ridiculously bad than I finished it only because it was so bad. Unlike Anne Fadiman, I don’t care to read anything else Sara Nelson has written.

52. Classic Stories 1 by Ray Bradbury
Collects two books of short stories for yet another breathtaking view on life – future, past, and present. This receives an honorary best read of the year, only because it would be unfair of me to automatically bestow “best read” to an author I already know I love.

52. Classic Stories 1

2006-12-22T12:51:00.000-06:00

by Ray Bradbury

I saved this book specifically so it would be my last read of the year. I’ve been feeling a science-fiction jones for the past couple months (looking through my list it seems I haven’t read anything sci-fi since the summer) and I also haven’t read any new-to-me Bradbury in quite some time. Ray Bradbury is, simply put, my literary hero. He writes such sentences that roll on your tongue, spreading flavor through your senses like a spoonful of ice cream as it dissolves in a warm mouth. They are sweet, they are strong, and they are memorable in a way that unbearably good things are. Bradbury’s writing both depresses and enlightens me. Every time I read his work I’m reminded that I will in no way contribute such greatness to the world, but I’m also reminded of how grateful I am that someone has.

Classic Stories 1 comprises the entirety of The Golden Apples of the Sun and R is for Rocket, the later of which I believe is out of print except that it’s being included in a reprint of a book titled just The Golden Apples of the Sun. The first half of the book features shorter stories that are more theoretical in nature, while the second half’s longer stories are more emotional. Both are fantastic. In “The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl,” Bradbury gives us a man driven to murder by his wife’s lover, only to go insane trying to wash his fingerprints from the crime scene. The man is convinced the lover forethought his own murder and, as way to trap him, gave him things to hold and lead him through all the rooms of the house, encouraging him to touch everything. The man is eventually found and arrested by the police the day after the murder, not because his fingerprints identified him, but because he’s still at the house trying to wash it clean. “The Garbage Collector” is about a man who is content with his job as a garbage man until the day all the employees receive instructions on what do with the bodies when war breaks out. Suddenly the job takes on new meaning and he’s unsure if he can ever go back. My favorite story in this first half was “The Murderer,” which starts with a man committed to a psychiatric institute. His crime? Shooting his telephone and television, stuffing his car’s radio transmitter with ice cream, and using a device to interfere with everyone’s communication devices on a bus. “It was all so enchanting at first,” he says. “The very idea of these things, the practical uses, was wonderful. They were almost toys, to be played with, but the people got too involved, went too far, and got wrapped up in a pattern of social behavior and couldn’t get out…so they rationalized their nerves as something else. ‘Our modern age,’ they said. ‘Conditions,’ they said. ‘High-strung,’ they said.” But all he wants is silence from these mechanical things. The story mirrors our current 24-hour-news-channels, cell-phones-that-can-be-used-in-the-subway, iPod-dependent society so much that I had to look up the copyright. It was written in 1953.

I’ll wait a moment while that blows your mind just a little.

Several of the stories in the second half are also published in The Illustrated Man, but it’s been about five years since I read that book so they were like new to me. One I do particularly remember, though, is “The Rocket Man,” about a man who spends months at a time on Mars and Venus while his wife and son stay at home. Although he always proclaims his most recent trip to be his last, it’s only ever a few days before he’s looking at the stars again. His wife generally acts as if he’s dead so as to cut her grief when it inevitably happens, but when it does the news has far greater impact than they could have ever imagined. (I also remember it from a play I saw based on Bradbury’s short stories, also called “The Rocket Man”. The play was, surprisingly, fantastic.) “A Sound of Thunder” was completely new and it retells the well known “when a butterfly flaps its wings…” allegory. Only this time there are dinosaurs and time machines involved. “The Exiles,” another reread, travels along the lines of Fahrenheit 451 in that it tells the story of a society that’s banned books from their planet and once an author’s very last book is destroyed, so too is that author’s essence and being.

Two stories originally published in Dandelion Wine round out the collection and they’re a beautiful end to a stunning compilation. I can’t say that this was my favorite read of the year because that would be obvious and unfair, but it was the perfect way to bring a year of reading to a close: My favorite author, gorgeous writing, and a goal reached.

51. So Many Books, So Little Time

2006-12-17T12:14:00.000-06:00

by Sara Nelson

Now, you know I’m fan of the semi-metatextual books about books written by people who love books genre, so when I saw Sara Nelson’s So Many Books, So Little Time sitting there at the used bookstore I snatched it up. Subtitled, “A Year of Passionate Reading,” the book follows Nelson’s attempts to read one book a week for an entire year. The task sounded familiar enough, so how could I go wrong?

To be honest, I don’t think I went wrong at all. Nelson is the one who’s wrong in so many ways that I almost stopped reading the book, but finished because I kind of loved how bad it was. There are many reasons why I found the book to be pitiful, but I was most taken aback by the tone Nelson uses to address her fellow readers. It’s one of a group dynamic, as if all of us readers are all reading for the same reasons, reading the same types of things, and up against the same reading obstacles (time, interest, friends who think we’re crazy for reading). She approaches the topic with a “we’re all in this together” attitude that doesn’t apply here. While many of us booklovers may experience similar revelations or obstructions with our reading, I don’t want to read some treatise proclaiming “we do this” or “we do that”. I don’t need to be told what I do or why I do it; that’s not why I read about readers. I read about them because the most honest authors of such books do nothing more than chart their own behaviors and search them for meaning. They are about the individual, not the group, and in that way it’s fun to explore your own similarities or dissimilarities to the author’s quirks. It’s not about what “we” as readers do, but what you or I as distinct individuals do with our reading.

However, Nelson’s approach that all “us readers” think alike is surprising given that she spends a significant amount of time trying to convince us that she was not a quiet, anti-social girl who found solace in books and grew up to be a quiet, bookish woman (apparently, that’s what the rest of us are). “I don’t have bittersweet memories of sitting by the window devouring Little House on the Prairie as other kids whooped it up on the playground. I never once, as an adolescent, chose a fictional Heathcliff over my personal real-life version… Nobody who knows me would ever confuse me with Marian the Librarian (‘Why, Miss Nelson, when you take off your glasses, you’re actually pretty!’) or suggest I left a single social stone unturned in my pursuit of literature.” Well, you know what? I wasn’t a weirdo outcast either, but I still love reading. But if you were a weirdo outcast or still are a weirdo outcast and turn to reading in lieu of social activity, that should be okay, too. While Nelson may be trying to convince non-readers that readers are people too (not that non-readers would really be the market audience for a book about books, but that’s another issue), her pages-long effort to distance herself from the frigid, anti-social reader stereotype is just a bit too much in the way of protest.

Here’s an example of what I mean when I say that Nelson believes all readers are alike (except that she’s the only one who’s ever had a social life): “For me – as, I believe, for a lot of readers – when a book gets overhyped, we get mad. We’re a funny, cliquish group, we book people, and sometimes we resist liking – or even resist opening – the very thing everybody tells us we’re supposed to like.” Which, okay, that may be true on one level, but isn’t that true of many things? Isn’t that one of the reasons one of the boys I dated in college thought he was superior to me, because he listened to music no one’s ever heard of and I listened (and still listen) to – gasp! – pop music? Books get overhyped for many different reasons, but the exposure doesn’t always elicit the same effect. I don’t believe the exalted stance many put toward Midnight’s Children equals the madness over The DaVinci Code. It’s unfair and presumptuous for Nelson to state that all readers shy away from any book that’s received a modicum of press.

Another passage I must point out because it’s so ridiculous: “Explaining the moment of connection between a reader and a book to someone who’s never experienced it is like trying to describe sex to a virgin.” I’m just going to come out and say, definitively, no, it is not. For one thing, I hate it when people try to impart a sexual nature on a nonsexual topic just to make it more stimulating. (How long did we have those horrible “organic experience” Herbal Essences commercials? Like, six years?) But moreover, reading and sex are not comparable activities or feelings. One can safely assume that a virgin will one day have sex and aspires to the status of non-virgin. Not so with non-readers. They don’t think about the day they’ll start reading, wondering which book it’ll be or if the one they’re reading now will finally be the one to take them all the way. Most non-readers are perfectly happy to go their entire lives not reading, so while a virgin may not fully comprehend a description of sex, non-readers probably don’t care to hear about books at all. To sum up: This is a stupid and unnecessary comparison.

I could list many more passages where I shook my head in annoyance, but I’ll just leave this with a simple plea to the author in the event she’s contemplating further books about her reading exploits. Ms. Nelson, Sara – as a reader, and I don’t presume to speak for the group but from my discussions with other readers I believe many would be in agreement with me, don’t try to me why I read or what I gain from it. Tell me why you do and what it means to you. And if you can’t do that, perhaps you should limit your activities to reading and not writing about it.

50. Woe is I

2006-12-11T20:52:00.001-06:00

by Patricia T. O'Connor

I’m not a huge stickler for grammar and it wasn’t until I started learning Spanish that I even realized how important learning the rules of English really is. Everyone was all crazy about Eats, Shoots & Leaves a couple years ago, but I never picked up that book. I’ve always kind of had my eye on Patricia T. O’Connor’s Woe is I, which seemed less like a gift book and more like a book actually concerned with grammar.

I was disappointed to find that the book was more cutsie (cutsier?) than I expected. O’Connor is fond of writing in the sort of voice that you might expect a kindergarten teacher to use with her students. I realize the book is geared at reintroducing grammar to adults who had bad experiences with it in school and her goal is to show that grammar can be fun (whee!), but stop with the sappy sayings already. I mean, are there really people who still don’t know what a noun and a verb are? If so, do you think they’re taking the time to read a book? My guess is no, so I wish O’Connor had taken knowledge of some things, such as basic subject/predicate agreement, simple plurals, and basic punctuation, for granted and assumed an audience who would actually pick up a grammar book for fun probably already knows most of this stuff. A brief review would have been okay, but the entire chapters dedicated to these subjects were somewhat undermining in their pedagogy.

Nevertheless, O’Connor does offer bounds of information that is useful to any writer who wishes to tidy up her prose (and useful to any reader who is daily faced with authors who break all sorts of grammatical rules). O’Connor deftly answers some grammar issues that have plagued me for some time:

- When multiplying names, you don’t use an apostrophe. It’s “two Johns” and not “two John’s” or two “Johns’” unless you’re expressing possession, of course.

- You do use an apostrophe when multiplying numbers, years, or initials. “1950’s.” “CD’s.” “6’s.”

- When a subject has two parts and one is singular and the other is plural, the verb agrees with the noun closest to it. “Either the papers or the folder is in his locker.” “Neither the bookmark nor the books were on the shelf.” (I already knew how to use either/or and neither/nor, thank you very much.)

- The subjunctive uses “were” not “was,” which is something I’ve always thought was the rule, but which people violate everyday. “I wish I were the kind of person who gets paid to read everyday,” not, “I wish I was…”

- “Stationery” is paper. “Stationary” means standing still. That one still trips me up.

- If a quotation is inside a sentence and not the entire sentence, the ending quotation mark goes inside the final punctuation. I can’t think of any examples of this right now, but I’ve had reason to question it before.

I also finally learned what a dangling participle is (a clause which is attached to a subject other than the one to which it refers) and had several of my grammatical suspicions confirmed. For example, to say “the reason is because” is redundant. I’ve always thought it sounded clumsy, but it turns out that it’s also wrong. It’s okay to start a sentence with “and” or “but”. (Ooh! I just did the quotation thing!) “E.g.” and “i.e.” are not interchangeable – the former means “for example” and the latter means “that is”. It irks me when people use them incorrectly because they’re rather pretentious bits of grammar and you just make yourself look stupid if you do it wrong.

O’Connor also includes several lists of words that are often confused (compliment/complement), sound like they mean something else (“noisome” doesn’t mean “noisy”, but “foul-smelling”), mistaken (“any one” and “anyone”), or just plain used wrong (“impact” is not a verb, people!). Still, I’m not sure how useful Woe is I will be as a reference book. I’d honestly rather have a cut and dry textbook with a killer index that I can flip through whenever I question my grammatical prowess. I don’t need to be convinced of grammar’s importance nor do I need little jokes to fool me into thinking that learning about the English language can be fun. O’Connor’s target audience is the average person who hasn’t thought of grammar since, well, grammar school. While the book is written to appeal to that audience, the book’s greatest fault is assuming this group is its audience. Smarten things up a bit and it could appeal to those of us actually interested in reading and writing, too.

49. It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken

2006-12-07T18:16:00.001-06:00

by Seth

Oh, Seth. What can you ever say about Seth that will truly capture how amazing he is? I read him first in McSweeney’s, had the rare opportunity to see him talk at a Columbia gallery show (I now know it was rare because I’ve since talked to people who were unable to get in), and fell in love with Clyde Fans. I would already own everything in his catalogue if it weren’t for the money (again, why aren’t there used comic shops?) and, you know, the fact that I always want to read about ten different books at the same time so it’s not too difficult to find a distraction. Reading this early collection of Palookaville issues after it being a year since the last time I read Seth was nice because I know there’s a finite amount of his work published together and stretching them out means there will always be something new for me to find.

It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken is autobiographical and it follows the author’s obsession with a long forgotten cartoonist whom he knows only as Kalo. It’s in a old copy of The New Yorker that he finds Kalo’s single contribution to cartooning and it drives him nuts to think that he made it that far only to disappear afterwards. Seth’s research, which yields little findings, eventually causes him to travel to Ontario to visit Kalo’s former home only to find another dead end. Finally, a reference to a realty company leads him to Kalo’s daughter who confirms the artist’s death and shares the little she knows about his work. Although Kalo had stopped cartooning by the time his daughter was born, he did leave behind paintings and Seth’s visit to his still-alive mother offers the chance to look into the scrapbook she’s kept of her son’s work. The epilogue reaffirms that Seth has had little success finding much of Kalo’s work, but he does include all eleven pieces he’s managed to collect.

As I’ve found with Seth’s other pieces, the story is almost secondary to the look and the feel that he creates in his panels. We see his solitude and his introversion; we sense his disdain for his brother and his surprise at any change in his mother’s home; we feel the pull of his obsession in the silent images of a night sky. How he’s able to do this is beyond me. Whenever I read a particularly good graphic novel, I always think that it must be much harder to create a story in this medium than in plain old prose. I mean, we get to spell everything out for our readers, but cartoonists? They have to create isolation and ecstasy and disappointment and contentment without ever saying a word. Well, the good ones do, at least. There are plenty of not-so-great cartoonists out there, just as there are plenty of not-so-great novelists, but Seth is certainly not among that group.

What I like best about the story is that it’s about an obsession. It’s about that moment you discover a new author or musician and suddenly have to know everything about them. Whether that thing is popular or obscure, there’s a pleasure to be had in searching out all the information you can find and feeling like you’re the one who knows the most about this person who’s had such an effect on your life. Seth, as he writes himself, is a cut and dry, factual man with little interest in emotional work, but his whole-hearted fascination with Kalo’s cartoons is compelling in its own way. In the same vein, I can’t wait to collect the rest of Seth’s work.

48. Gilead

2006-12-03T20:18:00.000-06:00

by Marilynne Robinson

Gilead is a very simple story. John Ames is a preacher at the end of his life. His son is seven and his wife is several decades younger than his seventy-some years and, knowing that the natural progression of things won’t allow for him to see them into their later years, the novel is a letter to the young boy, chronicling all of Ames’s life. I didn’t know much about the story when I picked it up – just that it won a Pulitzer and that many of the chickliterati were gleeful over the return of Marilynne Robinson (it’s been about ten years since her first novel). Sometimes I wonder why some books are chosen for these prestigious awards; sometimes they’re boring and tedious or impossible to follow or just plain weird. In this case, as I said earlier, the story is so simple and unadorned - there isn’t even really a plot to speak of – but Robinson creates this character filled with questions and a lust for truth, a character whose fascination with life is countered only by the physical weariness his age brings, that you can’t help but feel him in your own heart. Perhaps that’s why some of these awards are bestowed and, as far as I’m concerned, that’s as good a reason as any.

I’m Catholic, so the idea of clerics marrying and having children is somewhat foreign to me. I have to be honest and I say that I was glad to read that the reason for Ames having such a young son was that his first wife and child died very early on. It made the idea of a man in his late sixties marrying a woman in her thirties and having a child with her much easier to understand. Well, “stomach” is the word I first typed because the idea of an older man going after a younger woman disturbs me, especially since I’m at the age where older men seem to think they can legitimately make passes at me and I just think, “You could be my father. Ew.” But that’s not the issue in this story. Ames makes it clear in his epistle that he’s felt alone since the death of the childhood friend who became his wife and although he’s felt some peace and serenity in that solitude he’s always wanted a family. His regret that he will not get to see his new wife and son grow old is prominent throughout the writing.

There’s another layer to the story, though. Ames comes from a religious lineage. His father was a preacher and his father before him was a preacher and a lot of his writings are recollections of the things his father and grandfather have done, both of them colorful characters in their own right. His best friend is also a preacher with a family of his own and it’s with this man’s son that Ames maintains a complicated relationship. Named after the Reverend, John Ames Boughton is the son whose life decisions break Ames’s heart. There’s some mystery at what actually went on, but when the truth comes out we learn that years ago Boughton had a child with a young, poor girl whom he essentially abandoned. His father and sister visited the child and even offered to take care of her full time, but the mother’s family wouldn’t allow her to be taken. The baby soon died from an infection she received from a cut on her foot, but Boughton is not much affected. The one thing Ames wants – children and a family – is the one thing Boughton turned his back on without a second thought.

At the point that Ames is writing this, Boughton has returned to Gilead, Iowa after many years of absence. His own father is dying and calling for him and he stirs up all sorts of emotions in Ames, especially after revealing his current place in life. I don’t think Gilead is a story that will appeal to everyone. It’s very introspective and emotional (though rarely sappy) and it’s easy to question Ames’s passivity. He asserts that he merely shares the profession of his forebears and would have always been called to the vocation; he prays for Boughton without ever fully engaging his anger and jealousy; he’s never left his Midwestern hometown. But there is beauty in always having known what you were meant to do and where you are meant to be. There is honor in providing objective guidance, especially when it’s not wanted. And there is something to be said for the unquenchable love for a son. Gilead is not a story for everyone because it’s not a story about everyone. It’s the story of one man and it’s told very well.

47. As I Lay Dying

2006-11-30T19:58:00.000-06:00

by William Faulkner

I’m surprised. I didn’t dislike As I Lay Dying. In fact, I even kind of liked it and I can see myself rereading it at some point. Why did I expect to dislike it? Well, there’s that problem I have with classic southern writers; they don’t seem to grab me nearly as much as they grab the rest of the reading populace. There’s also the fact that the book is written in stream-of-consciousness, which I almost always have difficulty following. So then, why did I want to read it? To be perfectly honest, there’s this little-known movie call Kicking and Screaming (not the Will Ferrell movie, this one came out much longer ago) about a group of college graduates who find themselves with nothing to do after said graduation. At one point Max is sitting in his apartment, staring at books, and saying, “As I Lay Dying…Heart of Darkness…” Then he starts singing and it’s really more amusing if you just see the movie, but since then I’ve wanted to read the book. Dumb reason, I know, but it got me to read one of America’s most famous authors, right?

Here’s the story as I understood it. Addie Bundren is dying. Her son Cash is building her coffin right outside her window, so as she’s passing away her last days she hears the sawing and the banging and witnesses the construction of her final home. Her husband Anse isn’t much for hard work, so much so that he believes sweat will kill him. Darl and Jewel, two more sons, make one final delivery for three dollars which causes them to miss Addie’s death. Vardaman, the youngest son, likens his mother to a fish that he caught, this being the only way his immature mind can comprehend her death; meanwhile, Dewey Dell, their daughter, fans over Addie as she slowly dies.

Anse’s final promise to his wife is that he’ll bury her with her family in Jefferson. Once she dies the family packs up and embarks on a trip that is at parts funny, at parts disturbing, and all together revealing about the Bundrens. Told from the points of view of every family member, and from characters that aren’t part of the family, we get to see into Bundrens from every angle. We get to see how Jewel can be both determined and selfish. Darl is the most introspective of the bunch, perhaps taking the death the hardest. Cash breaks his leg, but sucks it up and goes the entire trip without complaining. Dewey Dell has a secret and visits a couple pharmacists on the trip, searching for a drug that will take away her pregnancy. It’s generally thought that Anse is lazy and many of the characters wonder why he doesn’t just bury Addie in their hometown. And we learn from a section told by Addie herself about her somewhat apathetic relationship with love.

But there were some things I didn’t understand and I did look up some summaries on the internet. I didn’t really understand why Vardaman kept calling his mother a fish and I wasn’t entirely sure who it was that was pregnant and wanted not to be (these parts were told from the viewpoints of the pharmacists so I thought it might be a flashback on Addie’s life). I also didn’t understand much of the ending – Darl goes crazy and there are all these bananas and Anse introduces the children to a new “Mrs. Bundren” – but I learned that that was okay. There’s been a lot of confusion and debate over what these things mean and whether Anse traveled all the way to Jefferson just to meet a new wife. I was also suspicious of a passage wherein Vardaman confesses that he saw something which Dewey Dell made him keep a secret. Generally it’s thought that he saw Darl going crazy and setting fire to a barn, but I kind of thought Darl and Dewey Dell had an incestuous relationship and Vardaman had seen something he shouldn’t have. Turns out there are some theories leaning toward this as well.

One of the things I’ve learned by reading “classic” books is that it’s okay if you don’t understand everything right away. Some writers are just difficult and abstruse and they’re better read if accompanied by the thoughts of someone who spent a lot of time connecting some of those dots. Which isn’t to say that maintaining your own opinions on literature isn’t important, but it’s okay to get a little help every now and then. Now, I’ll admit that I did check out the Oprah lectures for As I Lay Dying, mainly out of curiosity for how she guided her readers through a book that’s seemingly impenetrable to even seasoned readers. She had video lectures from a Faulkner academic, quizzes to test yourself on how much you understood, and FAQs to give you answers to some of those things you didn’t. It was actually pretty comprehensive and if I had been taught to fear literature I’m sure her site would be a welcome helping hand. I’m not the biggest fan of Oprah’s book club, but most of us ardent readers can attribute our love of books to an influential source. We weren’t born this way; we became this way. If Oprah can help someone discover that in themselves, no matter how late in life, that can only be a good thing.

46. The Turn of the Screw, The Aspern Papers, and Two Other Stories

2006-11-27T18:10:00.000-06:00

by Henry James

Well, I didn’t like The Turn of the Screw nearly as much as I thought I would. In fact, I can’t say I even really understood it, which is disappointing. It’s something of a ghost story that’s being retold at Christmas and it involves a nameless narrator in care of two children. From what I gather, she’s a new governess and the children are home from school. The boy, Miles, has been kicked out of his boarding school for stealing letters while the girl, Flora, is living at home in the care of Mrs. Grose. Their uncle is living elsewhere and I don’t know where their parents are. Probably dead. So, the governess starts seeing apparitions of former servants Mr. Quint and Miss Jessel and I think the ghosts are somehow controlling what the children do. The governess is scared but reluctant to call the uncle lest he think her incapable. The boy dies at the end. Are the ghosts real or is it all in governess’s mind? That seems to be the main question, but, man, did it take lot of hinting around to get there.

After reading the Wikipedia entry on the story it seems that my interpretation isn’t too far off. As in, it’s unknown if the ghosts are real or if the governess is just crazy. There are a few details I missed though: the uncle doesn’t want to have anything to do with the children, which is why the governess doesn’t want to call him. After learning that Miss Jessel and Mr. Quint were lovers she worries that the two are using the children to continue their relationship, which…ew. I remember something about the governess being worried for the children’s innocence, but I totally did not pick up on that. I’ve become a fan of James’s writing, but this one just didn’t do it for me. When I see “classic ghost story” I think of Poe and The Turn of the Screw is like Poe on Nyquil, which is to say “sleep-inducing.”

I enjoyed The Aspern Papers so much more. It’s the story of a literary historian so obsessed with getting the letters a famous American poet wrote to his lover that he actually goes to the woman’s house in Venice to win them from her. Here the narrator meets Juliana, the lover many years older though still single, and her niece Tina, a middle-aged woman who’s also single. Together the two occupy a large house; at the narrator’s suggestion they rent out some rooms overlooking the garden where he may write and enjoy the flowers. They don’t know the real reason he’s there, but after Tina reveals her aunt’s romantic history, the narrator expounds on his love of Aspern’s work and his enthusiasm for the locked up letters. Juliana becomes ill and, in her sleep, the narrator sneaks into her room to look for the papers, but she suddenly regains her wits and screams at the narrator, causing him to run from the house. When he returns he learns from Tina that Juliana has died and that, yes, there are papers to be had. The price for the papers? Becoming Juliana’s “relation” by way of marrying Tina. He runs off again, only to return, having rethought the proposition, and find that Tina’s burned the papers. This was actually much more suspenseful than The Turn of the Screw and the ending was both satisfying and amusing. It serves the (yet another) unnamed narrator right that his obsession crushes him as much as it sustains him.

I feel similarly about the two short stories: I liked The Beast in the Jungle but didn’t understand what happened in The Jolly Corner. In the former, a man has been worried for his entire life that something horrible will happen to him. He’s so worried that he never takes a chance on anything and let’s a potential romance with long time friend May pass him by. Upon her death May tells him the real truth, that his curse is not to have something bad happen but that nothing will happen to him at all. Ever. You’ll have to look up a summary for The Jolly Corner because I just read through it without picking up on anything.

I guess I see where people have problems with Henry James now: sometimes he writes these great, detailed, and engrossing stories, but sometimes he’s just boring.

45. Native Son

2006-11-24T10:14:00.000-06:00

by Richard Wright

Richard Wright’s Native Son is a book essential to the U of C experience. Like Marx and Durkheim, I don’t think many people leave the school without having read it. It’s not only one of the classic texts of the twentieth century, but it’s also set smack dab in the middle of Hyde Park. I read it my first year for a general humanities course, but I never really finished it, getting thrown off by the political tirades at the end. I’d always planned to reread it, so eight years later that’s what I’ve done.

At #20 on the Modern Library 100, Native Son can be summed up as a really bad day in the life of Bigger Thomas. Of course, it’s much more than that under the surface, but the plot is interesting enough to make it an engaging read even if you’re unable to get much further than that. Poor and black in Chicago, Bigger gets work through relief aid as the new chauffeur to the Daltons, an affluent white family living near the university. On Bigger’s first day of work he meets Mr. Dalton, who assures Bigger that he’s all for helping blacks by donating his money to charities, Mrs. Dalton, blind and ethereal in the white dresses she wears, and Mary Dalton, the couple’s rebellious daughter who makes Bigger nervous by asking him if he belongs to unions. That night Bigger is tasked with taking Mary to a university lecture, but she changes the plans and has him pick up her boyfriend Jan, an admitted member of the communist party. They drive around and ask Bigger to take them a restaurant where his “people” eat, they get drunk, and Bigger takes them home. Once in the Dalton’s driveway, Bigger’s realizes that Mary is too drunk to get upstairs by herself. While helping her into her bed, Mrs. Dalton comes into the room. Bigger panics, knowing what people would think if he, a black man, were found in a white girl’s room, and in his panic he smothers Mary with a pillow. Subsequently, in a very brutal scene, he stuffs the body in a furnace and hopes he won’t get caught.

Bigger does get caught and the ensuing story is a telling response to racism in America. I remember discussing it in my first year Hum class and spending way too many minutes on a small scene in the beginning where Bigger kills a rat in the one-room apartment he shares with his brother, sister, and their mother. “A huge black rat squealed and leaped at Bigger’s trouser-leg and snagged it in his teeth, hanging on,” the text reads. The instructor, and the rest of the class in their eagerness to prove themselves smart by agreeing with her, claimed that the rat symbolized Bigger’s life by the simple fact that Wright had called it a “black rat.” Which, to this day, I find ridiculous. I was the only person who questioned her, my argument being that the presence of the rat goes to show the squalor in which Bigger’s family lives, that it’s part of the setting and as for it being “black,” well, you just don’t see many white rats running around. One of my classmates them asked me what the rat meant to me, to which I said, “Nothing! It’s descriptive!” After having reread the book I’d also say the scene is a good opportunity to showcase Bigger’s violent nature, as he goes after the rat with an iron skillet and doesn’t relent until it’s dead, but I maintain that the rat does not equal Bigger.

I like retelling that story because it was the first of many times that I’d be surrounded by very smart people and realize, “Wow, you people think too much.” Not that I thought I was smarter than them, but there is a lot to dissect and analyze in this story, not the least of which is that whites start losing their trust in blacks as a whole once Bigger’s found to be the culprit (there’s a quite painful scene where one man reports that he’s lost his job because his white employer won’t risk having blacks around). In fact, I went back and looked through the paper I wrote for that class where I focused on Bigger’s relationship with the Dalton women and how his fear of them resulted in Mary’s murder and, I have to tell you, it wasn’t half bad. I also imagine much has been written on Wright’s view of communism and how it relates to racial equality, as Bigger finds his lawyer through Jan and there’s this fifteen page stretch that reads as a sort of communist manifesto (ah yes…that’s why I never finished it!). This is a book that can be examined from many different angles, but what makes it a literary staple is that it’s intelligent and suspenseful and heartbreaking all at the same time. It’s really just a very good read.

And we spent twenty minutes talking about a rat.

44. The Sign of Four

2006-11-19T13:45:00.000-06:00

by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Shortly after finishing A Study in Scarlet I dove right into The Sign of Four. I would have continued reading my entire Sherlock Holmes collection if it weren’t for the fact that I’d like to make these nine last as long as I can. And the fact that I have to go to work everyday. Both Holmes and Dr. Watson are both such intriguing characters that it’s hard to not want to read all their stories at once.

The Sign of Four is the second of the Holmes/Watson adventures and it brings us some interesting facts. Did you know that Sherlock Holmes was addicted to crack? Okay, not crack, but he did use the cocaine quite liberally. “I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one,” he tells Watson after Watson declines his offer to share. “I find it, however, so transcendentally stimulating and clarifying to the mind that its secondary action is a matter of small moment.” Did people regularly use such drugs back in Victorian England? Was I the only one shocked to read Conan Doyle’s nonchalant description of drug use? I guess it’s not so surprising that Holmes would use drugs of some sort, but I really didn’t expect to be all out on the table and everything.

This story also brings us Miss Mary Morstan, who comes to visit the detective because she’s been receiving a series of pearls, sent on the same day each year, and a letter that requests her to meet the unknown sender. Holmes and Watson insist on going with her and it’s kind of amusing to read Watson’s reactions to her distress. He wants to comfort her and protect her and it’s easy to tell he has something of a crush on her. By the end of the story she’s slated to become his wife, but in getting there we meet a set of Indian brothers whose father held a secret, a murder that leaves one of the brothers dead in his locked-from-the-inside room, a treasure hidden high in an attic, and a peg-legged man with a dwarf for an accomplice.

Sounds like the plot of a cheesy mystery, but characteristics that are cliché in our world are morsels of intrigue in Holmes’s world. Once the police are called in the first brother becomes the natural suspect, but after a little bit of observation Holmes comes to his brilliant deduction: “His name, I have every reason to believe, is Jonathan Small. He is a poorly educated man, small, active, with his right leg off, and wearing a wooden stump which is worn away upon the inner side. His left boot has a coarse, square-toed sole, with an iron band round the heel. He is a middle-aged man, much sun-burned, and has been a convict…” And so on. These are the details Holmes is able to garner after sparse investigation and it’s so much fun learning of how he came to have knowledge of these facts.

I never knew that Watson got married so it’ll be interesting to see how he and Holmes interact in the coming stories. I know that Holmes has a series of women himself, though I’ve yet to meet one, and I always assumed that all the stories took place from the headquarters of 221B Baker Street – Watson’s observations of Holmes in the comfort of their shared home was always amusing and I’m curious to see how that works once they’re apart. Of course, I’m assuming Watson moves out to share a home with Miss Morstan, but possessing as little knowledge of the great detective that I do, maybe that’s not what happens after all. I do know one thing: Conan Doyle kills Holmes in the next one and I can’t wait to find out how that happens.

43. Ex Libris

2006-11-15T22:07:00.000-06:00

by Anne Fadiman

Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris is a book that has received much attention among the Chickliterati. A slim volume, I’ve lusted after it many times when I browsed the literary criticism section of Borders because if there’s one thing a bibliophile loves more than reading a great story is reading about books and reading. On some level I think it has to do with wanting to feel like we’re not so weird for the habits we endure, but I think it’s also just as much about the vicarious and voyeuristic act of reading about others’ love of books.

Because any book like this is bound to elicit some very personal emotions from an avid reader, I think the best way for me to go about describing it as a whole is to describe my reactions to specific parts. Thus:

In the preface (already we have insight in the preface!), Fadiman writes that books are often written about as toasters, with which I’ll agree and it’s the reason I don’t read many book reviews. Sometimes I think reviewers don’t actually read the book and, as a result, can’t do much more than describe the plot rather methodically. Now, I review books in my spare time (oh, would that I could say “for a living”!) so I know it’s kind of haughty for me to criticize book reviewers, but I have actually read the entirety of every book I’ve ever reviewed and I think that simple practice has made me a fairly decent reviewer. (I judge this from a few very complimentary reactions I’ve received from the authors of said books. I’m not tooting my own horn or anything…I’m just saying.) Anyway, Fadiman’s problem with this view of readers as mere consumers is that it “neatly omits what I consider the heart of reading: not whether we wish to purchase a new book but how we maintain our connections with our old books, the one we have lived with for years, the ones whose textures and colors and smells have become as familiar to us as our children’s skin.” I believe that is so true. It’s the reason why I couldn’t just buy a new copy of Dandelion Wine, signed by the author, or why I ended up getting rid of a nice copy of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn only to steal back tattered high school copy I had given to a friend. As songs and smells can bring memories racing to the forefront, so too can a singular copy of a well-read book.

Fadiman is fan of the thoroughly read book, by which I mean she dog-ears pages, writes in the margins, and breaks spines. The thought of which makes me cringe! A few weeks ago I had to copy a book’s pages and, in trying to scan the full page, it was necessary for me to break the book’s spine. It was painful and I felt guilty for what I had done. For me it was like hurting a puppy! By Fadiman’s definition I’m a “courtly lover of books,” someone who, “always remove[s] their bookmarks when the assignation is over.” This is opposed to what she calls the “carnal lovers [who] are likely to leave romantic mementos, often three-dimensional and messy.” Carnal lovers make me want to cry. I see them on the El, rolling back the first half of a paperback, folding in a page instead of using a bookmark – I always want to scream, “Why are you doing that?!” Although, I have to admit that when I read books for reviews I do write small notes in the margins. But only in pencil! And only because it really is the most effective way for me to remember what I was feeling as I was reading the book. Otherwise, count my books among the read and pristine.

“Between them, our parents had about seven thousand books…other people’s walls looked naked to me.” My parents had nowhere near seven thousand books – I remember my father once saying we had around a thousand – but I remember fondly the living room in our New Mexico home, lined with full-height bookcases filled, of course, with books. “Ours weren’t flat white backdrops for pictures. They were works of art themselves, floor-to-ceiling mosaics whose vividly pigmented tiles were all tall skinny rectangles.” Yeah, I don’t understand those people who use their bookcases to display knick-knacks or the TV designers who promote the aesthetic (yes, Nate Berkus, even you). Nothing is so beautiful as a wall of bookshelves filled to the brim with all sorts of books. It’s what I aspire my home to be.

These are just a few of the things that struck me as I was reading Ex Libris. I think anyone with a heart for books will love this little gem and I can’t wait to pick up Fadiman’s other writings. While I’m usually happy when I can finish a book in one day, I really wished this one could have lasted for much longer.

42. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns

2006-11-12T15:30:00.000-06:00

by Frank Miller

I’ve wanted to get into the superhero comics for a while, but the eternal question for someone who didn’t grow up with comics is, where do I start? I really wanted to get into X-Men so my knowledge of their stories would extend beyond what I’ve seen in the movies, but they’ve got a lot of stuff out there but a lot of different writers and artists and I’m still at a loss as to where I should begin. Most answers to this question have been to jump right in wherever, but I’d like to make the most of my reading time so it’s kind of hard for me to do that. Plus, this would be a much easier decision if, say, I were able to pick up some for cheap at a used bookstore. That is, after all, how I make a lot of my reading decisions. But where can you find used comics in Chicago? Seriously, if any of you know, drop me a line.

So I went with Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. The story takes place when Bruce Wayne is about sixty and Batman is thought to be gone, ten years having passed since his last sighting. Gotham’s no less plagued by crime and Bruce is still haunted by his first encounter with the fearsome bats and by the death of Robin. The early hours of the morning find Bruce staring at the chamber that holds his late sidekick’s costume. (Kudos to Miller for giving Alfred the word “somnambulism” to describe Bruce’s late night habits. Such a great word.) The breaking point is when Harvey Dent, aka Two-Face, is released from the sanatorium and the murders again run rampant. Here, also, is where we meet the new Robin, a brainy girl named Carrie who isn’t so much asked to be Robin as she takes it upon herself to follow Batman around and get into trouble. She kind of saves his ass, too, so she does prove her worth in the end.

Also making a return is the stone-faced man in a nearby sanatorium cell who breaks out into a devilish grin when he learns of Batman’s return. After he’s deemed cured, the Joker wastes little time in driving the public to insanity. The two eventually wind up in a carnival fun house where Batman gouges out the Joker’s eyes but can’t bring himself to kill his enemy. The Joker dies anyway and his body explodes, killing a number of cops. Prior to this Batman was fighting a bunch of mutants (okay, I didn’t really understand what this was about, but maybe I’m just not familiar enough with the Batman oeuvre) and all the ruckus in Gotham has caught the attention of the President. Who does he call to reign in the overzealous crime fighter? That would be Superman.

Bringing in Superman as both colleague and cop was an awesome turn, as was seeing the two of them battle it out. When I first heard of this book I also heard that Superman dies at Batman’s hand and I thought, what? Superman can’t die. He’s a super man. Regular men can’t best him. At least not without some kryptonite. But I didn’t really hear right and while he shrivel up and die while trying to stop a nuclear warhead, he doesn’t really die. Batman, on the other hand, meets an end of sorts and we come to the book’s close as Clark Kent mourns at his grave. The final page, however, tells us this is nowhere near the end.

I guess I’ll read the sequel to this book. I don’t know that I liked it as much as I could have, though. To be honest, I really didn’t like Robin and thought she was kind of annoying. And I feel like my huge lack of knowledge in the genre worked against me; I was in the dark most of the time so stuff that may be been really cool to those in know left me confused. Like the mutants. I still don’t know what those were about. But can you fault a girl for trying to undo her comic-free upbringing? I’m just trying to figure out all that I missed.

41. Larry's Party

2006-11-09T19:34:00.000-06:00

by Carol Shields

I need to read this book again.

Let me set the record straight on this: I’m not disappointed in the book, but I’m disappointed in myself for how I read it. When I started my second year of the 52 books, I set certain goals for myself to read more award-winning and historically acclaimed novels. I fell into a reading slump for awhile, which meant that I had to start reading faster to ensure I’d make my quota. And instead of letting my whims dictate which book I chose next, I made myself read the books I’d promised myself I would. I realize now that was a bad idea because I can make a reading plan of all the books I want to read and in what order I read them, but something always comes along to knock the plan around. There is such a thing as reading a book at the wrong time, being in the wrong mood for it or not having enough time for it. This is what happened with Larry’s Party. I need to read it again.

From 1977 to 1997, this is Larry Weller’s life. We meet him just before he’s to marry Dorrie Shaw and embark on the honeymoon that will set the tone for the rest of his life. Larry is just a regular guy, having worked in a flower shop since school and living in his parents’ home up until his wedding. He doesn’t have much in the way of aspirations, but he knows he has to support his wife and the son that is quickly on his way (the baby being the motivation behind the marriage). On the honeymoon to England, Larry’s first introduced to the idea of garden mazes and is smitten from that point forward. He even goes so far as to start a maze in the lawn of his Winnipeg home, but after years of cultivation Dorrie’s irritation with the project gets the best of her and she bulldozes half of the maze before Larry rushes home to stop her. The two divorce shortly thereafter.

Larry moves to Oak Park where he meets Beth Prior, the woman who’s to become his second wife. He sends money for the care of his son Ryan and takes care of him on vacations. Beth is different from Dorrie – she’s more sexually open, she studies female saints, and is accepting of the landscape design business Larry’s started for himself. Maybe Larry’s happier now or maybe Beth is a better fit for him or maybe he’s just learned how to be a better husband after the dissolution of his first marriage, but it’s evident that Larry’s happier in this part of his life than he has been before. At least, until he turns forty. “He understands at last the rather surprising, hard dullness of being an adult,” Carol Shields writes, “and perhaps for that reason he’s become a man too easily consoled by games and surfaces. And now, suddenly, having celebrated four decades of his life, he is a sad man but without the sad history to back it up.”

That pretty much sums up Larry’s character. It also sums up a lot of other people’s characters, which is why Shields’s account of his life is so remarkable. Larry isn’t incredibly smart, but he’s not by any means an idiot. He’s not a stud with the ladies, but he certainly does all right. He tries his best to be a father from afar and he’s truly broken up about his marriage’s failure, the upside being that he seems far more comfortable in his second marriage to Beth. He’s never really had any career goals, but stumbles into his life’s work by accident. He’s a regular guy, like so many of us regular people who only want our lives to mean something. When Larry reaches forty, his sadness at not having done more is palpable, both to him and to us. That he’s able to have made something out if all at the end is what makes his story amazing.

Even as I write about this book and flip through its pages I know I didn’t get as much out of it as I could have. I was busy. I was trying to read other things for GB and it wasn’t until I took the book on a train trip to Michigan that I devoted an uninterrupted number of hours to it. I saw that I could have loved it, but it was too late. This wasn’t the right time for me to read it, sandwiched between other books I was trying to review or finish for Book Club. This isn’t a book to finish quickly. This is one through which you travel slowly, feeling each page in your fingers as you turn it, drinking in the words and taking your time to get to know Larry, realizing that you’re getting to know yourself through Larry. It’s not a book to read because you’ve decided you want to read Orange Prize shortlists; it’s a book to read because Shields is able to tell us so much about ourselves through a man so ordinary we probably wouldn’t look twice if passed him on the street. I’m glad I read this once, but I have no doubt that the second time will prove itself the more endearing one.

40. The Anxiety of Everyday Objects

2006-11-06T20:03:00.000-06:00

by Aurelie Sheehan

I first learned about The Anxiety of Everyday Objects through an issue of Bitch wherein the article’s author discusses the evolution of chick lit. To some extent I think that chick lit is a really unfortunate genre because it allows for a proliferation of women to write about incredibly stupid and insipid things like clothes and shoes and men and do it in a really uninspiring way. Now, these things don’t have to be stupid and insipid nor do they have to be uninspiring, but publishers have realized that women will buy anything that features shoes on a cover and a pink spine, regardless of how poorly written it is. It’s like the literary equivalent of a Meg Ryan or Reese Witherspoon romantic comedy.

That’s not meant to be an insult to either of these actresses, because both have done some great movies, but they’ve also done some very fluffy ones. The unfortunate thing about chick lit is that, now, pretty much any book written for women and by women is labeled and cast off as chick lit and thus unworthy. What the Bitch article talks about is how, maybem chick lit isn’t as bad as we’ve made it out to be because as a result it’s opened up a path for women authors that, no matter how talented they are, may not have gotten a chance otherwise. The Anxiety of Everyday Objects is mentioned as one of these books.

Anxiety is Winona Bartlett’s story. She’s got an MFA in film but works as a secretary in a law firm. She does her job well and fits in at the firm, but it’s not her dream. It’s just a way to pay her bills: “Everyone has to make a living, even fledgling filmmakers. Is there one kind of job that’s better than another?” she asks, in defense of her choice. Sandy Spires is a new lawyer at the firm; confident, intelligent, impeccably dressed, and, most impressive to Winona, blind, Sandy acts a source of fascination for Winona. She’s able to handle the male lawyers with ease and commands an air of importance and intrigue wherever she goes. Owing to Sandy, Winona finds herself promoted to office manager, much to the dismay of the former office manager whose job description gets demoted, and more involved in her job than ever. Her love life, though, is unstable as she breaks up with Jeremy the Sincere, rebuffs the advances of her perfectly nice colleague Rex, and finds herself literally tied up with on-again/off-again William.

Overall, I really liked Anxiety. I have a couple criticisms, which I’ll get to in a minute, but I read a fair amount of “serious” books, you know? Sometimes I just want a light read, something refreshing and palate cleansing that doesn’t make me think too much. Something delightfully entertaining. The problem with most chick lit is that what these authors often take for refreshing and entertaining actually ends up trite and insulting. Unlike the heroines of Jane Green novels or the ditzy Becky Bloomwood of Shopaholic fame, Winona is actually a realistic portrait of an intelligent, thinking woman trying to figure out who she is and how her job defines her. Winona’s plight is, trust me, very near and dear to my heart so it’s refreshing indeed to see a “chick lit” author treat this with some heft. Winona isn’t troubled by which pair of Manolo stilettos she’s going to wear that day – she’s troubled by the fact that it’s up to her to fire the receptionist for being late. And when she does engage in some flirtations with Rex, her actions have some very real consequences.

What I didn’t like about the book was how it ended. After learning that Sandy’s motive for being in the law firm isn’t as straightforward as she’s led everyone to believe, Winona ends up leaving her job on her own terms and that’s how it ends. One can guess that she starts things up with Rex, but I take issue with the fact that this is supposed to be some sort of happy ending. Winona feels stuck in a job that’s nowhere near her dream and her happy ending is that she learns she’s strong enough to leave it behind. Okay…what happens after that? Quitting your job is a nice thing to think about, but it loses its shininess once you also think about how you’re going to pay your rent and bills. I’m guessing Winona still had student loan debt following her, so I would have liked to see her a little more troubled. Not that there isn’t something to be said for realizing when it’s time to leave a job that’s sucking your soul dry and feeling a huge sense of relief afterwards, but it’s not a nice, tied with string and a bow kind of happiness. The story doesn’t end there.

(I also take issue with the token black woman – the receptionist – whose son Aurelie Sheehan names “Denzel” of all ridiculous things. She also lives in Harlem. Because all black people in New York live in Harlem and give their children silly names. If you’re going to introduce a non-white character into your otherwise lily white cast, try at least not to make them a total racial caricature. I’m just saying.)

You probably wouldn’t think “chick lit” if you were to come across Anxiety in the bookstore. There’s a woman on the cover, but no martinis or disembodied feet in stilettos or any pink to speak of. “Would a major publishing house have taken a chance on this novel if there weren’t already a market for stories about young women living and working and falling in love in the city – that is, if there weren’t chick lit?” Jessica Jernigan poses the question in Bitch and I have to admit, she has a point there. I still think most chick lit is moronic, but if it paves the way for more thought-provoking work, can I really condemn it? I guess not.

Don’t think you’ll ever catch me on El with one of those pink-spined things, though.

39. The Big Fat Kill

2006-11-01T18:49:00.000-06:00

by Frank Miller

Book three in the Sin City series, The Big Fat Kill is Dwight’s story again. This part is featured in the movie, with Clive Owen, Rosario Dawson, and Benecio Del Toro. In case you haven’t seen the movie, Dwight is Shellie’s new boyfriend, in as much as either of them can really have a significant other because, as a waitress in a seedy bar it seems that Shellie would have many male suitors. And I don’t really buy that Dwight would consider himself tied to one person for any extended period of time. So I think that by calling Dwight Shellie’s “boyfriend,” he’s really just the guy she happens to be seeing at the time. Anyway, Shellie used to go with Jackie-Boy, a cop who comes to her apartment drunk, with his thug friends in an attempt to gain further favors from her. With Dwight hiding behind the shower curtain, Jackie-Boy’s visit to the bathroom results in his head being shoved in a toilet, a scene that is several pages devoid of words that are more shadows than drawings and are so much more effective in their silence. The movie does do this scene justice.

Dwight escapes by jumping off the ledge of the bathroom window and, knowing that \ Jackie-Boy and his clan are following him, drives his car straight into Old Town. If you’ve been following along in the series, you know that Old Town is run by hookers, owing to an agreement they have with the law enforcement. However, when Dwight lures Jackie-Boy into their realm and they meet their end, thanks to deadly little Miho, it’s only then that he finds Jackie-Boy’s police badge and realizes that Shellie wasn’t telling him to stop as he jumped off the ledge – she was telling him “He’s a cop.” All bets are off and the girls of Old Town know a war’s coming.

Of course, if you’ve seen the movie you know that Dwight gets captured by angry militants and thrown into a tar pit, to be saved by Miho who delivers the message that Gail has also been caught. Gail is in the hands of Manute, former bodyguard to Ava who is a former love of Dwight. I’m still having some problems figuring the chronology of these books and the only way I know that The Big Fat Kill is after A Dame to Kill For is that Manute is missing his eye in this book, having had it pulled out by Marv in the previous book. I don’t quite know how Dwight’s relationship with Gail falls in – he’s with her after he realizes that Ava is evil, but then he’s with Shellie at the beginning of this book. Then he’s with her at the end, calling her the “Valkyrie at my side,” as if he’s devoted to himself to her again.

Well, I suppose that’s not really an issue because Gail and Dwight probably fall in and out again throughout the series, but I’m still confused as to where Marv’s story falls in. I’m also interested to find out what happens to Becky, the hooker who first lures Jackie-Boy into the gang’s clutches, only to double-cross the friends that protect her by selling Gail out to Manute. At the movie’s end we see her enter an elevator with the ominous Josh Hartnett, but his character hasn’t show up yet so I don’t know if she meets a fitting end for her treason. Next up is That Yellow Bastard, which follows Bruce Willis’s part of the movie and introduces us to Nancy, the highly-desired cowgirl dancer who, if you’ve ever put all seven books together in order, graces the series’ spines. I hear they’re planning a movie for the remaining books, so I should probably get on these pretty soon.

38. Seven Types of Ambiguity

2006-10-29T10:08:00.000-06:00

by Elliot Perlman

When I was in the middle of Seven Types of Ambiguity, this is what I wrote in my commonplace book:

“I suppose I can’t say that this is the single most amazing book I’ve read this year, because I’ve read some pretty amazing books and I’d be hard-pressed to crown just one. But what I can say is that this is the single most unexpectedly amazing book I’ve read this year.”

At the time, this was true.

I first heard about this hefty Elliot Perlman tome in Esquire’s “Big Important Book of the Month” column, wherein Tyler Cabot wrote, “Perlman writes with such convincing simplicity – his sentences read like whiskey-fueled confessions – that you can’t help but imagine being locked in a room with his characters, devising a plan to palliate their woes.” (There’s actually a large chunk of this review quoted on the back cover of the paperback.) Rereading that review, I’m not sure what about it sparked my interest in the book, but I stuck in on my reading list and when I found it remaindered at Unabridged, aka The Best Bookstore Ever!, I picked it up. I didn’t start it until later when I was sitting on an Amtrak train, coming back to Chicago from Michigan. I was completely engrossed for those four and a half hours. When I wrote those words in my book, several hundred pages later, I meant them.

The story centers around one pivotal moment and the sweeping affect it has through seven lives. That moment is when Simon Heywood, our central character, picks up the child of his college girlfriend from his school, without her permission. The cops bust into his apartment and he’s taken away to jail, even though the son was not harmed in any way. That’s just the moment. What made me use the word “amazing” was the way the story went back in time and forward through the future and spanned different personalities and viewpoints to become this sweeping, massive work that can only appropriately be described as Literature. Seriously. I think we may be reading this one decades from now.

This is the way you write a story from seven different viewpoints, I thought. (Andrew Winston, that was directed at YOU.) Perlman doesn’t just give us snippets of these seven different thoughts, he actually spends time in these characters’ minds and gives us intricately fleshed out accounts of their lives. What’s most surprising is that you’re never quite sure who your narrator is going to be next. As the book opens it’s Dr. Alex Klima, the psychiatrist Simon’s father hires to treat him but who ends up far more embedded in Simon’s trials than professionally, or even personally, advisable. Perlman turns next to Joe Geraghty, father to the boy Simon takes and husband to woman for whom Simon pines. I won’t tell you who else takes a turn at narrator, because half the fun was wondering whose side of the story I was going to get next, but it was an ingenious way to keep the story alive and it drove home the point that there’s more than one side to everything. Because Perlman is a truly great writer, this usually tricky device works and it works well.

Then I came to the end. Sandra at Book World remarked that any regular reader would have seen this end coming, but I didn’t. I didn’t see it coming because it was the most predictable, neat, tied up ending there possibly could have been and I didn’t want the book to end this way. Happily. Not that it’s entirely happy, as our final narrator has much pent up anger and resentment for a father that forwent his family for an obsession, but it’s far more happy than I wanted and I was truly disappointed at this. I, otherwise, loved the book so much that I actually tried to construe the ending to convince myself Perlman was trying to tell us that the characters were far more screwed up than we even knew, but I think I was going out on a limb there. I think, maybe, they were just supposed to be happy. Unfortunately, I just don’t buy it.

In my commonplace book I also wrote down the phrase, “I believe that you can’t choose your favorite books. They choose you.” I do believe that, because when I first read the books that are now my favorites I didn’t know that one day they would be. I loved Seven Types of Ambiguity, right up until the end, but maybe it can’t be a favorite. Not right away. I do know that even though I didn’t love the end, I’ll read this again some day and we’ll see where it falls on the scale of favorites then.

37. The End

2006-10-24T19:31:00.000-05:00

by Lemony Snicket

So I read The End. It was…not the end? The idea behind this chapter in the series is that no story really has a beginning or an end, just different parts of it, and I respect that idea and I understand that it leaves the Baudelaires’ story open for revisiting, but there were things I really wanted to know that are still a mystery to me. I suppose it would have been disappointing if the series had been tied up all nice and neat at the end, but there would have been a good amount of satisfaction gained from uncovering some of the mysteries Lemony Snicket has created over thirteen books.

Here’s what I want to know: What the heck is VFD?!?!?!

That’s all I want to know. We’ve gotten so many versions of what these initials stand for, but we still don’t know what the name of the organization is or what, exactly, they do. They keep the world peaceful and quiet, yes, but in what way? Are they like CIA agents or police or philanthropists or what? Why are children recruited and why are they stolen from their parents? Olaf was most certainly the root of the schism, but why? Was he too enamored of his own power and did he try to turn VFD into his own dictatorship? Why did the Baudelaire parents kill Olaf’s parents with poison darts? If Olaf caused the schism, why were the Baudelaire orphans delivered to his care? What role does Mr. Poe play in this? Why is Lemony Snicket feigning his own death? Does this mean the Baudelaire parents could still be alive? What would cause them to leave their children?

Okay, so I guess I want to know more than just what VFD stands for, but I mean, come on. Even The X-Files gave us more answers when they met their end. We knew when the aliens would be coming and that, yes, Mulder and Scully hooked up.

There are two things we know for sure. We know what’s in the sugar bowl (the Vessel for Disaccharides): horseradish. So if anyone got their hands on the Medusoid Mycelium (as you remember from The Grim Grotto), they would have a way of saving themselves. Although, why people couldn’t go to a grocery store and just buy some horseradish is beyond me, but I guess that’s too easy of a solution. We also know that Beatrice is Mrs. Baudelaire. We know this because VFD has a tradition of naming their children after members that have passed away. In a large chronicle of VFD events found on the island on which the siblings become stranded, Violet learns that her mother would have named her Lemony if she were a boy. After Kit Snicket gives birth and dies shortly thereafter, the children name the child after their mother, whose name is also on the boat previously named Olaf, previously named Carmelita, which washed up on the shores of some isolated land. That boat’s name is Beatrice.

Oh yes, the Baudelaire’s ended up stranded on an island and where there were “Others” who took them into their community and this crazy hatch under a tree with library and all the herbs and spices you could think of. I half expected there to be mysterious smoke and a monster who evaporates when you stare at it and polar bears. Running out of ideas, Snicket?

Anyway, I guess I do need to read The Beatrice Letters to get the full story. Or, a fuller story. Maybe a neat and tidy ending would have been boring, but it would have been better than ending and making us wonder if that’s all there is. And I know I need to read through them all again to pick up on all the little hints and literary references Snicket has so deftly scattered throughout. I fear it’ll be awhile before I have time for that, but when I think about, this is a children’s series and as a child there were few things more fun than rereading books and finding new things with each review. Perhaps that’s the point. Perhaps it’s not the destination of the thirteenth book, but the journey of getting there. Are did I have fun getting there? Yes…I believe I can say I did.

36. A Study in Scarlet

2006-10-18T20:40:00.000-05:00

by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

I recently purchased a very handsome leather-bound Complete Sherlock Holmes. Okay, it was $20.00 from Barnes & Noble and that kind of makes me feel bad for all those legitimate old-school books sitting in dusty bookshops somewhere, selling for maybe five times that, but looking at it on my shelf you would never know the difference. And it’s what’s inside that counts, right? Trust me, it’s really pretty.

The first thought I had when reading A Study in Scarlet was, how did I go twenty-five years without ever having read Sherlock Holmes? Who let that happen? Why didn’t anyone tell me he was so great? Granted, I know we wouldn’t know about Holmes if there weren’t some merit to his existence and I know there are societies, secret societies even, devoted to keeping these works alive and I even remember playing some type of computer game when I was younger that involved Scotland Yard and 221B Baker St., even though I don’t remember it specifically involving Holmes himself. But no one ever said, “Hey, that Arthur Conan Doyle guy…you should read him!” I wish someone had. It seems such a shame that I went my entire life not knowing the great detective. So, if you’ve never read any of these stories, read them. I don’t care if you’re nine or ninety-nine, if you like fantasy, chick lit, or historical novels, or can’t fathom ever reading a mystery. Pick up a Sherlock Holmes today. Because this Arthur Conan Doyle guy…you should read him.

A Study in Scarlet is the first Sherlock Holmes story and the one in which he and the inimitable Dr. John Watson meet. Watson has come back to London from his tour of duty with the Army and, with a bum leg, he needs an affordable place to stay. A mutual friend suggests he room with Holmes and upon visiting 221B Baker St. he agrees. Watson views Holmes with great interest, but is surprised that a man of his intellect isn’t very well read. Holmes explains the gaps in his knowledge as retaining only those facts which will prove useful to him, only “a fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it.”

It’s not long before Holmes receives a letter telling him of a house found open and empty except for a man, laying murdered on the floor. Upon arriving at the crime scene, Watson watches as Holmes inspects the pathway to the house, some dust on the floor, and the word “Rache” scrawled in blood on the floor. Scotland Yard detectives Gregson and Lestrade immediately claim that the murder was done in the name of a “Miss Rachel,” but Holmes has other ideas. “I’ll tell you one thing which may help you in the case,” he tells the two detectives. “There has been a murder done, and the murderer was a man. He was more than six feet high, was in the prime of his life, had small feet for his height, wore coarse, square-toed boots and smoked a Trichinopoly cigar. He came here with his victim in a four-wheeled cab, which was drawn by a horse with three old shoes and one new one off his fore-leg. In all probability the murderer had a florid face, and the fingernails of his right hand were remarkably long.” All this from a few minutes of observation.

Observation is, of course, Holmes’s forte and it’s simply amazing watching him unfold a case and latch onto clues that others miss entirely. Watson describes him as being reminiscent of a “pure-blooded, well-trained foxhound, as it dashes backward and forward through the covert, whining in its eagerness, until it comes across the lost scent.” I won’t spoil the mystery by dishing out all the details to you, but suffice it to say that it’s a story of murder in the name of love, though not for a woman named Rachel. I was surprised at how impossible it was not to fall completely in love with Sherlock Holmes because that’s exactly what happened as I fell into these pages. He is awe-inspiring in his intellect and Watson’s fascination with him becomes our own as he’s both incredulous of and captivated by this character.

In A Study in Scarlet Watson found his partner in infamy. I may have found my new favorite leading man.

35. The Unauthorized Autobiography

2006-10-15T21:30:00.000-05:00

by Lemony Snicket (and Daniel Handler)

I think one of the most joyful moments in a reader’s life, at least a reader that does not have much disposable income, is when you’re on the verge of paying full price for a book you’ve wanted to read for a while and decide to pop into a used bookstore first, just in case they have it. And they do. And it’s in great condition. I always feel a little victorious when that happens.

I had been waiting to read Lemony Snicket’s Unauthorized Autobiography for a while because it’s a companion volume and I didn’t think it would have much to do with the story itself. When I recently read reviews that said it held some secrets to the Baudelaire’s story, I decided I needed to read it before The End came out. Just as I was about to buy it at Borders (my usual independent didn’t have it in stock; I don’t usually shop at Borders) I took a walk through Bookworks on Clark and lo and behold, there it was. Right place, right time, and right price. It doesn’t usually take me more than a couple days to get through a Snicket book, so I had plenty of time to read this last week before The End came out on Friday. I’m not sure when the Autobiography was published in relation to the other books in the series, so it may be that I already knew about the “secrets” in the book or it may be that it just wasn’t all that revealing. In any case I don’t feel like I know much more about VFD than when I started.

Here are some of the secrets in the book:

--Snicket is purported to be dead, although the obituary in The Daily Punctilio states, “no one seems to know when, where, how, and why he died.”

--VFD steal children from their parents by carrying them out of the house, by their ankles, in the middle of the night. I suppose they then convert the children to volunteers, which seems a little cultish to me and, as the cultishness is never remarked upon by the author, a little inappropriate. I know the entire series is about bad things happening to children, but Snicket usually comments on these things and there’s little thought on idea that someone could come into your home and take you away. That strikes me as kind of scary for kids.

--There’s this mysterious cursive “R” that keeps showing up as the writer of Snicket’s letters, but I can’t recall there ever being a character with a name that started with “R”. I feel like this is something I should be able to figure out.

--A VFD meeting transcript is included and the following initials are present: J, L, M, R, R, M, L, K, D, S, I. Also, O and E show up and later in the book H is mentioned. Now, O and E are clearly Olaf and Esme, and H is Hector in his self-sustaining hot air balloon apparatus. I’m guessing J is Jacques Snicket. L is Lemony. K is Kit. One M must be Dr. Mongomery, but that’s as far as I can get. If the other initials refer to characters in the past books, then there are just too many characters and it’s been too long since I’ve read the books for me to remember. (And if I and D are Isadora and Duncan Quagmire, then where's Quigley?)

--A letter from Jacques to Jerome in which Jacques implores him not to marry Esme also contains this revealing statement: “I am not really a detective, my friend. I am a member of an organization that requires its members to pretend to be various occupations, including detective, ship captain, dramatic critic, duchess, waiter, and many others. For years this organization has behaved in ways that were as noble as they were secret, but recently this organization has experienced a schism.” Okay, but what does VFD stand for and what exactly do they do?

--A letter from Jacques to Lemony contains the postscript: “The combination to the safe is a three-digit number, identical to the address of our headquarters on Dark Avenue.” If you remember from The Ersatz Elevator, the Baudelaires found a secret passageway from 667 Dark Avenue to their former home. Were all VFD members’ homes linked to the headquarters by secret underground passages?

--Esme was an actress and once starred in a play written by “Al Funcoot.” Sounds like she and Olaf were in cahoots for quite a while, which explains Jacques’s letter to Jerome.

There are more tidbits spread throughout the book and it’s cute and fun, but you know what it isn’t? Explanatory. I hoped I would find something to make some of these details click into place, but I just have more questions. I guess I’ll have to finish The End to find out if anything’s answered. There’s also the recently published Beatrice Letters, another companion volume that’s rumored to have secrets in it as well, but while my usual independent did have that in stock, I put it back because it was more expensive than I had expected. VFD or no VFD, I’ve got bills to pay so that’s going to have to be another used bookstore treasure.

34. Bitchfest

2006-10-12T19:55:00.000-05:00

edited by Lisa Jervis & Andi Zeisler

I discovered Bitch four years ago, randomly in a Borders where I would have least expected to find the magazine that would later become one of my favorites. I was drawn in by the pop culture aspect, having always wished there were a magazine that addressed pop culture from an academic standpoint and giving it the legitimacy it deserves. I know the academic tone is something that turns off some readers, but for me it was the most refreshing thing I could have found. I have long considered myself a feminist, ever since I was old enough to understand that my life could be different from my mother’s, so while the word “bitch” was not something I necessarily wanted to show off while on the bus or el, I believed too much in what these writers were trying to do for the name of the magazine to matter much in the end.

Ten years later the magazine is still alive and that’s where Bitchfest comes in. Bitchfest is a collection of essays picked from ten years of writing with several new pieces composed just for the book. I’ve been reading more novels than magazines lately, so I’m a little behind on issues of Bitch, but reading Bitchfest reminded me exactly why I need to get caught up on those couple of issues I’ve let pass.

I remember some of these pieces the first time they were published. I remember “On Language: Choice,” by Summer Wood in which the author discusses the use of the word “choice” and how using that word as a label can, however inaccurately, impart a feminist ideology to that which is labeled. She cites the scene in Sex and the City in which, upon divulging her plans to quit work in order to become a mother, Charlotte screams at Miranda, “I choose my choice! I choose my choice!” as if to convince herself that her choice was truly for herself and not for the benefit of her husband. I thought the same thing when I saw that episode, seeing how “choice” was being misappropriated to claim a feminist stance on any ground, and I thought it again when I saw a commercial for a new type of birth control that urged women to break free from the chains of the daily pill or even weekly patch and make a “choice” for a monthly version. While the decision and the freedom to regulate one’s reproductive ability is no doubt a feminist issue, I found it a bit ridiculous that the creators of the ad used the idea of “choice” as a marketing tool. After all, I’ve never found it a particularly difficult task to remember to take a pill after I brushed my teeth every morning.

I also remember Jennifer Maher’s “Hot for Teacher: On the Erotics of Pedagogy.” While musing on her own high school crush on her English teacher, Maher takes a look at the acceptance of male pedagogic idolatry from females who are then inspired to learn more and become more through their love, versus the typical male crush on a female teacher which leads to the female stripping down to a bikini and dancing on top of a desk, if you happen to believe in Van Halen videos. In the classroom, what does this say about the worth of the female teacher versus the male? Maher poses the problem as such: “For a female student, identifying with the man at the front of the classroom means gaining power in the form of knowledge, authority, and sexual possibility. For a male student, however, identifying with a woman means losing it.” Looking to Maverick’s interaction with Charlie in Top Gun, Madonna’s teacher-like role in Desperately Seeking Susan, and the women of Mona Lisa Smile, Maher examines how the problem has both persisted and changed in cultural representation.

For all the essays I’ve already read, though, there were still many in this book that I’d missed. “Sister Outsider Headbanger,” by Keidra Chaney looks at what it means to be a black female metalhead, which, although I could never really say I was a metalhead, was something I identified with because I always preferred rock to anything else and that apparently wasn’t the right type of music for my ethnicity. “Marketing Miss Right,” by one of the magazine’s founders, Andi Zeisler, dealt with the way single, twenty-something women are written about in magazines and books. Published in 2000, it was the time to see all those Bridget Jones clones and Rules-following women and wonder what the hell was going on. And in “Screen Butch Blues,” a piece written for the collection, author Keely Savoie recounts the experience of her girlfriend being approached by the producers of Queer Eye for a special butch episode and uses it to examine how butch women have been treated in movies and TV.

Although I don’t agree with everything Bitch prints – I think Loveline’s a hilarious show (the radio version, anyway) and I can’t get behind promoting one’s abortion on a t-shirt – and I’m still hesitant to break out the magazine while on my morning commute, I love Bitch dearly and will be quite sad if I ever have to see it go. Ladies – here’s to another ten years of deconstructing feminism, femininity, and pop culture and finding out what they mean to us. Here’s to another ten years of reminding everyone why all those thing are so important.

33. Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005

2006-10-08T19:51:00.000-05:00

edited by Dave Eggers

I actually read The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005 a little bit ago and am just posting about it now because, well, I get busy and get a little behind on the posting and, in fact, I have about ten books about which I’ve yet to tell you, so don’t think the current surge in posting means that I’ve started reading at lightning speed, just that I’ve realized I’ve got three months to put up twenty or so posts and I’m looking at the stack of books in my apartment thinking, “chop chop!” Although, that would be so cool if I could read at lightning speed…what if that were my superpower? Some sort of genetic mutation that allows me to read five hundred page novels in only two days! And remember everything I’ve read! I could be…The Reader!

Yes, I’ve been watching Heroes, why do you ask?

Anyhoo – it’s really no surprise by now that this collection of short stories and essays, although it was really more short stories than anything else, was pretty darned good, considering we’ve got Dave Eggers to thank for collecting them all. Some of the names were new to me. Like Ryan Boudinot, who wrote “Free Burgers for Life,” about a college-aged guy (I get the impression that’s his age, but I don’t think he ever really says) who wins a contest at a local fast food joint entitling him to one free meal of a $5 value, per day, for the rest of his life. Because he’s kind of a loser, the kind whose one dance move involves some version of splits, he takes the deal seriously and goes in each day to collect the burger he’s owed. It’s sad because you know that this will probably be the best thing that’s ever happened to him and there are people like this you’ve known and pitied, the ones who stalk their ex-girlfriends in the grocery store where they work and make themselves feel cool by buying beer for under-aged kids. It’s kind of funny, too, but only because laughing at them is the only way we can create distance from them. It’s the only way we can think, “thank god I’m not like them.”

Kate Krautkramer was also new to me. In “Roadkill” she chronicles some rather interesting and not often spoken about aspects of her pregnancy. Krautkramer takes a more scientific look at pregnancy, thinking of birth in an animalistic way, rather than in the joyous glowing way that most view the experience. “They let this vast, shapeless secret shimmer just behind their eyes when they meet me on the street,” she muses, “and just smile and nod in recognition of my burgeoning figure.” But instead of deifying the pregnancy, she wonders why so many who do choose to be anesthetized when going through the actual birth. Although I’m scared to death of pregnancy myself, it was comforting to read an account from a mother who wasn’t blindly enamored of her own pregnancy. I also liked Jonathan Tel’s “The Myth of the Frequent Flier,” about a man who spends so much time flying that he marries and eventually has children in the air. Every flight attendant’s heard of the story and each has their own details to add; sometimes he’s Canadian, sometimes he’s Australian. He has a son or he has twin girls. Some claim to have actually met him and some have only heard of his story. With the narrator following the myth all around the world, you can’t help but laugh at the man who’s stalking his own legend.

Of course, reading collections like this is also a really good opportunity to stumble upon works by authors you know, only to make you even more sure of their ability to move and create emotion with their words. In this book it’s Jhumpa Lahiri with “Hell-Heaven.” The story is narrated by a woman who witnessed her mother falling in love with a man other than her husband. Though nothing ever happens between the two, the mother looks forward to her companion’s visits and he becomes a close friend of the family. Despite the wishes of his Bengali parents, he marries an American girl and starts his own family away from his somewhat-adopted family. It’s only when the marriage falls apart many years later, and the ex-wife admits how jealous she always was, does the mother reveal how hurt she was by the loss of her always-platonic friend. Anyone who’s read Lahiri’s work will have a difficult time denying that she writes rich and engaging narratives, but after reading this I was could only wonder how some people get to be so well endowed with words, to know just the right ones to use to be able to create a specific feeling or image in your mind. I never cease to be amazed when I come across people who have this gift.

So, do I think I’ll continue to read this series in the coming years? I’m not sure…I plan to give myself a subscription to McSweeney’s for Christmas, which satisfies my need for a variety of stories and essays, and if there’s anything this year has taught me it’s that no matter how much I want to read a book or plan to read a book, I’ll never be able to resist the pull of other books as they spring up on me. While this may not become a perennial favorite, at least I’ll now I know what I’ll be missing.

32. The Inferno

2006-10-04T19:24:00.000-05:00

by Dante Alighieri

The Inferno is a book I was, and I’m sure hundreds of other students were, forced to read in school. It would have been 12th grade AP English (World Lit) where I also read Oedipus Rex, portions of The Aenied, the requisite Shakespeare (Hamlet), and spent more time sitting on the floor getting acquainted with my now best friend of nine years than following Raskolnikov’s tribulations in Crime and Punishment. It was also the first of several times that I would be asked to read The Iliad and the first of all those times that I would really just b.s. my way through the test.

I never had plans to return to these texts I had been obligated to read and it wasn’t until very recently that the idea of reading them popped into my head. One day I randomly announced to a friend that I was going to read the entire Divine Comedy and I meant it. I don’t know why I decided on that. Perhaps because I hadn’t understood it the first time and wanted to see if my acquired years of reading experience helped me out (though, to be honest, I had no interest in understanding the first time as those were my “non-reading” years). Perhaps it was knowing that these writings have held a great influence in literature combined with my penchant for getting at those original sources; after all, we wouldn’t be forced to read them seven hundred years later if they didn’t mean something. Perhaps it was the simple idea of falling into an intensely descriptive account of hell, purgatory, and heaven. Or perhaps it was the repressed academic deep down inside me that, after several years of doing nothing with my college degrees, wants to prove to myself that I’m still, maybe, just a little bit smart. And maybe to prove it to other people, too.

Hey, no one ever said this reading business was vanity-free, okay?

What I really love about reading classic texts is finding all of those little things that have survived hundreds of years later to become fully immersed in pop culture. They become those sayings that everyone knows but of which no one knows its origins. Most notably for everyone who’s been keeping up with the Series of Unfortunate Events is Beatrice, the woman Snicket often refers to as a deceased love. Turns out that Beatrice is the woman Dante was always in love with and, in the Divine Comedy, calls for him to be led through the after-life to meet her in heaven. Also, there’s this little line I found just before Virgil is about to lead Dante into hell: “All hope abandon, ye who enter in!” For as many times as that line has been uttered in movies and TV, I’d never stopped to think where it may have come from.

Of course, what really brings The Inferno its fame is Dante’s extremely vivid vision of those condemned to hell and the punishments they must suffer. He’s split hell into nine levels with each level serving a different sin. One thing that makes these sorts of classic reads really difficult is that there are so many historical and cultural references that, without being some sort of Italian scholar, we don’t stand a chance of understanding. Which is why it’s so important to get a really well annotated edition. But, for each of the politicians, adulterers, and greedy bankers that find themselves in Dante’s hell (it’s important to note that many of these people were not yet dead and Dante was prophesizing their fates), it’s interesting to think of who from our day might make it into his hell. Would Hitler be in the seventh circle where the sin is violence against others, or would he be somewhere in the ninth circle, closer to Lucifer? Would the Enron executives be in the eighth circle with the thieves and counterfeiters whose punishment is be engulfed in flames? And what of our promiscuous celebrities that go from marriage to marriage without a thought? Would they be in circle two, forever tormented by heavy winds and storms, “whirling them around, and smiting, it molests them”? Who would be our society’s flatterers, condemned to the eighth circle where the sinners are “smothered in a filth that out of human privies seemed to flow”?

Oh yes, that would be the ass-kissers literally covered in shit. When you take the basic story and ignore the fact that you don’t recognize half of the names Dante drops – that’s what the Italian scholar’s endnotes are for – it becomes really interesting to extrapolate this idea to our world. If you can forget that you were once forced to deal with the obscure references and garner some kind of meaning from the heavily historical mess with your fifteen year old mind, it’s really worth giving the epic another try. Dante’s a man with a heavy political grudge (he was exiled, after all), a sharp cultural wit, and an even sharper tongue. It’s too bad we don’t have any current writers than can compare – who wouldn’t love to find out where he’d place our current president?

31. The Penultimate Peril

2006-10-01T19:00:00.000-05:00

by Lemony Snicket

The End is near! I waited quite some time to read this book in order to consume the last two in rapid succession, so huzzah, I say! Huzzah!

After being whisked away by Kit Snicket in a taxi cab at the end of Book the Eleventh, The Penultimate Peril finds the Baudelaire orphans eating brunch at the foot of the Hotel Denouement. The Baudelaires’ job in this book is to act as concierges and flaneurs, disguising themselves as hotel employees while observing all that’s going on around them. Something big is going down on Thursday and the siblings have to make sure the good side is getting what they need while the bad side is defeated. Or something of that nature because, as usual, no one is telling the siblings what exactly they should be looking for or who they can trust. All they know is that one of the two twin managers, Frank, is a volunteer while the other twin, Ernest, is a villain. Since neither Frank nor Ernest reveal themselves to the siblings, who do they have left to trust?

Once inside the hotel things start to get interesting. The siblings split up in order to attend to their concierge duties and each one runs into characters from their recent past. Violet finds Esme Squalor and Carmelita Spats sunbathing on the roof, Esme wearing a bikini of lettuce leaves (where in the world did this come from?) and Vision Furthering Devices and Carmelita asking for a harpoon gun. Not knowing what the harpoon gun is for or whether the manager who aids her is Frank or Ernest, Violet brings the despicable girl the gun, feeling even more like her efforts are going to waste. Klaus is sent to room 674 where Charles and Sir, from the Lucky Smells Lumberyard, need to be shown to a sauna, not because Sir likes the steam, but because he likes the smell of hot wood. (“Hot wood” proclivities aside, does anyone else think Charles and Sir are together? Their relationship is just dysfunctional enough to be romantic in nature.) The manager, either Frank or Ernest, also asks Klaus to hang a large piece of flypaper out of the room’s window. The hotel is having a bird problem and any falling birds will be caught on the paper. Sunny finds herself at the mercy of Vice Principal Nero from Prufrock Preparatory School. She must take him and Mr. Remora and Mrs. Bass to the Indian restaurant down the hall and in the process runs into one of the managers who has news from J.S. Since J.S. once referred to the now deceased Jacques Snicket, one can’t help but wonder to whom the mysterious initials belong.

And so it continues, with all of the characters from past books making an appearance, at least in name if not in person. Hector and the Quagmire twins should be landing their hot balloon on the roof; the ambidextrous Kevin, the contortionist Colette, and the humpbacked Hugo from Caligari Carnival are back; Justice Strauss and Jerome Squalor reappear as the owners of those important initials; and, of course, Count Olaf tries once again to get his hands on the orphans so he can claim their fortune. We still don’t know what VFD is, but we do learn about the aforementioned Vision Furthering Devices, as well as Vernacularly Fastened Doors. If you recall from the other books, we’ve gotten some pretty interesting names for VFD: Village of Fowl Devotees, Volunteers Fighting Disease, the Valley of Four Drafts, and, of course, Very Fresh Dill. But none of them are as interesting as the latest explication – Vessel for Disaccharides. In layman’s terms, the sugar bowl. Not that we know why the sugar bowl is so important or even find that out in this book, but it was nice feeling like we were finally getting to the bottom of something.

We don’t yet know how Lemony himself figures in the story and I’ll be sorely disappointed if he leaves himself out of the finale. More than anything I want to know how the third Snicket sibling came to chronicle the Baudelaires’ story and what’s happened to him since. (If you pay attention to the pattern of groups of three siblings – the Snickets, the Quagmires, and the Baudelaires themselves – you’ll figure out how each of the Baudelaires were able to speak to one of the managers at the same time.) Things take a decidedly darker tone in this book so Snicket has left us unsure as to the Baudelaires’ fate. The siblings’ decisions are more ambiguous than ever and two characters die as a result of their actions. They go on trial and are unable to claim themselves wholly innocent and in the process of escaping from the hotel they also help Count Olaf escape. Of course, if Olaf had met his end in this book that wouldn’t have made for a very satisfying ending, but I have to be honest and say I have no idea what that ending is going to be. Snicket has been fairly formulaic in all of his books, even if the formula he’s following is his own, but bringing back all of these characters and having the Baudelaires create nearly as much destruction as they’ve tried to prevent was a departure which leaves the final installment in this series a complete unknown. I would say time will tell, but it’s only two weeks until The End comes out and it’s only two more weeks until we know who Lemony Snicket is, what VFD stands for, and what the Baudelaires’ fate turns out to be. It’ll be a long two weeks, for sure.

30. The House on Mango Street

2006-09-15T07:39:00.003-05:00

by Sandra Cisneros

The House on Mango Street is the October selection for the GB Book Club and you can read my intro right over here. I have to say, I was surprised at how weighty and meaningful this small tome turned out to be and I loved Ciseneros's writing so much that I went out and bought the more lengthy Caramelo a few days after I'd finished. It's a short, refreshing read and so worth it.

29. Wide Sargasso Sea

2006-09-10T11:43:00.000-05:00

by Jean Rhys

At #94 on the Modern Library 100 list, Wide Sargasso Sea is a book I’ve wanted to read for some time, although I’ve been a little hesitant. Jane Eyre is my second favorite book ever and I would hate to have a modern retelling spoil it for me in any way, but because Wide Sargasso Sea isn’t really a retelling of Jane Eyre but an explication of how Mr. Rochester’s first wife came to be the crazy woman in the attic, it seemed pretty safe. It was safe, but I also wished I could have liked it more.

The weird thing about WSS is that I wasn’t enjoying it at first, but the more I read it, the more I wanted to know how it turned out. I mean, I know how it turned out, but I wanted to know how it got there. In the beginning, Antoinette Cosway is our narrator and we see her life in Jamaica as a child. I think it’s Jamaica…Jean Rhys isn’t too keen on actually acknowledging the setting to her readers, so it’s difficult to tell exactly where everyone is. This is actually one of the bigger problems with the book, this confusion, but I’ll get to that in a minute. Being a poor white family places the Cosways on a social station lower than the blacks, so from childhood Antoinette is used to being derided and ostracized. Her younger brother, Pierre, is either mentally or physically handicapped – I don’t think we’re ever told exactly what’s wrong with him – and her mother is in a crumbling marriage with Mr. Mason, Antoinette’s English stepfather. After a fire claims the Cosways’ house and little Pierre in the process, Antoinette is sent to live with her aunt. The one time she visits her mother afterwards she’s witness to the madness that’s deteriorating her brain and psyche. Clearly, this is foreshadowing for Antoinette’s fate.

The second part of the book is narrated by Mr. Rochester after he comes to the unidentified island. Here is another problem that goes along with not knowing where everyone is: there is nothing that tells us we’re in Rochetser’s head. In fact, the name “Edward Rochester” is never mentioned and it’s only because I’ve read Jane Eyre so many times that I was able to figure out who the new narrator was. This means, of course, that Wide Sargasso Sea is not a book that can stand on its own. If you just saw the book at a store and though it sounded interesting but had never read Jane Eyre you would have know idea what was happening. You could argue that because the story is based on what happens in Jane Eyre, reading the original work is crucial to understanding the second, but shouldn’t any story, even if it’s based on a previous work (with the exception of a series) be able to stand on its own? Take Wicked, for example. I know you can understand Wicked without having read the original Oz books, because I’ve read Wicked, but not Oz, but I think you could also understand Wicked even if you’ve never seen the movie The Wizard of Oz. You might not like it as much, but the story doesn’t fall apart just because you haven’t experienced the original source. If you don’t possess an intimate knowledge of Jane Eyre, you can forget about understanding Wide Sargasso Sea.

So, at some point that’s skipped over in the story, Rochester and Antoinette get married, but even though they seem somewhat attracted to each other at first, it’s not a love marriage and it’s not long before their relationship dissolves into animosity. It seems as though Rochester were tricked into the marriage by Mr. Mason and Antoinette’s stepbrother and it’s a dark secret that her mother went crazy. The same, of course, is expected of his wife. Then Rochester starts calling her Bertha (the name she has in Jane Eyre) because…I don’t know…he likes the name? That is seriously the explanation we get and it was at this point that the story became interesting to me because I found that incredibly mean and I wanted to know in what other ways Rochester stripped his wife of her identity. They fight constantly and Antoinette turns to her housekeeper for voodoo assistance and then she goes completely insane, at least by Rochester’s standards, and Rochester drags her off to England. We know what happens after that, what with the attic and the fire, but it was interesting to see this from “Bertha’s” surprisingly lucid perspective.

Now, I don’t need an author to spell out everything for me – I’d like to think I’m a little bit smarter than that – but I can’t stand it when I’m completely lost in the middle of a book and I don’t know who’s talking or where we are or why the things that are happening are important. I think it’s the author’s job to provide some amount of guidance, otherwise why am I reading your book? So, I’m not sure why this ended up on the Modern Library 100, but having read Jane Eyre as many times as I have I can at least say it was an interesting imagining of how the woman in the attic came to be. I just wouldn’t recommend it on it’s own.

28. Sons of the Rapture

2006-09-07T19:02:00.000-05:00

by Todd Dills

We are doing things over at the GB Book Club, let me tell you. First and foremost, we've instituted a weekly, Wednesday feature, the first of which is my review of Sons of the Rapture by Todd Dills. Todd is something of a name in the Chicago lit scene, so getting to review his first novel is kind of cool. It's a bizarre story to be sure, but it's well-written and that always wins you points with me. Zach at Featherproof put up a nice little link to it and it always kind of tickles me when publishers or authors like my reviews because they'd be the first to stand their distance if you said something bad or just wrote a generally crappy review, right? So I guess I did okay.

Anyway. Go read the review. Then check out the book if it sounds like something you'd like. It's all I'm sayin'.

27. The Luck of the Bodkins

2006-09-03T12:28:00.000-05:00

by P.G. Wodehouse

Let me see if I can get The Luck of the Bodkins straight. Monty Bodkins and Gertrude Butterwick are engaged. While on vacation in Cannes, Monty is writing a letter to his love when he asks American entertainment maven Ivor Llewellyn how to spell “sciatica.” Just at this moment Llewellyn’s sister-in-law is encouraging him, at the request of his wife to smuggle a jeweled necklace past Customs so they won’t have to pay duty fees. Shortly thereafter Monty receives a telegram from Gertrude breaking their engagement. Llewellyn’s convinced Monty’s a Customs spy.

All end up on a boat heading for America, along with Gertrude and her two cousins Ambrose and Reggie Tennyson. Also on board is Lotus “Lottie” Blossom, actress and part of Llewellyn’s production company. After some prodding, Monty learns that Gertrude broke off the engagement owning to a bare-chested picture of him showing a tattooed heart around the name “Sue.” Monty explains that Sue was a woman with whom he had a failed engagement and only the tattoo remains. The two reconcile. At some point Monty gives Gertrude a Mickey Mouse doll with a screw-top head that becomes the bane of their relationship.

Now, Ambrose and Lottie are in love but Ambrose won’t marry the actress because she makes more money than him and his manhood won’t allow for that (the publication date is 1935 so I’ll let that anti-feminist dog lie). Lottie convinces Llewellyn to take Ambrose on as a writer, thus enabling their marriage. Reggie’s been assigned to the room next to Lottie and for some reason I can’t remember, Reggie switches rooms with Monty which leaves Monty in a room with lipstick words written across the bathroom wall. Of course, when Gertrude sees this, as she inevitably does despite Monty’s efforts otherwise, she breaks their engagement again.

Monty’s in a similar situation with Gertrude in that her father won’t let the two marry unless Monty has a job. Never mind that Monty is set for life with money earned from an inheritance, Gertrude’s father insists on a steady income to support his daughter. After losing several jobs, Monty earns his employment in a detective agency for which he doesn’t actually do any work but simply appears on the books as employed to assuage Gertrude’s father. Once Llewellyn gets wind of Monty’s detective career, he immediately sets about befriending faux-investigator and offering him a position in his company. At some point on the boat trip, also for reasons I can’t remember but probably because Gertrude has broken up with him again, Monty sends his resignation notice to the detective agency and Llewellyn’s job offer becomes important once the engagement is back on.

Reggie’s love life is also dependent on Llewellyn as he and Llewellyn’s sister-in-law, Mabel Spence, have fallen in love, but Reggie’s family has packed him off to Montreal to force him into an office job. Being employed by Llewellyn is his only chance at happiness with Mabel. Basically, everyone’s livelihood depends on Llewellyn’s money and he’s willing, although irritated, to comply as long as he believes that Monty is an undercover Customs agent.

The Mickey Mouse comes into play when, over the course of breaking and reentering their engagement, the doll gets passed back and forth between Monty and Gertrude as a sort of physical representation of the state of their relationship. When Lottie gets hold of it due to an obliviously meddling steward it seems the end of it all until everyone gets off the boat and all misconceptions are revealed. Hilarities ensue.

If it seems that I’ve forgotten more than usual about the plot of this book, well, it’s a pretty thick plot laden with twists and misunderstandings and general bumbling sense of nature at which, as an omniscient audience, you can’t help but shake your head and laugh. It stuck me as I was reading this that the story was a lot like a good episode of Seinfeld – all these crazy things happen that affect everything else except no one knows about them so everything just seems a mess. I couldn’t help thinking about what happens when your fiancé’s family forgets to put out the marble rye and your crazy father takes it back so you have to get your best friend to get another from the bakery and because there’s only one he has to steal itfrom an old lady and then you have to get your other friend to take your future in-laws out for a hansom cab ride only to have that go awry because he’s fed the horse beef-a-reeno and his gastrointestinal system isn’t so happy about that. I only remember all of that because I’ve seen that episode probably a dozen times. So then it struck me that isn’t not this story that’s Seinfeldian in nature, but it's Seinfeld that’s Wodehousian and I’m amazed at how great an influence this British writer has had on pop culture. Wodehouse, like one of my favorite TV shows, isn’t about getting the entire story straight, but about the entertainment you have watching it all unfold.

This is just another thing I wouldn’t have discovered without the great thing that was Chicklit.

[Oh yes…and there’s something called the “Glory Hole” that was mentioned seemingly in earnest and I couldn’t help but wonder if that phrase means the same thing in England as it does here. Anyone care to enlighten me?]

26. What Was She Thinking?

2006-08-27T19:54:00.000-05:00

by Zoe Heller

I first have to say that I’m sad, but not shocked, to learn that Chicklit is closing. I discovered the site a couple years after its inception and it’s been something of a haven for all of us booklovers. I’m sure we’ll all miss it terribly. Thankfully, the forums will remain open and we’ll continue to be able to glean book knowledge and opinion from those with whom we share our love. I can’t say how many books I’ve read or now have an interest in reading because of a discussion in the forums and I don’t know where I’ll turn if those close one day, too. But for now, I’d like to thank Deborah and all the wonderful people who kept Chicklit alive as long as it was and I’ll continue to look forward to reading the forums on a regular basis. Chicklit was a good thing.

I second have to say that one of the discussions in the Chicklit forums is about the struggle to find enough time to read. While I do everything from reading while waiting for the El, while on the El, while watching TV, and while eating, the one thing I thought I’d try out is reading while cooking. You’re always waiting for one thing to heat up or stirring something, which leaves one hand free, so it seems like a good idea, right? Okay…I now have an oil stain on the back of my hardcover edition of this book! Luckily, I had taken the dustjacket off, like I do with all hardcovers, but still! I’m one of those people who can’t fathom dog-earing pages, let alone spilling food on a book. Cooking and reading shall be separate endeavors from this point forth.

Shortlisted for the Booker in 2003, Zoe Heller’s What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal] is the sort of book you’d think were just regurgitating current headlines if it weren’t written so well and so damned entertaining. Written from the first person perspective of Barbara, a teacher at St. George’s, the story is about Barbara’s colleague Sheba, the school’s new ceramics teacher, and her affair with student Steven Connelly. The story is written in the form of a manuscript Barbara is composing after the affair has been discovered. What Barbara plans on doing with the manuscript after it’s completed we don’t really know; she justifies the work as the necessary one of getting all the details down straight. We open when Sheba is just starting at the school and is somewhat aloof and ambivalent toward her new coworkers. Barbara worries that Sheba will become close to the wrong people but, despite her after-the-fact belief that the two were destined to become close, she steers clear of the newbie as well.

It’s clear to Sheba that Connelly has a crush on her, but she reproves him at first and just allows him into her classroom outside of class hours so they can talk about art. It’s not long, though, before Connelly pushes forward and the two embark on their destructive affair. It’s not clear to anyone, including Barbara, why Sheba starts her affair because she seems to have a decent family life with an intelligent husband and children, though they may be difficult (her son has Down’s syndrome and her daughter is at her rebellious teenager phase, but whose family life is perfect anyway?). It’s as if Sheba has reverted to being a teenager herself and is getting carried away with a stupid crush that can never amount to anything.

It’s interesting to me that I kind of had an icky reaction to Sheba’s descriptions of her sex life. As I’m getting older, I’m realizing that the idea of being with younger guys creeps me out. This is becoming especially evident as I’m slated to celebrate my quartennial birthday (I’m making that word up, but there’s got to be a word for quarter-of-a-century, right?) in a few weeks and I’ve updated my minimum age from as-long-as-they’re-21 to a few years past that. Seriously, who wants to be with a little boy? So I found the fact that Sheba was so passionate about her physical relationship with Connelly, in a word, gross. And when Connelly unceremoniously dumped Sheba and she started going crazy over relationship’s dissolution I thought, well that’s what you get when you mess with a kid. Not that of-age relationships are any easier or, in some cases, any more mature, but at least you’ve got a little leg up with them as opposed to when you’re with a literal fifteen-year-old.

Eventually the relationship does end and with it comes the destruction of Sheba’s family. Her daughter runs off to Scotland and holes herself with Sheba’s judgmental mother. Her husband won’t allow her to visit with their son unchaperoned. She’s an emotional wreck and the media is chomping at the bit to get to her. It’s an ending you’d expect for this kind of tryst, but what makes this story so great and different from others is that we get to hear about it from Barbara’s point of view. Indeed, word of the affair might never have gotten out had it not been for Barbara’s small slip-up with a coworker. Introverted and traditional, Barbara might well be called the matron of the school and the only teacher who the students are a little afraid of. Barbara’s also a lonely woman, though she may never admit it, and after she and Sheba become friends it’s obvious to the reader that she takes advantage of the latter’s situation to live a little vicarious excitement. She takes the emotionally beaten Sheba under her wing, living with her, cooking for her, and generally mothering her. It may be Sheba who’s convinced that she’ll never be able to get over her romantic tragedy, but it’s Barbara who’ll experience the true fall out if she ever does. So subtle and prim is Barbara’s involvement that it’s of great amusement to the reader when they realize just how much Barbara has come to depend on Sheba. Heller’s construction of these characters is incredibly spot on, causing me to I do something I don’t usually do: finish this book in only one day.

25. The Devil in the White City

2006-08-24T21:19:00.000-05:00

by Erik Larson

Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City is the GB Book Club’s selection for September and I’m pretty sure I would have never read the book if this weren’t the case. First of all, I was convinced it was fiction. I knew that certain parts of the story were true – that it was set during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and that it featured America’s first serial killer H.H. Holmes – but I thought it was just based on these facts and that the story itself was fiction, kind of like how The DaVinci Code is based on actual theories but is really, despite some ridiculously zealous readers’ beliefs, a work of fiction. I’ve read some “historical fiction” in my day and I wasn’t too enthralled with the genre. Second of all, this book was immensely popular when it came out, achieving a DaVinci Code-like status so that everywhere I went I saw people with the book in their hands. I hate to say this, because I’m so against the thought that popularity equals lack of quality, but you know, usually when a book is grabbing everyone’s attention, even non-readers, it tends not to be that good. However, after actually reading the book, my previous conceptions couldn’t have been more wrong.

As most of you probably know, the book isn’t just based on fact. It is fact. Everything Larson wrote actually happened, which he states outright in his introduction: “However strange or macabre some of the following incidents may seem, this is not a work of fiction. Anything between quotation marks comes from a letter, memoir, or other written document.” That immediately piqued my interest and I only wish I had picked up the book and read the short introduction much sooner. I already knew about Daniel Burnham and John Root, the fair’s architects, and I knew about Louis Sullivan and the buildings they designed, but I didn’t have much knowledge of the fair’s construction itself, so much of this was educational to me.

The book is two stories that weave into one: that of the World’s Fair and that of H.H. Holmes. Each chapter alternates between the two so you could almost read just every other chapter and have two distinct stories. When the US decided to hold a World’s Fair in honor of Columbus’s discovery of America, Chicago won the bid and immediately began devising ways that this World’s Fair would beat out the one held in Paris. The buildings had to be grand and the exhibits spectacular and there had to be something that stood out far beyond the achievement of Gustave Alexandre Eiffel. Troubles abounded everywhere as time was of the essence, setbacks came everywhere, and important figures met their unexpected deaths. The fair did get built and remains an important part of Chicago and US history, but Larson’s writing style imparts a good deal of suspense and even though you know how the story turns out, you wonder how it’s all going to happen. Holmes’s story is, of course, much darker in tone and Larson describes in detail how the man born Herman Webster Mudgett became the man who killed dozens. The chaos of the Word’s Fair allowed him to build the hotel where he carried out his killings, seducing women and then scientifically dismantling their bodies. It’s incredibly disturbing and, considering pop culture’s penchant for gore, easy to dismiss as fiction, but the wonderment of it all is that everything in the book actually happened. Beat that, Dan Brown.

The great thing about the book is that it’s totally and completely enthralling. I could not for the life of me put it down and I had to force myself to stop reading so I could do things like sleep and go to work. I don’t know how Larson was able to do it, but he took all these facts and put them together so that they read much more like a novel than a history book. He takes very little creative license, although he does stray in some places when describing the reactions of Holmes’s victims, but he acknowledges this in the end and backs up his speculations with medical and psychiatric research. What’s also interesting in the book is learning how much our current lives depend on things that debuted at the fair. Shredded Wheat, alternating current, incandescent light bulbs, belly dancing – we know about it today because it was at the fair. Hoards of well-known names also appeared – Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley had shows there. In one instance a young girl hugs the man who invented a machine that types Braille. That girl is Helen Keller. A man named Elias Disney was part of the fair’s construction team and Larson imagines that watching the proceedings had a profound effect on his son, Walt. L. Frank Baum visited. I half expected there to be a scene where a man reaches the fair by walking across the surface of Lake Michigan and the text to read, “It was the Lord Jesus Christ who had come to see the fair and He saw the fair and it was good.”

As a Chicagoan, though, the book held special significance for me. I’d encourage anyone to read this, but I don’t think someone who has never been to this city would love it quite as much. There’s something magical in reading about the fair and being able to picture the locations as they are today. I spent four years tramping across the Midway Plaisance during my time at the U of C. I’ve been to the fair’s Palace of Fine Arts and traipsed through it’s lawn, now the Museum of Science and Industry. When Larson describes the other contributions this group of architects made to the city, such as an acoustically perfect theater, he doesn’t even have to name the structure for me to immediately catch the reference (the Auditorium Theatre on Congress). I just don’t think you can get these things without having lived here. Maybe that’s what I loved most about it and why I saw it in so many hands over the years. The book is about the good and the bad housed together, the incredible and the demonic, the White City and the Black, but for all of that, it’s about this place that we all love. This place we call home. For that, we love it.

24. Best American Essays 2005

2006-08-20T16:07:00.000-05:00

edited by Susan Orlean

It was a long time before I recognized the essay as a legitimate form of writing. I think that holds true for most Americans who recall the essay as being the sort of piece you wrote in school, not giving much thought to how it was composed or the merits of the text therein. Sure, you made sure to get in your five paragraphs, but other than that you weren’t graded on much. You usually wrote about what you did over summer break or described your family life or recounted your affinity for some invention of modern culture. Those gave way to book reports in the upper grades of elementary school and became critical analyses or compare/contrast pieces in high school. I don’t recall ever being given creative license during these times (although, admittedly, I did not belong to a particularly progressive school system) because nonfiction was not fiction and was dry and to the point. I wish someone had told me that it could be otherwise.

My first introduction to the creative essay was probably when I started reading magazines. Esquire employs a good number of writers with a flare for taking the truth and spinning it into elegant prose. I’ve encountered many great pieces in Esquire that deserve more than simple categorization as “article” because they’re more than snippets of writing telling you which suit materials work best in summer (although there’s a fair bit of that in Esquire, too). One of my favorite Esquire writers is Tom Junod because he has the ability to take any subject and write a completely convincing and moving account of it. In February 2004 he wrote a piece for the “Esquire University Course Selection Guide” about “Air Combat Theory & Practice,” a subject about which I couldn’t care less, except that Junod’s writing was so strong that I did find myself caring and I’ve been devoted to the author and the magazine ever since. Thus, for me, the credibility of the essay came into light.

Similarly, in Best American Essays series editor Robert Atwan’s foreword, he recalls how at the start of the series, “‘essay’ remained an off-putting term, still too closely associated in most people’s minds with the dreaded classroom assignment,” but after years of publication the term has come back into vogue as “readers have discovered essays that behave personally and familiarly, others that take a journalistic stance combining reportage with a sharp individual perspective and style, and still others that in their ‘impure forms’ may appear indistinguishable from fiction, meditation, or lyric.” In other words, essays can be every bit as inventive, affecting, and creative as fiction.

I hadn’t read any of the pieces in the Best American Essays 2005 and I always wonder if that’s a good thing, because I’m exposing myself to the year’s best all at once, or a bad thing because it means I haven’t been reading the right stuff. In any case, several writers were definitely familiar and I enjoyed their pieces here as I have enjoyed their writing elsewhere. David Foster Wallace presents “Consider the Lobster,” the title piece in his recent book of the same name. In the essay, Wallace describes his trip to the annual Maine Lobster Festival, detailing the nutritious values of the animal, the various ways to kill it and to cook it, and the ethical debate surrounding lobster consumption. All of this, with Wallace’s trademark footnotes that are a story within themselves, and you’ll have an interest in seafood even if it’s something you’ll never actually eat. Jonathan Franzen contributes “The Comfort Zone,” a piece not only about the pulling apart of his family when his older brother left home, but also about the effect Charles Schulz’s work had on him. It’s this great combination of greater culture, i.e. the growth of comics, and personal experience that makes you think about how such things come to play in your own life. Regardless of the criticisms against Franzen, I think he’s always great to read so I was excited to recognize his name in the table of contents.

David Sedaris was also influential in my reconsideration of the essay. Few who have read his collections can deny that he has a talent for taking factual experiences and retelling them in a way that’s both fascinating and inspiring. Sedaris’s “Old Faithful,” included here, is no different as he contemplates growing old with his boyfriend. It’s not the most original of topics, but only Sedaris can take the popping of a boil and make it romantic and a little bit sad.

I did also come across new authors whose other works I’d be interested in reading. Kitty Burns Florey’s “Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog” expounds the beauty of diagramming sentences. “I remember loving the look of the sentences, short or long, once they were tidied into diagrams,” she writes, “the curious maplike shapes they made, the way the words settled primly along their horizontals like houses on a road, the way some roads were culs-de-sac and some were long meandering interstates with many exit ramps and scenic lookouts.” E.J. Levy’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” recalls the author’s memories of her mother’s reliance on Julia Child’s recipes, examining food and marriage and the loss of childhood innocence. Ian Frazier’s “If Memory Doesn’t Serve” is a funny look at how the mind mixes up similar names and causes one to, say, mistake H.G. Wells for George Orwell or the author with Ian Fleming, James Bond’s creator. It’s amusing because who hasn’t experienced their mind being so full that they combine two things to fill one slot?

I would like to continue reading the Best American Essays series in the coming years because I know I won’t ever have the time to get my hands on the all the magazines and journals in which the included pieces were originally published. (Would that I, daily, had numerous blissful, uninterrupted hours in which to read…) But at least there’s someplace that captures all of these great pieces of nonfiction and gives them a home. The essay’s come a long way since I was young and I’d like to give it the attention it deserves.

23. The Minority Report and Other Classic Stories

2006-08-05T17:03:00.000-05:00

by Philip K. Dick

When Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of The Minority Report came out a few years ago, I was really excited to see it because it featured a somewhat undiscovered Colin Farrell who I had deemed aesthetically perfect a few months earlier. I was less excited to see it because of the Steven Spielberg/Tom Cruise collaboration which usually amounts to ruminations on life, the universe, and everything, although in an arrogant sort of way and not at all in a way that’s particularly fun to watch. True to my speculations, there was an entire portion of the movie that’s dedicated to Cruise’s guilt over the son he lost and his resulting obsession with precognitive crime prevention. I had a pretty sneaky suspicion that the story it was based on didn’t have any of the melodrama Spielberg and Cruise are so fond of. Boy was I right.

This was my first experience with Philip K. Dick’s short stories, although not with his novels, two of which I’ve read. I came across a criticism that said Dick’s stories are more difficult to get into than his novels, that they’re choppier and not as smooth. I actually found I enjoyed the stories more and I think it has something to do with the fact that the Vintage Books novel editions I have give away the entire plot on the back cover. I spend the whole book confused and wondering when this one thing’s going to come into play, only to find out it was the big twist at the end. There was no opportunity for spoilage with the stories and for the first time I really enjoyed Dick’s writing.

Let me tell you just how different Minority Report the movie and Minority Report the story are: completely. The entire concept of the “minority report” is totally different! If you haven’t read/seen either, the story is based on a society governed by the precognitive insights of three mutants. As a result, murder has been completely eradicated. John Anderton is the head of the precrime unit and all is peachy until the young Ed Witwer (a gorgeous, pre-fame Farrell), is sent in to monitor Anderton’s work, making Anderton suspicious that his companion is vying for his job, and the precogs release a report that Anderton is about to commit murder. Anderton’s only hope for proving his innocence is finding the minority report and this is where the two accounts diverge. In the movie the report is the dissenting opinion of one of the three precogs, making the reports of the other two the majority report and the one that is taken as truth. In the story, however, a minority report happens when one precog’s vision is based upon the vision of another. Ergo, one precog foresees Anderton committing murder and another precog’s vision is based on Anderton already having that piece of information. It took me a moment to get my mind completely around that idea, but when I did I wondered why the movie version was so different. Seriously – why would you do that?

But anyway, I enjoyed both (although I may have enjoyed the movie less if I’d already read the story because I’m like that) and I also really liked a good number of the other stories in the collection. Some were kind of frightening when you thought about how true they could be. “The Mold of Yancy” was one of these, telling the story of a society conditioned by governmental teachings told through a fatherly television figure by the name of John Yancy. Through fireside chats and ponderings in the garden with his wife, Yancy spouts governmental propaganda and society laps it up, none the wiser. Things take a darker turn when one of Yancy’s writers decides to steer his teachings in a different direction. “War Game” is about a group of workers at a toy company that are obsessed with figuring out what’s going on with a game of soldiers, only to completely overlook the seemingly innocuous Monopoly-type game where the winner is the one who has first parted with all his stocks and money. Imagine if we were brought up believing that winning meant giving everything back to the sovereign entity!

I think my favorite was “Recall Mechanism” which was about a man with a fear of heights so great that he can barely get up steps and sometimes can’t even stand up. A psychiatrist determines he has latent precognitive abilities and is foreseeing his death, only his precog abilities aren’t strong enough for him to know it. In comes another patient with the same latent abilities who has incredible urges to push people and, well…you see where this is going. It was kind of funny, which I wasn’t expecting, but it was also just really creative and I finished this story in admiration. I actually finished the entire book in admiration of Dick’s creativity because while certain ideas, like precognition and subliminal governmental practices, reoccur, each plot is so different and for how many stories Dick has written, it’s really quite stunning. The fact that so many of his stories have been made into movies is a testament to that, but, you know me, I can’t wait to get the original sources and discover just how much better they are in the author’s words.

22. Watchmen

2006-07-29T17:40:00.000-05:00

by Alan Moore, art by Dave Gibbons

There’s this great documentary on comic book history that I’ve seen on the History Channel a couple times. It is the ultimate in geekdom (Comics and the History Channel? Yeesh!), but it was pretty interesting to learn how much current events affected the growth of the comic book industry, right up to affecting the creation of specific superheroes themselves. I didn’t notice until a later viewing that Alan Moore’s Watchmen was mentioned in the documentary, but while reading it I found it amazing just how incredibly intertwined with real life this story of erstwhile superheroes was.

The title Watchmen refers to the descendents of a group of crime fighters who called themselves the “Minute Men.” With the Minute Men disbanded, a second generation of crime fighters came together, including Laurie Juspeczyk, daughter of Sally Jupiter, Dr. Manhattan, a man whose exposure to radiation has rendered his skin blue and given him the ability to travel instantaneously in time and space, Rorschach, a psychopath, Night Owl, sharing his name with an original Minute Man, and the Comedian, who was part of that first group. When someone starts killing off superheroes twenty years later – the Comedian’s death in the first section leaves us with that splotch of blood staining the cover art – the reluctant vigilantes find themselves returning to their alter egos to get to the bottom of a plot far more nefarious than they could have ever imagined.

Of the characters, Rorschach is only one who’s kept up his superhero identity through the years, although he’s clearly the most demented of them. When he’s finally captured by the police and put under psychiatric analysis, we get to see how his abusive childhood led up to a grisly murder and the birth of his adopted identity. Rorschach is one of the most interesting characters because he’s basically a walking time bomb and you fear what’ll happen if he ever explodes. Except for Manhattan, who is physically incapable of returning to his former identity, Rorschach is the only one who wants no part of regular humanity and taking off his mask is akin to ripping off his skin.

On the other hand, Laurie wants no part of the superhero scene and is always a bit bitter towards her mother, Sally Jupiter of the Minute Men, who forced her into it as a teenager. Laurie is paired with Manhattan, stuck at the military base where he does his research. She finds a sympathetic ear in Dan Dreiberg, the second rendition of the Night Owl hero, and the two embark on a relationship that ends up being mutually beneficial to their stagnant lives. As the stoic voice of wisdom, Manhattan doesn’t grieve his loss of Laurie, having the ability to see the future and past simultaneously. His radioactive transformation is beautifully drawn and the story is straight out of the classic superhero genre.

I guess every superhero comic requires its non-hero characters to suspend their disbelief. They just have to accept that a man can fly around and dodge bullets or dress up like a bat and administer his own form of justice without questioning any of it. I haven’t read much of the superhero comics (or any really…I’ve never quite figured out where to start), so most of my knowledge comes from TV shows, movies, or general pop culture, but what I found interesting about Watchmen is that we aren’t required to believe that these characters have any special abilities, except Manhattan of course. Sally Jupiter is little more than the requisite sexpot and the Comedian is your typical testosterone-bolstered egomaniac. But this shows that these people who are outside of society are humans, too. They have their own set of problems and insecurities and when they get old they retire. They’re not that different or “super” after all. Each section of the twelve-part series ends with excerpts from a superhero memoir, newspaper clippings from their pasts, and, in Rorschach’s case, parts of his psychiatric chart. Moore gave all of his heroes a firm grounding in reality so it doesn’t take that much of a stretch to think that a group like this could actually form. It’s pretty inventive and Moore gives the genre an accessibility that I don’t think any other writer has.

I know this book is in the works for a movie and I’m hesitant to see that come to fruition. I’m still reeling from the bastardization that was the film version of V for Vendetta, so I can see how easily filmmakers might ruin this story. God knows what they’ll do with Laurie and Dan’s relationship because it seems that there’s always a sappy love scene in these kinds of movies to draw the female audience in. (Note to filmmakers: We don’t need that. We’ll see a movie just because it’s good, even without a trace of lovey-dovey, pappy crap.) I’ve heard speculation of Willem Defoe doing Rorschach and I can see that, but what of the other characters? This story just won’t do with a young starlet or the latest hunk. And, more importantly, who’ll play Manhattan? How will you pull off a big blue guy who walks around naked 90% of the time?

But I can’t worry about that because the movie will happen and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. I can just say, get thee to a comic book store before it comes out so you won’t be at all spoiled for a truly engaging, intricately written story. The back of my edition reads, “If you’ve never read a graphic novel, then Watchmen is the one to start with,” but I’m inclined to disagree with that point. Get a few graphic novels under your belt, then tackle Watchmen. There’s something to be said for saving the best for last.

21. Truth & Beauty

2006-07-25T21:52:00.000-05:00

by Ann Patchett

I’m slightly hesitant to post what I really think about Ann Patchett’s memoir because it seems, well, sort of wrong to criticize a memoir, especially when your criticism isn’t of the writing itself (I think that’s perfectly fine), but of the people themselves. Who are you or I to pass judgment on these people’s lives? But it’s something of human nature to do that, I think, so I won’t hold back too much when I pass my judgments and, besides, anyone is free to dismiss them as they wish.

For a bit of background, in case you haven’t heard of the book which means you’ve been living under a bit of a literary rock, Truth & Beauty is Ann Patchett’s chronicle of her friendship with author Lucy Grealy, who is famous for her own memoir, Autobiography of a Face. Due to childhood cancer, Lucy’s missing part of her jaw and both her own book and Ann’s focus on this. Anne’s book, however, is more about how the two of them became friends, how their writings were submitted and rejected and submitted and finally accepted, how they met men and left men, and how they were a part of each other’s lives right up until Lucy’s death. The book is a very revealing portrait of this strong bond between the two women and you’d be hard-pressed to not be somewhat moved by their devotion to each other.

Which is where my criticism comes in. I guess my criticism isn’t really of the women themselves or with the way Ann tells their story, but with the way the book is being described as a truthful telling of women’s friendships. I disagree with that. This may be a truthful telling of their friendship, but I do not at all think this speaks for women’s friendship as a whole. For some reason women’s friendships have been looked upon as a sort of mystical relationship that people keep trying to understand. (Is it really people, though? Do men care about our friendships or is it just other women who try to understand how female social networks act? I wonder.) Look at the success of Sex and the City and the way everyone hailed it as showing how women really spoke amongst their female friends. Lucy and Ann’s friendship is very affectionate, they share everything, and Lucy is very dependent on Anne’s presence and approval. (At least, that’s the way it’s portrayed. I don’t claim to speak for the actual people in the story.) Is that how people think we really are?

I know I reacted so strongly to this depiction because it’s the exact opposite of the kind of person I am. I definitely have strong friendships and there are people from whom I’d do just about anything, but there are things I doubt I’d be willing to do for anybody. I wouldn’t be able to deal with someone leaping in my lap and constantly asking if I loved them best. I wouldn’t be able to deal with someone complaining about her love life while being as promiscuous as possible. I wouldn’t be able to deal with someone addicted to drugs who does less to help herself than she expects me to do to help her. I believe that only you can make yourself happy and while other people can factor in that level of happiness, if you’re not happy with yourself no one else is going to make that happen for you. So, to see a portrait of a friendship that is clearly codependent with people who are not self-staining and to see that described as being the spokes model for women’s friendships everywhere, that really irks me. That’s not the kind of friendships I have. In fact, if Lucy were my friend, I would have dumped her long ago.

Maybe I’m not that compassionate of a person, but I don’t keep people in my life who suck me dry and then chalk it all up to the mysteries of the female friendship. Again, I’m not trying to judge what Ann and Lucy really had, but this is the way I read their written characterizations and the reaction I had knowing this is what people are saying we’re all like. I realize that neither Ann nor Lucy were your average people, but then, what’s average? Who’s normal? Whose to say that their friendship is better or worse or indicative of friendships as a whole? I’m not saying what they had was wrong, just that it doesn’t speak to me. I’m not saying Truth & Beauty was bad, either, but that it made me uncomfortable as a woman.

Actually, I’ll stop defending my opinion on it now and just say: read it. And let me know what you think.

20. Prep

2006-07-17T20:13:00.000-05:00

by Curtis Sittenfeld

Perhaps one of the greatest things about Prep was that it reminded me how good it is to be reading again. “So this is what it’s like,” I would think as I spent every chance possible reading the book and thinking about the characters when the pages were closed. “This is why I do what I do.” Besides reminding me how much I love reading, one other thing the book made me realize is that I should, perhaps, never force myself to read something I don’t like. There just isn’t enough time in one’s life to spend on mediocre or uninteresting books when great reads sit in waiting on your shelves. Of course, I’ve stumbled upon some amazing stories by reading things I would usually never pick up, so the theory isn’t quite sound, but maybe it’ll help me learn when to quit a book unfinished and not feel guilty about it.

Prep is a coming of age story, through and through, and you know I love a good coming of age story (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Dandelion Wine are my two most favorite books and both focus on the tenuous transition from childhood to adulthood). I’ll admit that I didn’t quite know what to think of Prep when it came out because, judging from the cover which we all know we do, it looks kind of like chicklit. And judging from its popularity, it seemed even more that it wouldn’t be a particularly substantial story. But I was still interested in reading it and the fact that it was nominated for the Orange Prize didn’t hurt.

I absolutely loved it. I can see a lot of people saying they loved this book because Lee Fiora, our narrator, is them or was them as a teenager. That’s not exactly the case with me, but I can say that I think Lee is the person I was always afraid I really was. Lee has a lot of the typical teenage problems with self-esteem and embarrassment over her family, so when she decides to go to Ault, a boarding school hundreds of miles away, the problems are only exacerbated. Do you remember all the drama that went on in your college dorm? Imagine all of that at high school level and you’ll get an idea of what Lee has to deal with. She makes friends with a minority (important to the character, I’m not just pointing it out) who steals from the other girls and later a girl who’s so rich her family had a professional decorator style her room and she spends as good deal of time obsessing over a boy who, as far as she knows, is barely aware of her existence. It isn’t that Lee isn’t a smart girl or is even entirely gauche, but she’s constantly second guessing herself and wondering whether she merits any attention instead of standing up and making herself known. Lee’s the kind of person I never want to be, but have always been afraid I really am.

The idea of going to a boarding high school makes me shudder. I spent a lot of time wondering why you would ever choose that, provided your life at home was relatively normal, when you would just have to go through all of it again in college. Maybe that’s because my own college experience wasn’t that great and by the time I started my third year in a dorm I realized it was one year too many (unlike other schools, most U of C’ers stay in the dorms for the entire four years). I wasn’t cut out to put up with other people’s drama and at the time I didn’t yet know how to separate myself from it. Or maybe you really can’t because no matter how against the norm you are, you’re forced to compare yourself against the backdrop of the general student population. Because even though Lee was not like the other Ault students and didn’t really want to be, she wasn’t outside of their emotional reach. I just don’t understand why anyone would want to live like that for eight years, but I guess you don’t know that’s how it’s going to be before you’re fully in it. Maybe you don’t realize that’s how it was until you’re fully out of it.

I spent every moment I could consuming this book and that’s something I haven’t done in a long time. Sure, I’ve read some good books recently, but none that grasped me so hard I couldn’t let go until work or sleep forced me to. I imagine, too, a lot of other readers have felt this way. The majority of them may be female, but that’s not a bad thing because the book is told distinctly from a female point of view and it’s not wrong if that speaks to us. I can’t say if it was the plot or the language or something else that drew me in, but I hope this is a book that continues to hook readers for many years to come. I hope one day, a hundred years in the future when the cars we drive are in history books and only great-grandparents grew up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, some thirteen-year-old girl picks this up and reads it. Maybe it’ll be assigned to her in freshmen English, if such a thing still exists. Maybe she won’t get understand it right away, because she’ll be a little too young, but she’ll like it well enough and will continue to pick it up every couple of years and reread it into her adulthood. It could be that a decade later she pinpoints that summer, spent lazing on her bed with the pages splayed open and Lee Fiora saturating her mind, as the one when she first truly fell in love with a book. Lee Fiora could be our country’s next Francie Nolan and I can personally pay Ms. Sittenfeld no higher compliment than that.

19. Coffee Will Make You Black

2006-07-16T10:48:00.000-05:00

by April Sinclair

Coffee Will Make You Black is our August choice for the GB book club, and here I've written a nice little introduction. (Note that we now have our own page - whooo!) I have to point out that, as someone who doesn't often read an entire book in one day, I read almost all of this book in one day. It's that fast of a read and it's also that enjoyable to warrant the single-day read. I did really like, although, as I say in the intro, I do wish Sinclair had taken more time to explore some of the heavy topics she touches on. These very serious ideas of race, sexuality, and identity shape her protagonist and her story, but they just sit there instead of serving as a jumping off point for a more indepth exploration. Perhaps the fact that this is a young adult book has something to do with it, but regardless of that and regardless of my singular criticism, Coffee is a worthwhile read.

And, if any of my Chicago readers find they want to pick it up, stop by our meeting in August (details on the GB page). This will be my first time actually leading the discussion, so wish me luck and come say hi if you can.

18. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

2006-07-03T15:41:00.000-05:00

by J.K. Rowling

I’m going a little out of order in terms of posting what I’ve read, but having stayed up until 3am last night to finish the latest Harry Potter, I have to give you my thoughts on it RIGHT NOW. As always, spoilers abound, so if, like me, you managed to go all this time without hearing about who died and want to keep it that way, avert your eyes now.

I remember before this book came out, at which point I’d only read through the second book, there was much speculation that Ron would be the one to get the axe. After reading the fourth book I had a speculation of my own – that it would be Dumbledore. I mentioned this guess casually, having no evidence to support it but knowing it would be the most shocking character possible. Think about it – your first reaction is that Dumbledore can’t die isn’t it? Who will teach Harry? Who will lead him to Voldemort? Without Dumbledore, Harry will actually have to start making his own decisions and god knows that’s something Rowling has avoided as much as possible. We don’t want Harry to have an active role in his future do we? But this being the case, only one person’s death could greatly alter the course of events. Ron’s or Hermione’s deaths would be sad, but that’s it. Malfoy’s death would be satisfying. The Aurors are all too peripheral. And while Mr. and Mrs. Weasley were possibilities, they’d be too much like losing parents again. So there was only one viable option – Dumbledore. I did not, however, at all expect how it would happen.

Seriously, what’s Snape’s deal? Is he good or bad? Is he in cahoots with Voldemort or is he a double agent for Dumbledore? Snape is by far the most interesting character in the entire series if only because it’s impossible to pin him down. It would be easy to say he’s pure evil and has been in league with Voldemort the entire time, but why has Dumbledore trusted him so? If he is, indeed, on the side of good, he’s still a mean-spirited person who’s got some serious issues to deal with. Here’s how I interpret that final scene: Snape is basically good, but because he was one of the Death Eaters, Dumbledore has set him to appear as one of them again, doing whatever possible to make his deceptive allegiance convincing, whether this is making Unbreakable Vows or encouraging a young Death Eater or employing the Unforgivable Curses. Remember when Dumbledore makes Harry promise to obey his every order, even if this means saving himself and leaving Dumbledore to die? I think Snape has made this same promise, even if it means he must kill the person to whom the promise was made. And since Snape is so accomplished at Occlumency, Voldemort will never have the chance to discover differently.

That’s my theory, anyway, because claiming Snape was bad the entire time would be just too easy. It would also make everyone who trusted him seem like a complete idiot.

The latest rumor is that two people are going to die in the final book and the theory is that Harry will be one of them. I’m inclined to agree, if only because that’s the only way Rowling can put a definitive end to the series. It’s a practical decision more than a creative one. And if Harry dies, then Voldemort has to die, too because Voldemort living and Harry dying would be too depressing of an end and, man, we did not invest thousands of pages and hours of time just to have Voldemort win, now did we?

But back to the book at hand and my grievances therein. I know I’ve said this before, but as long as Rowling fills hundreds of pages with unnecessary stories, I’m going to keep complaining. Here are some things I don’t need to hear about again: Quidditch trials. Quidditch matches. House elves. People hooking up with other people just to make the object of their affection mad (although this was pretty funny). The Dursleys. Unicorns, huge spiders, or other magical creatures. Grawp. Fleur Delacour. Cho Chang. Things I want to hear more about, because they were nearly absent in this book: Sirius and Regulus Black (R.A.B.?). Mad-Eye Moody. Kingsley Shacklebolt! The Black house. Kingsley Shacklebolt! (Give a wizard brother some love!) And Snape’s true plan of course, but I’m going to make the wild assumption that we’ll get that. If not I’ll throw my book against the wall, I really will.

One of the problems I have reading these books is that Rowling packs in so much irrelevant information that when something important is mentioned, I usually don’t notice it until it’s mentioned a second time and I’m left wondering why these things have seemingly come out of the blue. And I’m not going to go back through four hundred pages to try to find that first mention. Someone needs to tell J.K. that sometimes more pages don’t make a better story – they just make a longer story. I wouldn’t be surprised if book number seven skims the thousand page mark and I doubt it’ll be just about Snape and Horcruxes and the final showdown between good and evil. But Quidditch or not, I’ll be there reading it with the rest of you. We’ll see if my predictions turn out to be right one last time.

Oh – did anyone else think Voldemort was the Half-Blood Prince? Because I did and even though it turned out to be Snape, who is just as dangerous as far as Harry’s concerned, you’d think that would have crossed someone’s mind. Voldemort is a half-blood, after all, and I believe so megalomaniacal as to refer to himself as a prince. It seems stupid to try spells from unknown sources with complete abandon. Just sayin’.

17. Instant Love

2006-06-25T21:43:00.000-05:00

by Jami Attenberg

Last Thursday I eschewed my usual evening plans – which involve coming home, eating dinner, and either reading, watching tv, or working on GB, or a combination of the three, until the Daily Show comes on – and went to a reading at the Hideout. I’m always saying how I should go to more of these events that I post about, but I rarely do. Mostly it’s because during the week I like to savor the time I have at home. I like my routine and I always feel a little off when I alter it. Also, and I don’t know if I’m in the minority here but it sure seems like it, I hate the Hideout. I hate it. Well, maybe not it specifically, but I hate getting there. I hate taking the El to North Avenue and then waiting for the stupid #72 bus that only runs every half hour, if you’re lucky, to take me to Elston so I walk up three or so seemingly deserted blocks to this small tucked away house that’s really a bar. Even more, I hate coming back home. Making the trip in the light of early evening isn’t the problem, but when I have to make my way back after midnight? It’s not my favorite thing to do. I know its relative obscurity is the point, but I would be really happy if all the good readings started booking themselves at someplace a bit more accessible.

But I digress. I probably wouldn’t even have gone if I hadn’t gotten Jami Attenberg’s book in the mail. I’m always a little weirded out when I’m sent books to read or review. I have two reactions, in the following order: 1) Me? You want me to read your book? Why? 2) Free book! Whoo! So with the Hideout reading just a couple weeks away, I started right in on Instant Love.

This is going to sound like an insult within a compliment and I don’t mean it that way, but I really didn’t think I’d like Instant Love. It’s about women and love and women dealing with love and all that stuff about which so many authors try to say something original and just end up perpetuating bad stereotypes about female writers. I shouldn’t have thought that because I’ve come across plenty of books that are for women, by women (fuubuu?) that were fabulous! But old habits die hard, you know?

Instant Love follows three women, Holly and Maggie who are sisters and Sarah Lee who is a peripheral friend, and their trials with love during different periods of their lives. The book is a series of short stories that could very easily stand on their own, but work tremendously well when they’re collected in one volume. The first story, “The Perfect Triangle,” centers on a teenaged Holly and the boyfriend she loses to a “cooler” friend. Maybe the friend isn’t really cooler, but remember how you had that one friend who always seemed to get just a little more attention than you and you never really knew why? That’s the case with Holly’s friend Shelly and the way Holly claims her revenge is mean, but smart.

“Mean Bone” chronicles one of Maggie’s early breakdowns when she started carrying razor blades and cut an older man who thought nothing of flirting with her. The title story tells of Holly’s current love life, having sex with men from internet dating sites and a near stranger she encounters in her apartment building. In an interesting turn, “The Manzanita Grove” strays from the sisters and instead shows what may have caused some of their issues – this is the story of their father’s relationship with a PhD student. Absent are the two girls who refuse to have anything to do with their father.

What surprised me most about this collection was when I finally noticed that the stories were connected. I’ve previously expressed my dislike of authors who try to bill their short stories as novels, but I didn’t seem to have a problem with it this time. Maybe because Jami wasn’t trying to find a new, “original” way to construct a novel, but instead put her efforts toward just writing good stories. And because they were connected, it became fun finding out who the next story would be about and figuring out how it fit into their lives.

So what are the lessons learned? Accept any book anyone offers to you because, hey, free book! Don’t let old prejudices prevent you from getting into new reads. And just because you have to take two forms of public transportation to get somewhere, sometimes you should make the effort to go. You might get to hear some great people read and you just may meet some friendly, smart, interesting authors.

16. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

2006-06-13T13:28:00.000-05:00

by Alice Munro

I’m all moved into my new apartment now. The books are unpacked, though not in any order because my last bookshelf, which I’m painting, has yet to be reassembled. I was realizing this time around that my books were the first things to be packed and the first things to be unpacked. It was like they were a major hurdle in the moving process, like, “Whew! Once these babies are packed I’m halfway there!” And, “If I can just get the books unpacked tonight, I’ll be golden.” It’s not like I even have that many books. I only filled up ten boxes which, from the way some of you describe your personal libraries, is downright piddly. But it was nice picking up each one, remembering reading it or remembering how excited I was when I bought it. For some of them it was making the tough decision to give it away. And it was nice, on the other end of the moving, placing them in their new, if not completely organized homes, especially when part of that home includes the, ahem, built-ins flanking my [non-functional] fireplace. I like my new apartment.

It was during this process that I finally settled on a book to read. Doppleganger pointed out how horrible it is not knowing what or when you’re going to read next and, truly, it is. For someone who identifies herself as a “reader” to not be reading is almost terrifying. It’s like you’re flapping out there in the wind with nothing to grab onto. Jen commented that reading seems to go in cycles so, by that theory, reading slumps are just the opposite of those really high-intensity reading periods where you feel like you must read everything you can get your hands on. And I’ll certainly buy that, but why does it feel so bad when we’re at the other end of the pendulum? Why did it feel like an act against nature to not carry a book everywhere I went?

But back to the point at hand – it was during the process of packing the books away in their boxes that I came across the perfect one to read. I’ve read Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage before and, in fact, this was my introduction to Alice Munro, but when Doppleganger raved about it during her review of Runaway, a book that I also own but have yet to read, I realized that I remembered almost nothing about it. She recalled being blown away by some of the stories in here and I had no idea what she was talking about. That proved to be the perfect choice of books because, although I remembered nothing about the stories inside clearly I liked them enough to explore the author’s other works, and thus I was guaranteed to like it. And if it was indeed too early for me to come out of my slump, there would be no guilt over quitting the book early. It was, after all, a reread.

I read small sections of the book before the move, but after I’d had a few days to settle into my new digs, I read almost all of the remainder in one go. Which is to say, damn, this book is good. I tend to have a problem admitting that I like some things that are stereotypically feminine and part of me hates that Munro’s writings are, definitely, geared toward the female population. But when the writing is so pointed and all of the words are used to their fullest extent, making the stories intense and consuming, I start to be okay with the whole feminine thing.

There is an element of sadness running through these stories that I absolutely love. I love that Munro can take the memory of a one-day affair or young girls running off with older men and stray from the florid sentimentality with which most female writers would imbue them, instead giving them a gravity that makes them real. The title story follows a woman on the verge of spinsterhood who, as the butt of a teenager’s joke, actually ends up meeting the man she marries. The meeting isn’t cute, as she stumbles upon her future husband while he’s in a bought of bronchitis, and the woman isn’t shyly self-deprecating, blaming her man troubles on the five pounds she can never seem to lose. It’s shocking to find out that the two do end up together and you have to wonder what kind of determination this woman had to make it work out to her expectations.

In fact, several of the stories deal with unhappy or unlikely marriages. Both “Post and Beam” and “What Is Remembered” focus on women who realize their marriages aren’t as wonderful as they should be, but instead of tucking tail and running, they stick through their plights. It isn’t with a sense of “wifely duty,” either, because that would surely make me chuck this book against the wall, but rather with a sense of responsibility for the choices they made in their lives. There’s something about that that’s very grown-up and mature…this definitely isn’t chick lit.

I think my favorite story was “Comfort,” which centers on a woman whose ALS-suffering husband has just committed suicide. She walks in on the body and instead of falling apart, calmly calls the proper authorities and then proceeds to search for his final note. The story tells of their marriage, both strong personalities who did battle in the evolution/religion debate amongst their friends and in the husband’s job as a teacher. Perhaps it’s this characterization of the two as scientific, logic-minded people that prevents the story from devolving into the usual hope of meeting again at the pearly gates, but what’s really poignant about the story is that there’s this woman who must go on after this crushing event has occurred and she realizes, with some amount of shock, that she can go on. You just don’t get that kind of thing in those books with the hot pink spines.

The unfortunate thing is that when you come across a book written with women in mind, it’s far too easy to disregard it. Perhaps that’s because most women-centered books aren’t for real women, but for girls who don’t know any better. Real women know there’s more than finding the man you end up marrying, that when you do find him there is no such thing as the perfect man or the perfect marriage, that in the saddest moments in life there is some happiness and that the same is true in the opposite direction. Real women don’t pick up those hot pink things – they read Alice Munro.*

*How awesome would that be on a button? “Real Women Read Alice Munro.” No, really, I’m serious. Wouldn’t you wear that proudly on your bag? Or “Real Women Read Carol Shields,” or “Charlotte Bronte,” or your favorite woman-author. Someone needs to do that and cut me a deal for supplying the idea. I’m open to offers.

15. Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life

2006-05-11T13:42:00.000-05:00

by Amy Krouse Rosenthal

I know what you're thinking. "She's fallen off the face of the book blogging earth!" And yeah, it may seem like that, but really I'm just...you know...in kind of a reading slump. I don't know what to read next, despite having several books on my shelves I'm confident I'll love and I'm afraid to start reading those because what if I end up disliking them due to the fact that I've forced myself to read them? This is very bizarre for me. It's not like I'm in school and I'm spending way too much time reading other things to keep up with my pleasure reading. I am, however, busy since I'll be moving to another apartment in a couple of weeks. Signed my lease on Monday and everything. But then again, I'm not so busy that I couldn't read something.

In the meantime, check out my review of Amy Krouse Rosenthal's Encycolpedia of an Ordinary Life, which we're reading for the Gapers Block June Book Club. It's an awesome book and if you ever have the opportunity to see Amy read, I suggest you do so.

Of course, I read this book months ago when every spare minute I could muster was spent between the pages. Seriously, what's wrong with me? Anyone have any reading suggestions to get me out of this slump?

14. The Picture of Dorian Gray

2006-04-12T20:29:00.000-05:00

by Oscar Wilde

I just checked out the American Library Association’s 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000, certain that The Picture of Dorian Gray would appear on it. Why, you may ask, would I expect to find this book among those the public claim to be of questionable content? Have you read this book? I’m sure you have a general idea of the concept behind it – man sells his soul to remain forever young and beautiful while a portrait of him ages in a disturbing mirror of his true self. It’s been somewhat indoctrinated into pop culture, but, again I ask, have you read this book? Because it is gay. Gay, gay, gay.

The story starts with Basil Hallward preparing to work on the eponymous painting when his friend Lord Henry Wotton convinces Basil to let him stay while Dorian sits for the portrait. During the sitting, Henry, or “Harry” as he is often referred to here, has some choice words for Dorian, mainly planting the idea that while today he takes his youth for granted and has “passions” and thoughts that frighten him, he will one day grow old and ugly and be full of regret. This conversation, during which Harry talks greatly of youth’s beauty, leads Dorian to utter the pivotal statement:

“How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June…If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that – for that – I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!”

Indeed, Dorian does. As he grows older and more depraved, there are no lines on his face or any traces of age while, in a turn that is at first shocking then shameful then angering, Dorian’s portrait grows wrinkled and ugly, plainly showing all of the sins he’s committed. And does Dorian ever commit some sins. While pop culture’s knowledge of the story stops at the simple aging process, the source material goes further than that to strip Dorian of the ability to feel any remorse or sadness. He visits whorehouses and opium dens and creates quite a reputation for himself, causing even old friends to make their separation from him. When Dorian falls in love with and becomes engaged to the Shakespearean actress Sybil Vane (note the interesting choice of surname), he takes Harry to see her performance of Juliet and is greatly disappointed when her show is less than stellar. Sybil’s explanation is that now that she knows true love, she has no need to pretend it. Dorian’s response to this is cold and he immediately falls out of love and breaks off the engagement. Devastated, Sybil kills herself. Not that Dorian cares.

Although Dorian is at disturbed by the portrait’s change, he begins to take a bizarre delight in watching it grow more repulsive with each of his acts, keeping it behind a curtain in an unused room of his house. After many years – almost twenty! I had no idea this story went on that long! – Basil comes to revisit Dorian and confront him about the horrible things he’s heard about his character while revealing the intense admiration he held for the young man he painted. When Basil asks Dorian to see his soul, Dorian leads him upstairs and unveils the artist’s work. “Christ! What a thing I must have worshipped!” Basil exclaims. “It has the eyes of a devil.” No sooner does Basil implores Dorian to beg for forgiveness, to redeem his soul, than Dorian picks up a knife a stabs the artist to death. Then he calls his buddy Alan Campbell and blackmails him into burning the body. And, oh yeah, Campbell kills himself out of guilt for the act he’s done. Not that Dorian cares.

The only point in time that Dorian cares about anything is when Sybil Vane’s brother goes after him, vengeful for his sister’s death. Dorian’s scared then, but any other ill emotion leaves him when James Vane is accidentally killed. Although this does drive Dorian to a mad fury and he rushes to destroy the portrait that holds all his secrets. He grabs the knife he used to kill Basil and stabs furiously at the painting. A sharp cry is heard and the servants rush in to find a dead man “withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage,” and the painting restored its original beauty. I’m not doing that ending justice so just trust me, it’s pretty cool.

I realize I didn’t explain quite why this book is so gay, but once you read it you’ll be surprised by how strong the homosexual overtones are. Both Basil and Harry are very complimentary of Dorian, while Dorian just eats up their praise. It’s not your usual 19th century story of men, women, morals, and money – this ain’t your Jane Austen’s tale of morality. It’s wonderfully salacious and succinctly told. Two hundred pages rarely packs this much punch. But still, I’m surprised that this ode to man-love goes on being taught in schools and no one protests!* Basil and Harry clearly love Dorian and I imagine it was only a matter of social mores that kept this story from being the gay love triangle that it truly is. Not that there would have been anything wrong with that.

*I’m not saying the book should be banned, just that in an age when books like Harry Potter and James and the Giant Peach have been challenged, I’m surprised this isn’t on the list. You know how the crazies are.

13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

2006-03-28T22:19:00.000-06:00

by J.K. Rowling

Once again, mind your spoiler space.

Ah, the fifth Harry Potter, which could have easily been subtitled, “The One Where Harry Grows Some Balls.” After years of being an entirely passive character, Harry sacks up and starts demanding some answers, most notably why he’s always the last to know what’s happening to him. I loved that, upon arriving at the Order, Harry loses his shit and lashes out at Ron and Hermione who have been kept far more in the loop than he has. I realize that the adults have been trying to protect Harry from harm and from being troubled with the truth of his plight, but when the Dark Lord has a personal vendetta against you, there comes a time when you need to know what the fuck is going on. That’s something I’ve had a problem with for the past four books and it’s nice to see that Rowling is finally allowing the boy some action. I mean, give the young readers the benefit of the doubt – Harry doesn’t have to be a completely blank slate for them to identify with him.

On the whole I liked HP4 better than this installment as I found it be far more climactic. The final scene when Dumbledore breaks ties with Cornelius Fudge, orders Hagrid to get the giants on their side, sends Lupin to gather the others, and puts Snape on some as-yet-to-be-revealed mission completely blew my mind whereas the final scenes in this book – when Sirius “dies,” Dumbledore goes up against Voldemort, and the prophecy is revealed – were, yes, suspenseful and exciting, but didn’t elicit the same “Holy shit!” reaction the fourth book did. (I say “dies” because I’m not entirely convinced Sirius won’t turn up again in some form or another and don’t tell me whether it happens or not in the sixth book.) And maybe because this is first book where I expected some real shit to go down I was a little bit disappointed when the majority of the book was filler material, just like the previous four. For instance – I don’t care about S.P.E.W. and Hermione knitting hats for unwitting house elves. The house elves are the means of production, yeah, I get it. I just don’t care. I’m getting tired of Quidditch, too. We know Harry loves the sport and, sure, you can mention it, but we don’t need 200 pages on it anymore, okay?

I wanted some questions answered, man. Well, mostly I wanted to know where Snape went because that was the part that surprised me most, apart from Voldemort’s resurrection. All we find out is that Snape is a Death Eater turned spy for the Order and that Dumbledore has complete trust in him, so much so that he leaves Snape to teach Harry Occlumency (“Occlu-thing” as Harry once called it, which made me laugh) to help him close his mind against Voldemort’s invasion. However, it doesn’t work because Snape has a long seated grudge against Harry’s father and his hateful memories cloud his ability to fulfill his duties with Dumbledore. He throws Harry out of his office and refuses to continue teaching him Occlumency. Which, okay, so Harry was snooping around in his Pensieve and saw some things he shouldn’t have, but we’re dealing with the Dark Lord here. You’d think Snape would put that first. Also – how does Snape get away with the things he does? At one point he just pushes Harry’s potion work off the edge of his desk and gives him a zero for the day. What kind of teacher is that? Why isn’t he ever reprimanded? Alas, Snape remains a mystery.

And while we’re on the subject, what about Dolores Umbridge appointing herself headmistress and then employing Malfoy, Crabbe, and Goyle to physically punish students? And what about her pen that didn’t write on paper, but carved lines on the writer’s hand? How is that okay? What kind of people are running the show here? Although, I do have to say that Dumbledore’s escape from Umbridge was a great scene, especially when he’s all ready to throw down, calmly saying, “…if you attempt to – er – ‘bring me in’ by force, I will have to hurt you.” Dumbledore ain’t playin’, yo. And Dumbledore’s duel with Voldemort reminded me of the fight scene between Darth Maul and Qui-Gon Jinn in that it was awesome. They’re going to have to do some real work to make this movie as good as it needs to be.

I’m not saying there weren’t good things about this book, but I’m getting tired of Rowling’s version of suspense equaling the insertion of a hundred pages of rumination on an inconsequential subject. Is Cho Chang going to matter later on? Are we going to hear more about Percy’s break from his family? Will Hagrid’s half-brother reenter the picture? Are Ron and Hermione going to stop bickering and just hook up already? I’m tired of reading about all of these things when I just want to get to the meat of the story. I’m not one to jump to the end of the book and read it first, but Rowling’s writing isn’t good enough to keep me for 800 pages and it’s only principle that’s holding me back. I, for one, am glad there are only two more books left. I’m not denying that I’m interested in the story, but do you see all these other books I want to read? I don’t have time for this shit.

And what the hell is Snape up to?!

12. Hotel World

2006-03-21T20:47:00.000-06:00

by Ali Smith

Hotel World is a book I’ve seen around numerous times in the various used bookstores I visit. I’ve always been interested in it, but something about it – perhaps the bright pink cover – always caused me to hesitate when reading over the back cover. Ultimately, I always put it back on the shelf. Yes, I judge books by their covers, but not entirely on their covers and, hey, you can’t tell me that covers don’t matter. They do. So when I made my Booker/Orange prize pledge this year and found out that this book had been shortlisted for both in 2001, I got over the pink and picked it up the next time it came into view.

Which is a good thing because this book was exactly how I was hoping it would be and not at all how I feared it might be. The back cover starts out by saying, “Five people: four are living; three are strangers; two are sisters; one, a teenage hotel chambermaid, has fallen to her death in a dumbwaiter,” and that’s a pretty succinct description of what happens in this book. Broken into five parts, Ali Smith inhabits the mind of each of these women, telling their portion of the story and what leads their lives to intersect. This isn’t the kind of book that sets up elaborate back-stories then strings them together for a contrived meeting. These are simply the stories of five people, somehow connected with the Global Hotel.

Sara has just found love, finding herself enamored with the girl at the watch repair shop. It’s the first few moments of happiness she feels just before climbing into a dumbwaiter that snaps and propels her to her death. It’s through her spirit that her story is told and Smith never makes Sara regretful or emotional about her death, keeping her matter of fact and curious as to the events that caused it. This is probably the weirdest ethereal-spirit-speaks-to-its-deceased-corporeal-body scene you’ll ever read, if, in fact, you happen to ever read another, but Smith makes it work. It’s nothing short of cool.

Else is the homeless girl with the rattling cough who collects money on the steps of the hotel. Lise is the receptionist who invites Else into a room for the night, giving her a place to have a warm bath and free breakfast. Lise was there when Sara fell to her death, but her present story is unconcerned with that. When we meet Lise she’s put up in a bed, unable to walk, and filling out an employee form questioning the quantity and quality of pain she’s in. We don’t find out what’s wrong with her, but there’s clearly far more to her story than the night of the death. Penny is a journalist staying in the hotel who stumbles upon a chambermaid clawing away at a boarded up wall. A woman in a coat with pockets of change joins them and offers a coin to help loosen a screw. Clare, the subject of the fifth story, is that chambermaid frenziedly tearing down a shoddily boarded up hole. Clare is Sara’s teenage sister and while Smith’s choice to write Clare’s section in one huge run-on sentence is, at first, difficult to read, it lends the character the kind of confused desperation you’d expect in a girl whose older sister has just died unexpectedly.

What’s impressive is that Smith is able to write these five women with five distinct voices. You could argue that Smith’s way of writing in the third person, yet seeming to inhabit her characters’ heads in a first person sense, lending her words an almost eerie air – that isn’t entirely an accurate description but I can’t think of another way to put it - is a style all her own, and in that way these five parts resemble each other, but there’s a distinct change between each of these women’s stories that’s impressive. And what’s best about the book is that Smith doesn’t manipulate her readers into feeling any particular way about her characters or the events that draw them together. I think we know how I feel about that.

Hotel World is five stories, five cross-sections of five lives that is a thoroughly enjoyable read. If you ever see it in a used bookstore, it’s worth looking past the pink and picking up. I can’t give a much better recommendation than that. (And it’s more than I can say for my next Booker endeavor, The English Patient. I haven’t given up on it yet, but the prognosis is pretty grim. And if that book does meet its untimely, but deserved death, I have a pretty good mind to add Smith’s other double-nominated book, The Accidental, to my stack.)

11. Memory Mambo

2006-03-16T19:25:00.000-06:00

by Achy Obejas

I don't know that I really conveyed it in my introduction to next month's GB Book Club selection, but I quite liked Memory Mambo. It was a nice departure from our usual books in that Chicago wasn't at the forefront of the story. It was more just the background rather than a character of its own. Not that I'm against cities acting as characters, especially when it's the one that I know and love, but the change was refreshing. And the itself story was quite good. This was another instance of being pleasantly surprised by a book I'd never heard of.

10. The Wings of the Dove

2006-03-13T07:17:00.000-06:00

by Henry James

Do you have books that you feel were an accomplishment for you? Not ones that you didn’t like but read anyway because they’re “classics” and you think it makes you more “well-read” having read them (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and not ones that got a lot of attention and you read, despite having no interest in them (only a little wrong because there’s not enough time in a bibliophile's life to spend on uninteresting books). I mean ones that you always wanted to read but somehow kept finding a way to put off, then finally started to read and plowed on through when the beginning was slow-going, and ending up loving anyway. I mean the ones that, upon closing the back cover you think, I am so glad I didn’t go without having read that. That’s how I feel about The Wings of the Dove.

I first stumbled upon The Wings of the Dove when I worked in my university’s library, shelving in the stacks. I don’t know what drew me to it, but for some reason I always wanted to read it and never took the time to actually do so. My first encounter with Henry James was actually last year, when I read Daisy Miller and Washington Square, mostly because of a Gilmore Girls reference. When I bought Wings a year ago I was still intimidated by its heft, but its placement as #26 on the Modern Library 100 made it jump to the top of my unread stack this year. And I loved it.

Sidenote: How much do I love the Barnes & Noble Classics series? I’m all about patronizing the independents in my neighborhood, but the B&N Classics are so pretty and cheap and the introductions and footnotes are actually helpful instead of pretentious. I find them hard to resist.

The Wing of the Dove follows the deceitful and treacherous love triangle between Milly Theale, Kate Croy, and Merton Densher. Kate comes from a family that’s lost its wealth due to her mother’s marriage to a disreputable man. Kate has the opportunity to come back into money by way of her aunt, Maud Manningham Lowder, but not if she continues her romance with Densher, a journalist not too concerned with money. Milly is the last surviving member of her family, with more money that she’ll ever have the desire or, owing to an unnamed terminal illness, the time to spend. Upon Milly’s arrival in London, Kate begins hatching a plan to bring Milly’s fortune into her own possession. If she can convince Milly that she and Densher have nothing between them and successfully direct Milly’s attention onto Densher, and if Densher can exhort Milly’s sympathies for his supposed spurned affections toward Kate, then the chances for a marriage between Milly and Densher are good. Once time and the illness have taken their course, Densher and Kate will be free to marry with money.

Despicable, isn’t it? Mrs. Lowder and Susan Stringham, Milly’s companion, are no better as they strive for the same results, although for different reasons. Mrs. Lowder wishes to break the union between Kate and Densher because of Densher’s lack of status. She wishes to press Kate on Lord Mark, a man with clout, although abhorrent in character. Mrs. Stringham wishes for Milly to have some happiness before she dies and goes along with Mrs. Lowder’s plans. The plan goes completely awry when Densher has trouble going through with it. Densher doesn’t start out as the strongest of characters, going along with Kate’s every whim in the scheme, but he starts to demand something from her in return for his efforts. Oh yes…that something. Kate complies, but he starts to question her devotion to their relationship. Does she want him or does she want the money? When Milly finally passes, aided by the blow of finding out that Densher and Kate are engaged, Densher is left with an unopened letter that he’s pretty sure bequeaths some amount of Milly’s money to him. But the letter remains unopened, thrown into the fire, and Densher gives Kate an ultimatum – take the money and leave him or marry him as they were, before Milly entered their lives.

There’s a simple saying that sums up the moral of this story which James puts into his own words in his preface: “…what a tangled web we weave when – well, when, through our mislaying or otherwise trifling with our blest pair of compasses, we have to produce the illusion of mass without the illusion of extent.”

Ah, Henry James. The master of using big words when diminutive ones will surely suffice. I admit that I had some trouble at the start of this book. The beginning is fairly slow, but halfway through the story’s background is set and the plot is free to roll forward. Of course, the halfway point of this book is 250 pages, so it’s not without a small amount of faith that I stuck with it, but having finished it I’m so happy I did. There are few authors who can create such an intricate plot with developed characters that build up slowly and end with a big bang. As someone who has no trouble admitting that she has trouble getting into “classics,” I can’t really tell you why I love James’s writing so much; I’m just glad I didn’t let my apprehensions cloud my attempt. That’s the real accomplishment.

9. McSweeney's Quarterly Concern No. 15

2006-03-06T18:58:00.000-06:00

edited by Dave Eggers

I’ve come to a decision. After resisting McSweeney’s for a long time out of my dislike of Dave Eggers’s writing and after finally reading an issue and finding a lot more than Eggers’s voice inside and after reading several more issues that leave me wanting to continue with the literary journal, I think I’m going to subscribe. Not only subscribe, but drop my subscription to Granta in conjunction. It’s like this: Both subscriptions are fairly pricey, although deals when you add up the cost of each individual issue. Both journals are the size of regular books and take a regular-book amount of time for me to read. Both, I feel, are mentally good for me and keep me up on current writers. But, when it comes down to it, I just enjoy McSweeney’s more. I feel like I should like Granta more than I do and that it’s better for me than McSweeney’s, maybe because it’s British, and I find stories that I like in each issue, but as a whole I’m far more excited when I pick up an unread issue of McSweeney’s and continuing to read Granta is like forcing myself to drink black coffee. I can tolerate it and sometimes I even want it, but the added bit of vanilla creamer that is McSweeney’s is nine times out of ten more satisfying. Until I have a significantly greater amount of time to devote to reading, I’m sorry Granta, but I’m going to have to let you go.

I am, however, going to continue to report on my McSweeney’s here, not just because I don’t have enough time to not count it as part of my 52, but also because I get excited about the writing in here and want to report on it. Expect more issues throughout the year as I try to get myself caught up on the ones I’ve missed.

Issue No. 15 contains the usual batch of new short stories, but rounding out the second half of the book is a collection of stories all by Icelandic writers. Talk about your global market – I don’t know that I’ve read anything Icelandic or even thought about the literary output from that country. I can’t say I really got into that section of the book, but I did enjoy Gudbergur Bergsson’s (sorry…you’ll have to insert the diacritical marks in your head) “A Room Underground,” about the male narrator’s affair with a married man and the tension and longing felt when they’re not together. Bragi Olafsson’s “My Room” told of a man going to back to view the apartment in which he grew up, only to find that it’s changed and he’s been shut out from the life inside it. Andri Snaer Magnason’s “Interference” was a great sci-fi type story involving people selling themselves as advertisements, yelling things like “Ice Cold Coke!” at passersby. In this futuristic story, people no longer need wires to connect them to phones or television, but the catch is that they’re not as liberated as they’d like to believe.

I feel guilty that I really did enjoy the American section of the book more. (I’m not xenophobic, I swear!) I really liked Steven Millhauser’s “A Precursor of the Cinema,” especially since I wasn’t entirely sure if it was fiction at first. The story involves the work of Harlan Crane who created art that seemed to move. Showings of his painting were given in which the audience would witness dancers moving against the still background and then seeming to resume their previously stationary conditions. The showings go awry when a dark painting gives the audience what seems to be a taste of death. Judy Budnitz’s “Sales” also struck me as it humorously described a family who trapped door-to-door salesmen in their yard, taunting them, stealing their free samples, and letting them defend themselves against each other. Like “Interference,” it presents an interesting parody on advertising and the way companies try to garner attention.

So I’m a convert. I remain steadfast in my opinion that Eggers’s writing is not for me, but I’m getting behind the McSweeney’s thing. Sorry, Granta. Perhaps when I have that wonderful job allowing me to read for at least two solid hours every morning, we’ll meet again.

8. V for Vendetta

2006-02-26T18:14:00.000-06:00

by Alan Moore, art by David Lloyd

I hate being the kind of person that reads a book just because a movie is coming out, but Alan Moore’s oeuvre has been on my reading list for months now and, not wanting this movie to influence my interpretation of the book, I had to rush out and read V for Vendetta right away. Because those previews look awesome and there’s no way I’m not going to see the movie.

Simply put, V for Vendetta is an amazing story. Set in a post-World-War-Three-esque London, English citizens keep on the straight and narrow by obeying Fate – a governmental system comprised of the Finger and the Eyes, among other body parts, and, most importantly, the Voice. It’s through the Voice of Fate that regular public addresses are given and signs proclaiming “Strength through Purity, Purity through Faith” adorn the city’s walls. Starting with a literal big bang, a vigilante blows up the Houses of Parliament, creating unrest in an otherwise controlled population. This is where we first meet the character known only as “V.” In a black cloak, gloves, conical hat, and perpetually smiling Guy Fawkes mask, V is the charismatic antihero leading a single-handed revolt against the extreme conservatism. Evey is the young girl at his side through which we learn of V’s history and madness.

Two great literary forebears are readily apparent in this story. Like the movie Equilibrium, I immediately thought of 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 when introduced to the controlling government and the absence of what we recognize as culture. The scene in which V first brings Evey to the Shadow Gallery and reveals the classic texts lining his walls and plays music that is foreign to the girl’s ears descended straight from similar scenes in these other books. But unlike Equilibrium, which offered nothing original to these ideas, Alan Moore does them justice by creating an engaging back-story that, though written in the 80s and set in the 90s, remains relevant today. Under conservative rule, all the disaffected citizens, i.e. the blacks, the gays, the non-Protestant, etc., are rounded up and sent to resettlement camps. A number of these prisoners were subjected to an experiment, receiving doses of a chemical that drove all of them to ruin, save for the one man locked in room Roman Numeral Five. The experimental drug made the man stronger and more intelligent and, seemingly, insane, resulting in the present-day V. He’s not just out for revenge, but for complete revolution. The idea seems completely fictional, but when you take a look at history – the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, racial profiling, the present ban against gay marriage – it’s frightening to realize that Moore’s apocalyptic tale isn’t so far from the truth after all.

I have to say that the whole Guy Fawkes thing went completely over my head and it wasn’t until I read the short behind-the-scenes passage toward the end of the book that I realized the mask represented anything in particular. That’s the problem with being so American, which was something I recently discussed with a friend. He commented that in the movie previews the signs say “Strength through Unity, Unity through Faith,” which I think has to do with making it slightly more Americanized and taking away the religious tone of “Purity.” But we can’t be expected to know who Guy Fawkes is, can we? Do the British know about Memorial Day or Thanksgiving? Is my ignorance, in this respect, okay?

The one part of the story that I didn’t particularly like was Evey herself. I’m glad that Natalie Portman is playing the character in the movie because she’ll lend her a maturity and sophistication that’s absent in the book. I know that Evey’s only about sixteen, but with what she’s gone through – loss of parents, near enslavement, poverty – you’d think she’d have grown up a little bit. Instead she acts like a whiny girl through most of her time with V. Maybe that’s just my reading of her, but I would roll my eyes when she would continuously ask V to reveal his master plan and I cringed when she asked him if he didn’t want to sleep with her. I can understand Evey falling in love with V, with his intelligence and ambition and mysteriousness, hell I even have a little crush on him, but being solely concerned with his sexual attraction to her seemed really juvenile. I have faith that Natalie Portman will make the attraction more about his ideals than her body and I’m glad that the directors didn’t pick a more typical young starlet who wouldn’t have been able to do this role justice. Scarlett Johansson would have also been a good pick.

I’m really excited to see this movie because A) the action sequences look fabulous, and B) we haven’t had a good anti-totalitarianism, anti-fascism, culturally relevant movie in some time. Moore creatively honored his literary predecessors in this book; let’s hope the movie can do the same thing.

7. I Sailed with Magellan

2006-02-19T21:08:00.000-06:00

by Stuart Dybek

As the March pick for the Gapers Block Book Club, I was a little hesitant to pick up Stuart Dybek’s collection of short stories. I’m not sure why, but I think it had something to do with his other book, The Coast of Chicago, being picked as a One Book One Chicago read, although that doesn’t make sense since Pride and Prejudice was picked for that and I like Pride and Prejudice. I just had a gut feeling I wouldn’t like Dybek. I would say that happens when you read a lot, that you get really good at predicting what you’ll like, but that also doesn’t make sense because I’m constantly surprised by books I either thought I’d dislike or books I’ve never heard of. But in this case my gut was right. I hated this book.

I Sailed with Magellan is technically short stories, but they follow Perry Katzek, his family, and their lives in Chicago. Which is where I first trip up because I’m not a fan of this sort of story collection. You’ve read The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing? You remember how nothing really flowed and there were parts where you weren’t even sure who was narrating? That would be why. Magellan is not immune to these problems. The only reason I knew that this was supposed to be one story was that the same names kept popping up. And it said so on the back of the book. We jump around from Perry’s childhood to adulthood to adolescence and there are some stories in which he doesn’t appear at all. It doesn’t work. I say, write a novel or write a short story collection. Make up your mind. There’s no reason why your short stories can’t be linked in theme or character, but I’ve yet to see the benefits of the short-story-novel.

Worse than the poor structure is the writing itself. I can describe it in one word: sappy. It’s florid and overly descriptive and while I don’t have any problems with taking a few extra lines to provide a vivid description, Dybek’s adjective skills are out of control. They don’t provide vivid description – they provide canned emotion: “We’d been kissing all day – all summer – kisses tasting of different shades of lip gloss and too many Cokes. The lake had turned hot pink, rose rapture, pearl amethyst with dusk, then washed in night black with a ruff of silver foam. Beyond a momentary horizon, silent bolts of heat lightning throbbed, perhaps setting barns on fire somewhere in Indiana.” I mean, are you serious? This is what you write about your near-sexual experience, sissy boy? It’s not better elsewhere in the book either: “Falcons that roost among gargoyles, feral cats, high-voltage wires, plate glass that mirrors sky – so many ways to fall from blue. When men fly they know by instinct they defy.” Reading this is like watching a chick flick. It’s like Dybek is writing in the manner he thinks women want to read, which is particularly insulting if that’s the case. And if it’s not the case, then you just need to put down the thesaurus for a few days. Also, hide your Julia Roberts DVDs.

But the worst part – oh yes, there’s worse yet – is the sex. There’s a good deal of sex in this book and all of it is uncomfortable. In writing, sex should be either exciting or beautiful or disturbing, depending on your intended effect, but it should never leave the reader thinking, “Umm…ew? Can you stop writing about that now?” I’ll pick just one moment, because there are plenty to choose from but this one was particularly bad, in the story called “Breasts,” which, yes, had a lot to do with that part of the female anatomy. In this scene, the main character, who is not Perry Katzek, is with a former lover in a car and while they’re close to getting together again, she “squeezes a nipple and catches a milky tear on a fingertip and offers it to him, reaching up to brush it across his lips.” Okay. Not only is this not the singular instance in this book in which Dybek equates lactation with sexiness, it is also not the singular instance in which he uses the phrase “milky tear.” I nearly gagged when I read that. Both times. I’m not anti-breast feeding and it’s something I plan to do should I have children, but it’s in a whole other realm of the human experience than the homely sex that’s happening here. It’s just not good.

Don’t get me wrong…this is not, by far, the worst book I’ve ever read (Owen Meaney, that would be YOU). It just wasn’t any good and I’m surprised that it won any awards, but I guess that happens with saccharine stories that are meant to pull on the female heartstrings. It works for Oprah. I just know that I'm not that kind of girl and it seems that my gut knows it too.

6. Division Street: America

2006-02-14T19:43:00.000-06:00

by Studs Terkel

Being something of a sociology geek (okay, major…I’m a sociology major) and being a self-proclaimed Chicagoan, you’d think I’d have read loads of Studs Terkel by now. Nope. I’ve owned Division Street: America for some time, but it wasn’t until we selected it for the Gapers Block Book Club that I finally sat down and read it. And my opinion on it? Well…

Here’s the thing. The entire book is a collection of interviews Terkel did with a number of Chicago residents. It’s a pretty ambitious project and I can only imagine how many reels of untranscribed tape didn’t make it into the book. Division Street stands as a benchmark of oral history, putting forth the belief that you can learn a lot about a society by listening to the people who live in it. It’s simple, without prejudice or interpretation, and successfully captures the voice of a diverse community in its place and time. “It is simply the adventure of one man, equipped with a tape-recorder and badgered by the imp of curiosity, making unaccustomed rounds for a years, trying to search out the thoughts of noncelebrated people.” And there’s some really surprising and telling information contained in this adventure, too.

Maybe I’m remiss on my Chicago history, but I never realized that the Jane Addams Hull House was torn down to make UIC. That was a surprise to me. Terkel begins and ends his book with interviews from influential Hull House figures, framing the contents of the book with an event that created significant social, racial, and neighborhood unrest. It was sad to read how these women fought to keep the house alive, but ultimately failed. In fact, one of the most shocking elements of the book was reading about all the racism that was prevalent then…and realizing that there are still people who think that way. Racism is no longer taboo and we see it on TV and nominate movies like Crash for awards, but in the end they’re just stories. Reading these words, actually spoken by people, was more shocking and powerful than I expected. It felt that much more real. Even though I know I’ve been the subject of racist comments myself, it’s always been more along the lines of stupid ignorance. I read things like, “The colored don’t worry me…I’ve heard tell of one colored family moved on this block. It doesn’t both me as long as they stay on their side of the street and I stay on my side of the street,” and “I have seen Negroes cry…I know they have feelings. I know that they love just as deeply as we love, if not more so.” And it hurt to know this wasn’t fiction.

It was amazing to see the range of people Terkel included in his interviews. Although the races aren’t too widely varied – there are few Hispanics or Asians, if any – we do get a nice mix of ages, economic status, and mindset. Where a young woman discloses her apathy with the world in the beginning, we near the end of the book with an interview of a woman of the same age who teaches in an integrated school and really believes in the value of he work. We have worldly travelers and people who have lived in the city their entire lives and have never seen Marshall Field’s. Stay at home mothers, working women, bar owners, celebrities…it’s as close as you could come to a cross-section of the city in a single book.

But here’s the thing. I really wish – and I really wish that sociological lightning does not come down and strike me as I state my wish – that Terkel had drawn some kind of conclusions in the end. I think the work he did is amazing and it stands as the first great oral history project and maybe the point is for the author to distance himself from his subject and allow the reader to draw their own conclusions from the first person narratives, but I really would have liked to know what Terkel thought of all that he collected. While I can’t help but think how great it is that things have progressed as far as they have, but how sad it is that these sentiments we think of as outdated still exist in society, what did Terkel think? Maybe he put some of that in his other books. That’s something I’ll have to find out.

5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

2006-02-07T07:23:00.000-06:00

by J.K. Rowling

[If I am not, in fact, the last person on the planet to read this book and you are and you want to read it at some point in time, consider this your spoiler space.]

I don’t know how this happened, how I became one of…them. You know who I mean. Those people who care about Harry Potter. It happened. I crossed over. Judge away…I deserve it!

I don’t care either, because in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, man, shit started going down. It started out simply, much like the three previous books. Harry’s forever trying to escape the Durselys, this time doing so by virtue of an invitation to the Quidditch World Cup, to which he accompanies Ron, his family, and Hermoine. It all seems pretty normal until the Dark Mark appears in the sky, something that hasn’t been seen since Lord Voldemort was in power. When the kids go back to Hogwarts, they find out their school is going to be a part of the Triwizard Tournament, a competition that hasn’t taken place for hundreds of years. Competing against them are the French school Beauxbatons and the Russian school Durmstrang. One champion is selected from each school and they compete against each other in three tasks; the one with the most points wins the Triwizard Cup and a bunch of money.

Here’s where things go predictably wrong. Although only those seventeen and above are allowed to enter the tournament, which is done by putting one’s name into the Goblet of Fire, Harry somehow gets entered and the Goblet picks him as the fourth school champion. Yeah…like the main storyline wouldn’t directly include Harry. On top of that, the new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, Mad-Eye Moody, has a suspicious past and is weird looking. We go a good six hundred pages with this. Harry goes to his classes and competes in the tasks, his scar hurts at times and various characters are suspected of having ties with Voldemort. Harry and Ron have a fight and we get the idea that Ron has unexplored feelings for Hermoine. Hermoine is, as always, strict with her studying and pours her efforts into the liberation of house elves. It’s the same kind of fare we got in the first three books, but, in those last hundred pages, as I said, shit goes down.

Dude. Voldemort comes back. He rises again! And not in some ethereal kind of way, either. He comes back because Harry is kidnapped and his blood is used as part of a spell to revive the Dark Lord. I never thought Rowling would reincarnate Voldemort because he is the embodiment of evil and everything she’s done up to this point has been very safe. Very good-always-triumphs-over-evil. Everything until now has reassured the kiddie audience that grown-ups keep you safe and bad things don’t really happen. In a few pages, all of that is gone. It is awesome.

Even though Harry escapes from Voldemort, it’s not without some scarring. His companion and fellow Hogwarts Triwizard champion dies in the confrontation. From this point forward Harry knows his safety is compromised and it’s quite the scene when Dumbledore enters the hospital wing and starts laying down the law. He dismisses Minister of Magic Cornelius Fudge for refusing to carry forth his orders, stating that he doesn’t have to do what he asks, but he better figure out which side he plans to be one. He demands they get the dementors out of Azkaban, for they will surely come to Voldemort when called, leaving the prison unwatched. He requests a truce be drawn with the giants, with whom they have experienced years of unrest. He makes Sirius and Snape, longtime foes, put aside their open hostility. He sends Sirius to find Remus Lupin and the rest of the “old crowd.” And to Snape he’s like, “Snape, you know what I need to do!” and Snape’s all, “I’m on it!” then walks out of the room. What’s Snape doing? Where’s he headed? What’s going on here???

This is the first time that an HP book hasn’t had a definite ending. We’re left with more questions than answers and it feels rewarding after three only semi-decent books. I almost had a moment of breakdown when the person who entered Harry into the tournament was revealed. I had just decided to commit to the series and placed an order for the hardbacked, not paperback, edition of the fifth book, and I came to the part where Mad-Eye Moody confesses that he’s the villain. I threw up my hands in disgust, thinking, “For once can we please not have the Dark Arts teacher be the bad guy?!” But a few twists later and with Dumbledore doing the equivalent of Jack’s “How fast do you think we can train an army?” on Lost, I was back in for the long haul. I’m here, man. You got me.

I still have problems with Rowling’s writing. I still find it very basic and plain and, at times, clunky. Her way of hinting that Harry might have a crush on Cho Chang (I don’t even want to get started with that name), is to say, “For a fleeting second, Harry had a strange desire to join the Ravenclaw table too.” Her version of foreshadowing is for a character to point out something’s weird. Classification as “odd” is our cue that something will be important later. There’s a way to write for children that isn’t 80% short declarative sentences, though you wouldn’t know it here. But I can overlook it. Voldemort’s back. Characters with a sinister air are revealed to actually be sinister. A kid freakin’ dies. For the first time, Rowling’s keeping it real and she’s got me hooked.

4. Right Ho, Jeeves

2006-02-01T20:32:00.000-06:00

by P.G. Wodehouse

I picked up my first P.G. Wodehouse on the raving recommendations of the Chickliterati and an early post from Doppleganger on Wodehouse being one of her go-to’s for comfort reading. I was a little hesitant to start in on the British series because you know how it is when everyone tells you something’s hilarious, you have to read or see it, and then you end up disappointed because they went and got your expectations all high. Also, I’m not the tiniest bit British and sometimes the humor goes over my head.

I’ve rarely found the Chickliterati do me wrong and this case was no exception. In Right Ho, Jeeves, Bertie Wooster finds himself in the middle of two lovers’ quarrels and takes it as his duty to set the relationship right. On the one side we have Gussie Fink-Nottle, hopelessly in love with Madeline Basset but scared out of his mind to do anything about it, and on the other side we have Tuppy Glossop and his fiancé Angela, Bertie’s cousin, whose engagement is on the brink of destruction. With Jeeves in tow, Bertie heads to his Aunt Dahlia’s to fix everyone’s predicaments.

What’s so funny, and what I didn’t expect, was how incredibly arrogant Bertie is. As the narrator of the story, we’re completely inside Bertie’s head, but we’re also very aware of how badly he’s messing things up. When Aunt Dahlia has a fight with her husband Tom, Bertie manages to convince the three wounded parties – Dahlia, Tuppy, and Gussie – to push back their plates at dinner, letting their feigned lack of appetite show how upset they are. All find this a difficult task since the chef, Anatole, is a culinary master and so greatly is his food loved that when he sees the three plates sent back untouched, Anatole announces his resignation. Bertie later convinces Gussie that alcohol is the only way he’ll ever get up the nerve to confess his feelings for Madeline, but when he gets drunk on his own, then downs the pitcher of spiked orange juice that Bertie planned on slipping to him, he ends up making a fool of himself during an award ceremony. Jeeves tries to warn him about the flaws in his plans, but Bertie’s so convinced that only he can mend things that it’s not until Jeeves manages to send Bertie off during a false fire alarm that Jeeves corrects his follies.

“We Woosters are ingenious, Jeeves, exceedingly ingenious…As a matter of fact, I am not speaking without a knowledge of the form book. I have tested this theory,” Bertie says, explaining how his plan to insult Tuppy’s character will cause Angela to rise to his defense, a plan that backfires when Angela simply agrees with his criticisms. But even better than Bertie’s haughty attitude are the social observations he makes. Of the argument that caused Angela and Tuppy’s breakup, one in which Tuppy shot down Angela’s story of when she was almost eaten by a shark, he says, “I must say I saw the girl’s viewpoint. It’s only about once in a lifetime that anything sensational ever happens to one, and when it does, you don’t want people taking all the colour out of it.” And when trying to convince Jeeves of the necessity of alcohol to Gussy’s proposing he says, “Use your intelligence, Jeeves. Reflect what proposing means. It means that a decent, self-respecting chap has got to listen to himself saying things which, if spoken on the silver screen, would cause him to dash to the box-office and demand his money back.”

Hilarious, no?

Well, maybe you can’t tell it from what I’m saying here, but trust me, Wodehouse is a literary force not to be missed. There are lots more laughs to be had in Right Ho, Jeeves and as one who uses the phrase “laugh out loud” only non-literally, I can say that I definitely giggled audibly. You can expect more Jeeves and Wooster in the future; after all, thousands of Chickliterati can’t be wrong.

3. A Dame to Kill For

2006-01-28T16:50:00.000-06:00

by Frank Miller

I recently had the overwhelming desire to pick up the entirety of the Sin City series and read them all in one go. It was possibly inspired by this bit on Elijah Wood in one of my Spin magazines and my thinking how he was really good in the movie and wondering if one of the seven books follows Kevin’s story and then observing that, man, Elijah Wood grew up, and then feeling embarrassed about that thought. (It’s Elijah Wood. That's weird.) I didn’t rush out and buy the six remaining of the series, but I did pick up books #2 and #3, though I haven’t yet read the third one.

A Dame to Kill For is not one of the stories in the movie. It focuses on Dwight’s fixation on a woman named Ava, a past love who is now married to the powerful Damien Lord. Like Marv, Dwight’s got a bit of an anger management problem, attempting to control his inner rage by repressing it: “I put the game on and pray it will chase away the memories. The damn Old Town memories of drunken mornings and sweaty sex and stupid, bloody brawls. You can’t just pick and choose. You can’t take the good without the bad. Not once you let the monster out.”

The monster comes out when Ava resurfaces from Dwight’s past, screaming tales of her husband’s jealousy, mistrust, and abuse. She seduces him one last time, leading him to seek out her torturous husband and murder him in a fit of desirous rage. Unbeknownst to Dwight, this is exactly what Ava wants – a way out of her marriage and access to her husband’s fortune. She is, in her own words, pure evil: “There’s a word for what I am, but nobody uses it anymore. Nobody wants to see the simple truth. If they did, they’d kill people like me as soon as we revealed ourselves. But they don’t. They close their eyes and blather about psychology and say nobody is truly evil. That’s why I’ve won. That’s why I always win.” Then she shoots Dwight in the head.

I love that Ava is pure and shamelessly evil. I love that she manipulates anyone and everyone without remorse. I’m not sure why I love it, but I think that many of the times we get a villainess, there’s some kind of underlying reason for her rage. Her father abused her when she was young or her sister ran off the love of her life or she watched her husband die. Ava’s powerful and influential and she knows it; everything she does is for her own gain and she’s not apologetic about it. Don’t misunderstand me as trying to put some kind of feminist slant on the character. I’m just saying that we don’t often get women who are evil because that’s who they are. Usually female characters are only allowed to go bad once something awful has happened in their lives and that’s not the case with Ava. I like that.

I’m a little confused on the exact timeline of these books because Dwight enlists Marv’s help to, first, kill Damien Lord, then to take him to Old Town for recovery and, in the end, put an end to Ava’s insanity. But in The Hard Goodbye, the first in the series, Marv dies. This is also our first introduction to Gail and “deadly little” Miho, two of the Old Town prostitutes who come to Dwight’s aid, and we have an appearance from the twins Wendy and Goldie, the latter of which is Marv’s obsession in the first book. Clearly this story happens before that, but this leaves me wondering if I’ll be able to figure out the chronology of all seven when I’ve got them read. Reading all seven is, of course, on my list of ever-growing reading goals.

2. The Know-It-All

2006-01-18T19:47:00.000-06:00

by A.J. Jacobs

I don’t know if this actually happened or not, but I seem to remember a man visiting our house when I was fairly young and, from that visit, we gained our full set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I always thought it was weird to remember a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman, but according to A.J. Jacobs, the Britannica was sold in this manner until the early 90’s, so my memory is most likely real. And it’s too weird for me to have made up anyway, so, by that virtue alone, I’m guessing this salesman actually existed.

You’d think reading the entire Britannica would be the most boring, ridiculous time waster a person could concoct, and you’d wonder why you’d ever want to read about a person taking on this task, but in The Know-It-All, Esquire editor A.J. Jacobs does exactly that and his memoir-like ruminations on his project are far from dull. His thoughts are at times funny and at times profound. He can be arrogant in one moment and then be completely humbled the next. His thoughts vary widely, arranged only by their alphabetical significance, but in the end we get a nice little picture of this chunk of his life during which the Britannica reigned supreme.

Here are some things we would never know without the Britannica:

Isaac Asimov wrote five hundred books. Five Hundred! I knew the man was prolific, but five hundred?

Ecstasy was patented as an appetite suppressant by Merck in the 20’s.

The Gettysburg Address was not the main event of the evening, but a two-minute speech following Edward Everett’s two-hour oration. Yet another case against over-achievement.

There is an actual chunk of metal that weighs exactly one kilogram. The metric system is based on concrete objects that you can see.

In the 18th century, people used vinaigrette as perfume. I guess if everyone smells like salad, you don’t notice it too much.

But far from containing a simple collection of random facts, Jacobs using this experience to ruminate on some pretty interesting things. Hovering over all of this is the question of whether reading the Britannica will make Jacobs smarter. Will ingesting great amounts of information make one more intelligent? And what does it mean when you’ve read all this stuff, but you can’t remember any of it? “I’m not so deluded that I think I’ll gain one IQ point for every thousand pages,” Jacobs ruminates early on. “But…I believe that there is some link between knowledge and intelligence. Maybe knowledge is the fuel and intelligence is the car? Maybe facts are the flying buttresses and intelligence is the cathedral? I don’t know the exact relation. But I’m sure the Britannica, somewhere in those 44 million words, will help me figure it out.”

Throughout, Jacobs tries his best to stump his brother-in-law Eric who prides himself as the family’s fountain of knowledge. Even though Eric always has a leg up on Jacobs, his knowledge fails him as he costs Jacobs’ thousands of dollars on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Jacobs gains entrance to Mensa on the strength of his high SAT scores, only to fail the entrance test he unnecessarily takes to find out just how smart he is. And he never gets the opportunity to try out his Britannica wits on Jeopardy due to a past interview with Alex Trebek. So, notwithstanding his constant efforts to interject bits of trivia into everyday conversation, has reading the Britannica made Jacobs any smarter?

That’s not something that’s answered here, but there are some things we learn. We learn that through this task, Jacobs has completed his father’s own failed attempt to read the entire Britannica. We learn that thorough knowledge of past European monarchies cannot prepare a person for the frustration of infertility. And we learn that no amount of information, no matter how organized or complete, can make up for family and fun and love and all those other intangible things. Which isn’t to say that knowledge and intelligence isn’t important, but as the Britannica’s condensed version of Ecclesiastes says, “In the face of such uncertainty, the author’s counsel is to enjoy the good things that God provides while one has them to enjoy.” That’s what Jacobs takes away from his task, and since most of us aren’t going to sit down to read an encyclopedia cover to cover, we’re lucky enough to be able to gain this from Jacobs’ book.

1.5. The Adventures of Augie March

2006-01-14T09:40:00.000-06:00

by Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March was the January selection for the Gapers Block Book Club and, okay, I was cheating a little on this 52 books thing because I started reading this way back in December with every intention of posting it to the 2006 list. Those last couple of weeks when I didn’t post anything new? Those days were filled with Bellow. (And catching up on my magazines because I kind of let those slide in effort to complete the 52.) The meeting for Augie passed and guess what? I didn’t make it. I didn’t finish the book in time. And I’m not going to finish the book ever.

It seemed like such a good idea. Saul Bellow won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. Augie comes in at number 81 on the Modern Library 100. And the book is a significant part of Chicago history. Here’s the thing, though: I hated reading it. Well, I didn’t really hate it, because sometimes I would actually get into it and want to continue reading, but every time I put it down I found it increasingly difficult to pick it back up again. I dreaded that 600 page tome, hating it all the more because I didn’t want to let it beat me. I told myself I’d read to at least page 400 before the meeting, figuring the remaining 200 wouldn’t be too much to complete without deadline.

I got to page 330 in my Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century edition. I never made it any further.

The last time I didn’t finish a book was due to a conscious choice. The last time I didn’t finish a book because I just couldn’t make it? Well, it’s been years. It feels like a failure. And, because I’d already spent at least three weeks on it, a big waste of time, to boot. I’d already put so much effort into the book, shouldn’t I suck it up and finish it? I was already half way through, what was 300 pages more? Then I looked at it from a different perspective. I put my Carrie Bradshaw lenses on and thought, when you’re with a man and it’s not working, you don’t continue to be with that man. It doesn’t matter if you’ve wasted three weeks or three years, when it’s not working, it’s not working. Barring children or other extenuating circumstances, you break up, move on, and hope for the best in your futures.

So, Augie, I’m breaking up with you. I think it would be better if we didn’t see each other anymore. No, of course it wasn’t all bad. I enjoyed some of the time we spent together. I’d like to know how things end up for you, but I can’t take that journey with you. You’re more…existential. You like to sit around with your Great Books and ruminate on the philosophy of life. I’m more…pop. I like to sit around with my Seinfeld DVDs and ruminate on how every situation in life can relate to an episode with Jerry and the gang. We could certainly learn things from each other, but we can never be together. You understand, right?

No hard feelings. I’m sure you’ll make someone very happy. I’m with a book by an Esquire editor about his quest to read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica. It may not be love, but we’re having a lot of fun. In the end, we have to remember that’s what this reading thing is all about.

1. The Best American Short Stories 2005

2006-01-09T07:10:00.000-06:00

edited by Michael Chabon

I’ve always been a little wary of picking up the Best American series because I’ve often found that multi-author collections of writings can be a little scatterbrained, with no common theme tying the contents together. True, the stories in The Best American Short Stories 2005 are widely varied, speaking of a dissolving marriage in one instance and a mystical outlaw in the next, but what I didn’t realize what that the range of topics addressed would be part of the collection’s greatest charm.

My buddy Michael Chabon introduces this tome by ruminating on the meaning of entertainment. He muses that the word “entertainment” has become somewhat pejorative, equating itself with passivity and loss of mutuality and suffering from the “ills of mass manufacture.” Which is true in some sense, especially if you look at the state of VH-1 programming these days (Celebreality? Seriously?), but Chabon proposes that entertainment should also “encompass everything pleasurable that arises from the encounter of an attentive mind with a page of literature.” To wit, reading is entertainment. Literature is entertaining. And in doing his job as guest editor, Chabon simply selected the twenty stories that entertained him most.

And there, in his short five-page introduction, you have the entire reason many of us spend our lives with books. We just find it entertaining. Is there any wonder as to why I love this guy?

But enough about Mike, let’s get on to the stories. I was pleased to find a few stories by authors with whom I’ve already become acquainted and whose work I’ll read any day. Tom Perrotta kicks things off with “The Smile on Happy Chang’s Face,” a story about a little league umpire who is unable to make an important call during the final seconds of a game. What he imagines as his greatest moment – when he admits to his blunder and walks off the field – only looks like a man running away from his problems when replayed on TV. This is exact opposite of what he hopes to convey to his estranged family when he begs them to watch the televised game. Sadly, he realizes that all he did was confirm their already low opinions. J. Robert Lennon’s “Eight Pieces for the Left Hand,” is included and even though I’d already read the piece in Granta, rereading it here made me remember how much I loved these short, fable-like pieces. I also learned that the story comes from Lennon’s larger book, Pieces for the Left Hand, which I will certainly read at some point. The incomparable Alice Munro also makes an appearance here with “Silence,” a profoundly sad story in which a woman loses her daughter, not by death, but by the daughter’s choice. It’s a story for which we desperately wish a happy ending, but whose lack thereof only makes the story that much more true. That is Munro’s gift – the ability to squeeze the truth even out of the most despairing of narratives.

Overall, the collection contains far more stories by authors I’ve never read. Kelly Link’s “Stone Animals” was by far the weirdest of them all, telling of a family whose possessions become haunted when they move into a new house. The wife paints and repaints the walls and rabbits infest their lawn, popping up everywhere. Whether the house is really haunted or whether the family is just having trouble adjusting to their new lives is never explained, but we accept that something just isn’t right in this home. I’m not usually one for war stories, but Tom Bissell’s “Death Defier,” is a startling piece about journalists in Afghanistan, one of whom is stricken with malaria and the other of whom goes on a search for a supposedly medicinal grass that will help his compatriot. What happens on that search is heartbreaking. And in “Justice Shiva Ram Murthy,” Rishi Reddi tells of an elderly judge, having moved to America from India after his wife’s death. Not wanting to admit his trouble adjusting to the culture, Justice Murthy attempts to bring a seemingly frivolous lawsuit against a fast food restaurant at which he was mistakenly served beef. The story can be read from dueling perspectives – from the American point of view the old man is laughable, but for anyone who’s ever experienced some amount of cultural discordance, the sympathy is easily felt.

Chabon is quick to admit that anointing these stories as “best,” is a subjective practice and that each reader will undoubtedly have their own opinions on the pieces contained within. But, as David Sedaris points out in the introduction to his own collection of short stories, an anthology’s greatest task is to introduce the reader to authors and works they would have never known otherwise. In that vein, this collection is undoubtedly successful. It’s hard to say whether these are the best stories I’ve read, but I will say that they were pretty damned entertaining.

Year 2: Another 52 Books, Another 52 Weeks

2006-01-02T08:49:00.000-06:00

My Dear Readers,

Well, hello there. It's another year and another fifty-two books await me. I really didn't think I was going to make it there for a while, but I pulled it together and managed to squeeze in the last couple of books before the stroke of midnight. It was a task, let me tell you, but a rewarding one as I look over the list of my reads. I was a bit hesitant when I started this blog because I felt certain that I wouldn't be able to keep it up. I was pretty sure that I'd keep reading books, but considering the way my posting has gone on the home site, I feared that writing about my books would seem a greater task than it was worth and that I'd eventually abandon the thing sometime around September. So, not only am I happy to report that I’ve read fifty-two books, but I’m happy that I’m still here, reporting them to you.

I'm doing things a little differently this year. Last year, my goal was simply to reach fifty-two books, but this year I'm setting my sights higher. Not with more books, but with the type of books I want to read. My book selection is, at best, absolutely random and while I've read some good stuff, when it comes to the number of critically acclaimed books I've read, the stack is woefully slim. So here's what I'm going to do: I’m going to increase my number of award-winning and nominated books. My goal for this year is to read the following:

3 Booker shortlists
3 Orange Prize shortlists
3 from the Modern Library 100
1 Pulitzer Prize winner
1 Nobel Prize winning author
2 recommended by Esquire (because I always take note but never get around to reading them)
2 recommended by Bitch (same reason)
5 sociology texts (because I think I read all of one this year)
3 Best American books (Shorts Stories, Essays, and Non-Required Reading)

This is, of course, in addition to the 11 or 12 I'll read for the Gapers Block Book Club, but I'm guessing several of these will overlap. For instance, our January selection of The Adventures of Augie March will count as my Nobel Prize winner as well as one from the Modern Library 100. (If I actually make it through that one. I mean, have you seen that bad boy? Yeesh.)

Lest you think I'm doing this in effort to appear more "well-read," (whatever that means...the term is so debatable) yeah, I guess I kind of am. Not to be snooty or anything, but if I read so much, shouldn't I have some of these under my belt? Not just on my shelves? Also, some of these books I've wanted to read for years anyway. This gives me incentive to get them done. Call it arbitrary motivation.

So let’s shine our glasses, put on the really comfy pajamas, and raise our cups of coffee in toast to another year filled with books, comics, magazines, and words that can change our minds, if not our worlds. Thanks for joining me on the ride.

Cheers,
Veronica

52 Books 52 Weeks: A Year in [Book] Reviews

2005-12-29T07:22:00.000-06:00

I did it! I read 52 books! Here I present a rundown of all things literary consumed between January '05 and now:

2005 Introduction.
I didn’t really stick to that whole “no thousand word diatribe” thing, did I?

1. Thy Brother’s Wife by Andrew M. Greeley.
One of my mother’s favorite authors, I’d always wanted to read something of his so I knew what she was talking about. After running into the good Father, and acting like a star-struck idiot, while working at the Art Institute, I finally did it. Although mass-market in feel, Greeley does good by reminding us that priests are humans too.

2. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.
A fabulous criticism on war cloaked in a sci-fi tale. Though I really liked the movie, despite Tom Cruise, the book is still better. Go read it.

3. America (The Book) by Jon Stewart and The Daily Show.
Perhaps one of the best books I read all year. From the high school text book format, to the scathing criticism of American history and government, to the fact that there’s a lot of legitimate information in this book, I can’t think of a single person who wouldn’t enjoy it. Also, “poonberry tree” still makes me giggle.

4. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri.
A Pulitzer Prize winning collection of short stories ruminating on culture, marriage, and the differences between individuals. While story collections can often feel stilted and reliant on experimental voices, Lahiri’s writing is nothing short of complete.

5. The Hostile Hospital by Lemony Snicket.
Book the Eighth in the Series of Unfortunate Events in which the Baudelaire orphans wind up in a dilapidated hospital with the Volunteers Fighting Disease and find the Library of Records containing clues to their parents’ deaths.

6. The Carnivorous Carnival by Lemony Snicket.
Book the Ninth, in which the orphans end up at a carnival complete with an ambidextrous freak. They dress up as freaks themselves, but end up being found out and whisked away to Mortmain Mountain.

7. Werewolves in Their Youth by Michael Chabon.
I love Michael Chabon dearly and his collection of short stories does not fail to please. There are some heavy topics covered herein and although I love Chabon’s writing in any capacity, I did miss the length he usually imparts in his stories. He has a great talent for that.

8. The Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie.
A doozy of a book that slightly dented my will to read. This is a life-long account of a love triangle between three rock musicians and the impact the music has on their lives and the world around them. My first Rushdie, considered his weakest by many probably because it feels very unedited. It makes me curious to read Rushdie’s other works, though. Also, it inspired a U2 song.

9. Under Her Skin edited by Pooja Makhijani.
Reviewed in Bookslut, this book features essays by several different women on the topic of growing up female and of color. Because that’s something with which I have firsthand experience, I identified with much of what the authors had to say, especially the parts about the hair. I later had the opportunity to ask Pooja Ten Questions.

10. Television by Jean-Philipe Toussaint.
Reviewed in Bookslut, Television follows a writer who decides to cut TV entirely out of his life in order to concentrate on his Vuillard monograph. His rationalizations and failed attempts make this story hilarious. I’d really like to pick up more of Toussaint’s work.

11. Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde.
This is the kind of stuff I read when I want something easy and amusing. A palate cleanser in which Thursday Next must learn to bookjump using only her mind. Her partner in this adventure? A vampire hunter named “Spike” Stoker. Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen and Dickens’s Miss Havisham make appearances here.

12. Cast of Shadows by Kevin Guilfoile.
A debut novel from a local author, I reviewed this mystery/adventure story for Gapers Block. It was a fast-paced and engaging read and it was very easy to get emotionally invested in the characters. I almost cried at the end. Having had the opportunity to meet him, I can say that Kevin is a top-notch guy and I wait with bated breath for his next work of fiction.

13. Hairstyles of the Damned by Joe Meno.
The inaugural Gapers Block Book Club book, which I never would have read on my own. I’m far from punk, but Joe Meno’s story of growing up in the 90’s brought a lot of memories back to me. To think – my kids will have no idea what a mix tape is. Meno’s writing is inventive without being pretentious.

14. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson.
I have a great interest in the reading the original texts on which many pop cultures references are based. I liked the title story here and was surprised to find out the angle from which it was told, but the short stories that filled out the rest of the book left me scratching my head. My Victorian Achilles reared its head.

15. Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules edited by David Sedaris.
A collection of Sedaris’s favorite short stories. Sedaris’s efforts are noble, as he notes in his introduction that he was introduced to many of his favorite writers through anthologies of this sort and hopes he can inspire other readers to delve further into these authors’ works. Works for me. Includes Jhumpa Lahiri, Alice Munro, and Tobias Wolff.

16. How to Be Alone by Jonathan Franzen.
A number of essays on the pursuit of alone-time, something I very much enjoy. Includes the “Harper’s Essay,” in which Franzen puts forth theories on how readers are made. Very interesting for anyone who has ever eschewed a night out on the town for a night in with a book.

17. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.
A reread, pursued in anticipation of the movie’s release. This may be my favorite of the five-part trilogy, but it’s also the first one I read and the only one I’ve read thrice. That probably has something to do with it.

18. I’m Not the New Me by Wendy McClure.
Reviewed in Gapers Block the week of its release and again for our Book Club. INTNM is an easily-read, but thought provoking memoir of Wendy’s experiences with weight loss and the internets. The book, like her life, doesn’t end when she loses the weight and Wendy proves that online journaling isn’t just for geeks and little girls.

19. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.
A reread, for which I originally interviewed the author in Bookslut and later reviewed for the Gapers Block Book Club. It’s a science fiction love story, following the intertwined lives of Henry and Clare and their Chicago home. That sounds like a bad thing, but Audrey’s way with words and plot make it exceedingly wonderful.

20. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams.
Also a reread, in preparation of the movie. Some of those previews looked like they took place at the concert, so I read through the second in the series to be safely refreshed.

21. The Hard Goodbye by Frank Miller.
My first comic, purchased by my best friend after having seen the movie and going on and on about how I wanted to read the books. Brilliant art and a solid plot line involving Marv’s hunt for a cannibalistic psychopath that made the movie even more stunning in retrospect.

22. Daisy Miller and Washington Square by Henry James.
The moral of Daisy’s story? Don’t flirt with boys! Although the extreme lengths to which James imparts his women are laughable by today’s standards, the writing is solid and the two stories are enjoyable to read. I’ll tackle James’ greater works at a later date.

23. The Women’s Room by Marilyn French.
A feminist novel in which the protagonist goes from resolving to never be a repressed housewife, to becoming just that, to divorcing her husband, to studying at Harvard and meeting a whole range of liberal feminists. A nice critique of the varying forms of feminism and a good story, too.

24. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture by John Storey.
Boring for you, perhaps, but right in my area of study. The title explains it all. I only wish the book contained original texts instead of the editor’s summary of those texts. Kind of feels like someone else did my homework for me. But I guess that’s what the follow up is for.

25. McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern No. 13 edited by Chris Ware.
The comics issue of McSweeney’s. This gave me a lot to work with when I realized I wanted to get into the comics world. Lovely pieces by Seth, Richard McGuire, and Ware himself.

26. Crossing California by Adam Langer.
The Gapers Block Book Club proves its worth, because I would have never picked up this excellent book without it. It’s the story of a group of Jewish high school kids growing up in Rogers Park. Langer’s characterization is so great that you truly feel like you know the kids by the time you finish the story. I can’t wait to read the follow up.

27. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers.
I wasn’t as fond of this book as I thought I would be. Set in the south, the book is composed of several different narratives that center around a deaf man who comes to stay in a boarding house. Well-written, but just not for me.

28. Summer Blonde by Adrian Tomine.
Four stories dealing with social isolation. More a chunk stolen from the characters’ lives than their complete life stories. Tomine’s art is clean and his narratives are linear, making his stories entirely believable.

29. Looped by Andrew Winston.
Reviewed at Gapers Block, this was undoubtedly my most disappointing read of the year. For all of the praise it received for interweaving seven different storylines, I found this structural element to be its greatest downfall. I’m surprised Winston didn’t take a hit out on me.

30. Heat Wave by Eric Klinenberg.
Read during the month of July for the Gapers Block Book Club. Perhaps the worst time possible to read this account of the 1995 Chicago heat wave that, while being one of the nation’s greatest natural disasters, is also one of its most ignored. Doesn’t make for great 102-degree reading, but informative and shocking otherwise.

31. Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury.
One of my four favorite books of all time. Reviewed for the Gapers Block Book Club and read by the Book Cellar’s own book club, at whose discussion I met biographer Sam Weller and wound up having my tattered, thirteen-year-old copy signed by the man himself.

32. I Sing the Body Electric! by Ray Bradbury.
Riding high on my Bradbury love, I dived into this collection of short stories I found in the free box outside Powell’s. Contains such goodies as “Tomorrow’s Child,” about a child accidentally born into a different dimension, and the title story, about a substitute mother. I can never get enough Bradbury.

33. American Gods by Neil Gaiman.
Andrew assures me this is a great book, but because I read half of this, put it down to read other things, then read the remainder, I didn’t understand a lot of what happened. Some of the characters that appeared in the beginning I had forgotten by the end. Maybe I’ll read it again someday, but in one go.

34. Jimmy Corrigan by Chris Ware.
Maybe not the daddy of the modern graphic novel, but certainly the big brother or uncle or mentor. This influential book follows Jimmy’s trip to meet his father for the first time, an adventure told over the course of three generations. Great full page portraits of the Chicago World’s Fair.

35. Unless by Carol Shields.
A wonderful, amazing story on the meaning of goodness. With feminist undertones and solid, elegant writing, Shields’ name deserves to be more widely heard. I made Doppelganger jealous with my newfound Shields love.

36. Little Children by Tom Perrotta.
An amusing story featuring suburban parents who need more excitement in their lives. Predictable affairs ensue, but Perrotta’s writing keeps the story interesting. The best Perrotta I’ve read thus far.

36.5. Magical Thinking by Augusten Burroughs.
The only book I didn’t finish this year. I found the essay in which Burroughs equates baldness with breast cancer incredibly offensive and, had I not been in public, I might have thrown the book violently in disgust. I’m upset that I wasted any amount of time on the man.

37. Ghost World by Daniel Clowes.
Two once inseparable friends grow apart as they graduate high school and look for different things in their lives. Interesting take on friendship and alienation.

38. Nowhere Man by Aleksandar Hemon.
Experimental, told from the viewpoint of several different narrators, this Book Club pick generated some interesting discussion because none of us really knew what was going on. Not my cup of tea, but I understood it a little better after hearing others’ thoughts on it.

39. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling.
I’m trying to get this series read after having avoided it for so long. I don’t love Rowling’s writing, but it’s an easy escape and not as annoying as I had anticipated. The third in the series, this book follows Sirius Black’s escape from Azkaban prison and reveals his part in the elder Potters’ murder.

40. The Slippery Slope by Lemony Snicket.
Book the Tenth, introducing Hotel Denouement and a character once thought to be dead. We still don’t officially know what VFD is, but we do know that it stands for Very Fresh Dill. Sunny is really starting to grow into her own.

41. The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas by Davy Rothbart.
An excellent variety of short stories by the creator of Found Magazine. I also had the opportunity to hear Davy read from his book in a performance that made me want to rush home and reread it with his voice in my mind. I later interviewed Davy, which can be read, along with the review, at Gapers Block.

42. Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman.
Ruminations on pop culture. Some call it unnecessary and self-congratulatory. I call it fabulous.

43. McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern No. 12 edited by Dave Eggers.
Contains stories written in twenty minutes, which I thought would be gimmicky and patchy, but which were surprisingly good. I also really liked James Boice’s “Pregnant Girl Smoking,” written in an interesting voice that illustrates the narrator’s shock at the story-inspiring incident.

44. The Grim Grotto by Lemony Snicket.
Book the Eleventh. I’m getting a little weary of the constant deflection from these “unfortunate” tales, but really I’m just eager to figure out how everything comes into place. Two more to go.

45. Clyde Fans Book 1 by Seth.
A gorgeous, haunting tale of two brothers and the family fan company to which each has devoted his life. In this first part we watch Abe go over his life with some regret and then travel back in time to see Simon abandon his work in a nervous fit. I can’t wait until Book 2 is published.

46. The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby.
A book about books by an author I love. Need I say more?

47. Colors Insulting to Nature by Cintra Wilson.
I’m usually against penetration of the fourth wall, but in this raucous, whirlwind of a teenage melodrama, the author’s direct comments to the reader were spot on. Liza wants nothing more to be famous and her trashy mother, mentally disturbed brother, and string of useless boyfriends aren’t going to stop her.

48. Microserfs by Douglas Coupland.
Remember when Windows was a new thing? I do, too. I feel old. But at least I mostly understood what was happening here. My children won’t.

49. Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk.
Imagine only having to run through a series of words in your mind and every annoying person in your path falls to their immediate death. Imagine having to prevent everyone else in the world from stumbling upon these words. Started out with a bang, but ended up more fantastical than I would have like. Still a good read.

50. The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature by Neal Pollack.
I was hesitant to read this because Pollack is among the Eggers canon of writers, but I actually enjoyed many of the essays herein. A bit acrimonious and self-effacing, which can come off as insecurity, but not something I regret reading.

51. The Final Solution by Michael Chabon.
My love for Chabon is not shaken by this mystery novella written in a perfect Victorian tongue. Inspired by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the book is an homage to Sherlock Holmes, who makes a quiet, modest appearance here.

52. Life of Pi by Yann Martel.
Enthralling, emotional, and wonderfully written. Pi Patel is stranded at sea with nothing but a Bengal tiger to keep him company. How he survived the ordeal is startling and unforgettable. Wholly deserving of that Booker.

52. Life of Pi

2005-12-21T07:26:00.000-06:00

by Yann Martel

Sometimes I’m wary of books that garner a lot of attention and win major prizes. Even if the book comes with a personal recommendation, it may still be a while before I’m convinced to pick it up because sometimes those awards are really misleading. (Anyone else read The Shipping News?) Thus, three years passed between the time I received my first recommendation to read Life of Pi, which won a Booker in 2002, and the time that I actually sought it out in a bookstore and read it. I wish I hadn’t waited so long.

As anyone who knows anything about books probably already knows, Life of Pi is the story of Pi Patel who was orphaned in the Pacific ocean when the boat carrying him, his family, and their zoo sank on its way from India to Canada. After being thrown into the ocean by some Chinese pirates, he inhabits a lifeboat with an orangutan, an incapacitated zebra, and Richard Parker, a Bengal tiger so-named by virtue of a clerical error. It isn’t too long before it’s just Pi and Richard Parker and Pi must learn to keep his 450-pound companion happy enough to prevent his own grisly end. Pi establishes dominance over the tiger using his knowledge of circus training and, for the most part, Richard Parker emits friendly grunts. The two exist harmoniously, with Pi providing Richard Parker with fresh water and food and the tiger providing Pi with much-needed companionship.

I read the majority of this book over one weekend because I wanted so badly to know how it all ended. It’s a given that Pi survives his journey, but how is the burning question. Although the beginning part chronicling Pi’s tripartite religious beliefs turned me off a little – that one could simultaneously subscribe to Islam, Hindu, and Christianity strikes me as unrealistic – it did speak to Pi’s character as one who could find God in anything. That’s sort of the theme of the story – the ability to suspend one’s disbelief when all logical contentions point elsewhere. We have to believe that Richard Parker doesn’t dispose of Pi and, beyond that, we have to believe some other pretty weird things that happen. There’s this one great scene involving a meerkat-infested island with exotic vegetation that made me gasp like I was watching an episode of Lost. I won’t spoil it for you, but I will say that it was so wonderfully disturbing when Pi unwrapped those leaves.

Then there’s the end. This was one of those endings that, like when I first watched The Usual Suspects, left me disappointed. Then sad. Then really impressed at the writer who could conceive of and execute such an intricate story. I also have to admire a writer that can make me exclaim, “What? No way!” like I’m there, listening to Pi recount the events, instead of in my pajamas and on my couch on a snowy Sunday morning. According to the Booker’s website, M. Night Shyamalan is slated to direct and write the screenplay for this book. IMDB says otherwise, so I’m not sure who to believe, but I sincerely hope Shyamalan gets the gig. He’s one of the few writer/directors that can hold you in suspense over the outcome of a story even when you already know its necessary conclusion. However, my recommendation is, should you have any desire to read the book, do so before the movie comes out. Yann Martel has a masterful handle on the English language and an ability to unfurl a plot that no movie should preempt.

“I have a story that will make you believe in God,” says the old man to our narrator at the very beginning of the book. Well, I already believe in God, Mr. Martel. This is a story that made me believe in the future of fiction.

51. The Final Solution

2005-12-14T21:43:00.000-06:00

by Michael Chabon

The first thing that drew me to The Final Solution, aside from the fact that it was written by Michael Chabon who I’ll read regardless of the topic (including Summerland one day), was the cover art. This gorgeous teal and blue and orange amalgamation of numbers drawn up inside this bird, composed by none other than my city’s own Jay Ryan. When I realized the artist I thought, I should have known. It was a good pick because, much as I hate to admit it, I do somewhat judge books by their covers. Not that I would have skipped this novella had it been nothing more than plain black print on white background, but such stunning dust jackets do tend to draw my fingers to open the pages therein. Case also in point: Tom de Haven’s It’s Superman! with cover art by Chris Ware. Sure, I’d read it anyway because it’s about Superman, but would it have been the first thing I reached for during a routine trip to the bookstore if the cover were different? Probably not.

As I said, I’ll read anything Michael Chabon writes. I could ensconce myself in his words. I sometimes have to pause and just inhale the twinings of his letters, admire the way he creates such vibrant portraits in sentences and paragraphs. The Final Solution is no exception to what I’ve come to expect from Chabon, but even more impressive is that this entire book is written in the parlance of a nineteenth century British mystery. It’s an ode to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and readers his Holmes books, of which I am, admittedly, not, will surely recognize the infamous detective in the central character referred to as nothing more than “old man.” Fan of Holmes or not, Chabon crafts a story whose telling is remarkable in its ability to transport the reader to an entirely different place and time. At one point I actually had to stop and think, Michael Chabon is American…right?

At the heart of the story is a man’s murder and a parrot’s disappearance. In addition to providing a perfect mimicry of the voices it hears, the parrot has also been known to recite a series of German numbers whose significance are unknown to all but Linus Steinman, the mute boy to whom he belongs. When the bird goes missing and a man is found dead in relation to the theft, only the once famous detective can hope to uncover the crime’s details. What those numbers mean is another story unto itself.

That’s a pretty trite summary because, well, the book is only 131 pages and the story is less about an intricate mystery and more about Chabon’s mastery of the English language. Take, for example, this passage where Mrs. Panicker describes a viewing of the old man: “This as a whippet…with something canine, or rather lupine, in the face as well, the heavy-lidded eyes intelligent and watchful and pale. They took in the features and furnishings of the platform, the texts of the posted notices, the discarded end of a cigar, a starling’s ragged nest in the rafters of the overhanging roof. And then he had trained them, those lupine eyes, on her. The hunger in them so startled her that she took a step backward, striking her head against an iron pillar with such force that she later found crumbs of dried blood in her hair.”

Lupine eyes…crumbs of dried blood…people just don’t write like that anymore. So rarely do authors take the time to fully investigate their settings and describe their characters’ features in such detail that the reader feels as much shock at seeing those animalistic eyes as Mrs. Panicker must have. Even a simple sentence such as this: “Mr. Shane looked at the boy, who looked down at his soup, dipping the merest tip of his spoon into the thick pale bowlful,” renders the reader capable of experiencing the trepidation with which Linus approaches his meal of cold cucumber soup.

Now, don’t misunderstand and believe me to imply that most writing is sub par. The fact that I read in such volume can attest to my belief that there’s plenty of good writing out there. But rarely is that writing so…what’s the word?…exquisite. I know it must sound as if I’m writing a love letter to Michael Chabon, but it’s really not so much that as I’m simply in admiration of his talent. That, and I’m insanely jealous. Would that I were one of those gifted few.

50. The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature

2005-12-08T20:40:00.000-06:00

by Neal Pollack

What can I possibly say about Neal Pollack? Did I love The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature? Kind of. Did I get the joke immediately? Umm…not so much. You see, I’ve never read Neal Pollack before. I mean, I’ve only read three issues of McSweeney’s proper, so I haven’t had the chance to be inundated with his work as long-time readers of the quarterly may have been. While I knew the book was a tongue-in-cheek, self-aggrandizing collection of satirical writings, I hadn’t at all expected it to be the scathing criticism of Literature (capital “L”) that it was. Once I caught onto that, yeah, it was pretty fucking funny. I’m not sure if I entirely loved it, though.

Let me explain to you why I’m sort half-in, half-out about my feelings for Pollack. I’ll use Dave Eggers as an example because he’s the perfect one. Now, I read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius years ago when it came out, under the instruction of a friend who touted it as “hilarious.” Which, parts of it were. What I didn’t like was Eggers’ penchant for over-explaining himself, for apologizing for making mistakes and not being a better writer. (As far as I’m concerned, if you tell me that you suck, why should I stick around to read your book to find out? I’m going to take your word for it.) See, at the University of Chicago you get a lot of people who are unbelievably insecure about their intelligence and their person as a whole, so this sort of practice of apologizing for one’s existence is annoyingly pervasive. Maybe it’s new and charming for other readers, but I’m filled to the brim for life. While I have the utmost respect for Eggers, that’s why I don’t particularly want to read anything he’s written. By sardonically inserting himself into the pantheon of Great American Writers, Pollack is kind of doing the same thing.

However, I tried to keep that from clouding my reading of the book. I wanted to give it a fair chance since I’ve heard a good amount of praise thrown in its direction. I did, for the most part, really enjoy it. “Teenagers: The Enemy Within,” was great, as Pollack writes that teenagers are the least covered topic in the media, their world shrouded in mystery to the remainder of society. The fact that this is far from the truth makes Pollack’s undercover stint as a teenager absolutely hilarious. In “The Coitus Chronicles,” Pollack is beaten by a group of single, city-dwelling women who proclaim, “We are definitely going to hurt you. We are single women, and we hurt people.” And in “The Burden of Internet Celebrity,” Pollack has to contend with the incomprehensible fame and rabid fans he’s gained by posting his thoughts online. Would that we all had that problem, right?

My favorite piece was at the very end: “Coda: A Review of My Contemporaries,” in which Pollack gathers together a slew of prized American writers and dukes it out with them for the title of the Greatest. For some reason, the idea of Norman Mailer lacing up gloves and battling John Irving and Philip Roth is just hilarious to me. I guess the idea that someone would wonder what would happen if all these acclaimed authors got together in one room is what amuses me most. A sort of Authorial Death Match, if you will. I’ll give you one guess as to who won. (Hint: It wasn’t Mr. Mailer.)

The importance that we place on Literature, versus really good writing, is what Pollack attacks here and in that vein he’s right in doing so. All this attention paid to “major American magazines” can get ridiculous when the stories published in them are of the self-congratulatory sort. Pollack’s Anthology is a call to end praise heaped upon writers because of who they are or what they’ve written in the past and a plea to give due attention to what’s good now. It’s a worthy plea. But in doing this, Pollack is also complaining about his own lack of place in that world and at times he comes across as articulate as a whiny little boy. Mr. Pollack, I’ll read you if you’ve got something important to say, but count me out if you can’t say it without moping about those who aren’t listening. I’ve had enough of that in four long years of my life.

49. Lullaby

2005-12-04T10:54:00.000-06:00

by Chuck Palahniuk

I’m not sure if I loved Lullaby, or if I’m just kind of eh about it. It’s the kind of book that started out wonderfully, but by the last few pages I wasn’t sure if I liked the way it ended up. The beginning part felt like a wonderful new episode of The X-Files, with this great mystery going on and our protagonist personally affected by it, but in the end there was all this mysticism that made it more like a seventh season X-Files instead of a good second or third season episode. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t completely enjoy the book, as I read over half of it in one sitting, but I just wish it had ended differently or, at least, felt more tied together after that first half.

Carl Streator is a newspaper reporter who’s stumbled upon a passage of words that results in the death of anyone to whom it’s spoken. Streator’s wife and daughter were killed when he read this to them and, nearly twenty years later, his empty life is a-shambles until he crosses paths with Helen Hoover Boyle. Helen is a realtor who specializes in selling haunted houses to the unwitting public. She’s often heard saying such things into her cell phone as, “The head’s gone now!” Helen’s own husband and son were killed when she read the culling song and Streator turns to her for help. It turns out that the song can be found in a children’s book, “Poems and Rhymes Around the World.” Helen and Streator make it their mission to destroy every copy of the book so that no one will ever be able to recite the song again.

There were some highly amusing parts in this story, mainly when Streator first learns of the song’s power. Not only does he kill his editor, just as an experiment, but he kills every person who crosses his path and disturbs him in some way. This includes people blocking his way in the street and a married man flirting with a young woman in a bar. It’s like it’s Streator’s own form of justice, but because he hasn’t yet learned to control it – so great is his subconscious that he need only recite the song in his mind and direct it at someone – he simply tells people not to piss him off…he’s got an anger management problem.

What I didn’t like about the book was the way it got all mystical and magicky at the end. Helen and Streator go on a search for the grimmoire – the original book of “Poems and Rhymes” – that they hope, once destroyed, will take the power of the culling song with it. Mona, Helen’s literal witch of an assistant, and Oyster, Mona’s boyfriend, go with them to help find the book of spells. There’s this whole part where Helen and Streator go to Mona’s apartment for a meeting with other witches – Helen, in her state of self-absorption, hilariously insists on drinking the “sacrifice” – that I didn’t see as necessary to the larger story. And once the group has found the grimmoire, Helen casts a love spell on Streator and the two float into the air while they consummate their affection. I could have done without that.

I will say that Palahniuk is, as always, ingenious with his storytelling. There’s this twist that happens at the end to which we’ve been privy since the beginning, only we haven’t been aware of it. It makes the seemingly misplaced, present day passages click right into place. And Palahniuk’s mastery of the first-person narrative is just as strong here as it is in his other works. Well…the other two that I’ve read anyway (Choke and the requisite Fight Club). So, even though I wasn’t totally satisfied with Lullaby, I’m just as much of a Palahniuk fan as I ever was. The man may occasionally falter, but I intend to be there with him through both the ups and downs.

48. Microserfs

2005-11-25T11:35:00.000-06:00

by Douglas Coupland

I picked up Douglas Coupland because I have a Chuck Palahniuk lying around from my August trip to Powell’s and need something to bridge the gap from a somewhat normal novel to the darkness prevalent in Palahniuk’s writing. Coupland came to mind. I sometimes get the two writers mixed up in my mind and I’m not sure why, because they’re not really all that similar, but Coupland’s culture-obsessed, self-conscious, semi-nihilistic worlds seemed a good transition to Palahniuk, who is batshit insane. Well, maybe not insane, but judging from what I’ve read of his thus far and the muscle he sports in his author photo, let’s just say I wouldn’t want to encounter him alone on a dark street. He’s not the happiest of gentlemen. (Although, the baleful mind and all the muscle is kind of, um, hot so maybe a dark encounter wouldn’t be entirely thwarted. I’m just sayin’.)

I’ve read two previous Couplands – Generation X and All Families are Psychotic – and enjoyed them both. I’ve heard some unfavorable things about some of his books, but the guy is pretty prolific, so I’m willing to excuse him if not everything is absolutely stellar. I especially wanted to read Microserfs because, about a year ago when Eleanor Rigby came out, I went to a very enjoyable Coupland reading at Borders and he mentioned that he was working on a follow up to this book. The crowd broke into applause at the announcement, but I could only guess as to what the fuss was all about. After seeing copies of the book at the same used bookstore for years in a row, I finally made the commitment to purchasing it last week. I was nearly dismayed because I didn’t see the perennial four or five copies occupying the shelf, but was relieved when, tucked away amongst the top shelf hardbacks, was a lone copy that I immediately snagged and made my own.

Microserfs is about a group of computer programmers who, appropriately, work for Microsoft. They live together and spend countless hours slaving away in the name of technology. The book is in diary form, as told by Dan. We follow about a year and a half of Dan’s life, as he reveals everyone’s dream Jeopardy categories, their idiosyncrasies, and their ambitions with the company. Dan and Karla, a fellow programmer, fall in love, their friend Michael splits off to create an entirely different software system, and the group follows the job offers to be a part of something new – “one point oh,” they call it. They end up living with Dan’s parents in Palo Alto, where his father is recently unemployed but now spends the majority of his day “working” for Michael. The other members of the group fall in and out of love and wax and wane on their status as techies and nerds. It’s a dialogue book. Not much actually happens, but there is a lot of talking as told through the filter that is Dan’s journal.

I’ll admit that I felt like I couldn’t quite get the story because it’s set very strongly in the mid-nineties when Bill Gates came to fame and the internet was just becoming the hegemony that it is and that’s all little before my time. Not that I wasn’t alive then, but I was in my teens and I’m just on cusp of not being old enough to remember when not everyone had a computer but not young enough for it to be a historical note. I feel like I should get everything the characters are talking about, but I just wasn’t entirely conscious of the change when it was happening. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t end up totally immersed in the story and finding myself cracking up at some of their pointless conversations. One in particular, when the guys are privy to the girls’ menstrual-related conversation and IM each other asking “Are guys supposed to know this stuff? I am experiencing fear,” reminds me of a similar email conversation I had with friends of mixed gender after which the male participant ended by saying, “This has easily been the most informational email conversation I’ve ever had.” So even though I felt a little young for the book, there were the parts where I definitely saw pieces of me and the culture that I’ve grown up in.

I understand now why the audience cheered for Coupland’s sequel. I ended up feeling like I was part of the extended family and I want to know what happens to Dan and his friends. The beauty of the book is that even after the failure of numerous dot-coms, it still applies to our technology saturated world. It’s a book born out a specific cultural movement so, sure, it feels a bit dated ten years later, but that makes it kind of nice for those of us who get the joke.

47. Colors Insulting to Nature

2005-11-19T10:40:00.000-06:00

by Cintra Wilson

Colors Insulting to Nature is one of those books that I first learned about by reading Pamie’s blog. The Body Project and, of course, her own are a couple of others of which I wouldn’t have known without her. I didn’t know much about Cintra Wilson’s book before I started reading it and, let me tell you, I would have never guessed it was the circus that it is. I don’t think I’ve read such a high energy, comedic catastrophe since…well…Wonder Boys comes to mind. Which is not to put it on par with Wonder Boys, because I hold Michael Chabon in such high esteem, but it was one of those stories where all this crazy stuff keeps happening and it’s like the author put their characters in the dryer, set it on spin, and watched through the little window to see what would happen. They get all banged up, but they keep going and you keep watching through that window because you can’t look away.

Colors follows the Normal family over the period of, I’d say, ten to fifteen years. I’m not entirely certain how long the story spans, but we start when Liza Normal is on the brink of adolescence and end when she’s at least 21. Liza is the main character, but we also become well acquainted with her melodramatic mother Peppy, her good-hearted grandmother Noreen, her agoraphobic brother Ned, and a whole host of boyfriends, friends, and ne’er-do-wells in between. You could say it’s a coming of age tale, but it’s more of what happens when a girl grows up with a dysfunctional mother and becomes saturated with the celebrity culture of American life.

All Liza wants is to be famous. Peppy is on her own search for infamy, but while Liza dreams of singing and acting on the big screen, Peppy is more interested in quirkier performances. She institutes the “Normal Family Dinner Theater,” a show that never actually features dinner and closes after the inaugural performance of a camped up Sound of Music. Peppy falls into a depression, drinks, gains weight, and tries vainly to win back her credibility by later opening up a drama therapy studio in the theater. Liza, who is at the mercy of her mother’s suggestive clothing choices and never realizes how trashy she looks, is a natural outcast at school. She finally finds a friend in Lorna, the girl who sits out during swim class by virtue of a note stating that she has herpes. The two are inseparable for the rest of the story, going through a forced punk phase, a stay in a house populated by druggies who believe in elf-mysticism, and the obligatory stint in rehab. Meanwhile, Ned becomes increasingly withdrawn from society and constantly wears a ski mask to cover his face. He’s immersed in his art creating light boxes and, in a fitting twist of irony, is awarded the respect and admiration he shies away from, but that Liza’s always craved.

I really, really liked this book, but if you read it and don’t, I can completely understand why. It’s grandiose and extravagant, reading like a True Hollywood Story and, sadly, probably reflects some poor person’s real life. It’s as if Wilson sat around thinking, What else can I do to these people?, and then took it even a step further. If you prefer more grounded stories, set in a believable reality, this probably isn’t the book for you. Wilson also has the habit of breaking the fourth wall and addressing her audience directly in a series of bolded passages. She comments not only on the state of her characters, but also on the culture that has led them to where they are. It’s the kind of meta-textual interruption that I usually loathe (Dave Eggers, I’m talking to you) but, for some reason, really didn’t bother me here. Actually, I quite liked it. I’m not sure why it worked for me, maybe because it didn’t happen all that often, but every time the omniscient narrator stepped in to make herself known, it just added to the hilarity of the story. These things usually don’t work for me, but this time it was great.

I’ll leave you with a quote that sticks in my mind: “High school, for most people, gets boiled down to select formative experiences that can still make the person writhe like a cold ball of worms, twenty years later.” It’s funny because, like a lot of Wilson’s words explaining these crazy people’s lives, it rings true.

46. The Polysyllabic Spree

2005-11-14T07:16:00.000-06:00

by Nick Hornby

I would say that I am, at heart, not a very social being. After a few weekends of going out and generally spending time with people, I wanted nothing more than to spend some quality time alone with some well-written pages. A Friday evening trip to my two favorite bookstores brought me two books that I’ve been wanting to read for some time: Chicago Comics yielded the afore-posted Clyde Fans and Unabridged proffered Nick Hornby’s The Polysyllabic Spree. Both of which I had finished by Saturday night.

I know that it’s probably not cool to like Nick Hornby anymore, especially since that awful film adaptation of Fever Pitch (which I haven’t seen but am assuming was awful because of Drew Barrymore, nor have I read because it’s about soccer), and especially since he’s become kind of that author that it’s okay for guys to like (I don’t really understand the gender division in reading, but whatever), but I love Nick Hornby. I just do. I have since reading High Fidelity and I still do despite the last two pages in How to Be Good and I’ll continue to love him, even if I never read Fever Pitch (it is, after all, about sports).

That being said, what could be better to fill a weekend of reading than a book about books written by one of my favorite authors? The feeling I got from this was what I’m guessing most chicks get from watching a Julia Roberts movie marathon. Or something. I don’t know what you girls do.

The Polysyllabic Spree is a collection of Hornby’s Believer essays, chronicling the books he buys and the books he reads. As most bibliophiles know, the books-bought pile is always greater than the books-read pile and Hornby provides such a sense of validation for this that makes me want to rush out a buy more books. The only thing that’s stopping me is the money. And the space (I’ve long run out of open bookshelves.) But that’s okay. So are a lot of the things we bibliophiles do; let me share with you some of the things I’ve learned:

- I’m not the only one who can’t remember the majority of what she’s read, beyond knowing it was good or bad. Hornby finds this depressing. “What’s the fucking point?” is how he puts it. I wonder the same thing too, especially when my friends ask me about a book I’ve read and my only response is, “I don’t know what happened! I read a lot, okay?”

- You can ruin a good book by reading it poorly or at the wrong time. “I’m beginning to see that our appetite for books is the same as our appetite for food, that our brain tells us when we need the literary equivalent of salads, or chocolate, or meat and potatoes,” and “We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they’re badly read, too.” Like splitting my time with American Gods. I hear that’s an amazing book. I couldn’t begin to explain the plot to you.

- You can’t really plan your path in books, which I regularly try to do only to be tripped up by some other book that demands my attention. “Being a reader is sort of like being president, except reading involves fewer state dinner, usually. You have this agenda you want to get through, but you get distracted by life events, e.g., books arriving in the mail/Word War III, and you are temporarily deflected from your chosen path.”

- The “Trivial Pursuit” cataloguing of books trumps the Dewey decimal system. Personally, I’ve got hardbacks separated from paperbacks separated from mass markets; then fiction, women’s studies, sociology, children’s, graphic novels, tv/music/pop culture, other non-fiction (i.e. cookbooks, reference books, etc.). Of course, it’s all starting to run together, what with the lack of shelf space.

- It’s okay to panic about not having enough books to read. There may be a catastrophic snowstorm. I better start stocking up in July.

- “There is very little point in persisting with a book that isn’t working for me, and even less point in writing about it.” I’ve slowly come to this realization myself. It’s very freeing.

- “Books are, let’s face it, better than everything else.” True that, Mr. Hornby. True that.

Of course, Hornby goes on to discuss his chosen books in specific, and that’s great because I have some lovely reading suggestions now, but man, it just feels like I can hold this up and point to it, saying, “See? I’m not crazy! This is legitimate stuff I’m doing!” (It’s shocking, but I have been asked, “Why do you read so much?”) Whether or not it was his intention, Hornby has provided some much-needed liberation to the truly bibliophilic, those of us who eschew friends, movies, and drinks for a night curled up with ink and paper. You can’t convince us to do otherwise, it’s just who we are. If my love for Nick Hornby has ever faltered, I love him all the more for understanding why that would be so.