The Promise of Amazing

I read The Promise of Amazing quite a while ago, and I'm trying to catch up on my reviews...   Somewhere I read a perhaps over-enthusiastic review of this book which caused me to actually purchase it (a somewhat rare occurrence for me as I usually get books straight from the publisher these days or else the library where I work.)  It's written by Robin Constantine and it's a YA book about a perennial  "good girl" who does what's expected of her and stays out of trouble.  She meets a boy who used to be a star but has made a few screw-ups and is getting a reputation for a "bad boy".  Grayson's a bit of an incongruous character who wears an elbow-patch blazer and has, unbelievably, an eyebrow piercing.  It's his very bad boy charm that Wren (good names, right?) is attracted to, having been pigeon-holed as a middle-of-the-road kid.

The characters never felt fully developed to me, leaning, instead on the sort of stereotypical tropes from John Hugh's movies of which Constantine is clearly a fan.  There are multiple references to Pretty in Pink and The Breakfast Club (not that there's anything wrong with that - I weep for a generation not weened on 80s movies - I mean, have kids today even seen Say Anything?)  However, there's a bit of a tidiness that rings untrue - Grayson, for example, has done something illegal for which he is eventually caught, however, due to some savvy moves by his dad he basically gets off scot-free.  This freedom from consequence is annoying in a YA novel.... but, I don't know.... they don't all have to be didactic, I'm just saying - in a book about two middle-class white kids, confronting their white privilege might have brought a bit more depth to the story.

Where Constantine does confront a social issue is in the tackling of Grayson and Wren's sexual pasts.  In a chapter written from Grayson's perspective, she writes, "I'd left Wren and her chai latte downstairs, making up some excuse about wanting to get my iPod so she could hear my favorite song from the latest Coldplay album.  In reality I was picking up in my room and figuring out how I could get her to come upstairs, since I pretty much wanted to devour her whole."  

What I did like was how Constantine frees the characters from their sexual "baggage" instead offering a vision of a more sexually empowered teen that's able to experiment and move on.  One of Wren's girlfriends says, "What I'm getting at is - so what if he's been with other girls? It only means he's experienced. You've been with other guys - is he all jacked up over that? We're sixteen... this is how it's supposed to be."  Ultimately this YA novel wasn't really what this adult reader was looking for but I suppose it did have some promising aspects.

All the Birds, Singing

Here's my review of All the Birds, Singing, on Newcity.  This book was totally amazing, I loved it SO. MUCH.  I first read and excerpt in Granta's Top 20 British Authors.  I believe Evie Wyld is actually Australian/British, but who's quibbling?  Her chapter was the standout of Granta and I was dying to read the whole book after I read it.

Panic

Panic is the name of a game played by high school seniors in heather's small town. The winner gets a pot that all seniors are bullied into contributing $1/day their last year of school, whether they want to or not. The game is extremely dangerous. It begins with participants leaping off a cliff into a quarry, and ends with a game of chicken in cars, though the years, players have been killed or maimed, but they keep playing the game because they feel like it's the only way to escape life in this nowhere town. Sounds a lot like the Hunger Games, right? Except it's not a dystopian future and the game's not mandatory. But it is an impoverished town with little to no options for young people to strive for, and Heather's even got a saintly younger sister she feels responsible for and an incompetent mother that can't care for either one of them.

 Heather falls into a job helping a local woman care for her chickens and farm animals and starts, for the first time, to trust an adult parental figure and experience a type of stability for the first time in her life. This woman improbably has two tigers on her farm, rescues from... somewhere. It brings to mind, naturally, that age-old saying by Chekov: If you introduce a tiger in the first act, it had better go off in the second act. 

I've read Lauren Oliver's Before I Fall previously. I'm not nuts about her writing style, I find it slightly unsophisticated, like a YA novel that is definitely intended for a young audience. Her heavy handed foreshadowing, the obvious conflicts of the love interest are just a little tiresome.

Stephen King recently announced that he was self-censoring his short story, Rage, because it seems to have influenced a number of real-world school shootings. The story will not be published in reprintings of the compilation. I found it interesting that that story came out while I was reading Panic, which explains how to make a car bomb, "easy as making salad dressing", and describes a game of Russian Roulette. I think Panic is unlikely to garner any more publicity than The Hunger Games, particularly because it's main audience is girls. Ultimately I wouldn't necessarily recommend Panic to mature readers but I can see it being appealing to younger readers.

Bark

Lorrie Moore, you can do no wrong.  I loved your book, although I wished half of it hadn't been published already in the New Yorker.  Here's my review of Bark on Newcity.

Last Days of California

The Last Days of California was a fantastic little book!  Here's my review on Newcity lit.

Little Failure

My review on Newcity Lit.

I really enjoyed this memoir - it made me want to read Super Sad True Love Story again as well as everything else Shteyngart has written.  AND, check this out - I tweeted my review and Shteyngart "favorited" it.  (Also my friend Amber. Isn't that cute how she has three followers?  I have like, 7 times that!  haha  There is, alas, no "Shteyngart Bump."

Salinger Contract (2013)

My review of the Salinger Contract by Adam Langer on NewCity Lit!

This book felt like it was written just for me.  Really enjoyed it.

Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh (2013)

My review of Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh on Newcity Lit!

The Circle (2013)

My review of Dave Egger's The Circle on Newcity Lit!  In which I declare that Eggers has invented a new type of fiction because I am a horrible journalist.  

Guide for the Perplexed (2013)

Here's my review of A Guide for the Perplexed by Dara Horn over on Newcity.  Once again she's written a beautiful book about a fascinating subject - a great return to form for her!

2013 In Review

In 2013 I read approximately:

39 Books,
35 Fiction and 4 non-fiction,
with 33 by women and 6 by men.

I wrote 16 reviews for Newcity Lit.

That's considerably less than 2012, when I read 54 books.  I suppose it's not about quantity.... Did you know I didn't read a single book for all of December? That's unprecedented.  I've had this terrible illness that made it quite painful to read.  I did manage to read the three pilfered Salinger stories, though.


My favorite reads were...

Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel (2012).

How to Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran (2011), a bit silly but so funny.  Every page was delightful.

Lavinia by Ursula LeGuin (2008).  All hail the great and powerful!

So Much Pretty by Cara Hoffman (2011) - this book actually had a huge impact on me a reader and a feminist this year...

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki (2013).  Seriously, this woman is taking it to another level.

Claire deWitt and the Bohemian Highway by Sara Gran (2013) who is out there KILLING. IT.

Good Kings Bad Kings by Susan Nussbaum (2013) who I had the honor of interviewing.  Another book that had a HUGE impact on me.

Most Looking Forward to:

Be Safe I Love You by Cara Hoffman (April)
Secret Place by Tana French (maybe?)

I missed the boat on:
Tampa by Allisa Nutting and I never managed to read Diabetes with Owls.  Need to get my hands on those...

Life After Life

Here's my review of Life after Life on Newcity Lit!

These are a few quotes I didn't include in my review but really want to remember.

Ursula found it very odd to think that up above them there were German bombers being flown by men who, essentially, were just like Teddy. They weren’t evil, they were just doing what had been asked of them by their country. It was war itself that was evil, not men.  Although she would make an exception for Hitler. ‘Oh, yes,’ Miss Woolf said, ‘I think that man is quite, quite mad.’

_____

He prodded his enormous tongue, like an ox’s, against the portcullis of her teeth and she was amazed to realize that he was expecting her to open her mouth and let the tongue in.

____

“Long, lazy days like these will never come again in your life. You think they will, but they won’t.”

“Unless I become incredibly rich,” Ursula said. “Then I could be idle all day long.”

Mad about the Boy, Bridget Jones #3 (2013)

I finished Mad about the Boy a month or so ago, but I've been sick and haven't been up to writing very much.  After re-reading BJ 1 & 2, I was excited to get back into Bridget's universe, but, something about me is that I don't really like change that much, and Bridget had changed a LOT.

I'm going to talk about what may be considered a spoiler, although, several months after publication and the fact that the spoiler was basically on the cover of the New York Times, I'm not too bothered by it.  But, if you don't know ANYTHING about a certain Mr. Darcy and you DON'T WANT TO KNOW, you'd better hit the road...

So, as nearly everyone knows, Mark Darcy is DEAD at the beginning of the book.  Some jerks ran around posting it on every blog and online news headline in the world so it was nearly impossible not to know.  Especially if you're in my book club and I announced it in a drunken stupor.  If one had not heard the, yes, devastating news that Mr. Darcy had died, it would have been quite dramatic to read the first bit of the book because Fielding does do a great job of jumping right into Bridget's life with two kids and a boyfriend while only slowly allowing the reader to discover what happened to poor Mark.

The boyfriend is young - 30?  and she calls him Roxster, based on his twitter feed.  While she and Roxster are a good match, the age difference is difficult for both.  Bridget, 51, is nevertheless as immature as ever.  I admit I laughed for several days over a funny exchange between Bridget and Roxster wherein she texted, "Well, I'm just sending the most GIANT FART WITH EXTRA STINK right out of my bum" to him.

Mad About the Boy has lost quite a bit of edge with this (slightly) more grown-up Bridget.  Just as an example, aside from the constant reference to head lice, Bridget's new model of fashion is this Disney kid's tv show called Good Luck Charlie, which I only happen to know about because my 9 year old neighbor loves to watch it when she comes over.   It's a harmless, milquetoast program that the Bridget of old wouldn't have anywhere on her radar.  So, whatever - I mean, I'm the asshole that thinks I'm too cool for Good Luck Charlie and therefore Bridget Jones is less edgy.  For me, part of fun of those first books was relating to Bridget and I just have much less to relate her now.  But, that doesn't mean the book isn't funny and genuinely moving.

So... about those kids.  I think I would have liked Mad About the Boy if I had kids myself, but since I don't and because I loved singleton Bridget so much and also I think books with small children in them are generally like, beyond lame, I was a bit disappointed.  I suppose it wasn't as terrible as I had feared - where Fielding is more satirical than sentimental she excels.   Fantastically witty, Fielding finds great ways to satirize the state of parenthood today.  Says another mother at Bridget's child's school, "I used to be a CEO of a large chain of health and fitness clubs, which expanded throughout the UK and into North America. Now I am CEO of a family. My children are the most important, complex  and thrilling product I have ever deployed."  And just as Bridget's younger self was dogged by the idealization of the "perfect" couple, her status as a female, single parent is low in a world perceived to be filled with "complete" families.  Her own friends say things to her like, "'What I mean is that for a single man of Bridget's age, it's a total buyer's market. No one's knocking at Bridget's door, are they? If she was a middle-aged man, with her own house and income and two helpless children, she'd be inundated by people wanting to take care of her. But look at her.'"

One of my favorite aspects of the book was how Bridget responds to fashion.  Like myself, Bridget remembers the days when a completely black outfit was not just completely reasonable but quite chic.  Her response to skinny jeans, flowing scarves and oversized handbags is pretty hilarious.  "I now realize everyone has floating bohemian scarves double-looped round their neck.  Is odd, though, when remember all the years Mum and Una spent trying to 'get me into scarves' and I dismissed them as old-lady accessories rather like brooches."

Like the two first Bridget Jones novels, Bridget is unwittingly quite successful in her career.  In this third book she is "updating of the famous Norwegian tragedy Hedda Gabbler by Anton Chekhov" (purists will recognize a few gaffs in that sentence.) I love that Fielding continues to look back into literary history for strong female characters, spinning them into a hilarious, modern version.

A favorite line:
"It's always nice to meet someone more badly behaved than oneself."

Vocabulary Gems:
Brits call Boy Toys "Toy Boys"!

Berk: fool, prat, twit. "The usage is dated to the 1930s. A shortened version of Berkeley Hunt, the hunt based at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire. In the Cockney rhyming slang, hunt is used as a rhyme for cunt giving the word berk its original slang meaning."  (via). Apparently not an offensive term despite it's origins.

Curiosity: Fielding thanks both Hugh Grant and Colin Firth in the acknowledgements but not Renée Zellweger.

The Bone Season

I read this review on NPR that gave The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon some high praise - "There's a distinct Margaret Atwood-style wash to Shannon's dystopian universe" they said.  "The new J. K. Rowling," they said.  Let's not get carried away.  The author is 21 and has gotten a 7-book deal and a film in the works, but I don't think we're looking at the next Harry Potter.  

It takes place in an alternative/futuristic London where some people, like the main character, Paige, have magical powers, but they are outlawed.  Paige is arrested and taken to a secret land where some other alien-types keep the magical people as slaves and suck up all their energy and whatnot.  Paige's "master" is some brooding old dude that glares at her all the time like Heathcliff and... can you guess what is going to happen???? 

Shannon invents a fairly large vocabulary as well as world (there's a glossary I was rather annoyed to find at the end - but, I never skip ahead...) so if you like that sort of thing you may find The Bone Season right up your alley.  It's really quite complex, I wonder what her notes looked like.  

Ultimately I found it wearisome - there were no surprises in the romance area and once the introductions were made to all the ins and outs of this universe, I just didn't find the story that compelling. 

Who knows, maybe this series is going to blow up - maybe as the books and the author age, it will grow into itself.  Anyone else have a different experience than me with this book?  

Flight Behavior

We read Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver for book club.  Everyone agreed it was a perfectly fine book but we didn't have a great discussion.  Often a book everyone merely enjoys has a kind of bland reaction.  No one's offended, but no one's world has been rocked.  That's a bit unusual for Kingsolver, who has rocked my world before.

Flight Behavior is about a young mother who lives on her in-law's property with her husband and babies.  Monarch butterflies have altered their flight path to migrate in their Appalachian home.  So, it has a lot to do with the environment and global warming, and a bit with globalism.

The Goldfinch

Donna Tartt inspires some real adoration in her fans.  I was 100% willing to jump on the bandwagon after reading some amazing reviews of The Secret History. Tana French cites Tartt as an inspiration and I'm crazy about her.  So, I read The Secret History this summer and to tell the truth, wasn't quite sure what all the fuss was about.   I have relatively fond memories of The Little Friend, which I read back in 2007 and wrote a really worthless review about.

So, anyway, still eager to fall head-over-heels, I read The Goldfinch.  Here's my review in Newcity Lit.  I thought parts were outstanding and over-all it was too long, to greatly simplify a not-so-simple book.  I love that she uses this actual painting as a jumping off point - creating a narrative around a (fictional) history of that work.  I suspect, although I honestly have no idea, that there was some really higher-level Marxism shit going on in the theory of this book but, ha! ha! I am not a Marxist expert!  Particularly near the end, she becomes extremely theoretical about spending time with art work and the capacity of an experience like that to change a person, but more than that, it seemed quite related to the ownership or possession or consumption of things of beauty that led certain people (wealthy ones!) to afford that experience.  Anyway, I would be much obliged if anyone with expertise in that area would like to weigh in.  Or I suppose I could break down and go read the wikipedia page on Marxism.  Ugh.

Also of note was epigraph she included that I had never read before:

We have art in order not to die from the truth.-Nietzsche

Whoa.   I need to think about that for about the next ten years 'til Tartt's next book comes out.

The Goldfinch (Het Putterje), 1654
Mauritshuis, The Hague

Anyway, the whole thing reminds me of this lovely article I read in Harvard Magazine about patience, and art, and looking.  By coincidence, it also features a small animal on a chain.

John Singleton Copley’s A Boy with a Flying Squirrel, 1765

The Lowland

Here's my review of The Lowland on Newcity Lit.  Jhumpa Lahiri is a beautiful writer but I didn't love this book.

Claire of the Sea Light

Here's my review on Newcity for Claire of the Sea Light.  I'm a huge Danticat fan - this is a fine addition to her ouvre.

The Likeness

After I read In the Woods, by Tana French, I had that terrible I don't want it to end feeling, and skedaddled over to my local bookstore for The Likeness. That book switches POV to Cassie, Rob's partner from the previous book.  Cassie's out of sorts because of the cock-up that her last case turned out to be, but she doesn't really drop any spoilers about the case, so it doesn't matter if you read these books out of order.

In the beginning of The Likeness, Cassie's boyfriend, Sam, calls her and asks her to come to this location, where it turns out this woman who is the spitting image of Cassie lies DEAD. Her former undercover boss is there, and he has already hatched a plan to send Cassie into the dead girl's life to find out who the murderer is.

Thereafter follows about a hundred pages of Cassie waffling about whether she wants to do it, and then studying the girl's life so she can fit in - I was kind of like let's get ON with it.  Also, let's face it, the whole premise is just ridiculously unlikely.  But, whatever.  Go with it.  When Cassie does move in with the girl's roommates, who live in a ramshackle but beautiful old house in the Irish countryside outside Dublin, the book is essentially unputdownable, just an addictive ride to the end.

After I read In the Woods I read a bunch of interviews by French trying to find out more about the unsolved mystery she leaves at the end of that book.  I discovered that The Secret History, by Donna Tartt, has been influential to her.   (Also that she often doesn't know who the murder is when she starts and works it out as she goes along, also that she might revisit the unsolved mystery in the future!!!!!!)  I didn't love The Secret History, but French captures the greatest aspect of that book in The Likeness, which is this group of oddball, brilliant, friends, as close as can be, that, as as a reader you would like to be friends with, even though one of them is most likely a murderer.  And, that's exactly the problem Cassie has - after moving in with them, she quickly falls in love with their way of life, with their easy relationships with each other, with their wonderful house - and, despite the fact that one of them just might have killed her likeness, the urge to spend the rest of her life with them is almost irresistible.

It's pretty amazing that French crafts these mysteries without knowing how they're going to end - she must go back and do a lot of editing - becau
se her books are so smooth - when she wraps things up, everything falls into place in a extremely satisfying way.  I think the only thing that might improve the whole experience for me might be to listen to her next book on audio because I would like to hear the whole thing in an Irish accent.

The Housemates, shoulder to shoulder, graceful and inseparable as a group in a painting and all with the same fine bloom of light on them, like the luster on old beeswaxed wood. It was only over that first week that they had turned real to me, come into focus as separate individuals with their own little quirks and weaknesses.  I knew the cracks had to be there. That kind of friendship doesn't just materialize at the end of the rainbow one morning in a soft-focus Hollywood haze. For it to last this long, and at such close quarters, some serious work had gone into it. Ask any ice-skater or ballet dancer or show jumper, anyone who lives by beautiful moving things: nothing takes as much work as effortlessness.  

Good Kings Bad Kings

Oops - I thought I posted this a long time ago.  I had the pleasure of interviewing Susan Nussbaum about her new book, Good Kings, Bad Kings, which is probably one of my top five fave books from 2013.

The book is about some young people that live in institutionalized homes for disabled people and really opened my mind to what happens in places like that, and really turned my mind against institutionalization as well.  I love a book that makes me think that hard.  Her book is brutal, but actually very very funny.

It was so nice to meet her, one of the more pleasant interviews I've ever done.

Here's the article that Nussbaum mentions in the interview that inspired the title.  And these are the organizations in Chicago she mentioned that do great work with the disabled community:
Access Living
Equip for Equality