Good and Okay

It was a long week, so I went home to play in the snow (awesome snowshoe hike!) and veg out before a few long (but awesome) weeks to come. I also wanted a break from serious reading so I brought with me a book that I had grabbed on impulse last time I was at the BPL, Pauline A. Chen's The Red Chamber. It was more substantive than I was expecting, and/but I really enjoyed it. The re-imagining of a classic (apparently) Chinese story, The Dream of the Red Chamber, the book traces the lives of three women of the aristocratic (I...think? Kind of? Chinese social hierarchies confuse me; upper classes, in any case) Jia family in eighteenth-century Beijing. The three main characters are finely drawn, but I appreciated that other characters were multi-dimensional and nicely fleshed out as well.

 Chen also did a good job of setting the scene, and making the world the women live in, while obviously very far from my own experience, real and not overly, falsely exotic. Part of the reason I wasn't expecting much was that one of the blurbs on the back was from Arthur Golden, the Memoirs of a Geisha guy; I don't love that book, and I don't get why it was so popular, unless people were responding to the selling virgins / selling sex titillation aspect. That's probably unfair. I'm sure it was exhaustively researched and God knows he did love a setting-detail. I never thought there was much emotional depth, though - unlike Julie Otsuka's Buddha in the Attic, which I loved. Otsuka also wrote a blurb for this book, and that was what instantly decided me on checking it out. Interestingly, I probably also would have if I had read the acknowledgments and seen the should out to Leslie Levine (editor at Knopf / Random House), since I have yet, I think, to read a novel in which she participated in the production of, that I wasn't impressed with (full disclosure, there's something of a slim professional relationship there). I think Levine worked on Buddha in the Attic, too...

After Red Chamber I went back to Ben Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk to finish it, since I had a book club meeting centered on it last night. It is...okay? Honestly, I think it's a really, really long short story. But a great short story, probably. The title character is a young war hero home from Iraq after a massively publicized firefight with Iraqi insurgents, being trotted around the U.S. with his squad (er, or whatever - team? I'm not a military expert) for a publicity tour culminating in their appearance at the Thanksgiving Day Dallas Cowboys game. We went back and forth about whether this was a book about sports or war, in the words of one of the book club organizers; I would say neither. It's about a young many, naive in many ways, who's never quite been fully integrated (mentally/emotionally) into the world around him who's now definitely somewhat adrift in a couple worlds that don't really make sense to him. And about figuring out who he is and what he wants - although in a book that takes place in a day, obviously there are no clear answers to be had. Billy, though, is a really appealing and believable character, and very well delineated. His fellow "Bravo squad" members, while never as fully drawn (the whole book is Billy's thoughts), are similarly human, with distinct personalities and backgrounds. Like the character of Billy, Fountain did an excellent job with the relationship of the team, and its one of the strengths of the book. Billy's sisters, too, and his relationship with them, feel very real, although his parents are surprisingly more caricature-like.

The book is rocky, though. The beginning is especially tough to get through, with a story that maybe is meant to be somewhat stream-of-consciousness-y, but just feels over-enthusiastic and under-edited. Fountain also does this thing where he has pieces of words trailing across an otherwise blank page to indicate the flashes of conversations that are getting through to our dazed (hungover and unsure of the world around him) hero. It gets the point across, I suppose, but it feels lazy or like something a writing class student would come up with and find very clever...and then do over and over again. I read the book, as I try generally to do, without knowing anything about the author, and I have to say, I wasn't surprised to find out afterwards that this was a first novel. Fountain is definitely a talented writer - strong characters and some really vivid, evocative descriptive lines - but the book felt like it needed to be edited way the hell down. Maybe not to short story length, but it should have been a lot shorter. In particular, it was one of those situations where the author would make a point really, really well with one or two passages, but then go on to make the same point, again and again, with several more "okay" passages. Less would definitely be more here.

I'm not even going to get into the fact that apparently Billy manages to, in a few moments in a hidden corner, get a cheerleader off merely by rubbing his pelvis into hers. Sure. I am, however, pleased that V, my book club-buddy, also had to go back and re-read that passage to see if she had missed something. I am also amused that the only guy at book club totally thought that was a perfectly reasonable scenario, lol.

So, overall...it was good, but not great. I'd have loved to have gotten my hands on it while it was still being edited, though. A lot of decent points about America and our war machine were made, although often made not subtly at all and repeatedly. Billy, again (I can't say it enough), was a fantastic and fantastically handled character. And the end was a lot better than the beginning. Maybe I just never got over the beginning. In any case, I'm still talking about it and mulling it over, so that's good (and V and I kept talking about it at the next bar after we bailed on the book club after it had melted down into a general discussion of...something).

Siena,

and the Palio, is such a rich subject. And I feel like Anne Fortier's Juliet gave me everything I didn't get from the other Siena/Palio book I read a while ago, Daughter of Siena (Marina Fiorata) [also, HOLLER, system worked, I had no idea what that book was and then found it in the blog just now]. This was more of a Pink Carnation or Mary Malloy type book, with the action in the present and the (related) action in the past being interwoven together. And a kind of mystery. Not that Malloy and Lauren Willig have a monopoly on the style, it's just what I think of.

Anyhow, I really liked Juliet, as I said the other day. I had been getting another book from Lamont, and I saw Juliet down the shelf a couple books, and the spine was appealing. So I read the first page - an epigraph, as it happened - and liked THAT, so I checked it out. Finally got around to reading it during the blizzard weekend, wanting something lighter after I had been reading something heavier, but it was better than just a palate cleanser.

Basically a young American woman who is obsessed with Shakespeare and Romeo and Juliet ends up in modern-day Siena where she finds out she's a descendant (and namesake) of the original inspiration for Juliet. She also needs to find the artifacts relating to the story, and the whole story, that were a part of her parents' mysterious deaths when she was a young child. And there's a hot Italian man, and lots of clothes and prosecco and gelatto. Lots of history, too, but handled well - respectfully (and hopefully responsibly/accurately, although it's NOT my period, so it could all be totally wrong for all I know) and lightly, so it's everywhere, but not overwhelming or artificial. Lots of my favorite things in any case.

A lot of it is predictable, especially the development of the "relationship" between our Juliet and the leading man, but still entertaining and the main character, while a bit obvious, is relatable and very engaging. The setting (both the city and the temporal setting too, when in the past) is handled quite well, and the worlds feel real while you're in them. Ugh, except now I really want to go to Siena!!!

Hours of my life I don't grudge!

Over the weekend I read and really enjoyed Anne Fortier's Juliet. More later, running to go celebrate V's first day at a new, awesome job!!!

Hours of my life I will never get back...

At least it wasn't as bad as the movie/trainwreck Snow White and the Huntsman (I almost just typed "Snotwhite" - wouldn't have been totally wrong)?

So, after an aborted attempt at reading The Apothecary's House by Adrian Mathews on Saturday night, I finally finished all 534 grueling pages of it over Sunday-Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday nights. I think. Now I don't remember when I started it. But I DO remember that every night I'd get into bed and be like "okay, back to the grindstone" and not "yay, back to the wonderful, entrancing story and the finely-limned characters who populate the vivid world in which it's set!" Needless to say, I was not impressed.

Basically, the story is about a young(ish) woman (maybe?) in the Netherlands who works for a group that evaluates claims to artwork stolen by Nazis, and how she gets deeply involved with one painting (and one of its claimees). Then there's also this whole thing where someone's out to get her, and presumably the painting, because of it's freaking mysterious alchemical significance. It's not that any one strand of the story was so terrible or unrealistic, but all together they were way to much. Pick one, Mathews.

The characters were a problem, as well. The two primary supporting characters are probably the best. You get a good sense of who they are, and the author balances their humorous value with more serious sides. The main character, though, is kind of an idiot. While she admits to being something of a b*tch at the end of the book, my issue with her was not that, but that she was totally self-absorbed and really dumb. She wrote people off that she shouldn't have (like the awesome guy she eventually realizes the worth of about 300 pages after you know he's going to be the best thing that ever happened to her), alienated some friends and used others, and constantly got herself into bad situations that she should have seen coming, in most cases, and could have avoided, in virtually all.

I've read other books set in the Netherlands, but it's still unfamiliar enough terrain to me that I think I could have really enjoyed the setting, and the location is very important to the story, but Amsterdam doesn't really come to life here. Also, maybe this is a Dutch thing, or maybe it's some American pc/squeamishness on my part, but I was really, really uncomfortable with the way race was handled/written in the book. At first I thought maybe it was a translation issue, when the main character's friend kept being referred to as "the black girl" over and over again. She has a name, you can use it. Nobody else is referred to as "the white girl/man/etc." But then Mathews started referring repeatedly to another character as "the black." Oh my God. Just call him the Negro and have done with it.

Honestly, even beyond it just making me kind of uncomfortable, it's lazy writing. If the only way you can identify a character is by his or her race, then maybe you need to work a little harder at making him or her memorable. Or even mildly interesting. OR USE HIS OR HER NAME. At one point, when discussing the effect the man had had on another (white) man, Mathews say "the black had stifled him [guy #2]." CAMERON. CAMERON had stifled him. Or "He had stifled X."

Dumb. So glad I'm done with this book. I don't remember ever hearing/thinking about this book, so I'm wondering if I just grabbed it off the shelf at the library because the spine looked cool / the title sounded promising. If that's the case...FAIL.

Orgies

Of reading, obviously.

I plowed through a ton of books this week/end, at least that's what it feels like.

Started Justice Sotomayor's memoir, but I was taking cold medicine for most of the last week, so I didn't want to really get into it, excited as I was to get my hands on it. So more on that later, when I really read it.

What I DID read, and is perfect for when you're not feeling great and spending a lot of time curled up in bed, was the latest Agent Pendergast book, Two Graves. It's pretty much what you'd expect - actually, it's exactly what you'd expect - but that's just fine - it's what I wanted. I will say, I give Preston & Child credit for not recapping the first two books in the trilogy (to say nothing of the entire Pendergast series), and basically just jumping into this particular story. It was schlocky, belief-stretching fun, although way over the top, of course. But who doesn't love when a Nazi hive gets blown up?

After Two Graves I continued on in the same vein with The Third Gate, by half of the same duo, in this case Lincoln Child. It was...fine? It's set at an Egyptian archaeological dig site, so maybe I was extra harsh, given my childhood love for the subject, but I felt like there were a lot of flaws. like the Preston & Child books, a LOT was crammed in - lots of different plot strands, random comments about cars and guns and machines that are maybe boy-brain-action-porn, but weren't doing it for me, and waaaay too much description of the man-made physical setting. Now, about that last maybe part of that is how I read. I generally don't "see" what's being described in my mind's eye, at least not always at the level of detail given, so when you go on and on about how the joists of a particular platform are connected, I get bored. But I think most people would have in this case.

The biggest problem was the huge twist at the end, or at least what I suppose was meant to be a huge twist, was super obvious and I saw it coming right away. Then again, I saw it coming because of clues in the text, so maybe we were supposed to get it, and then saying "you idiots! Don't you see?" to the characters would have ramped up the tension. But instead I just said "you idiots" and then was mildly annoyed when the revelation hit them, because I had been waiting for so long.

The end of the book, too, just seemed very abrupt and unsatisfying. Well, not unsatisfying, because I didn't want anything more, but not satisfying either.

Finished that yesterday, Saturday late afternoon, then started a book called The Apothecary's House (Adrian Mathews) - fine, about art stolen by the Nazis, but it was sloooooow going, so I gave it up, since I started it around 11 p.m. (stayed in last night, long story), and wanted something fast and easy.

So then I flew through another book with NO twist (although, again, when it's that obvious, is it even meant to be a twist?) and a really abrupt and in this case very unsatisfying ending, The Poison Diaries by Maryrose Wood (and inspired by, or something, the work of the Duchess of Northumberland). It's a slim YA book about a girl in eighteenth century England whose father is an herbalist who keeps a locked garden of poisonous plants and about a mysterious young man (heh, I feel cheesy just writing that, but there's no other way) - who's also hot, obviously - who comes to live with them. The main character, even the two main characters, are appealing, and there's so much room in the plot to really explore, but virtually nothing happens and what does happen is incredibly obvious.

And, maybe this is a YA thing, but much like when I watch The Vampire Diaries or Pretty Little Liars on TV, I just want to scream/scold "you stupid adolescent idiot - just TALK to him/her/them and you'll get this all figured out a million times sooner than if you run around trying to do everything on your own and secretly." I guess wisdom comes with age.

Then the end is just like "okay, and now we're done. The end." Dunno. Found myself wishing a better author had taken the same story and made an adult novel out of it.

So then it was 1:30 a.m. (I read it in under 90 minutes), and I had napped from 5:30-7 p.m., so I was awake, so I sped through Lauren Willig's The Mischief of the Mistletoe, which is just such a sweet, adorable little thing (well, almost 400 pages, so maybe not that little...but they are small pages), and then I was happy again, so I went to bed. 

N.B. - looked up The Poison Diaries to the author, and it looks like it's the first in a series. So that may account for the abrupt ending.