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Stuff I've been reading

All right, y'all, I'm sure you've noticed my conspicuous absence. Nothing weird or bad going on, just a lot of Real Life that needs straightening out which leaves me with not a ton of time to be reviewing. Trust me - there's about ten started-but-not-finished reviews lingering on the back end of this blog, staring at me and inducing wracking guilt every time I'm online.

So what have I been reading? Well, being a list-maker at heart, I thought I'd just let you know.

Working on Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susannah Clarke, which is one of my books for 2009. I am really enjoying it, even though it took quite some time to get into at first. The scenes with the statues at York Minster talking - and the brilliant description of Waterloo as seen through Jonathan Strange - are so far my favorite bits. This book has occupied the odd position of my Breakfast Book: being a person who reads several books at once, books generally take a geographical or chronological assignment. This one, by virtue of the fact that it's fun to read on my sunny front stoop on the weekends (and is way too big to carry around in even my monster-size purse), has taken up residence in the breakfast hours - or twenty minutes - of my mornings.

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons. After hearing a lot of people raving about this I decided to give it a go. I think I was initially turned off by this book by some earlier edition that I think had some fruit on the cover. Seriously. But it's quite unexpectedly funny, and a little bit of fresh air. This is the book I carry around with me.

The Lunatic at Large by J. Storer Clouston. Never heard of it? Not surprising. Apparently it's been out of print in the US since 1926, though the Collins Library of McSweeney Books re-released it a couple of years in a gorgeous hardcover edition. The crux? A mysterious amnesiac escapes from a rural British asylum and befriends a befuddled but well-meaning German baron. Antics ensue. If you like Wodehouse, do yourself a favor and check this one out.

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. Am I perhaps the only person who hasn't yet read this? It's interesting so far, but I am only about twenty pages in. It also occupies a unique position since it's too large to carry about during the day but breakfast book is taken. Also I generally don't want something so hefty at night. So it's not yet found a comfortable place in my day, but I suspect it may take Strange/Norrell's place when I am finished with that.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Of course I've read this before. I just have to read it again before the film comes out. I'd forgotten how good it is.

One Thousand White Women by Jim Fergus. This was a book club pick. Don't read it.

The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson. As a narrative nonfiction the author does a good job, although he goes off into a crazy tangent at the end about nuclear weapons. I can almost hear some agent or editor saying, "No one cares about cholera in 1854. Can you make it more pertinent to the present day?"

The Watchman by Robert Crais. This was borrowed from a friend who reads mystery-detective-type books and shares them with his father, who is also an avid reader. It wasn't much up my alley, but it wasn't bad. It was just so completely swathed in testosterone that it was difficult to resist snorting at it every now and again.

Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett, perhaps my favorite Discworld novel. This was probably my tenth reading. What makes it memorable to me? Well, I adore Susan, the granddaughter of DEATH, and this novel is a bit more philosophical as opposed to political in nature, though it's no less humorous.

Revealed by Kate Noble. The author was kind enough to send me a copy after I fell in love with Compromised. I have to admit this one didn't do it so much for me - and that's partially because I read it immediately after reading My Lord and Spymaster, and if you want Regency spies you should look to Joanna Bourne immediately - but it was still really amusing and well-written, and I will undoubtedly buy Noble's next book without hesitation.

Vanity and Vexation: A Novel of Pride and Prejudice by Kate Fenton. This one was so cleverly written and conceived and executed - and so very meta - and I loved it. Brilliant. And I tend to not like Austen "retellings."

Lavinia. This was my first Ursula K. LeGuin novel, and I enjoyed it although there was a definite change in agency about half-way through in which Lavinia as a character stops acting for herself and starts acting as an agent for the action in the novel. (This also happened in One Thousand White Women, and I disliked that book so much that I actually didn't care in that novel.) I'm on the fence about this one. I did really enjoy it, but I hate that dying fall when women in books stop telling their own stories.

Desperately Seeking a Duke by Celeste Bradley. I don't remember a lot of it except the main characters were all trying to marry dukes in order to win some inheritance, and the three cousins who were the main characters had such similar names that I kept on getting them confused.

The Spymaster's Lady and My Lord and Spymaster by Joanna Bourne. I definitely preferred The Spymaster's Lady of the two, although both were excellent. I would like to read Adrian's story, though. Is there any chance there's a third coming from these loosely-related two?

So...how about you? What have you been up to?

By the way, I really do intend to write reviews of most of these books. Seriously. Just not today.

Upcoming Powell's events

Should you be in the PDX area, here are two upcoming Powell's readings you should know about:

Seth Grahame-Smith will be reading and talking about his new book Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance - Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem! on June 11. Note that they're unfortunately shuttling Grahame-Smith all the way out to their Cedar Hills store (seriously, Powell's, knock it off) and Jane Austen will not be raised from the dead for this talk. This is a free event.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon will be interviewed by the executive director of Literary Arts, Andrew Proctor, at the Bagdad Theater in Southeast Portland on June 24. Zafon's newest book, The Angel's Game, has been released in English this month. Tickets can be purchased at the Badgad or Crystal Ballroom box office or at Ticketmaster.com or Ticketmaster outlets, $19 in advance and the price includes a signed copy of The Angel's Game (which retails at $26.95, so you're getting a bargain here).

Are you gutted that you're not close enough for the real thing, live and in person (Ana and Thea)? Two thoughts...Powell's often has their guest authors contribute to their blog, and you can order signed copies from all of their visiting authors through their website.

In which I am honored

The ever-lovely Daphne of somewhere i have never travelled has honored me and called me out as a wiener...um, I mean, winner.
Daphne and I "met" some time ago due to a mutual appreciation of all things John Bellairs, and eventually met up at Powell's, one of my favorite places in the world. We traded some authors and ideas. I love Daphne's blog because no matter what she's writing about - food, her art, her sweetie's battle with CFS, crafts, hiking, her local library, books, thrift shopping - she infuses it with meaning. Not the sort of cloying, trying, earnest Meaning that we all went for in college, but the simplicity of layers inherent in everything in life. This is good writing, and posts that make me think, examine, feel, and crave. Lovely, lovely, Daphne. Thank you so much.

Something Borrowed: Emily Giffin

Do you ever finish a book thinking to yourself, "Well, that's four hours and four dollars I'll never see again"?

Yup.

From the back cover:

Meet Rachel White, a young attorney living and working in Manhattan. Rachel has always been the consummate good girl - until her thirtieth birthday, when her best friend throws her a party. That night, after too many drinks, Rachel ends up in bed with Darcy's fiance. Although she wakes up determined to put the one-night fling behind her, Rachel is horrified to discover that she has genuine feelings for the one guy she should run from. In her wildest dreams (or worst nightmares?) this is the last thing on earth Rachel could ever have imagined happening. As the September wedding date nears, Rachel knows she has to make a choice. In doing so, she discovers that the lines between right and wrong can be blurry, endings aren't always neat, and sometimes you have to risk all to win true happiness.

First line: "I was in the fifth grade the first time I thought about turning thirty."

I picked this up at the library store since it was inexpensive and looked like a light read, and thought that it might be a Bridget Jones-esque humorous story of self-discovery at A Certain Age. I also just hit A Certain Age and although I managed not to sleep with any of my good friends' various husbands or fiances, I found myself slightly sympathetic to the plight of a woman character of A Certain Age in a light read like this.

Well, I was the more deceived. This was hardly a humorous look at turning thirty and the mistakes inherent when you take that number too seriously. It had very little of the Bridget Jones in it. In fact, it had very little to do with actually growing up, learning from one's mistakes, or self-discovery at A Certain Age. It had everything to do with an enormously passive main character sleeping with and then falling in love with her selfish best friend's fiance. That's about it.

As a main character Rachel is so amazingly passive that it was difficult for me to be sympathetic to her "plight." She delays asking Dex if he plans on breaking his engagement with Darcy. She resists having any conversation about what they are doing by embarking on their affair. She lets Darcy run her life as she had since they were in grade school. Indeed she continues to justify her relationship with Dex over and over with the fact that Darcy has been a mean, cruel friend all their lives. The most interesting relationship in the book is between Rachel and Darcy, but their dynamic even fails as Rachel continues to be a silent sufferer of her best friend's will, and Darcy remains a selfish, spoiled, beautiful brat with no thought of anything beyond herself and her desires. And where's Dex in all of this? Well, practically nowhere: he read like a man who would cheat on Rachel as easily as he cheated on Darcy, and really only acted as the vehicle upon which Rachel could play out her passive angst on having Darcy trounce upon her their entire lives.

There was no growth here. There was no learning from mistakes, no great revelations about being A Certain Age, falling in love, realizing that those who are friends out of habit aren't truly friends. There were very few recriminations for any actions. Instead it was just a book about posh, rich people in posh, rich Manhattan (and the Hamptons) and this life that they lead, cheating on each other and back-stabbing friends. The fact that it was told with a sympathetic voice instead of a more acidic tone doesn't make it any different. In fact, it just makes it more manipulative and much less entertaining. Think of Something Borrowed as an angsty, unfunny Sex in the City without the fashion obsession. Which, really, is taking out the only good parts of SITC.

Perhaps my expectations were set too high. This one just didn't do it for me. The writing isn't bad, the plot isn't great, and the characters exhibit no growth to complement the single-minded plot. Save this puppy for the beach or the airplane, and don't expect miracles.

_____________________________

Other reviews, or perhaps Further proof I shouldn't read chick lit:

Chick Lit Reviews: 5/5

Write Meg!: 4.5/5

Magic Lantern: suitably jaded about the perfect lives of the characters

Happy Grrls: 2/5

Entertainment Weekly: A

...and apparently Hillary Swank and co. have snapped up the production rights to this and the sequel, Something Blue

The Help: Kathryn Hockett

In the Deep South of the early 1960s the civil rights movements gained force and the institutions that had held back African Americans for generations fought to keep their laws and traditions in place. It was a time and place of assassinations, lynching, riots, and demonstrations, both peaceful and non. It was also a place where regular people dealt with racism in everyday lives. This is the Jackson, Mississippi, of The Help, the story of three women, the quiet constraints on them, and the measures they take to rebel.

Skeeter is just back from college and expected to marry, though she chafes under the control of her parents and her upright Junior League friends. Aibileen, a maid, has lost her own child and finds that she can't raise her white charges after they are old enough to echo their parents' casual racism. Minny might be the best cook in the city, but her short mouth and temper prevent her from keeping jobs even as she struggles to raise her own children and avoid an abusive husband.

What brings these three to their subtle rebellion? A bathroom. Skeeter's best friend and Aibileen's employer builds Aibileen a separate bathroom - outside of the house - so that the family doesn't have to use the same toilet as she. This one small act, an act of a very domestic and very personal racism, brings the three women together to defy the people around them and tell the stories of the help.

This novel brings a woman's voice to the civil rights movement in a quiet, home-based way - a way that's just as personal and meaningful as if the pages were filled with blood and fire. The Help doesn't ignore the events of the time, but instead the women move through them as they happen almost in the periphery, just as it must have been for thousands of people. The focus here is the home, family, friends, and lives of these women, and the book doesn't attempt to explain, condemn, or justify - only to tell. In her debut novel Stockett doesn't take any literary or historical risks with The Help, but the unique voice of her three heroines tell a quietly moving and deeply personal story - and succeeds.

Winter Under Water: James Hopkin

From the author's website:

Is it possible to fully comprehend a person when you don't grasp the intricacies of their culture, when you don't share a homeland or a voice, when you have different definitions of the past and conflicting commitments in the present?What future is there for love when you find yourself the other side of language -- a place where everything feels slowed down, reduced to gestures, as if underwater?

When Joseph meets Marta, he is captivated, and when she returns to her native Poland, he follows her. His subsequent journey, across a continent, through the cold and dark of an unfamiliar country, meeting all sorts of characters, and culminating in a KRAKOW proves as much a search for understanding -- of a person, a place, a language -- as it does a struggle against isolation.

Interlinking Joseph's often strange experiences with Marta's letters to him, Winter Under Water is a book of Europe, of myriad identities, of love and language, of intimacy and exile. It is also, ultimately, a book that suggests you only truly know a person or a place when you can sit in silence and not feel compelled to break it -- in any language.

James Hopkin is a writer to watch.

Winter Under Water shows a mastery of language that isn't often seen with words inducing laughter, stillness, misery, and every possible human emotion on the spectrum. His way of weaving the text into tales is more than just story-telling, it's a craft, an almost tangible talent of creation. The story of Joseph and Marta is really not a love story, it's a modern story of adult emotional entanglements and the further questions of culture and language in a world that is increasingly smaller and losing its originality.

Hopkin's Krakow is bold, dirty, filled with people you wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley and other assorted crazy characters in varying degree of post-Communist poverty. Reading Winter Under Water while in Krakow was an experience of worlds colliding: Hopkin's (and my) Western world with a distinctly post-Communist East, shaking the grime off and trying to move in a different direction. Reading Krakow through Joseph's eyes was telling and stunning, a world where the weather is a character, the human characters are all some sort of mad, and the streets of the city down to the rubbish and the grit are by turns degrading and magnificent. The writing, in a word, is stunning.

It is also dense. Although there are plenty of poignant and humorous moments, Hopkin's style is enormously opaque, as if there were simply so much cornstarch in the stew. It isn't bad, but there are plenty of times when his style - which serves him magnificently well in a short story format - weighs down the flow of the already nontraditional, post-modern story. In a book which does occasionally seem to have a moving plot, the sheer weight of the words sometimes grinds the motion to if not a halt, then at least a molasses sort of slow.

But it's still a first novel, and Hopkin's stellar short stories are something to behold. It's hard to express in a review the despair and hope that Hopkin expressed in a novel: I can only recommend you immerse yourself in the thick, slow world of Winter Under Water.

Marching forward...sort of...

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There's a lot of folks in Romancelandia who are marching forward with the very real stance of "Hey guys...it's good over here. Stop making fun of us till you try it." This is taking a lot of different faces, from the academic with the good people at the International Association from the Study of Popular Romance and blogs like Jessica's Racy Romance Reviews and Teach Me Tonight, to more populist (but no less intelligent) sites like Dear Author and the Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books to name only two out of thousands and thousands of good ones. Candy Tan and Sarah Wendell, the Smart Bitches themselves, recently published their guide to the genre, Beyond Heaving Bosoms (which briefly though spectacularly unseated Twilight on Powell's best-selling romance list a couple of weeks ago.)

The Smart Bitches have been doing a fair bit of book promotion over the last month since it's been published, and have been popping up all over the place from book stores in Des Moines to a recent interview in Bitch magazine.

I'm generally supportive of Bitch magazine. But I have a hard time with this one. Poster Mandy Van Deven prefaces a great interview with Sarah Wendell with this paragraph:

Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan of the Smart Bitches, Trashy Books blog defend the legitimacy of romance novels in their newly published Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches’ Guide to Romance Novels. After years of sifting through smut books in order to find the ones that are worth the $4.99 you’ll pay for it, these two ladies have created a humorous guidebook for the discerning smut reader. And since romance readers tend to fly through five of these books a week, having someone else sift through the junk is like clipping coupons before going to the grocery store; it just makes good economic sense.

Now, really, if you're posting an interview that's all about misconceptions in the genre and why feminists should read romance, should you make a point of referring to said genre not once but twice as smut? Or is this some sort of post-feminist way of reclaiming and becoming empowered by negative words - much as the magazine is called Bitch? Whichever, it just seemed counterproductive to try to talk intelligent and progressive about the genre when you're also calling it names. This is one of those times when I'm not so happy with Bitch.

What are your thoughts on it? Do pop over and read the interview and leave a comment if you'd like (disclaimer: I know some of the staff - and they're stoked for comments, seriously). I stopped calling my romance novels smut - as I did through high school - when I realized that people actually thought I was reading porn. Nothing wrong with reading porn, but I wasn't reading porn...and if a common sentence to a romance defender is "It's not chick porn," then I'm not into opening that stereotype back up by letting people think that I'm reading "smut" by reading romance.

And really, Bitch, it is a little annoying that you tried hard and had a really good interview, but you lost me in disgust at your first paragraph. One step forward, one step back.

(And I can't remember when I last paid $4.99 for a paperback. What, 1994?)