The Five Borough Book Review

Westward Ho!: Sherman Alexie's Modern Indian

noreply@blogger.com (Kari) — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 22:36:00 +0000

When I was in the fifth grade, my teacher made me read a book and write a report on it...that NO ONE ELSE HAD TO DO. The intent of it, I know, was to keep my mind challenged because there was no "Encore" program at my middle school, but the overall significance of this was lost on me as an eleven-year-old; I was just bitter I had to do more work than everyone else. Though I have no idea what the book was called nor what it's plot was, I know it was about the Trail of Tears. And I remember its existence because it sparked in me a curiosity of these cultures that are spoken of so predominantly in terms of the past and not the present.

I've been wanting to read some Sherman Alexie for a while now, since I've been motivated to read about American cultures and lifestyles that are unfamiliar to me. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven is the short story collection that pulled Alexie out of the blue and to the forefront of modern Native American literature. Earning a Hemingway/PEN Award nomination in 1993, The Lone Ranger and Tonto is partially a memoir of Alexie's life growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. The stories are somewhat connected, mostly by character overlaps, and often focusing on a character named Victor who has quite a cynical outlook on life.

That, in fact, is the predominant tone that just drips from Alexie's stories: cynicism. Some of the stories are told from Victor's perspective and some are told about him by others, but no matter the narrator, most are just filled with an overwhelming disenchantment with people and society. A common theme that shows up in many of the stories is alcoholism and how widespread and destructive it is in this tribe. The edition of this book that I read had a preface by Alexie in which he stated (and I'm summarizing by what I remember) that he did not have a motive in writing about the alcoholism; he was not trying to make a statement nor validate a stereotype; he was just writing about what is. I would hate to believe that this is, in fact, the life and mindset of today's Indians, but as I said before, it's a lifestyle unfamiliar to me and one I am trying to learn more about. And though Alexie is perhaps the most well-known modern Indian author, he is but one voice, and his voice alone should not define or generalize a vast group of people.

Alexie's stories are not deeply complex, nor action-filled. They are brief snippets of time or conversation between characters, revealing thoughts and emotions that Alexie has seen and felt. In the first story, "Every Little Hurricane," a nine-year-old Victor witnesses a fight between his uncles on New Year's Eve. We see pieces of a young Victor's history and will be able to understand, as the stories progress and Victor ages, where he is coming from and what he is relating to. "The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Don't Flash Red Anymore" merely contains a conversation between two characters on a young, talented basketball player who succumbed to alcoholism and their hopes that a young, talented artist doesn't follow suit. These stories, no matter how brief, create a history for the reader, so that we will understand how experiences have led to how these people see the world today.

I had a thought while reading this, one that doesn't have much literacy importance but is a discussion point nonetheless: the appropriate term for indigenous peoples of America is still a tricky one to define, depending on who you're talking to. Most of us probably developed the habit of using "Native American" while in grade school, as "Indian" was deemed to have negative stereotypes. But throughout Alexie's book, the only term he uses (when using as a blanket statement and not referring to specific tribes) is "Indian." Now, before reading this, I was still in the grade-school mindset in which "Indian" seemed slightly un-politically correct, but this made me think—think about the history of the term and the environments that have demanded specific language—and the "Native American" I had been so used to suddenly sounded, to me, so...forced. With an evolving language, it's difficult to get an entire population on the same page, and what sounds correct to some may still hold inappropriate connotations to others. So this, and so many more examples of "politically-correct" terms, are still drifting in uncertainty.

Overall, I felt Alexie presented a strong voice through his stories, but he's still only one voice of a population of people that is over-generalized despite carrying vastly different cultures and histories. And to further understand the whole, you need to explore its individual pieces.

Nonfiction | Starving Artists in the City

noreply@blogger.com (Kari) — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 17:38:00 +0000

Patti Smith's National Book Award-winning memoir Just Kids is a book that's been on my periphery for quite a while. For a period there it was one of the books you'd most frequently see on the subway and on the 'featured' shelves of bookstores. In fact, I think I'd checked it out from the library no less than three times before I ever got around to actually reading it.

Before reading this book, I had no idea who Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe were. I got the impression that maybe these were people that are well-known to a certain crowd, a certain New York City artsy crowd, but it wasn't their story that drew me to the book in the first place; it was that the book (supposedly) captured a particular moment and lifestyle in New York City history, and as a resident, that's always exciting to read about.

So, if you also have no idea who these people are, don't worry. In a nutshell, they're sort of vagabond artists of the Dylan, Morrison, Warhol generation. They lived paycheck to paycheck, worked whatever job would pay, moved wherever was cheaper, saved pennies and occasionally splurged on treats. They did what they had to do to get by, but art was always at the forefront of their minds—creation of something...photography, painting, drawing, sculpting, writing, composing...didn't matter what. The late 60s and 70s are not often reflected upon fondly in New York City. It's an era defined by the city's decline—uptick in crime, heavy drug use, neighborhoods falling apart—but it produced some of the twentieth century's most lasting artists. Intentional or not, Smith's memoir describes the connection between art and environment, how having nothing inspires creating of something, how surroundings influence what an artist wants to say.

Patti Smith encountered a lot of famous people in her youth, people with much bigger names than hers. She never describes these people to name drop. Her own described insecurities keep her placed her on a rung below the most famous, but she did share their world. She recalls encounters with Hendrix and Joplin and describes them as the gods they have become, leaving me wondering if she remembers them with the status they have attained in the past forty years or if they really were so far above in their own time.

Smith paints a full picture of the era, complete with secondary characters and locations, but the focus of the story is always on her relationship with Mapplethorpe. Ultimately, she tells the story of two people who support each other endlessly as they each try to achieve their goals and reach their dreams.

February 1: Next On the List

noreply@blogger.com (Kari) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 21:40:00 +0000

In an attempt to mentally organize and motivate, I think I'm going to start taking a monthly mental pause to assess what I want to read, where I am with any reading goals, and what exciting things are on the horizon. It sounds silly because reading should be a relaxing, enjoyable activity, but it can sometimes get a little overwhelming to think of all I have and want to do!

W H A T I ' M R E A D I N G

In January, I started my own personal Westward Ho! reading project, for which I read two books (but only blogged on one; I'll get there!). I don't have anything on the immediate agenda for this, only in the abstract future—the next couple of months. I am going to be reading Lions of the West with Aarti, but that's not going to start until at least March.

Yesterday I started the book for my February book club meeting, Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh. I've been taking a bit of a break from book club for the past two months. It's not that I grew tired of it, it's just...well, the last two meetings went on for two and a half hours. I mean, I enjoy talking about books, but that is a long time to discuss one book. The discussion is great for about an hour and then it gets too detailed, like people are grasping for straws for something to discuss, and it's the same couple of people who just keep talking. It is possible to over-discuss a book. Anyway, I just needed a breather and now I've had one, so I'm excited for next week's meeting! The book, by the way, is "eh" so far (I'm 100 pages in). Like every book I've read for this book club, I probably won't love it but I will enjoy the discussion of it.

I started Jonathan Raban's essay collection, Driving Home, last week, and it is a chunkster. I took a break from it for a bit to start my book club book, but it's a library book so I plan on finishing it in the next two weeks. (The only time I'm able to start a new book in the middle of another one like this is if it's essays or short stories!) So far, some of the essays are interesting and some are boring. I thought it would be more of a travelogue, but a lot of his essays are just analyzing other authors' works and have little to do with American travel. It's not really what I expected from the book as a whole.

I got some fabulous books from ALA Midwinter, including:

Marzi, a new graphic novel that the girl at the Random House booth generously let me take
Maggie Now, a Betty Smith novel I'd never heard of, thanks to the HarpeCollins booth
Come In and Cover Me, the new Gin Phillips (I loved The Well and the Mine) thanks to Penguin's $5 all-you-can-hold sale
The Man in the Wooden Hat by Jane Gardam (I have Old Filth but haven't read it yet!)

Conferences are fun, but when you're working at one and have to stand in your exhibition booth all day...well, you miss out on the fun of discovering new books! Luckily, the last day was pretty slow and I got to wander a bit.

W H A T ' S H A P P E N I N G

If you live in Brooklyn (or even just in NYC) and you don't know about WORD yet, you should. It's an independent bookstore in Greenpoint, and they have some fabulous events. It's where I've gone to readings with Emily St. John Mandel and Jon Michaud. In December, I missed Haley Tanner, who was coincidentally there as I was reading her book. But in February, they have some great things coming up, including an event with Jonathan Evison (of West of Here) which I will sadly have to miss because of class, one with Joe Wallace who I met there once and subsequently read his book, and one with Michael Showalter of comedic fame.

Related: Wet Hot American Summer is one of my top 5 movies of all time, and in college, my friend Gretch and I once spent an entire three-hour studio painting class throwing Wet Hot quotes back and forth until, at the very end of class, a guy sitting next to us finally asked, "Are you guys quoting Wet Hot?" I asked Colin if I could tell Michael Showalter that story, and he said no, it would not impress him. I think it would. We quoted the movie longer than the movie itself.

Happy February!

Westward Ho!: On Little House and childhood obsessions

noreply@blogger.com (Kari) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 18:23:00 +0000

The kick-off novel in my Westward Ho! reading project isn't exactly the gritty historical fiction or gripping non-fiction narrative that you may expect... Instead, it's the memoir of one modern-day woman searching for something authentic in a fictional historical world that was based on real-life experiences. Got all that?

Wendy McClure's The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie is, at its most basic, a tribute to the life and stories of Laura Ingalls Wilder. On a deeper level, though, it is McClure's quest to experience the world that she loved as a child—a world she knew as fiction but discovered was very much based on fact—by obsessively reading everything she can find on the topic, retracing the Ingalls' pilgrimage West, and stocking her apartment with pioneer technologies to prove that she, a 21st-century woman, can churn butter with the best of 'em.

McClure's quest sounds like something I would absolutely do. (My own adolescent obsession was a TV show about vampire slayers, so a little more difficult to find, but trust me, I have my own stories...) I would even enthusiastically follow McClure's own traveling trail for the "historical scavenger hunt" (as I am terming it), but here's the thing...I've never read most of the Little House books. Therefore, I think this book possessed a level of enjoyment I was capable of reaching, but I couldn't go any further because I haven't read all the books and couldn't fully invest in what she was looking for. I think it was a fun read, but it would be astoundingly better for real Little House fans.

The concept of this book continues to swirl around in my head, though. My childhood and adolescence were littered with little "obsessions" that still conjure up a very special feeling in me as an adult—the feeling of which an entire moment in your life (the thoughts, emotions, experiences) are intricately linked with something so...material, sort of tangible. These feelings are harder to create as an adult (or maybe it's just that we lack the distance we now have to childhood), and we want to keep experiencing them, experiencing that magic we felt that we link to a movie, a tv show, a book, a song.

So, McClure's quest makes perfect sense to me, but it does come with the risk that we won't find what we're looking for. I marked this passage, because it perfectly identifies those fears and makes you consider if it's worth it to search at all.

But then on page after page in the book, the girl kept discovering that all the old things weren't quite what she expected. She was shown sadly regarding the log cabin that was smaller and emptier than she'd thought, and she warily eyed gift shop merchandise at one of the hometown museums. She stood on the asphalt in downton De Smet, South Dakota, waiting for a Fourth of July parade that never happened. She squinted in the sunlight of an open field where the Big Woods had once stood. I remembered enough about the books—just barely—to know what she'd been searching for.

It figures, I'd thought, and put the book back on the shelf.

Lessons on Reading

noreply@blogger.com (Kari) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 14:25:00 +0000

As a raging bookaholic, I'm constantly looking for the next book to add to my shelf. There are so many options. I want to read more; I want to read it all. As a result, I'm certain that I miss some of what is there. I often skim the surface instead of dive down deep. My analytical skills suffer. I miss the subtleties, the nuances, the hidden themes and allusions.

It's poignant, then, that I just started Jonathan Raban's essay collection—his diary of America—and he begins it with these words on reading:

The first lesson Empson taught was to drastically slow down; to read at the level of the word, the phrase, the line; to listen, savor, question, ponder, think... A single paragraph in Seven Types of Ambiguity was like a street closely punctuated with traffic-calming speed bumps: you had to study the relationship between one sentence and the next—and often one clause and the next—to see the logic that connected them, and if I tried to read them in my usual skimming style, I instantly lost the thread.

The second, more general lesson required one to greatly enlarge one's understanding of what writing is and does... Empson illustrated his arguments by sentences from novels, book titles, newspaper headlines that had caught his eye, and so forth... Every piece of writing was like a pond, sunlit, overhung by willows, with clustering water lilies, and, perhaps, the rippling circle made by a fish rising to snatch a daring fly. This much could be seen and appreciated by any passing hiker. But the true life of the pond lay below the surface, in deep water where only the attentive and experience eye would detect the suspended cloud of midge larvae, the submarine shadow of the cruising pike, the exploding shoal of bug-eyed small fry. It was with the subaquatic life of literature that Empson...was concerned.

Beneath the clean line of type on the page lay the muddy depths of the living and changing language, a world of stubborn historic associations, swarming puns, suggestive likenesses and connections, meanings that were in a continuous process of education and decay, sometimes enriching the word in print, but as often subverting it...

Empson's preternaturally sensitive ear and eye for the deep-water workings of the language enabled him to share with his readers a myriad subtleties, shades of meaning, richness, in lines they might otherwise have skated over, in ignorance of this buried treasure...

—From Driving Home: An American Journey, Jonathan Raban, pgs. 7-8

Do you meticulously savor the books you read or fly through them and move on to the next?

Reading Roundup: Books That Deserve More Than A Reading Roundup

noreply@blogger.com (Kari) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:10:00 +0000

I just embarked on this Western reading project, just got the book for my next book club meeting, and just returned from the ALA Midwinter meeting with a stack of exciting new books to add to my shelf. Coincidentally (and appropriately), I just ordered a new bookshelf for our apartment today.

Well, despite all of this, it is necessary that I tell you about these two books I read last year, but because of all the things mentioned above, it is also necessary that I do it quickly. It is unfortunate, however, because both of these books deserve more than a quick comment. But, I will do as I must before I get even further behind; this is my last week of freedom...school starts next week, which means more time to read but less time to blog!

I actually read In Zanesville by Jo Ann Beard back in November, so I am sorry to say it is a bit fuzzy at this point in time. I can say, however, that I liked it! I read it off a recommendation from a former library co-worker with whom I usually share a taste in books and whose opinion I completely trust. I wouldn't really classify In Zanesville as a coming-of-age story, per se, but it is told by an unnamed 14-year-old girl. Our narrator has the voice of a somewhat awkward teen, not fully comfortable with herself but mostly okay with that fact. She doesn't have the confidence that some of her peers seem to have and she doesn't really get why it's necessary to feel and act so "grown up." She's got a companion in her best friend "Flea," though, which makes life in junior high manageable until Flea seems to get caught up in the influence of their more "sophisticated" classmates and the narrator feels abandoned.

I'm just going to speak for everyone here by saying UGH, JUNIOR HIGH. This story takes place in the 1970s, but no matter the era, those years are cringe-worthy for most. Beard's writing is simple but effective in transporting you back to those years of petty drama in day-to-day school life. It's the feeling of constantly walking on egg shells, hoping to blend in but still attract enough attention to be deemed popular—when friendships and relationships are volatile and constantly teetering between friend and foe. I was going to compare In Zanesville to Jill McCorkle's Ferris Beach and Margaret Sartor's Miss American Pie, and then I saw that my former coworker did as well. Guess she was spot on with this recommendation once again.

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Another good find from a trip to the library in December was Vaclav & Lena, the debut novel of author Haley Tanner. And it was especially cool that the book was set in Brooklyn and the author appeared at WORD Bookstore in Greenpoint just a couple weeks after I picked this one up (except I didn't actually get to go...I just found it coincidental!).

Vaclav and Lena are Russian immigrants growing up in Brooklyn, sharing the shame heritage but living in completely different worlds. They quickly bonded in ESL class and spend afternoons together working on homework and practicing for the magic show they hope to perform one day at Coney Island. But one day Lena doesn't come to school and disappears from Vaclav's life. She doesn't disappear from his thoughts, though. Eight years later, as a high school student who has gracefully settled into an American lifestyle, Vaclav is about to give a final farewell to his memories of Lena when his phone rings and she comes running back into his life. The two reconnect and explore the circumstances that tore them apart when they were too young to understand.

Tanner's characters were easy to sympathize with. The story is written mostly from a Vaclav-centric perspective, and as the reader, we see how the story unfolds mostly through his eyes. However, the young Vaclav's grasp is limited by his 9-year-old naivety, and as an adult reader, we know there must be something more—and darker—than immediately shown on paper. Nothing in the story ever feels too overwhelming, though. It has the quality of a children's story in that the villains and horrible events are somewhat masked and we almost overlook them because we're focusing too much on our stories' heroes. [I mean, think about Hansel & Gretel. Do we, as kids, ever really think how horrible the concept is of a old woman luring kids with candy to then cook them?? No, we just kinda glance over it and hope they escape.]

I thought this a great debut novel, and I look forward to reading what else Tanner puts out there. Her own story is rather heartrending as well, which makes Vaclav & Lena feel all the more full of love.

Westward Ho!: A Reading Project

noreply@blogger.com (Kari) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 17:34:00 +0000

Several months ago, I wrote about certain topics that I'd like to explore through books. The biggest of those is a topic I've found to be even bigger and broader than expected, and to sum this topic up as succinctly as possible, I'd just have to call it "The West." The topics I am using this label to cover include:

Westward expansion in relation to history and politics
Stories of people who experienced the homestead life first-hand
The American Indian experience, both past and present

After a recent visit to the library, during which I went a little crazy in the nonfiction section, I realized I had picked up a lot of books related to this topic, so I decided the Westward Ho reading project has officially begun! For this project, I'm planning to read a variety of books—fiction, nonfiction, modern, historical. I'd like my reading to paint a vast portrait of the "western experience" to discover the stories, the history, and the culture of life out there beyond the Mississippi River.

Last year, I read Dorothy Wickenden's Nothing Daunted: The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West, an NPR recommendation that helped with sparking an interest in this topic. So far, other titles I have on my list include:

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie
The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie by Wendy McClure
Lions of the West: Heroes and Villains of Westward Expansion by Robert Morgan
West of Here by Jonathan Evison
Letters of a Woman Homesteader by Elinore Pruitt Stewart

In the next couple of months, I'll be tackling this topic from as many perspectives as I can find, and I welcome your comments, discussion, and book recommendations! I'll also later be joined by another book blogger for a cooperative effort on tackling Lions of the West so we can share and dispute our own preconceived notions and accepted histories of the characters Morgan credits with westward expansion. If you're interested in participating, get a head start now—we won't be starting that one for several more weeks!

Until then, share your favorite western-themed books below and pack your bags...

Nonfiction | Southern Yankee minds think alike

noreply@blogger.com (Kari) — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 21:41:00 +0000

A long time ago, I was taken in by a web ad and put Jane Borden's I Totally Meant to Do That on my 'to-read' list, because it just sounded too perfect. Borden grew up a debutante in North Carolina and moved to New York after college, which is essentially my life, minus the extremes of debutante (I went to public school) and hipster (yeah, I live in Brooklyn, but I don't own Oxfords).

This book is essentially my brain on paper. It’s a collection of little observations that Jane has made on the on the idiosyncrasies of city-living that only someone from the South would spend the time noticing and analyzing. To so many of her experiences, I just had to say: Yes. Been there. Experiences like:

Stopping a stranger after picking up something they dropped, only to realize the person was, in fact, littering, and your help is interpreted as sarcasm. My first week in New York, I stopped a woman at the bank who dropped a dollar. Her response? “Pft, it’s only a dollar.”
Being yelled at or called a profanity by a stranger after the smallest of encounters. Ugh, nothing starts your day off worse than being yelled at by a stranger at 8:30am on the subway for something inconsequential. And I end up crying every time. WHY SO RUDE???

And how, inevitably, New York has its own reasons for its behavior. Like how:

Walking the streets is an art form (one on which I pride myself for having mastered), weaving in and out of people, avoiding stationary objects. Because the key is just to watch the people around you.
People project no sense of privacy, because, “Wherever New Yorkers are, they feel at home. What tourists regard as exhibitionism, locals herald as the inalienable right to treat the city like a bedroom.” I think it is often gross and inappropriate. DO NOT CLIP YOUR NAILS ON THE SUBWAY.
There’s no rule of etiquette because “manners require social interaction while New Yorkers are bred for anonymity, naturally selected to blend in and go unnoticed. Those who accidentally stand out get mugged. Or, worse, end up on reality-TV prank shows.” No joke, this is often my worst fear. That I will end up on YouTube because of something I did and didn’t even realize I was doing.

And how New York has this constant buzz of noise that you don’t even notice until you escape it completely and you realize that actually drives you crazy. And all the stimuli bombarding you constantly becomes commonplace until one day you suddenly see it clearly and it also drives you crazy. And utterly EXHAUSTS you.

After approximately 3.25 years in the city, I even made a decision similar to Jane Borden and decided to be a Southerner living in New York rather than a New Yorker from the South. And since, I’ve done what she did, trying to “import the South” with pictures, posters, recipes, bringing back “y’all” to my lexicon, probably much to the annoyance of my friends and loved ones in New York.

I read this book when I was home for Christmas, and I think I bawled in my bed at about 1:30 in the morning as I finished it, because of the ending which was just so on point that it’s not even worth paraphrasing.

“I thought I was choosing between between two geographical locations, between two ways of life. But that’s not true. North Carolina isn’t a lifestyle; it’s my family…New Yorkers participate in one another’s most intimate moments, and I want to share in them all…But by definition, these relationships could never be more than snippets—how can I justify choosing strangers over my family?…I now have three nephews and a niece who are growing up without me, know me as the aunt who flies in and out…I have wisdom to share, and I don’t want to do so over the phone or through the mail.”

Ok, for me, it is somewhat the lifestyle of geographic locations, but for the most point, she gets me. I'm not sure people who have not made the South to North move would fully get everything Borden says (get in that "OMG, YES, SO TRUE!" kind of way), but it's funny enough to be enjoyed nonetheless. It was just too eerily similar to my life that I absolutely loved it—similar even down to the same dive bar I live next door to in Brooklyn, and Southern women's fear of gypsies who will enter your unlocked house while you're outside gardening (something I was raised to fear).

Reading Roundup: A Collection of So-So Characters

noreply@blogger.com (Kari) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 16:51:00 +0000

In a, once again, frantic attempt to catch up on all the books I'm reading, I'm posting a reading round-up. In this case, it is especially necessary because I found all these books to be just "meh" and I don't have too much to say about them. What made them "meh?" Their characters.

Carol Shields' The Stone Diaries is supposedly a modern classic, winning the Pulitzer in 1995. It's the story of Daisy Goodwill Flett, from her birth in 1905 through marriage, children, middle age, and to her death towards the end of the century. What's so interesting about this story is the perspective. You can never really get a grasp on who is telling the story. Sometimes, it's Daisy; sometimes friends; sometimes children; sometimes it feels like an omniscient, unknown narrator. This perspective, however many of them there are, provides a broader look at Daisy, allows the reader to approach her from different angles and see, perhaps, what tiny part of her influenced a decision or a behavior.

Well, as much as we learn about Daisy, I never really liked her. She just seemed so emotionless and indifferent. I never felt she actively participated in the life about which we were reading, which was a life full of emotional events. Never seeing her emotions led me to find her a little cold and distant and therefore unrelatable as a main character. I think this would be a good book to read with a group for a discussion but reading alone left me flat.

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The Cradle by Patrick Somerville is essentially a short little book about a crazy pregnant wife sending demanding crazy things from her husband because of a pregnant whim. I'm certain the author intended a deeper message, but that's how it appears in a nutshell to me. The pregnant Marissa sends her husband, Matthew, on a quest for a Civil War era cradle she once slept in that disappeared when Marissa's own mother disappeared when Marissa was a teenager. Matthew's quest takes him throughout the midwest like a scavenger hunt, meeting really weird, terrible people along the way. In another story and a decade later, a teenager boy is shipping off to Iraq, and his mother, Renee, is having a hard time facing it. Renee's got issues of her own, though, as memories of her own tragic past are starting to surface.

Now, obviously these two stories are going to connect to create a bigger message about love, family, etc etc. I think the writing was very good, and I'm grateful that the author knew how to pace and how much to write, so the story did not unnecessarily go on for another hundred pages (as often happens). However, once again, I didn't much care for the characters. Marissa just seemed a little crazy and demanding because Somerville didn't throw in any redeeming qualities. I may have sympathized with her more had she been more fully fleshed out to appear a more normal person just going through a crazy hormonal time. As a result, Matthew just seemed whipped. He had issues of his own which explained much of his mentality, but there was just something missing. I didn't dislike him, but I also didn't overly like him. Actually, that's pretty a pretty good summation of how I felt about all the characters.

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Robert Goolrick's A Reliable Wife has been a bestseller (so the cover says), and I think this is why: America was just turned on by it. Holy Batman, this book had a lot of sex in it. A lot of detailed sex that I was not expecting. This is the story of a man in the early 1900s who places an ad in a newspaper for a reliable wife and gets a response from a "simple, honest woman." Now, this is a thriller, so obviously she is anything but, and his intentions weren't so pure either. Many of you probably already know about this plot, so I won't go into anymore depth, but unsurprisingly, the plot thickens as deceit is revealed and love becomes a game-changer.

I read the second half of this on a bus to DC, so I have to say, uninterrupted, I couldn't put it down. But that doesn't necessarily mean I liked it a lot. Once again, the characters were just bleh. I couldn't really connect with them, and though I was racing through to find out how the story ends, that's all I cared about: the end. I didn't care how it ended, nor what happened to any of the characters. I enjoyed this one the most of these three books, but it was still a rather dark story.

Thoughts on 2011 and Looking Forward to 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Kari) — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 19:58:00 +0000

The year is over, and I completed my goal of reading 60 books in 2011! Actually, I read 61 and beat my previous record of 60 from 2009. [Last year, you may recall, Howard Zinn slowed me down at the end and I didn't quite make 60. Thanks, Zinn.]

Looking back on my list of reading from the past year, I'm not inspired to create a "best of" list like I'd usually do; there are not a handful of books that stand out as utterly magnificent in every way. Instead, I'm going to make a few lists. (A couple books don't have reviews up yet...they're coming!)

Sucked me in the most:

New York: The Novel by Edward Rutherfurd
Tomorrow River by Lesley Kagan
Coming Home by Rosamunde Pilcher

Entertained me the most:

Bossypants by Tina Fey
I Am Half-Sick of Shadows by Alan Bradley
Anastasia Again by Lois Lowry

Pondered the most:

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamad
I Totally Meant to Do That by Jane Borden
Vaclav & Lena by Haley Tanner

Learned the most:

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier
The Lost City of Z by David Grann

Bored me the most:

The World As I Found It by Bruce Duffy
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick [So bored that I didn't even bother reviewing.]

Disappointed me the most:

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
Life With Mr. Dangerous by Paul Hornschemeier
Swamplandia! by Karen Russsell

2011 wasn't a very profound year for reading in the sense that I wasn't very adventurous in what I read with the exception of the World Reading Challenge, which expanded my international oeuvre. It was a fabulous way to make me read a larger variety of voices. I didn't sign up for it again, though, because of my new reading goals...

In 2012, I want to:

Read more non-fiction. I feel I've done pretty well with that in the past couple of years, but I think 2011 was the exception.
Read what's on my book shelf. I have a billion books to weed, but I can't do that without first determining if they're worth keeping or not!
Pay attention to my mood when selecting a book. If I just read southern fiction, read something else next. If I want to read something light and easy, pick up that chick-lit I've been avoiding for months. If you read according to your mood, chances are you'll like the book better than if in the wrong frame of mind.
Don't ever stress myself out over finishing a book on a deadline. Reading is meant to be enjoyed, and it's not fair to the book or author if you rush through it!

I'm going to keep a reading goal of around 60 books. As busy as I am, I don't think upping that number is very realistic!

Here's to a great year of literature!

Reading Roundup: Holiday Picks

noreply@blogger.com (Kari) — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 16:57:00 +0000

If you're looking for a holiday read in the next couple of weeks, I've got a couple of suggestions for you. These are both quick, lighthearted stories that you can squeeze in before the end of December!

Wally Lamb's Wishin' and Hopin' is something that's been on my list for months because a) I love stories told from a childhood perspective and b) I love stories set in the 50s/60s. However, I held off on reading this until the holiday season, because it is described as a Christmas story.

Wishin' and Hopin' tells the story of Felix Funicello, distant cousin of the famous mouseketeer Annette, who is getting through his fifth-grade year at St. Aloysius Gonzago Parochial School. After Sister Dymphna, Felix's teacher, suffers a mental breakdown at the beginning of the year, she's replaced by the eccentric Madame Marguerite, who emphasizes French culture over religious studies. When preparations for the annual Christmas program begin, everything that could go wrong does, resulting in the most memorable Christmas program in recent years.

Wishin' and Hopin' is similar to Jean Shepard's infamous A Christmas Story in tone—a lighthearted story of nostalgia that contains situations and incidents that are so unique to childhood in a particular time and place. The characters don't have oceans of depth, but are developed enough to interact (and often clash). Anyone who grew up in this time period is sure to enjoy this walk down memory lane. The story is amusing more than anything else, which may just be perfect for a quick holiday read.

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The Flavia de Luce series is one I have been enjoying for the past couple years, because Flavia is a really fun, unique character to read. She's intelligent, precocious, and entirely mischievous. The latest in Alan Bradley's series, I Am Half-Sick of Shadows, is now my favorite since I met Flavia in the first in the series, and with a holiday theme, it's perfect to read right now!

Christmas isn't the only thing coming to Buckshaw; the Colonel is hard up for cash and has agreed to allows Buckshaw to serve as the backdrop for a sure-to-be mega hit film starring the famous Phyllis Wyvern. The film crew has rolled in and made themselves at home, while the film's star has been busy charming the house staff, even winning over the skeptical Flavia. Of course, in a small town like Bishops Lacey, any news is big news, and the Vicar is quick to enlist the movie stars' help in a performance to fund a new church roof. But when a snowstorm traps the entire town at Buckshaw and a body is found strangled with a length of film, chaos ensues and, naturally, Flavia is on the case.

The reason I love these books is because they're multi-faceted and can't easily be defined by one genre. The plotlines are all mystery, but the characters add a light-hearted, juvenile dimension. Flavia's investigations are always fun to read, especially as we follow her deductive skills that lead to her crime-solving conclusions. KEEP WRITING, BRADLEY.

Reading Roundup: Not What I Expected, Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Kari) — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 22:44:00 +0000

As I mentioned last week, I've recently read a couple of books that ended up a complete 180 than what they had begun. The first was Edward P. Jones' The Known World, which started off boring and convoluted but I ended up really liking. Sadly, Part 2 does not have such a happy conclusion. This commentary will probably be a little spoiler-y, so read with caution.

Karen Russell's Swamplandia! has seen a lot of list placement lately, including a spot on the New York Times' 10 Best Books of 2011. I discovered it on a book blog (can't remember where) and it was one of those books I immediately thought I would love, and hoped that sentiment would be confirmed.

The premise of this book just sounds so great. Set deep in Florida's Everglades, Swamplandia! introduces us to Ava Bigtree, the youngest of an alligator-wrestling dynasty. Swamplandia, an old-fashioned tourist attraction, is the Bigtrees' livelihood. Ava's mother is the park's headliner, but she's just died and the theme park is dying with her. Ava's father, Chief Bigtree, has headed back to the mainland on "business" while a mountain of debt threatens the family's home; older brother Kiwi has run off to the mainland, partly out of frustration and partly to earn money for his family; and older sister, Osceola, has lost herself in the world of the occult, chasing after a ghost boyfriend. Left alone, Ava embarks on an adventure with new friend, the Bird Man, to find her sister before she gets lost in the Underworld.

There were just so many things I liked about this book in the beginning.

The setting: I grew up vacationing in Florida, and those tourist-trap sideshows are just so quintessentially Florida and have always piqued my interest. Who runs those? Do people actually visit them?
The plot: A little bit quirky, a little bit weird, a little bit of magical realism to create a tone oozing creativity and intrigue.
The main character: As an eleven-year-old Ava is just on the cusp of understanding things in the adult world. She shifts from having the perspective of an adult to the perspective of a kid, and it's exciting to see how these perspectives influence her actions.
The writing style: Once the characters have been separated in the story, Russell focuses on Kiwi and Ava in alternating chapters. However, Ava's chapters are written in her first-person perspective, so we experience Ava's story as she is.

So, for the first 200 pages or so, I absolutely loved this book and was certain I would love it in the end. Then we're hit with a major WTF plot point that was totally out of sync with the story and completely unnecessary. And to me, it just sort of lost its sparkle after that. The story had just seemed to be building up and building up, and after the WTF moment, I realized that in the end, the awesome beginning was never really going anywhere in the first place—a case of high expectations that fell flat. I can't even remember how it ends now, because it just felt so unfulfilling. That BIG AWFUL THING signaled the end of the magical realism as we suddenly saw Ava's story in the harsh light of adulthood instead of the muddle ambiguity of immaturity. Unfortunately, it also signaled the end of the story's magic for me. So while I think it was intentional, I found it very disappointing.

I did so enjoy about 80% of this book, but I so SO wish it had ended on a more satisfying note as a whole.

Judy Blume on NPR, and helping the YA audience

noreply@blogger.com (Kari) — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 22:09:00 +0000

“I’m afraid today everybody thinks the sexiest, smartest thing to do is write for YA, and I worry about the middle grade readers, because if they don’t learn to love books when they’re middle graders, when are they gonna learn to love them?”

This, in a nutshell, is why I want to be a youth librarian.

Early on in my quest for Master Level Librarian (aka grad school), I was mostly undecided about where to focus in the public library realm. First off, MLS programs are incredibly expansive. Do you know how broad the library field is? Technical services, records management, digitization, preservation, archives, academic libraries, School Media Specialist, and yes, public libraries. I've known, since day 1, that I want to work where the people are. I love books, and I want to share that, not be closed up alone in a room with them. This pretty much leaves academia, public libraries, and school libraries, but academia bores me and it seems to me primarily information retrieval. I want to be an information guide and promote a love of reading, and I want the diversity of a public library.

Once you get in a public library, though, it's still divided—adult services, children's services, YA services. Do I go Adult where I can share what I myself enjoy reading? Do I go Children's because they're so cute and inspiring? Or the YA group that is probably the most challenging and the most reluctant?

Here's what I've decided. If adults are in the library to read, then they're readers. You just hit a point in life where you're either a reader or you're not. And kids have people encouraging them to read from every angle. Parents reading to you at home, read-alongs in class at school, summer reading programs, Accelerated Reader requirements—things that just encourage you to READ, doesn't matter WHAT you're reading. Then you hit the middle school/high school years and it just seems to drop. You're done with programs like AR; you're done with class visits to your school library to pick out some books; you're given six books you must read for English class that are usually "classics" and therefore pretty boring. And because you have to do it, you don't want to do it. So you start to resist reading. It's not fun; it's boring; books suck. You Google everything, and books are outdated. You develop poor research habits based on what's quickest and easiest, not the most thorough or accurate. Maybe, by some act of divine intervention, you'll pick up reading again in a few years before your adulthood habits and priorities are solidified. But most likely, if you lost interest once, it's gone.

And that's why I want to work with this fragile and underserved group. Yes, YA is the rapidly-growing hot reading genre, but you can't just produce the material. Spending time with teens, teaching them good research strategies and habits, inspiring in them a life-long quest for knowledge and love of learning, using their individual interests to motivate them—that is what I think teens need, and that's where I want to help.

Reading Roundup: Not What I Expected, Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Kari) — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 01:41:00 +0000

This is going to be a story of two books I recently read and how they turned out to be entirely different than what I had expected at the beginning. I can't honestly say that happens very often in my reading adventures; I guess I'm usually just a pretty good early judge of my opinion, but these both surprised me.

The first was last month's book club selection, The Known World by Edward P. Jones. At first encounter, I thought, "Oh boy, it's a book about slavery. What an upper." And then I saw it won the Pulitzer, and I thought, "Oh boy, it's gonna be boring, too." And yes, it was. For a bit. The structure is non-linear and there's about a billion characters, which requires some time and dedication to fully grasp and get into. But somewhere just past a third of the way in, I got into it, and it turned out to be really stunning.

So yes, The Known World is about slavery, which I unfairly judge as a boring topic I've encountered one too many times, thanks to high school English. But, it's not really about the white vs. black theme of slavery predominant in American literature; it's about free blacks (specifically, a freed slave) owning slaves. The man around which all revolves, Henry Townsend, has had his freedom since he was a boy, when his free parents bought Henry's freedom from his master, William Robbins. Henry had an atypical upbringing as a slave under Robbins, who took Henry under his wing, made sure he was educated, and treated him more like a son than property. As a result, Henry adopted Robbin's belief system as an adult, which caused conflict between his parents, his plantation, and the Virginian society directly outside his realm of reign.

In this Virginia town that upheld slavery as an acceptable institution in society, free blacks owning slaves contradicted how things "were supposed to be." What Jones did—he made slavery less about race and more about class, invalidating all the rules from slavery that put blacks below whites. Naturally, this caused chaos that slowly, but surely, caused the town to essentially implode, as the rules of society and morality were called into question.

Jones' characters are complex with all the grey areas left open to explore. A single action can quickly shift your opinion, because no one is ever fully good or fully bad enough to have warranted permanent placement on either end of the spectrum. On a similar note, the scattered, time-jumping structure of the story can leave you wishing for more on some characters while other important ones reach their fate abruptly. The Known World keeps you on your toes, and you need focus while reading it. As I learned, it's not a book to be read in short snippets on your morning and evening subway commute. But it is very satisfying by the end, when you feel like you were plopped down in this specific place and time with these people and rules and you watch it all unfold and figure out what it all means.

By the way, there's a list of characters at the END of the book. Yeah, no one in book club realized that one until it was too late, either.

For brevity's sake, I'll post my second review at a later date. That turned out to be a lot longer than I expected, and I don't want to bore you to death...

Book vs Movie: I Capture the Castle

noreply@blogger.com (Kari) — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 15:41:00 +0000

True story: when I was a teen, I was OBSESSED with the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Like, unhealthily obsessed. And in seasons 4 and 5, my BFF Carol and I had huge crushes on Marc Blucas, the actor who played Buffy's college boyfriend. Like serious 'write fan letters, hang pictures in our lockers, hunt down his other movies, write notes about him' crushes. He was a total all-American boy beefcake. So, imagine my surprise when I'm browsing the Netflix instant library a few months ago and see his name in the credits of a BBC-produced film. I texted Carol immediately (because we still alert each other as to MB's whereabouts). And then I realized that I Capture the Castle is the book that's been sitting on my shelf in Nashville for years after my mom read it and passed it along to me.

Well, because I'm a book-before-the-movie type of person, I left I Capture the Castle and Marc Blucas patiently waiting on my Netflix queue until I headed home again and could grab my copy. I was actually excited to finally read it after all these years. My mom had recommended it to me back in my early college years or so, and the recommendation has only been reinforced since then; a fellow book club member who shares many of my reading tastes gave it the highest praises, citing it as one of her favorites.

Dodie Smith's classic is about a family living in squalor in an old English castle in the 1930s. Seventeen-year-old Cassandra guides us through the story via her journal pages. She's just on the cusp of childhood and adulthood and not quite certain where she belongs. Her older sister Rose longs for beautiful things and a rich lifestyle. Their father once wrote a great book but has been in a writing slump for years and refuses to get out of it. Stepmother Topaz is an eccentric soul, latching on to art and its creators. And little brother just tries to stay out of it. Life seems pretty mundane until two American brothers suddenly arrive and stir things up (in a nutshell).

I think this was a case of my expectations being too high. I enjoyed this, I really did, but I just didn't see the magic that lots of people have found in the story. Cassandra was introduced as such a strong, independent character as opposed to her sister, a characterization that was reinforced throughout her journal entries. But eventually, I lost faith in her rationality. Cassandra was never as petulant as Rose, but I didn't hold them on such a different level by the end. Maturing as a result of new experiences is one thing; I think the point, by the end, was to show a stronger, more mature Cassandra, but I didn't like the path that took her there, nor felt she was the same independent girl who viewed the world with a naive fascination. And that's something I don't believe Cassandra would have lost, no matter her experiences.

After I finished the book, I finally watched the movie. Sometimes, I actually like the movie version better, as in the cases of Harriet the Spy, Atonement, and Julie & Julia. Minor plot shifts, the visualizations, or an actor's characterization can bring a new dimension to the story. But this one just didn't really add anything. I felt like I was seeing the same exact story I had just read. Maybe it was due to the fact that I wasn't totally enchanted with the story in the first place, but I probably could've skipped it. Except I got to enjoy MB on my TV screen once again. Ahhh.

Nonfiction | A man so cool, they named DVDs after him

noreply@blogger.com (Kari) — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 01:40:00 +0000

Eeep, I have been MIA for quite a while. I know it's bad when I have my next book club meeting in two days, and my post on last month's book is still one of my most recent posts. Somehow, I imagine fall as this wonderfully peaceful time of winding down from summer and getting nestled in for winter...but that doesn't seem to be the case. Do you remember the days when your weekends just sprung up like any other day of the week, open for spontaneity and without plans? Yeah, neither do I. Something happens in adulthood where suddenly every weekend is planned, and even weeknights quickly become booked. So strange! But maybe winter will slow things down...(though I'm not holding my breath).

A few months ago, I heard Dick Van Dyke on NPR's Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me, where Peter Sagal provided the excellent introduction I am using as this post title. Dick Van Dyke has always been one of my favorites. When I was a kid, I could recite every line to Mary Poppins (which served me like counting sheep when trying to fall asleep) and spent my evenings watching Nike at Night. Needless to say, Dick Van Dyke has always entertained me, and after I heard about his memoir on Wait, Wait and I saw it at the library, I picked it up.

My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business chronicles DVD's career from his early high school days at a radio station to the present. His life is barely controversial, and he's candid and honest with his storytelling. The main point he drives home is that...he has no idea how all his success happened; he maintains it's all luck. And maybe it is, but the guy is a fabulous entertainer. He's got a rare talent of physical humor and has a pretty good stage presence. As entertaining as Dick Van Dyke is on the stage, screen, and radio...he maaaaay not be the most entertaining writer.

Some of his stories were so interesting, especially reading about the how the TV industry worked in days past. I have zero doubt in my mind that I could have dinner with DVD and he could recite every line from his book, and I'd be enthralled, intrigued, entertained, etc. But that's the thing with DVD...so much of his personality is dependent on his physical presence that his words typed on a page read kind of dry. I don't love him any less, but I think I'll stick to watching a man "so cool, his initials have entered the international lexicon" on my TV screen.

Fiction | The story of the Puzzle King

noreply@blogger.com (Kari) — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 20:06:00 +0000

I've been waiting for just the right moment to read The Puzzle King for quite a while. You know how sometimes you want to read a book, but you just know you need to hold off for a little while? Maybe you just read something similar or maybe you're just not in the right mood...I want to urge you to follow my new rule for reading: DON'T FORCE IT! Because a book will probably be better if you wait!

I picked this up at just the right time—after some non-fiction and before my (possibly) depressing book club selection. The Puzzle King is just serious enough to make the story feel worthwhile without bogging my mind down with depressing thoughts. The story begins with a 9-year-old boy named Simon whose mother has put him on a ship alone to start a new life in America. Basically the only thing he has going for him is his artistic talent; he's a fabulous drawer and earns a reputation as such, even as a kid. A decade later, Simon meets Flora, a German immigrant who has been in the States for four years. As their relationship blossoms, the world gets complicated. As Simon and Flora's life prospers in America, Jewish relatives in Germany are suffering under Hitler's rule. In case you can't tell, The Puzzle King has got a lot of dimensions to it...

First of all, the characters are fabulously developed. They each have their own defining belief system, sometimes conflicting with other characters and sometimes creating an internal conflict. These conflicts between characters are representative of much bigger conflict in the story. Carter creates a divide between one's history and one's present. As anti-Semitism is developing worldwide, characters in the US are torn between their European roots and their current situation in America—much of a "need we worry about what's happening there when we're here" mentality. Characters question what defines them as individuals—"am I defined by my country though it's turned its back on me?"

Carter knows how to tell a good story. And the exciting part is that it's based on her own family legend and lore! She has created her own puzzle in the narrative of The Puzzle King, interlocking family and identity with past and present. The sense of time and place is so distinct...and really troubling—the idea that you can work hard and create a successful life but knowing that others won't have that chance, that you're still hindered by where you came from.

My only complaint is that the story seemed to end rather abruptly. I had twenty pages left and couldn't even imagine how the author was going to wrap it up so quickly, and I was left wondering how things turned out for several of the characters. But, maybe that was intentional—the same uncertainty that many characters like these had to live with at the time. This is the exact kind of book I'd recommend to my mom (and I will! If you're reading, Mom, HI! Read this!). It's more substantial than light reading but light enough to be enjoyable and give you something to think about.

Note: I found this similar in tone to Colm Toibin's Brooklyn. So if you liked that, you'll probably like this.

Nonfiction | Lost in the Amazon

noreply@blogger.com (Kari) — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 18:42:00 +0000

After a long Anna Karenina-filled end of summer, my Idlewild book club decided on something a little lighter for our October meeting. Enter, the nonfiction bestseller, The Lost City of Z by David Grann. Grann is a writer at The New Yorker, and this first book of his led him deep into the Amazon to investigate the 1925 disappearance of explorer Colonel Percy Fawcett.

Fawcett's story is notorious. One of the last "gentlemen explorers" of the 20th century, Fawcett was a member of the Royal Geographic Society, an organization that sent explorers to map unknown parts of the world for the advancement of geographical sciences. First of all, take that in for a minute. Less than a hundred years ago, there were still parts of the world unmapped. It's not a fact easily comprehendible, when we live in a world in which I can currently perform a live street view search via Internet on my suburban house 800 miles away.

Fawcett took several trips to and through the Amazon in his day to map its unchartered abyss, but his 1925 expedition is unquestionably his most famous...because he never returned. Accompanied by his son Jack and Jack's lifelong friend Raleigh Rimmel, Fawcett entered the forest on a quest for Z, a lost city of grandeur he believed to have been hidden deep in the Amazon.

Imagine this: no phones, no satellites, no GPS, no Gore-tex, no Off, no modern gadgets for ease and convenience. You have none of these things and you're entering an unmapped territory, populated by possibly hostile natives, where nature rules. And let me tell you, Grann makes it clear that nature is nothing to mess around with—so many bugs that can invade your skin and body, viruses and bacteria that invade your body and mind, things so disgusting that you'll cringe as you read their attacks on explorers. WHY WOULD YOU SUBJECT YOURSELF TO THAT?

Fawcett wasn't the first to quest for a lost city. The legend of El Dorado long preceded Fawcett and his crew, but Fawcett believed he'd found proof, had faith, and was just antsy enough to keep trying. A lot of worldwide speculation has been made since Fawcett began his trek in 1925 and never returned—did he die of hunger? Was he killed by natives? Has he been held hostage? Did he decide to stay in the jungle? Grann uses our modern tools of the 21st century to try and follow Fawcett's path, find out Fawcett's fate, and see if there ever was a Z that existed.

That all was more of a summary than a review, but that's kinda how it goes with this book. It's a fascinating piece of 'armchair travel' nonfiction, one of those stories that's gonna make you want to Google everything and find out more information as you read it. It's got some good ideas to discuss...like what drives a person to such a quest? And can man ever really conquer nature? Does it need to? Should it? Living in a world that feels pretty domesticated, we're reminded by The Lost City of Z that nature is King. It's no joke; it can chew us up, spit us out, and make it look like we never existed—an idea further explored in Alan Weisman's The World Without Us.

Anyone else read this one?

Reading Roundup: Eclectic set of fiction

noreply@blogger.com (Kari) — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 15:15:00 +0000

October is here in full force, and it's already been a busy one! I spent six days in Nashville, wrote a paper for class, sped through my book club book, and celebrated my birthday—all in the past ten days! Thus, a reading roundup is necessary to get myself caught up and let you guys know what I've been reading!

I checked out Beth Hoffman's Saving CeeCee Honeycutt from the library and downloaded to my eReader for a day at the beach day back during Labor Day weekend (so long ago!). In case you don't recall, it got quite a bit of buzz in the blogosphere back in the Spring of last year. Well, I finally got around to reading it! It was perfect for a beach read, because I read the whole thing in about 5 hours sitting in the sun.

Twelve-year-old CeeCee has a big burden on her shoulders, and that burden is her mother. With a distant father that's always traveling for work, CeeCee has become the main caretaker of her crazy mother—a woman who thinks she's winning a Georgia beauty pageant in 1951, even though it's 1967 and they're in Ohio. After tragedy strikes, CeeCee finds herself living in Savannah with a great-aunt where she can finally be the one looked after, instead of doing the looking after. Saving CeeCee Honeycutt is sort of a coming-of-age tale for CeeCee as she adjusts to her new life in a new part of the country, new social issues, new relationships, and finally has room to discover herself.

The cast of characters was amusing and diverse in scope, and this was an enjoyable read—great for the beach. And...just that. I bet it was a big book club choice for 40-something Southern women. Similar to The Help in that it has a real easy writing style, reflects that Southern vibe, and sorta touches on social issues but not in a really gritty, intense, profound literary way. In that way, it makes both these books and any similar seem kinda formulaic. But I mean, I still enjoyed it.

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The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy was a book that I've been wanting to read for months (maybe even a couple years?) and just never got around to it. Finally after one book club meeting, I decided to buy it on a wine-influenced whim (is that why wine is served at our meetings?). I read Dundy's other novel, The Old Man and Me, last year, and supposedly The Dud Avocado is the better one (though they both have their cult following). In Dud, Sally Jay is an American that's headed to Paris in the 1950s to live as one of those "lost youth" so prevalent in literature at the time. She's witty and charming and sometimes a little crazy like any good young ingenue.

Well, here's the thing. I read this so long ago, and this whole time I've struggled on what to write about it. I had the same issue with The Old Man and Me. And because the writing is just so full of subtle wit and a highly developed (in terms of writing) and complex character, I feel I can't do it justice by just reading it once. So I'm not going to say much more about it, except this: The Dud Avocado and Dundy's works require more than a single light reading, and I hope to give them that...at some point.

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My hiatus from the Penderwicks didn't last long, because I picked up the most recent in the series the last time I was at the library. The Penderwicks at Point Mouette is the third in the series by Jeanne Birdsall that follows the adventures of the Penderwick sisters and their friend Jeffrey. This time, Daddy is on his honeymoon in England, Rosalind is vacationing at the beach with a friend, and the rest of the Penderwicks (and Jeffrey) have headed to Maine with Aunt Claire.

I liked this better than the last one, and I appreciated the details that made it a small departure from the previous two. Skye's character was developed and came into her own as she performed the role as the Oldest Available Penderwick; Jane experienced her first real disappointment with love and a more grown-up world; Jeffrey was finally a leading man rather than just supporting cast as he got his own unique storyline; and the girls all had learning, growing experience when Daddy wasn't there to fix everything.

I don't think the Penderwicks series has quite as much depth as some of my other childhood favorites, like Anne of Green Gables or Betsy-Tacy, and part of that may be due to its ensemble cast as opposed to a single main character. But, Birdsall has created characters and stories that are fun to follow and are pretty timeless experiences of childhood and adolescence.

World Party: An Uninspired Conclusion...

noreply@blogger.com (Kari) — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 20:11:00 +0000

Well folks, September has come and gone, which means that the 2010-2011 World Reading Challenge has officially come to a close. I am proud to say I kept up with this challenge all year! Except for....now. At the end. Right at the last month.

I sorta failed.

September's month was India, and I chose to read Salman Rushdie's well-known Midnight's Children. Originally published in 1980, it won the Booker Prize in 1981, the Booker of Bookers Prize in 1993 (a special award celebrating 25 years of the Booker Prize), and the Best of the Booker in 2008, celebrating the Booker's 40th. I'd never read Rushdie and I had nothing else in mind for India, so why not go with something so prestigious? (Plus, it was available as an eBook through the Brooklyn PL, once again saving me a physical trip to the library.)

Well...this is not a quick read. The story focuses on Saleem Sinai, born at midnight on August 15, 1947, his birth coinciding with the birth of a new, independent India. Rushdie's novel is divided into three "books," and Saleem is the narrator of the story. The first book serves as an introduction to Saleem's own life—stories of his grandparents and parents, of a prophecy made about him before his birth. Then narrator Saleem slowly introduces his own birth and childhood, interactions with family and peers, with the spectacle of India's independence happening all the while in the background. Most notable about Saleem is his "special power" that allows him to enter the mind of all the other thousand "midnight's children."

I know that Midnight's Children is notable for its unique use of language, an Indian perspective on the English language. Likewise, it contains elements of magical realism and is often compared to One Hundred Years of Solitude. So language, structure, and flow may or may not be to blame here when I let you know that I DID NOT FINISH either of these books.

It is extremely rare that I start and book and put it down without finishing it. I can only think of one other book I've done that with in the past decade, and that, coincidentally (or not?), is Marquez's classic, which I started and gave up on about two years ago. But this is what happened with Midnight's Children: I was about 250 pages in with over 300 left to go, my eBook check-out expired today, and I just was not into the story enough to dedicate another week or more to this book. The structure of the story takes time; the language has a specific style and pace, one which takes focus. I've got a busy schedule and list of exciting things I want to read, and frankly, I decided this wasn't worth my time struggling. Maybe I'll come back to it someday, but for now...sorry, India. I let you down in this challenge.

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I am very pleased I chose to follow this challenge over the past year. It's actually something I have told many people about and have promoted as a good way to broaden your reading horizons. For the most part, I am happy with my reading choices. I chose some because I felt like I should read them and some because they were easily accessible. Persepolis and The Reluctant Fundamentalist were my favorites; Three Cups of Tea was inspiring at the time but has had interesting developments since I read it; and some (read: Wolf Hall) were just too smart for me. I'd like to do a similar challenge again someday, but for now I'm going to take a bit of a break from a reading schedule!

The World Reading Challenge Year-In-Review:

October – Afghanistan — Three Cups of Tea (2)
November – Turkey — The Towers of Trebizond
December – Greece — Zorba the Greek
January – Iran — Persepolis
February – England — Wolf Hall
March – Ireland — The Outside Boy
April – Jamaica — The Long Song
May – Pakistan — The Reluctant Fundamentalist
June – Russia — Travels in Siberia
July – Spain — The Sun Also Rises
August – Thailand — Sightseeing
September – India — Midnight's Children

Fiction | Sentimentality in Athens

noreply@blogger.com (Kari) — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 19:25:00 +0000

Alright, I am not a sappy person. I am an appreciator of well-written romantic language, but I don't like the flowery stuff. To me, Simon Van Booy walks a thin line between the two.

In Everything Beautiful Began After, the author's first full-lenth novel, three young, lost individuals have come to Athens and their paths cross. George, an American from Kentucky with a boarding school past and a drinking problem, has come to Athens to get lost in ancient languages; Henry, from England, is there on a dig as a successful young archaeologist; and Rebecca, French, is an artist seeking inspiration and trying to find herself. The events of their summer together will prove to affect each one of them more than expected and continue to define them.

This is not my first encounter with Van Booy; I read his latest short story collection, The Secret Lives of People in Love, last year and the language was something of which I definitely took note. Like in his short stories, his language, to me, borders on exquisite and trite. I think certain sentences are beautiful and subtly capture a feeling:

Like some devout follower of an obscure religion, he was moved to tears frequently by what he perceived as divine moments—like rain on the window or the smell of apples, or a man reading a book with his daughter in the park; a flock of passing birds. (p. 91)

"How does it feel holding the leg of someone who once lived?"..."I wonder about their lives—not the main events, but small things, like drinking a glass of water, or folding clothes, or walking home." (p.105)

...and some are overly descriptive, like they're forcefully trying to make a poetic statement someone will underline:

He would give up his search for the dead. Love is like life but longer. (p.188)

Language is like drinking from one's own reflection in still water. We only take from it what we are at that time. (p 275)

Van Booy had more room in this novel to fully flesh out his characters than in his short stories, so I found that he relied less on the pithy one-liners to grab the reader's emotion. In this book, it wasn't really the language that made me roll my eyes at times, it was the writing style. The Prologue begins with a third-person omniscient perspective on the abstract existence and thoughts of some unknown child; the story continues with a third-person storytelling of our characters; a section later delves into communication between Henry and George strictly through images of fax machine letters (which I quite liked a lot!); and then it goes into the rare second-person perspective of Henry, and this is where I just said, "Oh boy..." Call me unappreciative of fine literary technique, but I just can't appreciate. This last section struck me as using various writing techniques just for the sake of it; I'm not sure what purpose it actually served and whether the story benefited from it. But at least it didn't feel too gimmicky.

I think Van Booy is talented with his use of language; he's mastered his own personal writing style. Nothing against him, but I'm just not sure I have the tastes to completely appreciate it. I roll my eyes at sap; I roll my eyes at 99% of poetry. It's just not my thing. I can appreciate a lot of what Van Booy says; my inner-cynic just needs it in small doses.

A Belated Book Blogger Appreciation Note and Giveaway

noreply@blogger.com (Kari) — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 14:35:00 +0000

I know that Book Blogger Appreciation Week came and went, but you'd never notice it based on this site. That was an intentional choice; between working full-time, grad school, banjo lessons (yes, I'm taking banjo lessons), and other really important things like watching Friday Night Lights on Netflix, this blog often gets the shaft.

As a result, this leaves me less involved in the book blog community than I would like to be. I don't have as much time to browse all your lovely blogs and check up on what you've been reading. Posting on this blog has dropped dramatically since its early days (if I can get something out once a week, I feel I'm doing well) and my posting inconsistency does not, in turn, foster much of a discussion, because I know you blog readers like frequency!

But excuses aside, I just wanted to say I am VERY appreciative of the book blogging world! I thank you guys for constantly giving me new books to read [Seriously, I used to browse the shelves at the library or bookstores to find my new reads, and I don't even remember the last time I did that. Now, all the books I read come from other bloggers' recommendations.] and for taking time to add to the discussion here with your thoughts and comments.

And now, I'm not trying to buy your love...but I have a lot of books on my desk that are duplicates or that I've already read (some are ARCs, and they are from Algonquin, so thanks Algonquin!), and I'd like to share them with you. If you're interested in any of these books, please fill out the form below and I'll shoot you an email. First come, first serve. Please limit your choice to one title.

When She Woke by Hilary Jordan
Something for Nothing by David Anthony
Barnacle Love by Anthony De Sa
Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger by Lee Smith
The Girl Who Fell From the Sky by Heidi W. Durrow
The Frozen Rabbi by Steven Stern
A Friend of the Family by Lauren Grodstein

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Reading Anna Karenina: Part II

noreply@blogger.com (Kari) — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 14:30:00 +0000

After a nice two-week break, I finally got back to Anna Karenina and finished it in time for our Idlewild book club discussion last week.

You know what I thought of Anna Karenina, Parts V-VIII? Mostly...BORING. Maybe it was because I already knew the characters; maybe because Tolstoy seemed to go on endless detailed rants, even more so than before; maybe because I was reading on long subway commutes and was being gently rocked to sleep anyway. But whatever the reason, I was just itching to finish.

My final thoughts on the book are pretty consistent with my original thoughts—more than consistent; those thoughts were completely reinforced!

The level of detail that I griped about back during the first half of the book seemed to take over certain sections. Long-winded chapters about hunting trips and dinner discussions and political elections about bore me to tears. I definitely zoned out for all of these sections during those long train rides mentioned before.
I thought the book's strongest point is that Tolstoy handles each character with such detail that they seem realistic—neither one way nor another, neither black nor white. This was particularly poignant in Tolstoy's treatment of his women characters. Anna is, at one point or another, intelligent, confident, irrational, jealous, passionate, apathetic, and ultimately her hysteria takes control and she spirals out of control, leaving you to wonder what happened to all her strong, independent characteristics.

I know that one of the notable features of Anna Karenina is that Tolstoy does address the issues of society in 19th century Russia, but as I mentioned, they bore me, so I don't have much to say on those. My favorite feature of the story, though, is how Tolstoy juxtaposes his characters and couples to create a story about relationships and how they are affected by the society in which they are built and by the individual personalities involved. The reader is constantly comparing Anna/Vronksy to Kitty/Levin because their stories are presented side-by-side.

One of the most important things to note upon finishing this book is—why is it called Anna Karenina? Sure, it's the plot line that everyone knows, the focus of any movie adaptations...but Anna's story is not the most important one in this novel. Yes, it's the most dramatic (a love affair, a fallen woman—ingredients for a headlining story), but Tolstoy spends most of his attention on Levin and his own personal awakening. The entire eighth part of the book, in fact, has moved entirely beyond Anna and Vronksy and is devoted entirely to Levin and his own struggle with reason and meaning. It leaves you wondering: What story did Tolstoy intend to write? Was Anna's only purpose to grab readers with a "dramatic" plotline? And if so, why did he name the book after her?

I never had to read this book in high school, but many other book club members did and noted how different their opinion was this time around as adults—when you understand complex relationships and recognize the grey areas. I have to wonder if I would've brushed this book aside ten years ago without thinking further about it.

Reading Roundup: Fiction for the Younger Set

noreply@blogger.com (Kari) — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 20:27:00 +0000

Last month, I told you about an awesome new children's series called The Penderwicks about four sisters, their widowed father, and their adventures and hijinks. I loved the first in the series and said it's just the kind of series I'm always looking for, because it's lighthearted and fun and perfectly representative of childhood. I'm trying to drag this series out since, so far, it only consists of three books, but I couldn't resist picking up the second in the series, The Penderwicks on Gardam Street, when I saw it waiting on the shelf.

This installment of the Penderwicks brings the girls back to their own home on Gardam Street and back to the routine of a new school year. But things are not all routine; Mr. Penderwick, goaded by his sister, has started dating again, much to the girls' chagrin. Seeing how unhappy and uncomfortable their father is navigating the dating world, the girls institute the Save-Daddy Plan.

While certainly still enjoyable, I found the second in the series a lot more predictable in the first, particularly because a major plot point depends on the fact that the intended reading audience is most likely under the age of eleven. Most adult booknerds will quickly pick up on the literary clue and realize how the story is going to end. That being said, I still love the daily adventures of the Penderwicks, and I'm going to have to seriously resist picking up the next in the series, The Penderwicks at Point Mouette, on my next library visit.

*************

Deb Caletti's Wild Roses is a book that's been sitting on my shelf to be read since last year's BEA and BBC. To be honest, I don't read much YA fiction, because...well, I am beyond those years. I don't need stories to connect to as an angsty teen; I don't need to look back on stories of adolescence with fond memories as I like to do with JUV fiction; and mostly, I just don't want to read about teenage issues that seem so imperative when you're a teen but that I'd just roll my eyes at now. Go ahead...call me a cynical, jaded ADULT. However, I've been on a kick where I'm trying to read the books that have been sitting on my shelves forever, so I finally picked it up.

Cassie is seventeen and has a stressful home life; her divorced mother remarried Dino Cavalli, a prodigy composer and musician, but also...an emotional time bomb. The talented Ian Waters enters Cassie's life as he begins lessons under Dino's tutelage, and Cassie—big surprise—falls in love.

As far as YA fiction goes, I think Wild Roses hits the mark. It deals with teen issues like relationships, family drama, divorce, depression, responsibility, and that big scary "future" with grace—never in your face, never over the top, never too much. There are many things for teens to relate to in this story, whether it be situationally or emotionally. I did have some issues—the basis of a relationship between Cassie's mom and the emotionally abusive Dino seemed unrealistic to me; the fact that more time was spent on chronicling Dino's decline than delving into the depths of Cassie's thoughts; that the teenage first romantic encounter is the be-all, end-all love story. Maybe my reaction is just influenced by my own teen experiences, because while Wild Roses may stand out to its intended audience, it was just a typical YA novel to me.

World Party: Contemporary Thailand through many sets of eyes

noreply@blogger.com (Kari) — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 14:17:00 +0000

Thailand was August's country of choice for the World Reading Challenge, and I chose some contemporary fiction—Sightseeing by Rattawut Lapcharoensap.

Sightseeing is a collection of seven short stories that touch on issues like family tension, generational division, and cultural differences. These stories all felt very raw. They all focused on one particular moment of life—an encounter with an foreign tourist, a trip abroad with a parent, a man's experience with the draft, an encounter with a refugee neighbor—but none of these moments, these stories, felt particularly optimistic. The voices in the stories all felt...not defeated, exactly, but perhaps disenchanted. It may have something to do with the perspective of the stories' narrators. Several of the stories were written in the past tense, as if the narrator was reflecting on this past incident or moment. Maybe this is why the voices sound so detached; maybe these are memories the narrators would rather not remember.

It's also worth noting that all of Lapcharoensap's narrators—except the narrator of the final story, "The Cockfighter"—were male, and I wondered why this was. Did culture play a role in that decision or was it purely the whim of the author? Though these stories, as I mentioned, weren't very happy, I found myself sympathetic with all of their narrators. I couldn't quite figure this author out after reading a couple of the stories. Sometimes, when you start a short story collection, you quickly pick up on the author's style and realize that all the stories have similar endings—a happy ending, a bittersweet ending, an unhappy ending. For example, when I read Simon Van Booy's The Secret Lives of People in Love, I quickly learned that all his stories end with some little catch, some little amount of pain that keeps the ending from being completely "happy." Well, Lapcharoensap isn't that easy to categorize. Some stories ended bittersweet, some happy, some poignant, and some just ended without much conclusion. Overall, these stories served more as introductions to characters than conclusions. The endings were mostly open-ended, which makes these characters memorable as you wonder what happened to them.

A good selection for the World Reading Challenge, and a good collection of short stories for readers interested in exploring unfamiliar (or at least, different) cultures.

Only one month left in this year-long World Reading Challenge, and I have to pat myself on the back here for successfully keeping up with it! September's country is India, and I haven't chosen a book yet. Any suggestions?