The Help

My sister gave me a copy of The Help for my birthday and told me, "If you don't cry like, 4 times, you're a monster." Eek. I got a little anxious when I was 3/4 of the way through and hadn't shed a tear.

The Help, by Kathryn Stockett, is a compelling story about a group of American Southern women. I had a hard time putting it down, even though the book is highly problematic. Told from the perspective of two African-American maids and one white woman, the book is about how the three of them write a book about the maids' experiences working in the homes of white families in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s.

The appropriation of the African-American women's stories and voices made me feel uncomfortable. Aibileen, a kind older woman who brings a very 21st century to bringing up children in the mid-20th century, ruminates:

Minny near bout the best cook in Hinds County, maybe even all a Mississippi. The Junior League Benefit come around ever fall and they be wanting her to make ten caramel cakes to auction off. She ought a be the most sought-after help in the state. Problem is, Minny got a mouth on her. She always be talking back. One day it be the white manager a the Jitney Jungle grocery, next day it be her husband, and ever day it's gone be the white lady she waiting on. The only reason she waiting on Miss Walter so long is Miss Walter be deaf as a doe-nob.

Even Stockett felt uncomfortable - in the after-word, she writes:

I was scared, a lot of the time, that I was crossing a terrible line, writing in the voice of a black person. I was afraid I would fail to describe a relationship that was so intensely influential in my life, so loving, so grossly stereotyped in American history and literature.

It is, of course, absolutely impossible to capture another person's experience (and nearly impossible to capture your own), but one makes allowances for artist license. I am very sensitive to racial prejudice, so, for me, parts of the book were inappropriate.

Most of the white people in the book are racists, some of whom actively work to harm the welfare of the African-Americans, most whom merely look the other way when they saw it happening. I feel quite positive that any white reader of the book would identify with the white character who has the idea to write the book and works with the maids to tell their stories. But what I found most disturbing is that it's quite unlikely that those same readers would have followed the rather exceptional actions of that character. It's more likely that they would have fallen firmly in the "look the other way" category, or, let's face it, the Civil Rights movement would have ended well before a mere handful of decades ago, and racial injustices would be a thing of the past, which they are not. The Help allows privileged white readers to pat themselves on the back for something we don't deserve.


I noticed the British cover and the American cover are quite different! I'm afraid the American version has fallen prey to that well-known publishing-world fear that images of black people on the cover will keep write readers from picking up the book. All of this is just proof that we still have a long way to go to heal the long, shameful history of racial injustice in this country. If people are reading The Help with a critical mind and asking themselves some hard questions, I think that is helpful.

I did, by the way, get a bit misty a few times near the end, so I guess I'm not a complete monster after all!

The Passion

In my course of quickly rectifying my lack of experience reading Jeanette Winterson I picked up The Passion. It takes place in the early 19th century, during the Napoleonic wars. One character is a cook in Napoleon's kitchen. Another is a Venetian woman, the daughter of a gondolier, who works in a casino. I don't think I'll ruin it by saying their paths cross eventually.

Both of the Winterson books I read are slender books, but best read slowly and thoughtfully. They're crammed full of big ideas, and each led to a crescendo of language and thought at the end.

In The Passion, Winterson lambastes the heartlessness of war:

Home became the focus of joy and sense. We began to believe that we were fighting this war so that we could go home. To keep home safe, to keep home as we started to imagine it. Now that our hearts were gone there was no reliable organ to stem the steady tide of sentiment that stuck to our bayonets and fed our damp fires. There was nothing we wouldn't believe to get us through: God was on our side, the Russians were devils. our wives depended on this war. France depended on this war. There was no alternative to this war.

And the heaviest lie? That we could go home and pick up where we had left off. That our hears would be waiting behind the door with the dog. (p. 83)

and the importance of love, or passion:

I think now that being free is not being powerful or rich or well regarded or without obligations but being able to love. To love someone else enough to forget about yourself even for one moment is to be free. The mystics and the churchmen talk about throwing off this body and its desires, being no longer a slave to the flesh. The don't say that through the flesh we are set free. That our desire for another will lift us out of ourselves more cleanly than anything divine.

Some people go absolutely batshit over Venice, and I suppose they have every reason to. Her descriptions of Venice were exciting and mysterious and made me want to return there. Oddly, this book occasionally reminded me of this goofy Anne Rice book I read a long time ago called Cry to Heaven about a castrati opera singer, due to the lush descriptions and the decadent lifestyle of the Venetians. But it made me think about (I'm not done yet) the difference between "high" and "low" literature.

Not unlike an Anne Rice novel, some of Winterson's characters are not hetero-normative. Winterson's young woman often dresses as a man, for safety and for fun, and moves somewhat freely between the masculine world (particularly as a boater) and a more feminine one. I think one of the main differences, however, between Winterson and Rice is that Rice's characters exist in a hyper-fantasy while Winterson's are more grounded in reality. Winterson's treatment of the female character's sexuality is pointedly easy; she loves.

Often Winterson's writing takes my breathe away. I love her repetition, the acknowledgment of story-telling, the poetry, and the grand themes. I intend to read everything she's ever written.

Weight

I recently read Jeanette Winterson described as "one of the most brilliant writers in the English language" on a blog I read and respect so I picked up a few of her books from the library. I actually had quite a few of her books on my "wishlist" so it's about time I read her.

The first I read was Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles, which is part of that "The Myths" series. (I love Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad from the series.) In The Myths, authors are invited to tell or re-tell ancient myths, and Winterson tells the tale of Atlas, who was punished with holding the world on his shoulders.

In an introduction, Winterson writes about telling stories and the issue of autobiography:

Weight has a personal story broken against the bigger story of the myth we know and the myth I have re-told. I have written this personal story in the First Person, indeed almost all of my work is written in the First Person, and this leads to questions of autobiography.

Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important. The writer must fire herself through the text, be the molten stuff that welds together disparate elements. I believe there is always exposure, vulnerability, in the writing process, which is not to say it is either confessional or memoir. Simply, it is real.

Later she leaves the story of Atlas and Heracles and writes:

I know nothing of my biological parents. The live on a lost contenent of DNA. Like Atlantis, all record of them is sunk... Spin the globe. What landmasses are these, unmapped, unnamed? The world evolves, first liquid and alive, then forming burning plates that must cool and set. The experiment is haphazard, toxic at times. Earth is a brinkmanship of breathtaking beauty and a mutant inferno. My own primitive life forms take a long time to web intelligence. When they are intelligent they are still angry.

Wow!

Ultimately, she brings the reader to the conclusion that the weight Atlas (and all of us) carry can simply be put down, if we choose. When she allows Atlas to unburden himself, the world doesn't come to an end, it hangs there without him. Winterson's re-telling of the story of Atlas undoes the story of an eternity of punishment and becomes a beautiful tale about letting go.

How to Suppress Women's Writing

How to Suppress Women's Writing, by Joanna Russ is a marvelous book that examines the systematic ways that women artists have been suppressed by society and critics. Russ's book is a very readable, accessible polemic against the suppression of women artists (not just writers, but artists, actors, musicians, etc) and explains the various ways that women's work is undermined:

She didn't write it.
She wrote it, but she shouldn't have.
She wrote it, but look what she wrote about.
She wrote it, but "she" isn't really an artist and "it" isn't really serious, of the rigth genre - i.e., really art.
She wrote it, but she wrote only one of it.
She wrote it, but it's only interesting/included in the canon for one, limited reason.
She wrote it, but there are very few of her.

Aside from verbalizing some of the frustrating questions I've been asking myself lately, Russ presents example after example of brilliant women artists and the denial of their place in the canon. She counts representations of women in anthologies, cites old criticism of books, most amusingly when a book is first published under a male pen-name and later revealed to have been written by a woman - like Emily Brönte's Wuthering Heights. After the shocking revelation of the artist's sex, her writing was compared "...to a little bird fluttering its wings against the bars of its cage." When it was understood to be written by a man, it was described as "powerful and original", "bestial, brutal, indeed monstrous."

Women's experience (sometimes but not always the subject of women's writing) is often rejected out of hand. Writes Russ:

Many feminists argue that the automatic devaluation of women's experience and consequent attitudes, values, and judgments springs from an automatic devaluation of women per se, the belief that manhood is "normative" and womanhood somehow "deviant" or "special." ... Not only is female experience often considered less broad, less representative, less important, than male experience, but the actual content of works can be distorted according to whether the author is believed to be of one sex or the other.

Naturally, she addresses Linda Nochlin's extremely influential 1971 article "Why have there been no great women artists?" in which Nochlin writes, "There are no women equivalents for Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Delacroix or Cezanne, Picasso or Matisse..." Russ answers that with, "...there is the statement "no great women artists" in a century that has produced Georgia O'Keeffe, Käthe Kollwitz, and Emily Carr, to name only those I happen to like."

Russ ends the book with a challenge to the reader to consider their own prejudices and rejections, while freely admitting that her own book doesn't adequately address the suppression of other minority writers, particularly black women writers and other writers of color and non-Western artists.

I came away with a long list of writers I want to explore more, here are a few:
The Countess of Winchilsea, Anne Finch
Margaret Cavendish
Jane Marcus, Art and Anger
Eve Merriam, The Club
Anna Letitia Barbauld
Jane Elliott
Lady Anne Lindsay
Lady Carolina Nairne
Aphra Behn
Charlotte Brontë's Villette
And, thanks to Russ, I got that Dorothy Sayers recommendation I've been waiting for: Gaudy Night - review coming soon! Let me know if you're familiar with the writers above.

Feed

Feed, by M.T. Anderson, is the next book for our book club. It's officially a Y.A. book, but I think very accessible at least to my age group as well. Feed takes place in the (not-so) distant future when everyone has a chip in their head that's kind of like the internet and facebook. People "chat" even when they're standing right next to each other, and, when the characters go to the mall and walk in a store, they instantly get a feed from the store with ads and prizes based on their previous purchases. Basically it's the dystopian future where the entire culture is consumer-based and corporate-owned and naturally, the environments a wreck. People have lesions on their skin, but even the lesions are consumerized and it becomes cool to have lesions of certain placement, size and shape.

You know in a teen movie where there's this group of good-looking rich kids that goof off and are kind of jerks? The main character is one of those. He falls for this girl, Violet, (on the moon!) and it turns out she's sort of anti-feed and anti-consumerism, but following her path is like, well, turning his back on everything he loves.

Some of the things I loved about this book was the creative language that Anderson employs. While some of the characters are so entrenched in the feed they can barely create a coherent sentence, he's created this goofy, idiotic, dumbed-down language and slang that even the President uses. Anderson's book is frighteningly close to reality, minus like, the flying cars. I think, like most good dystopian fiction, he merely expands upon reality to an absurd, but not impossible, conclusion.

One of my favorite parts, and I don't think I'll ruin it for you... is:

Violet was screaming, "Look at us! You don't have the feed! You are the feed! You're feed! You're being eaten! You're raised for food! Look at what you've made yourselves!" She pointed at Quendy, and went, "She's a monster! A monster! Covered with cuts! She's a creature!"

I think it's an important book, and I can see it being very productive to read it with a young(er) person. Or, any person - I read mine to husband on a car trip although he was a bit perplexed by the language. He kept stopping me to repeat and spell words. I'd say, "I don't know, youch, it says, y-o-u-c-h." It reminded me a lot of my favorite book of all time, The Handmaid's Tale - I will not be surprised if it claims a spot similar to Atwood's book, in the annals of, not just dystopian fiction or YA fiction, but simply excellent fiction.

Poppy Shakespeare

I hate to write that Poppy Shakespeare is like a cross between Catch-22 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, because that's what it says right on the book jacket, but, it's a very good way to describe the book.

It's about a group of people in a mental hospital in London. "N" is the narrator, and Poppy Shakespeare is a woman who is sent to the hospital against her will and attempts to get out, only to find herself in a "Catch-22" whereby she must admit that she's mentally unstable in order to get the support of a facilitator, at which point it's she cannot argue that she is not mentally ill. The whole thing is quite alarming to N and the other patients because they are very comfortable in the hospital and feel safe there and, of course, never WANT to leave.

What emerges is that the characters glide between the fluid space of what is considered "normal" and what might be considered "unstable", and that their environment only intensifies their behavior. The book begins with a quote by Chekhov that I was reminded of again and again:

Since prisons and madhouses exist, why, somebody is bound to sit in them.

The author, Clare Allan, created a whole set of language for the hospital, including, in a very English way, various Ministries of this or that. She gives N a rather marvelous way of speaking - I'm not enough of a linguist to categorize it, but it goes like this:

That frist day Poppy gone down alright. After she'd saved Brian the Butcher's life, people give her the benefit. So when she started slagging the doctors off, how she shat better crap than they come out with, I ain't saying there weren't a bristle gone round but people was prepared to overlook it. On top of which she got novelty value; no one met a dribbler like Poppy before, and when they finally got their heads round the fact that she meant what she said, she didn't want to be there, they was that fucking jiggered, that stunned to the core, it never occurred to them they should be offended.

I thought it was excellent. Very funny and poignant.

What my mother doesn't know

What my Mother Doesn't Know is a sweet little book written in free-form verse. It's over 250 pages, but I read it in about an hour. It's about a young woman (12ish?) who's parents don't get along and watch too much television, and her boyfriend's a d-bag who doesn't want his parents to know she's Jewish.

Apparently it's a frequently banned book because this young woman (*gasp!*) acknowledges her own sexual feelings and says the word "breasts" a couple of times. After a school dance, she waits for her mother, who's late:

I never thought
it would happen this way --
with the guy standing closest to me
suddenly bursting out laughing
and grabbing my breasts
with his slimy paws
squeezing them for a split second
that seems to last forever.

I never once envisioned
the devirginization of my breasts
happening like this,
with the guy and his scumbag buddy
slapping five afterwards
...

(Then she punches him! Yea!)

Well, it's an utterly charming little book and I'd recommend it to just about anyone. One of the most lovely bits (for me) was when she goes to the museum to view her favorite painting, La Bal à Bougival and she later learns that the young woman in the painting is Suzanne Valadon - that's a nice shout-out for a little-known post-impressionist.

Here's some amusing negative criticism on Amazon:

Book Giveaway!

Here are a couple of books I started but weren't for me. If you're in the Continental US and want to read them, leave your email in comments!

The Aqua Net Diaries: Big Hair, Big Dreams, Small Town, by Jennifer Niven. Written by a woman who grew up in a small town in Indiana during the 80s - just like meeee! But, I couldn't get into it.


Sabbath's Theatre, by Philip Roth. About an old dude trying to get more tail, as far as I can tell. Reminded me of hiliarious article I read on Tiger Beatdown called "Fond Memories of Vagina" about older, male authors who, well, I'll quote the article:

The plot is always the same: “I am a writer in the twilight of my years, bored with life and my sexual powers. Oh, wait: pussy. I shall attain some. I am reinvigorated! Thanks, pussy!” This bores me and makes my entire lower half numb.

That's two, Philip.

I know, I make them sound really enticing, but, one person's trash...

Adverbs

Ever since I read Watch Your Mouth by Daniel Handler (aka: Lemony Snicket ) I've been dying to read more. Adverbs (2006) is something like short stories but not quite. Sometimes the characters come back but it's also not a novel. Each story/chapter's title is an adverb: Clearly, Naturally, Wrongly, Often, etc. Like most collections, some of them are so-so and some of them make you want to lie down and die (in a good way. Happy.)

Look, I'll go ahead and tell you why it's called that because I don't think it will ruin it for you, and if you're like me, you'll forget anyway... It's based on a party game called "Adverbs" where someone leaves the room and you choose an adverb and when they come back, everyone acts out the word and the person tries to guess.

It's a charade, although it's not much like Charades. You play until you get bored. Nobody keeps score, because there's no sense in keeping track of what everyone is doing.

The story that made me want to die was Soundly - it's about two girl friends, one of whom is dying. They leave the hospital for the day and get stuck in traffic on the way back:

There was a noise above us like an airplane zoom, but it was getting too dark to see. People started laying on the horn, braying like bad geese in a panic. "I am here," Lila said with a trembly smile. Our driver's ed teacher had told us that's what the horn should mean. Not Move along, buddy or I am displeased but I am here. I am here, I am here, I am here!

Beautiful!

Methland

We read Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town, by Nick Reding, for book club. The book is quite interesting and I encourage you to read it if you are at all interested in Midwestern drug culture, or even Midwestern culture. Reding creates an argument for the proliferation of meth in the Midwest based on a number of factors - the abundance of chemicals (for corn production), people with few options for employment or wealth, and even that good-old-fashioned American work ethic.

To read his book, you'd think there wasn't a town in the Midwest that wasn't completely destroyed by meth. For me, one of the fallacies of his argument is that I'm from a small Midwestern town and, at least for now, it isn't running rampant with meth addicts roaming the streets like zombies. Of course, that's just my experience, I do know that some of my friends from the Midwest DO know people who's lives have been destroyed by the drug.

I think the book would have made a really terrific long article, perfect for Vanity Fair or the New Yorker, but I thought it was a bit long for a book. I GET IT! METH'S REALLY BAD AND STUFF.

Housekeeping

Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson (1980) is a highly acclaimed book which won a bunch of awards and was nominated for the Pulitzer, but I really didn't enjoy it. It's a prose-alicious book that is written with utterly breathtaking sentences, I mean, sometimes I'd read a sentence and then sit back and say, "Well, why would anyone write anything else?" But, altogether I found the book really distant and well, boring. It was a quite odd mix of beautiful writing and a boring story, but that's heavy prose for ya.

I'm sure there are many who'll disagree with me - I encourage you to defend in comments!

The Nine Tailors

Riding on the high of my first Dorothy Sayers experience, I went to the "Sayers Shelf" in the library and somewhat randomly chose The Nine Tailors, thinking, How could I go wrong? I love the sewing arts.

Turns out the nine tailors are like bells? And a certain style of ringing like, church bells? I'm not kidding you, beyond boring, but I hung in there 'til almost the end. Peter Wimsey continues to delight (despite his own predilection for bell ringing) but I wouldn't recommend this book, even to Quasimodo himself. (PS, the image I've included isn't the cover I had, in case my old friend Anonymous drops by and has something to say. As he always does.)

Now, I know there are some hard-core Sayers fans out there so I patiently await your recommendations before I return to that shelf. I'm not giving up on you, Dorothy!

The American Painter Emma Dial

I picked up The American Painter Emma Dial on our trip to South Beach about a month ago. It caught my eye because I'd heard some buzz about it in Chicago and the author, Samantha Peale, went to The School of the Art Institute (Hey! So did *I*, and yet, I remain an unpublished author.)

It's not exactly a "beach" book - it requires a bit of high-functioning brain activity, exploring the idea of The Artist, creativity, and ownership. Emma Dial is an assistant to a famous (fictional) artist, Michael Freiburg. Freiburg describes his paintings to Dial who executes them flawlessly while he takes all the credit for the work. Some readers might be surprised to hear about this type of relationship in the contemporary artist's studio, as we live in an age that identifies with the art hero as, specifically a solo genius. Of course, it's not unusual for many of today's artists to work as a team. What's interesting is that Dial doesn't seem to resent the fact that her work is identified as her boss's, merely that she isn't given more credit, and also that, as she spends all her creative time creating his art, she has no time or energy left over for her own.

While the book reads like an insider's view of the art world, the themes easily appeal to anyone whose creative work suffers while working for the man.

Peale's writing style is straight-forward, sometimes startlingly so. She writes, "We lay close. He wiped his dick on the sheet, drew me to him, with his arm across my shoulders." Ewww. I appreciated what she didn't describe. Mainly: the art, which allowed me to imagine the paintings as I chose. (For me, something akin to Gerhard Richter.)

Peale herself worked in the studio of Jeff Koons and the "Reading Group Guide Interview", normally ignored but in this case interesting, contained some fascinating tidbits about her own experience as an artist's assistant. But those looking for a roman à clef are apparently misguided. "When I worked for Jeff Koons he encouraged me to do my own work." says Peale. "He always had the time and interest to find out what I was up to and serve up some uncanny insight."

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour

Continuing my revisitation of J.D. Salinger, did I extract my Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour, an Introduction from the shelf.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters unfolds in that brilliant way, revealing pieces bit by bit, including that marvelous title.

Seymour is exquisite and indulgent, a dream to read. For fans of the Glass family, and me reading these stories so close together, it, to borrow a phrase from The Dude, really ties the room together. Told from the perspective of Buddy, it's Buddy who tells us that he wrote many of the stories in Nine Stories, even those that don't have to do with the Glass family, like "Teddy". No less than a meditation on art and artist, "Buddy" writes some killer lines, like "When he was twenty-two, he had one special, not thin, sheaf of poems that looked very, very good to me, and I, who have never written a line longhand in my life without instantly visualizing it in eleven-point type, rather fractiously urged him to submit them for publication somewhere." and "You can't argue with someone who believes, or just passionately suspects, that the poet's function is not to write what he must write but rather, to write what he would write if his life depended on his taking responsibility for writing what he must in a style designed to shut out as few of his old librarians as humanly possible." Buddy bristles at the idea that Seymour's art is based on biography, that old saw that true art comes from the imagination - it's one I don't particularly believe in because I think it's generally used as a defense of art by men and a way to discard art by women, but I never get tired of the argument.

I'm waiting with baited breathe to hear if any more stories will be published. Rumor has it that he had piles of stories about the Glasses.

The Plot Against America

In The Plot Against America, Philip Roth writes an alternate history to WWII in which, instead of going to war, America doesn't re-elect Franklin Roosevelt but instead Charles Lindberg, who becomes an ally of Hitler.

The story is told from the perspective of a young, Jewish boy in Newark whose parents view with immediate suspicion the change in leadership and the direction of the country. A family vacation to DC reveals the first public expressions of anti-semitism the family faces and soon after the oldest son is recruited to be part of a program to send young Jewish boys to the "heartland" to work on farms. He returns with less respect for his parents and deeply ingrained with the lessons he learned in "real America."

Mr. Mawhinney owned not just one farm but three--the lesser two rented to tenants - land that had been in his family going back nearly to the days of Daniel Boone, and my father owned nothing more impressive than a six-year-old car. Mr. Mawhinney could saddle a horse, drive a tractor, operate a thresher, ride a fertilizer drill, work a field as easily with a team of mules as with a team of oxen; he could rotate crops and manage hired men, both while and Negro; he could repair tools, sharpen plow points and mowers, put up fences, string barbed wire, raise chickens, dip sheep, de-horn cattle, slaughter pigs, smoke bacon, sugar-cure ham- and he had raised watermelons that were the sweetest and juiciest Sandy had ever eaten.

The anti-semitism grows stronger and stronger until eventually the US experiences something quite similar to Kristallnacht.

What Roth's book illustrates is how easily compliancy can lead to vast human rights violations. Published in 2004, it seems quite likely that the book was influenced by the liberties of the Bush administration, although I haven't read anything by Roth himself about that. For me, what really struck home, after some additional research, was the untold story of Charles Linderberg and other notable historical figures like Henry Ford, who are no less than national icons and symbols of all that is good about American ingenuity and capitalism, but were both anti-semites and used a fair amount of their political capital to promote that agenda. (There's a very helpful postscript in the paperback version that includes a "note to the Reader" and a "A True Chronology of the Major Figures" that provides more information.) Many of the hateful comments made by those characters in the book are taken directly from public speeches made by those men. (The postscripts reveals that history has literally been re-written in which re-publications of Lindberg's journals omit anti-semitical statements.)

Roth seems determined to expose Linderberg and Ford for the contributions of hate they added to the political and social atmosphere and I think that's a worthwhile endeavor. Ignoring their faults does a disservice to people who work for peace and, well, shows us that history is often a lie. And, of course, it is.

Aside from providing a lot of fodder for thought, the book is very entertaining and readable, as almost all of Roth's work is. I've never been disappointed by him with the exception of his 1971 Our Gang, which I think I just didn't have the historical perspective to appreciate. If you've never read Roth before, I'd suggest Goodbye, Columbus, which is one of my favorites - but, I certainly haven't read all of his stuff and would appreciate your suggestions if you have!

Nine Stories

After re-reading J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zoe, I re-read Nine Stories as well. It begins with A Perfect Day for Bananafish, an at-first charming and mysterious and ultimately alarming little story about the eldest Glass child, Seymore, on a beach vacation with his wife. That story's shocking ending rather keeps the reader on their toes for the rest of the collection. I'm quite fond of The Laughing Man, about a young boy who idolizes this young man who's kind of like a boy scout leader that all the boys call the Chief.

I like how many of the stories have a little mystery that unravels, like Down at the Dinghy, in which the maid has said or done something she shouldn't have and doesn't become clear until the end. Or Teddy, the last story, about another young boy of preternatural intelligence or perhaps (no spoilers) something else? I think all the stories highlight Salinger's incredible skill in the realm of the short story, and how in a few short pages he creates such a rich landscape of history and language and suspense.

From Teddy:

"I have a very strong affinity for the them. They're my parents, I mean, and we're all part of each other's harmony and everything," Teddy said. "I want them to have a nice time while they're alive, because they like having a nice time... But they don't love me and Booper - that's my sister - that way. I mean they don't seem able to love us just the way we are. They don't seem able love us unless they can keep changing us a little bit. They love their reasons for loving us almost as much as they love us, and most of the time more. It's not so good, that way."

I mean, wow. You could just spend the next two weeks thinking about that handful of sentences, couldn't you?

Unnatural Death

I picked up a Dorothy Sayers' book in South Beach at a fine little book store on Lincoln Road. I'd heard her mentioned reverently on some of the various book blogs I read and I was not! Disappointed! The book I somewhat randomly selected from her series was Unnatural Death, first published in 1927. It features a Lord Peter Wimsey, this wealthy dude who's really great at solving mysteries. He's kind of like Jeeves and Wooster rolled into one person, with a little Sherlock Holmes (He likes comparing himself to Holmes, as a matter of fact.)

The mystery in question is the death of an older woman for whom there is no sign of foul play and yet Peter Wimsey has a suspicion that she was murdered and sets out to solve it. Apparently the book was quite topical when it was published, relating to a change in inheritance laws which caused me to recall Austen and even consider looking up the definition of an "entail." (Just to consider, not to do, ultimately.)

Well, I thought it was absolutely marvelous and I intend to read many many more books by Sayers. It's very British, very funny, very smart and kind of scary! (I got spooked at the end!) Here's a passage that made me laugh:

"Your friend's going to be left behind," said Mrs. Cropper as the train moved out."

"That would be very unlike him," replied Mr. Murbles, calmly unfolding a couple of rugs and exchanging his old-fashioned top-hat for a curious kind of travelling cap with flaps to it. Mrs. Cropper, in the midst of her anxiety, could not help wondering where in the world he had contrived to purchase this Victorian relic. As a matter of fact, Mr. Murbles' caps were specifically made to his own design by an exceedingly expensive West End hatter, who help Mr. Murbles in deep respect as a real gentleman of the old school.

Night

Recently I had a desire to read something really excellent, so I went to my bookshelves and pulled out Nobel Peace Prize winning author Elie Wiesel's Night, which has been getting a lot of press since the the 2006 re-translation by Wiesel's wife, Marion, and a new preface. It's a slim volume of 120 pages but the weight on the soul is quite heavy.

Wiesel's novel, which was originally written in Yiddish and translated to French in 1958, is about his experience as a young Jewish boy from Transylvania who was sent to concentration camps (Auschwitz then Buchenwald) in 1944. Weisel and his father were immediately separated from his mother and sister after a harrowing train ride to the camp (the mother and the sister were killed immediately).

The book is hopeless and heart-wrenching and the fact that he survived at all is rather astounding. What Wiesel makes clear is that those who did survive were robbed of their humanity - he describes how his body sort of went on autopilot, as, starved and abused, he nevertheless was able to run and work for long periods. He describes how men killed each other for a piece of bread, and how, ultimately, he turned his back on his father for fear that he would be beaten himself. Wiesel's honesty about his own most shameful moments are, simply, agonizing to read. He is a brave, brave man to expose himself. However painful to read, his book is a gift. He writes in his preface:

For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear; his duty is to bear witness for the dead and the for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.

The Harlot by the Side of the Road

The Harlot by the Side of the Road: Forbidden Tales of the Bible, by Jonathan Kirsch is not so much about "forbidden tales". They're tales that are right there in the bible (I went and looked up a couple of them on my own). But they're the stories that priests and pastors and Sunday School teachers don't dwell on or even approach because they don't fit into the common narrative of the judeo-christian faith.

I would imagine that most folks from a Christian background would be unfamiliar with the stories in the book (according to the author, Rabbis also avoid these stories). I was familiar with a few, only because of my Art History background and a possible penchant for incestuous scenes in previous centuries. For example, one of the stories that Kirsch illustrates is that of Lot and his daughters. Lot and his family, as some of you might know, lived in Soddam, a city which God destroyed but allowed this one family to escape. As they were leaving, Lot's wife "looked back" and was immediately turned into a pillar of salt. Lot and his daughters eventually ended up in an isolated place and thought that the whole population of the world was destroyed. So, the daughters had sex with Lot to repopulate the earth. Look it up. Genesis 19:31-38. (Hendrick Goltzius, 1616)
Actually, from my own experience of growing up in a conservative Lutheran church, I remember very well the story of Lot and his wife, but I certainly don't remember being told the bit with the daughters. Our church was not the kind that entertained questions of any kind, so, "Why did his wife turn into SALT?" was the sort of thing that was answered with, "Why don't you sit there and be quiet?" And my family wonders why I don't want to go to church with them.

Kirsch copies various texts from the Bible, and then narrates it again for folks who have trouble parsing out the language. Then, he examines the history of the story and any cultural issues in the past or present that might apply. So, for the story of Lot and his daughters, he'll suggest that Lot, who was clearly not a righteous man, was more of a classic buffoon and the story would surely have "gripped the ancient reader." Oh, and I forgot the part where Lot offers his daughters to this angry mob of people to rape? That's because, Kirsch explains, the head of household must do absolutely anything he can to appease his "guests".

Kirsch's point, which he reiterates frequently, is that the bible is chock-full of these crazy stories which, in fact, do not carry a moral or didactic tale, but are simply entertaining and complex. "I hope to take back the Bible from the strict and censorious people who wave it in our faces and to restore it to the worldly man and woman who will appreciate the flesh-and-blood passions that are described in the Holy Scriptures." His approach is similar, but not as damning as Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus, which challenges the idea that the Bible is the directly translated Word of God but rather just a bunch of made-up stuff that's been deliberately or casually mistranslated for hundreds of years. Ehrman ultimately rejects the bible completely, which is not what happens to Kirsch at all.

I thought the book was really well-put together. I usually read a chapter, then was like, "No way." and then I'd go look it up in my own dusty Bible, then I'd tell my husband, then I'd read another chapter. Kirsch refers to a bunch of feminist Bible scholars (I didn't even know there was such a thing!) that I'd like to check out as well.

So we might conclude from an open-eyed reading of the forbidden texts of the Bible that the fundamental truth is that there is no fundamental truth. Instead, we are invited to join the rest of humanity in a restless, ceaseless search to discern some moral order in a chaotic universe. We are challenged by the Bible itself to figure out who God is and what God wants - and that is the most disturbing revelation of all.

Abundance

Abundance: A Novel by Marie Antoinette, by Sena Jeter Nasland is historical fiction about (you guessed it) Marie Antoinette. It's extremely well-researched and includes, as far as this semi-M.A.-dabbler can tell, just about every real-life quote that's documented by the former queen of France, and major historical details from the Necklace Scandal to, natch, the French Revolution. It's also the book upon which Sophia Coppola based her 2006 movie, Marie Antoinette (my review).

Jeter Naslund is a poetic writer, given to long flourishes, which are really fun at first but get old after a while. I also read (most of) her Ahab's Wife about (you guessed it...) but didn't finish it. In fact, I didn't finish Abundance but ended up skipping large portions of it. I was interested in how she wrote The End, which, I think I do not have to avoid spoilers here - suffice to say that The End is rather startling and beautiful - what she creates is an image of a young woman who's been raised her entire life to appease and to charm, to make herself amenable and that's what she does right up until her head gets removed from her body.

Breathe, Eyes, Memory

Breathe, Eyes, Memory is by Haitian author, Edwidge Danticat, 1998. I first learned about Danticat on the New Yorker Fiction podcast. Danticat read a story by Junot Diaz, and later, Diaz read one of her stories. Diaz spoke so highly of Danticat that his recommendation was enough for me.

Breathe, Eyes, Memory is a book about a young girl, Sophie, who lives with her aunt in Haiti. Her mother lives in New York and soon sends for her. She lives with her mother for a little while, and then there's a quick fast forward when Sophie returns to Haiti with her own daughter to deal with some family issues. (I don't think I'm ruining it for you.)

Danticat weaves in some big themes: diaspora, the abuse cycle, sexuality, family, matriarchy. Her description of life in Haiti is both beautiful and sometimes a bit shocking. Sophie's mother begins what she calls "testing" her in an attempt to verify her virginity. Sophie realizes this is a pervasive practice in her culture and comes up with a fairly drastic way to make it stop. She hates the practice and suffers psychological repercussions, as did her mother, and as did her mother.

Haitian men, they insist that their women are virgins and have their ten fingers.

According to Tante Antie, each finger had a purpose. It was the way she had been taught to prepare herself to become a woman. Mothering. Boiling. Loving. Baking. Nursing. Frying. Healing. Washing. Ironing. Scrubbing. It wasn't her fualth, she said. Her ten fingers had been anmed for her even before she was born. Sometimes, she even wished she had six fingers on each hand so she could have two left for herself.

Something that surprised me is that Danticat's writing is extremely simple. Aside from the somewhat frequent multilingual text, I was generally not wow-ed by her writing, although I appreciate how extremely accessible it was, and think this would be a really excellent book for young women. I remember Diaz saying that the way she writes is actually a rather complex accomplishment for a writer, I'm not sure I get that, but I really respect his opinion. The last two pages, I will say, were absolutely beautifully written, and I suspect the simplicity of the language for the majority of the book made those last few pages all the more spectacular.

Franny and Zooey

After JD Salinger died, I got that old familiar craving to read The Catcher in the Rye (for the __ time?) and, horror, it was not on my shelf. But there was Franny and Zooey, which I haven't read for quite a while. Dave Eggers wrote a lovely bit in the New Yorker re: the influence of JD Salinger, which almost goes without saying for a person like Eggers, forgoodnesssakes. These parts struck me:

I read “The Catcher in the Rye” the average number of times for a young person my age—which is to say, every few years between when I was sixteen and twenty-six or so.

Hey, meeee tooooo!!!!

His is still my favorite dialogue, the dialogue that rings truest, that’s at once very naturalistic and musical; it’s really remarkable how difficult it is to do what he does between quotation marks.

I think what's really interesting about his dialogue is, take for example, our Holden Caulfield - his language is pretty dated, but it remains so immensely readable! But, that sentence really made me want to go back and read Salinger with a more critical eye.

After he died I read that Salinger became a Buddhist as well as a semi-reclusive, so it was with only a small amount of surprise to rediscover (me and my memory!) Franny (the first of two short stories in the slender 1961 book) is about a young woman practicing Buddhist-style mediation with a Christian prayer. What I found remarkable about the story, as I read it again, was what brilliant control Salinger had over the narrative structure (and yes, that delicious dialogue) and in no more than 44 pages we learn so much about the characters. Zooey continues the arch and further examines (I don't think I'm ruining it for you...) the act of the repetition of the Jesus Prayer and delves even further into the marvelous Glass family. I found the both stories near-transcendent, they were so beautifully crafted and told.

And what really struck me, as I re-read these stories, was how much Salinger and one of my other favorite childhood books, From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E. L. Konigsburg inspired me for a life of arts, literature, and, dare I say it? Sophistication and education (me and Wes Anderson, right?) And to live in NY, which A Certain Husband continues to resist...

Unnatural Causes

Now I can't seem to resist picking up a P.D. James book when I see one, despite the fact that she and I have a tumultuous relationship. But, I'm beginning to think that if I feel like reading a decent British mystery, she's my gal. I think.

Unnatural Causes features Adam Dalgliesh, her steadfast detective, who, Murder She Wrote-style, goes on what he thinks will be a relaxing vacation to visit his aunt when a murder changes his plans. The suspects are the denizens of aunt's tiny sea-side village and for some reason they all start behaving like suspects right away, spilling the beans about their alibis to anyone who will listen.

I thought it was a decent little mystery that kept me guessing - by coincidence I happened to watch Murder on the Orient Express, by another acknowledged queen of mystery-writing and thus went through several They ALL Did It! moments.
James is a clever writer and a good one. Here's a passage that made me laugh and also sent me to the dictionary (I LOVE being sent to the dictionary, don't you?):

...The exclusion of women means that some of the best crime writers are unrepresented but this worries no one; the Committee take the view that their presence would hardly compensate for the expense of putting in a second set of lavoratories. The plumbing at the Cadaver has, in fact, remained virtually unaltered since the Club moved to Tavistock Square in 1900 but it is a canard that the baths were originally purchased by George Joseph Smith.

I was all, canard? Isn't that a duck?

James's 1967 book is a bit dated with an oogy reference or two to "colored people" and some 1960's pre-PC references to a "cripple". Blech.

Lonely Werewolf Girl

Lonely Werewolf Girl was published in the UK in 2007, and somehow escaped my notice until fairly recently. Needless to say, it was quickly rectified. It's written by Martin Millar, who's supposedly agoraphobic (what a coincidence!) and the book is self-published, which is pretty cool considering its success.

Lonely Werewolf Girl is categorized as a YA book and, in fact, I picked it up in the YA section of my fave Chicago book store, Women and Children First. I'm not sure it's exactly a book for teenagers or kids. Then I started thinking about how someone recently called me an "adult" and I got sort of surprised. So, I started thinking, "Am I not a young... adult?" Is it possible that all this time YA books are literally meant for Young Adults like me, dopey ladies in their 30s?

As you might suspect, Lonely Werewolf Girl is about this girl (14 yrs old), who's a werewolf (born one). She's not only lonely, a bit of rogue, but she's bulimic, suicidal, nearly illiterate, drug-addicted, and a cutter. Lonely werewolf girl isn't really the main character, even though most of the story circles around her. The most relate-able characters are a couple of humans who get involved in the plots and schemes of all these werewolves and folks from different dimensions and whatnot. The non-humans are mostly unpleasant and have bad personalities, not being bound by the social norms that most of us humans ascribe to (which is fodder for someone else's web post).

The book draws inevitable comparisons to Twilight, which I am powerless to avoid. Like Twilight, one of the main characters has an extremely unpleasant personality who makes you wonder, "Am I seriously supposed to feel SYMPATHETIC toward this girl????" And it's about a bunch of nonsense creatures that walk around in the modern world talking on their cell phones and having star-crossed love and being ridiculously moody. About 20 pages in, I thought, if this is some more uptight, sexless Twilight bullshit, I'm OUT. And then:

Gawain was the most handsome of werewolves, and he had once been her lover. On her fourteenth birthday she'd crept into his bed at Castle MacRinnalch and after that they were never out of each other's company. They had a year of insane joy before he was banished. Kalix yearned to see him again, but she knew he was never coming back.

OK, then. Unlike the Twilight series, it's very funny, it's progressive (pro-cross-dressing!), and, unlike Twilight, it isn't written so badly you curse the author for destroying the English language for you.

At 558 pages, I thought it was a bit long, although, I really enjoyed reading it and when I was stressed out at work I daydreamed about laying on a beach reading this book all day. I also think the author doesn't write women very well - it was as if he thought to himself, "Hmmm... what are girls into? Clothes, and shopping! And big, clunky shoes!" So. There's that. But.

Guess what? There's a sequel coming soon.

Generation A

We read Generation A for book club. It's the latest by Douglas Coupland.

It's about these people that get stung by a bee, and it takes place in the not-so-distant future where bees are thought to be extinct. After these five folks get stung, they get quickly gathered up by scientists and taken in for observation and to find out if there's something special about them that attracts bees.

There are five main characters and some of them are kind of interesting - a young man from Sri Lanka who works at a call center for Abercrombie & Fitch and has an idealized view of Americans (in stylish, cotton clothing) mostly named "Craig". A young woman with Tourette's Syndrome. A corn farmer/pornographer. The others kind of merged into one person for me - but others in book club said they found them all quite distinct.

In Sri Lanka, a dog in a doghouse owned more than I did. Could I ever be a Craig? No. A person was born into Craigdom, with its multiple ski holidays, complex orthodontia, proper nutrition and casual, healthy view of recreational sex.

Without giving too much of the plot away, they all do have something in common, and ultimately what emerges (I don't think this will ruin it for you) is how, despite living in the digital age and all it's presumed alienation, we're (some of us) nevertheless more in touch with each other than we ever were before.

Coupland's book was a little disappointing only because I think he skirts closely to some rather profound thoughts, but doesn't commit to them. I wish his book had been a lot more challenging. Instead he seems to opt for a more pop sensibility which certainly lends an equanimous readability to the work, but it's also a kind of cop-out to the audience.

One bit I loved, however, was how Coupland played a little bit with language and text - check this out - can you read it?
Wondering where that title came from? Coupland is partly responsible for the popularity of the term "Generation X", as you may know. But Gen A is slightly different, and, if you ask me, this book will most assuredly not carry the same caché and come to define a generation as X did. It comes from Kurt Vonnegut:

"Now you young twerps want a new name for your generation? Probably not, you just want jobs, right? Well, the media do us all such tremendous favors when they call you Generation X, right? Two clicks from the very end of the alphabet. I hereby declare you Generation A, as much at the beginning of a series of astonishing triumphs and failures as Adam and Eve were so long ago."

Snuff

So, I just finished this book by Douglas Coupland (Generation A) that I'll write about in a few days. After I finished it, I thought, gee, Coupland's kind of like Augusten Burroughs or Chuck Palahniuk although maybe not as creative and not as frantic. As if to prove it to myself, I picked up Snuff by Palahniuk.

A few years ago a friend said they saw Palahniuk read and said more than one person fainted at the reading because it was so shocking. Can you imagine, getting the vapors in this day and age? Anyway, this book is kind of like that - like, if you're reading it in a public place, you might find yourself holding the book half-closed so no one peeks over your shoulder and says OHMYGODWHATAREYOUREADING?

It's about a group of people who are waiting for their scene in a 600 person porn film gang bang to take place. And it's crazy-graphic and not for the faint of heart. I think what makes the book rather fascinating is that Palahniuk intersperses a healthy dose of thoughtful examination into the creation and participation of porn, and also into the extremes of ... shall we say... acting. Because, if you consider, for example, that the creation of a porn movie is not unlike the creation of any movie that requires the actor to go to some extreme lengths to portray his or her character, then you could conclude that porn actors and actresses simply go quite a far way for their craft. Palahniuk cites a number of examples of mainstream actors who go to such extreme lengths, a well-known example being the actor who played the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz who suffered quite a bit from the metallic paint his character required.

By chance, a certain husband rented a movie, a very famous and influential 1976 Franco-Japanese film (from Netflix, fyi) called The Realm of the Senses which was pretty much straight-up porn, although fairly gorgeous, art-house porn full of all the things you hope to find in mainstream movies and have no expectations for at all in porn - like good lighting and characterization and beautiful sets and a nice storyline. There's also excellent, highly intellectual socio- and cultural analyses in the blu-ray commentary by scholar Tony Rayns who explains that the actors were actually mainstream actors who happened to go to extreme lengths (all the way) (get it?) for their roles.

I think Palahniuk is a very smart, very clever writer who's extremely compelling and really exciting to read. If you're a Palahniuk fan, you'll probably enjoy this book, but I otherwise wouldn't recommend it unless you consider yourself to be Outrageously Open-minded or really like porn titles like, you know, The Wizard of Ass, of which it is chock-a-block.

Wuthering Heights

So, I read Wuthering Heights when I was a kid - I was a real Brontë-head back in middle school/high school and read Jane Eyre a perhaps excessive number of times. I read Wuthering Heights once or twice but I have a terrible memory and really couldn't remember a thing about it.

EXCEPT, I had this vague recollection that Heathcliff was a romantic, if broody, somewhat recalcitrant character. So, it was with no small amount of excitement that I began reading Wuthering Heights again, as if for the first time. And, it was very amusing and clever and mysterious and dark. I kept wondering, when does the romance start?

I'll remind you how the story goes in case your memory is as bad as mine: the year: 1801. Mr Lockwood rents a house from Heathcliff, who lives in the house next door, Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff is extremely rude company and lives with this weird gaggle of unhappy people. Upon spending the night at Wuthering Heights, Lockwood hears nothing less than a ghost outside his window, Catherine, who tries to grab him through the window and he cuts her and blood gets all over the place and everything. Lockwood freaks out, Heathcliff calls out to Catherine, "Come back to me!" or something and Lockwood splits.

Back at his rental, he gets the whole story from his maid how Catherine grew up in Wuthering Heights with her brother, and one day her dad brought home this "gypsy", and they named him Heathcliff. Catherine and Heathcliff were bosom pals, and probably would have gotten married one day, except for some reason Catherine married her cousin who lived in the rental. Only back then it wasn't a rental. Heathcliff doesn't take that well, and basically enlists on a long campaign of revenge that destroys everything everyone ever loved or knew. Among the terrible things he does is beat the hell out of people, practice child abuse, kidnap, force two women into unwanted marriages so that he'll control their property, kills at least one person, and also hangs a dog.

Why I had the impression that the story was romantic, I'll never know. It's really quite disturbing that it has that reputation. But, I did think that Emily Brontë, like Jane Austen, makes a powerful social commentary on the detriment of England's property laws as effected women. Women could own or inherit nothing, so they were under extreme pressure to marry well (as we see in Austin) and completely at the mercy of either husband or father (as we see in E. Brontë). Heathcliff first hoodwinks Catherine's sister in-law into marrying him and she is completely without power to divorce while he takes over her property, and later, he forces Catherine's own child (also named Catherine) to marry his child (in order to gain more property.) She also is unable to divorce.

I think Brontë wove a very clever Gothic ghost tail, and, for the most part, I couldn't put it down. During a dull bit in the middle, I tried to imagine myself reading it in the mid-nineteenth century with no tv! No Internet! No Sudoku, even! Probably if I was sitting around, reading Wuthering Heights out loud with my husband every night, I would have been pretty enthralled. And, we would have gone to bed feeling pretty smug about our relationship.

Of course, we always do that. We're no Heathcliff and Catherine.

Ice Haven

Ice Haven is a graphic novel by Daniel Clowes. I like Clowes style of illustration, and the story is as meta as I've ever read in a comic book. Clowes, who I believe is from the Chicago area, refers heavily to the story of Leopold and Loeb - a grim and awful tale of these two kids from University of Chicago who kill someone for basically no reason. The story parallels the tale of L&L, while the entire book is bracketed by the narrative of a comic book (or graphic novel) critic whom Clowes both mocks and elevates, by making him ridiculously self-absorbed and ass-scratching while at the same time allowing the "critic" to remind the reader of the greater themes of the book. Finally the critic explores Clowes biography for "evidence" of the author's worldview, thus providing a rather humorous bio of suspect veracity (at least to me) while continuing to mock the critic for assuming the artist's bio influences the work. Which leads the reader to consider whether it might... Very clever.

Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters

At our book club meeting for this book, someone had a great idea to go around and say what we hated the most about the book. The funniest answer was - the subtitle: From Dating, Shopping, and Praying to Going to War and Becoming a Billionaire - Two Evolutionary Psychologists Explain Why We Do What We Do.

I actually hated this book so much I can't bare to write much about it, aside from saying Evolutionary Psychology seems to be a new and suspect field in which "scientists" claim that basically, everything we do is motivated by the urge to spread our seed, as it were. Of course, it's a ridiculous argument and there are like, four THOUSAND reasons it's ridiculous.

I'd go so far as to say that this book is dangerous and could easily inspire racism and sexism while excusing inexcusable behavior by claiming that the offender is merely following his natural, biological impulses. One of my friends said, "That book makes me angry beyond words. I would like to hunt down the author and punch him in the face." Me too! Not only that, but a room-full of librarians, book lovers and liberals agreed we'd all like to go out in the street and burn every copy we could get our hands on.

I would never suggest you read this book unless you enjoy being outraged.

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute

I learned about Grace Paley from Selected Shorts, a podcast I listen to and admire. It's nice to hear her stories read, and read well. I probably should have tried reading some of the stories in this collection out-loud.

Paley's short stories are beautifully written - modern, witty, very American (American immigrant), feminist. Here's an example of a killer opening:

I saw my ex-husband in the street. I was sitting on the steps of the new library.

Hello, my life, I said. We had once been married for twenty-seven years, so I felt justified.

He said, What? What life? No life of mine.

I said, O.K. I don't argue when there's real disagreement. I got up and went into the library to see how much I owed them.

The librarian said $32 even and you've owed it for eighteen years. I didn't deny anything.

Although I found myself emotionally distant from most of her characters, sometimes they crashed right into my world:

Alexandra, in the first summer dress of spring, stood still and watched. She breathed deeply because of having been alone for a year or two. She put her two hands over her ribs to hold her heart in place and also out of modesty to quiet its immodest thud. Then they went to bed in the bedroom and made love until that noisy disturbance ended. She couldn't hear one interior sound. Therefore they slept.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Somewhat ambitiously, I took four books on our nine day Christmas vacation. Long days in a wintery cabin were spent not reading, however, but snuggling on couch with sister and staring adoringly at beloved nephew with husband. Therefore I only read one book, which I started on the airplane out and finished on the airplane in: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson. It's a mystery story that takes place in Sweden. It's a translation, so that may account for what frequently comes off as stilted language.

It's a "page turner", as they say, in the grand tradition of the Dan Browns and Michael Connellys of this world, and of about the same literary merit. It's about a journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, who gets hired by a wealthy business owner to unravel a decades-old family secret. Along the way, a young woman, Lisbeth Salander, becomes involved. She's something of a private investigator and has some unexplained mental condition and social conditioning that leaves her with a different set of moral and ethical values than most of world generally agrees on.

Each section of the book begins with a quote like, "Forty-six percent of the women in Sweden have been subjected to violence by a man." Lending an ostensibly pro-woman, anti-violence theme to the book. The fact that the book glorifies violence toward women in its graphic exploration of the same theme is a bit problematic, to say the least.

I love reading books about different cultures, but this book reads as if the story were in any generic place, only all the places have Swedish names. So, it's not unusual to read a sentence like, "She took the tunnelbana from Zinkensdamm to Östermalmstorg and walked down towards Strandvägen." Also, apparently in Sweden there is a statute of limitations on murder.

I wouldn't recommend this book unless you happen to really love murder mysteries. The author was obviously a huge fan of the genre himself and frequently his characters pick up a book by Sue Grafton or the like for some casual reading. I'm vaguely interested in learning more about Lisbeth, but not enough to read the other books in the series. I'm sure there will be a movie soon enough.

Year in Review: 2009

Last year I started keeping some stats of the books I've read so now I've got charts and everything! Here's how 2009 looked!

Books I read in 2009
Fiction: 34
Non-Fiction: 10
Books by Women: 29
Books by Men: 15

Comparison to 2008Good, my numbers have gone up, and up is always good, right? (That's what they tell me at work, anyway.)

Can you imagine what my chart would look like if I take my own challenge one year and only read one book, over and over? (Middlemarch.)

My favorites of 2009
A Gate at the Stairs
Push
Olive Kitteridge
Pride and Prejudice
Payback
Watch Your Mouth
The Year of the Flood

Happy Reading in 2010!