Saturday Review of Books: May 19, 2012

May18

“In 1946 in the village our feelings about books. . . went beyond love. It was as if we didn’t know where we ended and books began. We didn’t simply read books; we became them. We took them into ourselves and made them into our histories. While it would be easy to say that we escaped into books, it might be truer to say that books escaped into us. They showed us what was possible.” ~From Kafka Was the Rage by Anatole Broyard

SatReviewbutton

Welcome to the Saturday Review of Books at Semicolon. Here’s how it usually works. Find a book review on your blog posted sometime during the previous week. The review doesn’t have to be a formal sort of thing. You can link to your thoughts on a particular book, a few ideas inspired by reading the book, your evaluation, quotations, whatever.

Then on Friday night/Saturday, you post a link here at Semicolon in Mr. Linky to the specific post where you’ve written your book review. Don’t link to your main blog page because this kind of link makes it hard to find the book review, especially when people drop in later after you’ve added new content to your blog. In parentheses after your name, add the title of the book you’re reviewing. This addition will help people to find the reviews they’re most interested in reading.

After linking to your own reviews, you can spend as long as you want reading the reviews of other bloggers for the week and adding to your wishlist of books to read. That’s how my own TBR list has become completely unmanageable and the reason I can’t join any reading challenges. I have my own personal challenge that never ends.

YA Fiction You Can Skip

May17

. . . ’cause I read it for you. I know about the 50-page rule and Nancy Pearl’s addendum to it:

When you are 51 years of age or older, subtract your age from 100, and the resulting number (which, of course, gets smaller every year) is the number of pages you should read before you can guiltlessly give up on a book. As the saying goes, “Age has its privileges.”

But I still have trouble not finishing a book that I’ve started. Even if it’s a bad book, and I can tell it’s a bad book, I want to know what happens. I want to finish. It’s not a matter of guilt—it’s more curiosity. I can’t bear to not know. Did the book get better? Does it end the way I think (fear) it will? Do the characters become more or less likable? Is this book really as much of a train wreck as I think it is?

So, I finished the following YA novels, but you don’t have to read them. They really are not worth the time, unless there’s nothing else in the house to read or you’ve already started on one of these and have the same compulsion I have to finish.

Someone Else’s Life by Katie Dale. Such a soap opera, with a fictional soap opera actress thrown in as a minor character. Rosie’s mother dies of Huntington’s Disease, but Rosie finds out that her mom wasn’t her mom at all. Rosie and another baby were switched at birth! And that’s not a spoiler because that surprise revelation drops on page 46. But oh my goodness, there are many more confessions, and admissions, and drama-filled disclosures still to come—one about every forty or fifty pages in this 445 page tear-jerker. But I wasn’t crying because the roller coaster ride of emotional reunions and spectacular crises left me feeling . . . nothing much. It was all too, too much, and I just had enough curiosity to read to the end to see who would find out what next, and how many fireworks could be stuffed into one overly long book.

Life: An Exploded Diagram by Mal Peet. I really enjoyed reading two other books by award-winning author Mal Peet, Exposure, a novel set in South America and based on Shakespeare’s Othello, and Tamar, a book about World War II spies in Holland. However, this latest YA novel by Mr. Peet was a clumsy amalgam of two stories. In 1962,two British teenagers, Clem and Frankie, from different sides of the cultural divide, muddle their way toward a sexual liaison while world leaders Krushchev, Castro, and JFK blunder their way toward World War III in what later became known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. These two events, the sex and the world crisis, are supposed to have something to do with each other, but I never saw the connection. At the point of connection, there is an actual explosion, and then at the end of the book another explosion (9-11) is supposed to lend irony to the entire mish-mash. But it doesn’t really. The novel was a disappointment with way too much graphic sex.

Robbie Forester and the Outlaws of Sherwood St. by Peter Abrahams

May16

In most books, Magic always follows rules. You can only get into Narnia under certain circumstances, with Aslan’s permission. In Half Magic by Edward Eager, you always get exactly half of what you wish for. The One Ring (Tolkien) works in a specific way to do specific things and can only be destroyed in one, very specific place. Harry Potter has to go to school to learn the rules of Magic in his world.

In Robbie Forester and the Outlaws of Sherwood St., Magic shows up, but it’s an unpredictable, capricious sort of Magic that only seems to have rules. The children involved in this magical adventure never do figure out the rules of when the “magic power” will appear, much less how to control it. It seems to have something to do with injustice: Robbie and her friends, Ashanti, Silas, and Tutu, receive magical help and powers whenever there is injustice to be righted. But, as Robbie notices, the world is full of injustice, and the magic only shows up sometimes, following its own rules that are unfathomable both to the reader and to Robbie and her merry band of outlaws.

Robbie Forrester and the Outlaws of Sherwood St. tells the tale of a group of four young teens who become friends in spite of their differing backgrounds and talents and join together to “rob the rich and give to the poor.” The villains in the piece are greedy capitalist land developer, Sheldon Gunn, his fixer/lawyer, Egil Borg, and a nasty little arsonist named Harry Henkel. The rob-the-rich and capitalists-are-evil subtext bothered me a little bit, but the story was well-paced and fun. Sheldon Gunn really is an evil capitalist who goes so far as to try to put a soup kitchen out of business (isn’t it always a soup kitchen or a homeless shelter?), and the kids are purely good, never even thinking about keeping some of the money they “steal” for themselves. There’s not a lot of nuance here, just old-fashioned good vs. evil with some temperamental magical help along the way.

There are questions raised in the book, about Ashanti’s family, about Tutu’s future, about the possible reappearance of the magical powers, that are not resolved. It looks as if we’re being set up for a sequel, or maybe this book just doesn’t follow the rules for a magical fantasy.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

May15

Mr. Eugenides, Pulitzer prize-winning author of Middlesex, has given us a novel about the demise of the novel. It’s also a story that’s mostly about sex and its various permutations, but not really much about marriage, and equally about religion and its sundry incarnations, but not much about God. And I think the emphasis on sex and religion rather than on the core spiritual relationships of man and woman (marriage) and God and man (the core of religion) is an emphasis that is intended to say something about our culture and what we’ve lost in the twentieth century. Perhaps the idea is that we’ve reduced marriage to sexual attraction and sexual athletics, and we’ve reduced knowing God to going through the forms and expressions of religion and being good. Or maybe that’s just what I saw in the book.

Madeleine is an English major at Brown University in the 1980’s (Eugenides attended Brown), and as the story begins she’s about to graduate, has just broken up with her boyfriend, and has a massive hangover. The story moves back and forth in time a lot, beginning each section with a crisis moment and then going back in time to show us how the characters got to that crisis. However, this narrative technique isn’t confusing at all, and I rather liked it for some reason. Maybe it helped to hold my interest when the major characters weren’t terribly sympathetic or likable.

So, after having been introduced to Madeleine and the culmination of her last semester in college, we go back in time to see how she met, mated, and lost the boyfriend, Leonard Bankhead, how she came to major in English with an emphasis on the Victorian authors, and how she got the hangover. At a certain point, charismatic loner Leonard becomes the focus of the novel with his sparkling wit and intelligence, his brooding good looks, and his secret backstory that no one at Brown knows, not even Madeleine.

However, there is a third character who makes up the final point of this attempt at a modern, 21st century love triangle story, Mitchell Grammaticus. Mitchell, who’s been in love (or has he?) with Madeleine since their freshman year at Brown, is geeky, intelligent, and religious. He’s graduating with a major in Religious Studies, but he’s not sure what religion he believes in or where he’s going after college. So, he and his friend Larry decide to travel to India via Paris and Athens to see the world and wait for the economy to improve and inspiration to strike. Or maybe Mitchell is really waiting for Madeleine to realize that Leo Bankhead is a loser and that he, Mitchell, is the man she should marry.

The book is a mixture. There are some lovely and thought-provoking scenes in the novel that made it worth the investment of time, energy and slogging through (mostly sexual) sludge that it took to read the book. In one scene Mitchell encounters an evangelical Christian in the American Express office in Greece. The Christian girl witnesses to Mitchell in a rather formulaic, but sincere, way and tells him that if he accepts Christ as his Saviour, he can ask the Holy Spirit to give him the gift of tongues and he’ll be changed, completed. Mitchell tries it out, praying on the Acropolis, but nothing happens. “He was aware inside himself of an infinite sadness. . . He felt ridiculous for having tried to speak in tongues and, at the same time, disappointed for not having been able to.”

Another scene has Leonard trying to explain the experience of clinical depression to Madeleine who wants him to just try to pretend to want to be healthy.

“What’s the matter with me? What do you think? I’m depressed, Madeleine. I’m suffering from depression. . . .”
“I understand you’re depressed, Leonard. But you’re taking medication for that. Other people take medication and they’re fine.”
“So you’re saying I’m dysfunctional even for a manic-depressive.”
“I’m saying that it almost seems like you like being depressed sometimes. Like if you weren’t depressed you might not get all the attention. I’m saying that just because you’re depressed doesn’t mean you can yell at me for asking if you had a good time!”

Whatever you think about depression and its manifestations, isn’t this conversation just exactly the kind of conversation couple might have in this situation, coming at the problem from totally opposed viewpoints, trying to understand, but failing?

I’m tempted to recommend this book, in spite of all the sludge, in spite of the ending, which I hated, just because I’ve been thinking about it and mulling over the characters and their motivations and their mental pathologies all week long. I want someone to explain the entire book to me, wrap it up in a nice bow, but I don’t think this is a book that’s meant to gift-wrapped. Alternatively, I want to explain some things to Mitchell and to Madeleine and to Leonard, but I’m not sure I’d know where to start. I’m afraid I’d come across like Christian-girl-in-Greece, saying “Jesus is the answer!” in a way that sounds trite and essentially useless. Mitchell’s search for Truth, especially, is so frustrating to me as a Christian, yet so very typical of the people I see, searching but not really searching, for a god of their own imagining, instead of looking at Jesus, God in the flesh and trusting in Him.

Anyway, it’s a very contemporary un-love story that shows modern youth culture in all its befuddlement. The ending is meant to be hopeful, but it wasn’t for me because it wasn’t grounded in anything. I’d be curious to know what you thought about the book and the ending, if you’ve read The Marriage Plot.

Other reviews: Books and Culture, Caribousmom, Farm Lane Books, Bibliophile by the Sea, Book Addiction, Walk with a Book, Amy’s Book Obsession, At Home With Books.

Oh, by the way, I loved all the literary allusions and references to popular books and classics, everything from Born Again by Chuck Colson to Madeleine by Ludwig Bemelmans to The Cloud of Unknowing. All three of the protagonists of this novel are people who read, a lot, which was the main thing I actually liked about them.

Advanced Reading Survey: Eugenie Grandet by Honore de Balzac

May14

I’ve decided that on Mondays I’m going to revisit the books I read for a course in college called Advanced Reading Survey, taught by the eminent scholar and lovable professor, Dr. Huff. I’m not going to re-read all the books and poems I read for that course, probably more than fifty, but I am going to post to Semicolon the entries in the reading journal that I was required to keep for that class because I think that my entries on these works of literature may be of interest to readers here and because I’m afraid that the thirty year old spiral notebook in which I wrote these entries may fall apart ere long. I may offer my more mature perspective on the books, too, if I remember enough about them to do so.

Author Note:
Honore de Balzac, son of an officer in Napoleon’s army, was greatly influenced and impressed by the great emperor’s career. He once wrote, under a picture of Napoleon, “What Napoleon could not do with the sword, I will accomplish with the pen.”
Balzac wrote at an incredible pace throughout his life, and although much of his work was of negligible value, stuff written solely to support himself and pay his creditors, he did manage to turn out a few masterpieces, including Eugenie Grandet and Le Pere Goriot. Balzac died in Paris in 1850 at the age of 51, possibly weakened by his intense writing schedule and his incessant coffee drinking.

Gustave Flaubert on Balzac: “What a man he would have been had he known how to write!”
Victor Hugo: “Balzac was one of the first among the greatest, one of the highest among the best.”
Henry James: “Large as Balzac is, he is all of one piece and he hangs perfectly together.”
Marxist Freidrich Engels: “I have learned more [from Balzac] than from all the professional historians, economists and statisticians put together.”

Plot Summary:
Eugenie Grandet falls in love with her cousin, Charles, but her father is a miser who refuses to allow her to marry a penniless man. Eventually, Eugenie becomes wealthy and miserly herself, following in her father’s footsteps.

Characters:
Monsieur Felix Grandet: an old miser
Madame Grandet: His wife
Eugenie Grandet: the daughter
Nanon: the family’s only servant
Charles Grandet: Eugenie’s cousin

Quotations:
“Innocence alone can dare to be so bold. Once enlightened, virtue makes her calculations as well as vice.”

“Flattery never emanates from noble souls; it is the gift of little minds who thus still further belittle themselves to worm their way into the vital being of persons around whom they crawl. Flattery means self-interest.”

Other reviews:
Beyond Assumptions: “As it turns out Balzac has penchant for good story-telling and a fine eye for writing interesting and humorous characters.”

Wuthering Expectations: “Eugénie Grandet has some of Balzac’s best descriptive passages, and three or four really fine characters, and a snappy story. But it’s the combination of the characters, and the structure, and the details of the house and town that amaze me.”

Constance Reader: “every character in this novel is fully fleshed out and fully-realized, including secondary characters like the family housemaid and even tertiary characters like the village butcher, whom we only see once. The result is that you get a perfect idea of what life in a little town was like, at that time, from the top to the very bottom.”

The Music Man:
Maud: I shouldn’t tell you this but she advocates dirty books.
Harold: Dirty books?!
Alma: Chaucer
Ethel: Rabelais
Eulalie: Balzac!

The Heart of Texas, the Movie

May11

Wow! I just checked out this documentary movie from the library the other day, and I put it in my computer and watched it tonight. I had no idea that I would be watching such a powerful story of suffering, redemption, and forgiveness. The events chronicled in the movie happened in 2000; the movie came out a couple of years ago in 2009. The tragedy/miracle happened not far from where I live, in a little town called Simonton and nearby Wallis, Texas. I hadn’t heard of the movie, nor had I heard the story of Grover and Jill Norwood and their neighbors, Ulice and Carrie Parker.

I don’t want to say much more, except that I highly recommend that you find or buy a copy of the movie and watch it. You may find yourself in tears, and then on your knees before the Lord.

Saturday Review of Books: May 12, 2012

May11

“It happens to us once or twice in a lifetime to be drunk with some book which probably has some extraordinary relative power to intoxicate us and none other; and having exhausted that cup of enchantment we go groping in libraries all our years afterwards in the hope of being in Paradise again.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson in a letter to Sam Ward

SatReviewbutton

Welcome to the Saturday Review of Books at Semicolon. Here’s how it usually works. Find a book review on your blog posted sometime during the previous week. The review doesn’t have to be a formal sort of thing. You can link to your thoughts on a particular book, a few ideas inspired by reading the book, your evaluation, quotations, whatever.

Then on Friday night/Saturday, you post a link here at Semicolon in Mr. Linky to the specific post where you’ve written your book review. Don’t link to your main blog page because this kind of link makes it hard to find the book review, especially when people drop in later after you’ve added new content to your blog. In parentheses after your name, add the title of the book you’re reviewing. This addition will help people to find the reviews they’re most interested in reading.

After linking to your own reviews, you can spend as long as you want reading the reviews of other bloggers for the week and adding to your wishlist of books to read. That’s how my own TBR list has become completely unmanageable and the reason I can’t join any reading challenges. I have my own personal challenge that never ends.

Joy for Beginners by Erica Bauermeister

May10

“At an intimate, festive dinner party in Seattle, six women gather to celebrate their friend Kate’s recovery from breast cancer. Wineglass in hand, Kate strikes a bargain with them: to celebrate her new lease on life, she’ll do the one thing that’s always terrified her whitewater rafting down the Grand Canyon. But if she goes, each of them must promise to do one thing in the next year that is new or difficult or scary—and Kate get to choose their challenges.”

Caroline: “The bookstore where Caroline worked was a perfect example, designed as a place to linger as much as shop–incorporating a bakery and a cafe, a fireplace surrounded by oversized chairs for colder days and a patio outside for summer ones. It could have felt chaotic, a party full of strangers unable to introduce themselves, but instead was more like a genial conversation–the metallic clink of silverware set against the contented sigh of a book being slid from its shelf, the murmured comments of the knitting group seated at a round table in the three sided alcove that held . . the house/garden/cooking books.”
I wish I could own and operate a bookstore like the one where Caroline works.

Daria: “What was considered odd in elementary and junior high school became an asset on the dating circuit later in life. Men always loved the hummingbirds, weightless and colorful, so quick you could never catch them even if you wanted to. And her affinity for mud had turned into a profession in clay.”
Daria was hard to relate to: a hummingbird, yes, but also guarded and afraid to commit.

Sara: “Adults need to have fun so children will want to grow up.”
Isn’t that a lovely quote? I need to have more fun so that my children will want to grow up.

Hadley: “Hadley didn’t mind the unruly nature of her garden. She was safe; there wasn’t a car in the world that could blast through that wall of green. She could feel the garden reaching out its arms to protect her.”
That one reminds me of The Secret Garden, but Hadley’s garden is a hiding place where she avoids the world in fear instead of a sanctuary from which she emerges to engage with the world.

Marion: On tattoos: “Irreversible decisions are good for the soul, word lady.”
Really? If you got a tattoo, what would it be? I remember when I was a teenager, and we were painting the wall of the youth room at our church. Lots of the kids wanted to put all sorts of trendy, cool catch-phrases and symbols on the wall, but our youth minister insisted we go to the Bible and paint something that was based on Scripture, something that would be of lasting significance. If a person gets a tattoo, it should surely be a word or symbol of lasting significance, something profound and meaningful. Mermaids are not meaningful.

Ava: “The new Ava swam in her rediscovered sense of smell with relief and joy, and it was all Kate could do to stop her from accosting people on the street and offering suggestions on how to improve their olfactory reality.”
What would be exciting enough for you to stop strangers on the street to tell them about it?

Kate: “She had been a river . . . the one they all told things to. Caroline, Daria, Marion, Sara, Hadley, Ava—it seemed that when they were around someone who might or might not be there the next year, they said things they wouldn’t otherwise, let out parts of themselves they might normally keep hidden. . . . She had been a river, the thing that took them close to death, made them suddenly, courageously, honest.”

This chic-lit novel told a good story, although a little bit too pyscho-babblish at times. Mostly I enjoyed getting to know Caroline, Daria, Marion, Sara, Hadley and Ava and getting to witness their life epiphanies.

Crampton Hodnet by Barbara Pym

May9

Readalikes:
P.G. Wodehouse, Anthony Trollope, Angela Thirkell, D.E. Stevenson, Jane Austen, Jan Karon.

Setting:
Oxford. Crampton Hodnet is a Bunbury-ish place that Mr. Lattimer pretends to have visited when he is embarrassed to admit that he has been out for a walk with the spinster, Jessie Morrow.

Plot:
The elderly Miss Doggett sees herself as a mentor and advisor to young male students whom she entertains once a term at her house in Oxford.

Miss Doggett’s cousin, a married, middle-aged tutor (professor) at Oxford, Francis Cleveland, falls for a female student, Barbara, who has a crush on him in return.

An unmarried curate, Mr. Lattimer, proposes with confidence to the rather homely and lonely lady’s companion, Jessie Morrow, but his proposal is rejected.

The book is a mild sort of comedy of manners, and I enjoyed it in a mild but delighted sort of way. The characters and their thought processes are the focus of the book, and I thought Barbara Pym was quite insightful as she sketched out in words a flighty and flattered young co-ed, a professor in mid-life crisis, an over-confident suitor, a wise single woman, and an absent-minded wife who rather neglects her husband and takes him for granted. These are all types that I have seen, maybe even types that I have been in some cases, and yet each character stands out as an individual with his or her own quirks and distinctions.

If you enjoy the above listed authors, Barbara Pym should earn a place on your To Be Read list.

The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater

May8

When I was growing up as a kid of a girl in West Texas, all of my friends loved horses. They were all planning to grow up to be veterinarians. Not I.

I think my horse-loving friends would have liked The Scorpio Races, a fantasy horse novel for young adults that’s been all the rage over the past several months. I’ve seen lots of positive reviews. And I can see why. However, I had trouble getting into the book, partly because of all the horses. And there are not only lots of horses, but they’re sort of monster horses, called capaill uisce, that eat raw meat and drink blood. The horses come from the sea, and they’re killers. Either that idea is intriguing to you or it’s repellent. I’ll let you guess which category I fall into.

So, if you’re in the “more horses, please” camp, check out the reviews linked below. If you’re just not sure, I will say that the story was good, based on Irish and Scots legends of kelpies and water horses. I do like novels based on fairy tales and legends, and the writing was evocative of a wild setting for wild hearts. It’s just that this one in particular was a little too horsey for my tastes.

The Allure of Books: “The island becomes a living breathing thing – perhaps the strongest of the characters. I felt pulled into the magic of the capall uisce, the deadly horses from the sea.”

Rhapsody in Books: “This enchanting tale spun from Irish mythology puts you right beside the sea, tasting the salt water in the air and the honeyed goodness of ‘November cakes,’ feeling the grit of sand on your feet, and seeing dark shapes in the crashing surf.”

A Patchwork of Books: “Wildly exciting, yet beautifully written. I was completely enthralled with both Puck’s and Sean’s stories, frantically flipping pages in order to learn what would happen next. The mythical aspect was woven into the story without pause and left me wanting to research more on these water horses.”