Maybe?

 I vaguely remember reading a review of Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead when it came out (in the Times?) and thinking "maybe" - it's about a wedding on a Maine island, both things I find interesting - and then I think never doing anything about it, probably because I was thinking unless I am really excited about something, I need to stop growing my list of books to read. However, I just read a New York Times op-ed ["The Wedding Effect" - What is it about friends getting hitched that leaves us so unhinged?] of hers that I don't think is incredibly original or insightful (or, honestly, fairly original or insightful - or at all) but was well-written, more like an essay than an op-ed, so now I kind of want to read the book. Both copies at Harvard have wait-lists, though, and I don't want to request to be added to the list.  I might already on it, for one thing, and I am too lazy to log into my account and look. Also because I really need to chill on ordering books for a bit: I've got a stack to be read at home (not to mention several stacks to "review") and I'm moving in a month, so probably the fewer books I have to drag around the better...  Still, at some point I think I'd like to give Ms. Shipstead's work a shot.

A Month's Worth of Books, pt. 2

Okay, so, my thoughts on some of the books I read over the last month - we'll call this the "Foreign Mystery" edition:

S.J. Parris, Heresy - I read this one a while ago, but I got the sequel from the library, so i figured I'd re-read the first one so that I'd remember who/what was going on. I guess that was a good idea? In any case, the book was also fine, I guess? I read it either right around the time of the wedding (my best friend's wedding, yay!) or right after, so I was really just looking to relax with something mindless. And mindless it was, despite being a period mystery starring Giordano Bruno. What does it say about me that I find it more interesting to ponder if it should be "S.J." or "S. J." than the book itself?

S.J. Parris, Prophecy - I suppose this one deserves a review of it's own, since it's not a re-read, but I don't really remember it all that well at this point. More Giordano Bruno in England, working as an information-gatherer. I think it was...fine? Not so bad I stopped reading, or that I remember having a strong negative reaction, but certainly not good. I do vaguely remember thinking that I'm done with the series; even if there's another one written, I don't have any desire to read it (or them). I've stuck with plenty of other series before, even when they weren't all that well-written, but I'm not invested in the character, either, so it's just not worth the time.

Teresa Solana, A Not So Perfect Crime - I'm not sure if "Murder and Mayhem in Barcelona" is part of the title or just a snazzy teaser line they put on the cover. In any case, apparently the book won a prize for being the best crime novel written in Catalan in 2007. I'm thinking maybe there weren't a lot of competitors? I feel bad being snarky, but it really wasn't all that impressive. Not sure if maybe it was a translation issue, but I just didn't feel like the story was that good. It wasn't gripping, or compelling, or even, really, interesting, and in the case of a mystery, that's a pretty bad thing. The basic premise was interesting: a man and his brother work as fixers, more or less, but nobody knows that they're brothers, and their company is more or less literally a shell. They have an office, and there are fake doors in the wall that lead to the "offices" and when clients come they greet them in the main area, saying the other offices are being painted, and the receptionist is out - and even leave a bottle of nail polish on "her" desk to help sell the illusion. In that sense I felt like the author put a lot of thought into the book - her main characters and their setting, the world they live in and move through, is creatively and vividly imagined and fleshed out. The plot was boring though - no suspense, no surprises. Some humor, but nothing that stood out.

Do I seriously not read anymore?

I feel like I do...maybe I just don't remember to post. Anyhow, read Geraldine Brooks' latest, Caleb's Crossing. It was fine, and now it has to go back to the library - it is popular, at least, for sure!

late might not be better than ever

But in any case,  a while ago I read Cereus Blooms at Night, by Shani Mootoo; enjoyed the story & characters quite a bit (imaginative and unique, but believably familiar at the same time, if that makes sense.  The dialogue irritated me, though - literally, almost, in so far as it didn't make me angry as much as it sort of chafed at my brain and mental ear...  Mootoo, who I think is from Trinidad (already returned the book, and am too lazy to look it up) & sets the story in a imaginary West Indian place, attempts to replicate a...general West Indian patois?  I have no idea if it's even authentic or not, but it comes and goes willy-nilly, and when it comes, it feels forces.  Perhaps if it had been more consistent it wouldn't have bugged me so much, but it just didn't seem like it fit.  The post-colonial and gender/sexual identity issues, on the other hand, were handled lightly and gracefully, and were an absolute delight.  I see now that she has some other books, and I think I would definitely read one or more of them...
I would also maybe read more by Claire Harman, author of Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World - a bit on the light side, to be sure, but interesting.  Harman traces Austen's early writing and publishing attempts, and how her cult was slowly (well, in fits and starts, some very, very fast) grown over the years.  Very chatty tone; I think I would have preferred something a bit more scholarly, but it worked well for pre-bed reading.  Another small complaint would be that she references a lot of images not all of which are reproduced in the book, so some of them are kind of hard to picture, but I suppose there may have been prohibitive costs associated with some of the images.  My fingers are too cold to type more about it, but it was fun, in any case - and gratifying to know how many super smart people think she's nifty...
Additionally, I finally learned more about the most deliciously "cheeky experiment" (thank you, Guardian, that wouldn't get said in an American paper), in which someone tried to get only barely-disguised versions of Austen's books published, and was rather soundly rejected: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/jul/19/books.booksnews.  I HAVE to think that a lot of the rejections were because the books were so obviously Austen's classics, even if the letters didn't say so - one imagines the manuscript was picked up, a page or two was read, and it was immediately dumped in the "no way in Hell pile" where it was later picked up by another person entirely, who wrote a bland rejection letter without reading the mss.  At least, I hope that's what happened!

Also fun (for me, anyhow), but MUCH more scholarly was Susan Hardman Moore's Pilgrims: New World Settlers and the Call of Home, which I've been wanting to read for a while, and then had to read for work, so that worked out.  Really interesting book about the Puritans (and others) who went to Massachusetts / New England in the 1630s and 40s and then ended up going back to England.  The strength of the book definitely lies in her case studies, where she follows the lives of individuals who came over and then returned.  She's weaker on the math: there aren't all that many numbers, and the ones she has start to fall apart a little when you get into how she arrived at them.  Still, excellent work for what it is, if not what it aims to be.

UMass Amherst History Department publications

Just some housekeeping posts today - first, I finally got around to reading the History Department newsletter, and there are some books, etc. I want to keep tabs on.
-the current working title of Carlin Barton's third book is Between the Axe and the Altar; can't wait!!!
-Dick Minear has a book review on http://www.japanfocus.org/, which I definitely need to read
-Barry Levy recently published Town Born: the Political Economy of New England from Its Founding to the Revolution (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009)
-Anne Broadbridge is working on her next book which is going to be about imperial women of the Mongol Empire - so cool!!!

weekend reading

Started with Fever Dream by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child.  Not awesome, but so, SO much better than the last couple of books in the series.  I suspect because the super stupid brother character is gone.  Thank God.  Second-most annoying character appears infrequently, although I suspect she will be more, if not entirely, front and center in the next book (which, as usual, Misters Preston and Child not only hint at constantly throughout the story proper, but plug shamelessly, if ever there was a shameless plugging, in the end papers of the book). 

Next came Sovereign by C. J. Sansom.  I liked this one even better than the last Matthew Shardlake mystery I read - huzzah for authors who get better.  The kinks are clearly being worked out, and I really appreciated that while the author refers to events in past books, he does not ram ads for the previous installments, in the guise of plot, down the reader's throat.

After that (Monday-Tuesday, hooray long weekend!) was "An Abigail Adams Mystery" by Barbara Hamilton called The Ninth Daughter.   I was hoping it'd be good, given the character/setting, but it was...meh.  Not bad, not good.  This may be the "first in a new series!" but I'm not going to be searching out the next one. 

it's been a week?

I could have sworn I wrote about the last Maisie Dobbs book I read last week - in any case, as expected, The Mapping of Love and Death, by Jacqueline Winspear, was quite enjoyable.  However, as I was reading this, the seventh book in the Maisie Dobbs series, I realized that I had not read the 6th, Among the Mad.  I know that I meant to, and, honestly, I would have sworn that I had read all the ones that have been published since I first discovered the series.  In fact, now that I consider it, I think I saw Among the Mad at Harvard Bookstore, then went and did a little digging, discovered it was the sixth in the series, and got the others out of the library.  So maybe I got distracted?  Still and all, the title seemed so familiar.  But the events that were referred to in Mapping were not familiar, and it was clear there was a gap between where I was in Maisie's & her companions' stories, and where Mapping picked up.  In any case, I have now checked Among the Mad out of the library, and I am sure I will be able to enjoy it despite knowing some of the major developments now.

But, as I was saying, Mapping of Love and Death was good.  Not the best as far as mysteries, but Winspear draws her characters and settings so well, it's just nice to escape into that world for a while.  I could use a place to escape to this week, so I am pleased to have Among the Mad at home.  Mapping did seem different from the other books in the series, though, in that there wasn't the usual setting out of Maisie's backstory (how she came to be a lady detective-cum-...psychologist?).  It was nice for me, because having read five other books about her, I didn't need the history lesson; that said, particularly given some of the circumstances of this story, I think that a reader new to the series would be a bit confused as to just what Maisie Dobbs does/is, how she got to be that way, and what some of the relationships between characters are all about.

After Mapping I read Jennifer Lee Carrell's Haunt Me Still - and, honestly, not sure I wish I had.  I really, really enjoyed Carrell's first book, The Speckled Monster: A Historical Tale of Battling the Smallpox Epidemic, which I picked up from a  bargain bin at the COOP one day.  Now, that book, about the efforts to introduce "variolation" (inoculation - I think, sometimes I get inoculation and vaccination confused, but I THINK inoculation is giving a little bit of the smallpox virus, so you don't get full-blown smallpox, and vaccination is using the cowpox [cow/vacc-] virus as figured out by Jenner and then Pasteur) that were simultaneously undertaken in England by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (such a great character) and in Boston by Zabdiel Boylston, in the early 18th century, is fantastic.  I mean - really, really fun to read and super informative.  Now, in the end papers to Haunt Me Still, Speckled Monster is described as "a work of historical nonfiction" and that is absolute bullsh*t.  It's totally a novel - JLC follows Montagu and Boylston about their day-to-day lives and imagines feelings and conversations - but it is a great novel jam-packed with historical fact and "local color," as it were.  After reading it, I was excited to discover Interred with Their Bones, her novel featuring a Shakespeare scholar-cum-theater director [I am using cum a lot today, weird.] where there are lost manuscripts and murders and she goes racing around Widener to escape a killer!!!  Except it kinda sucked.  Not at all gripping, the bad guy turns out to be exactly who you thought all along, and it's just ludicrously improbable.  I mean, there is only so much disbelief I can willingly suspend.  At least, for that calibre of writing; maybe the same plot in another author's hands would be more compelling.  But she wrote one wicked awesome book, and has a great first name :) so I gave her another chance and grabbed Haunt Me Still from the library.  I...I don't even know.  Honestly, I am not even sure that the whole story makes sense to me, now that I've read it, and it could be that I'm just not smart enough, or was just missing something, in part because I read the second half after getting a bunch of bad news, and my concentration was completely shot, but I think the plot just didn't really hang together if you examine it at all closely.  Suffice it to say the Scottish Play turns out to be an actual guide to a black magic rite involving bloody (and bloody) sacrifice...oh, and let's throw John Dee in there too.  Okay.  Yeah.

Additionally, T(2) send me a link to a Boston Globe Magazine article, an excerpt from that new Emily Dickinson biography, so that reminded me I wanted to read it.  First, though, I should finish the book about the Pilgrims I started over the weekend.  Definitely not easy / escapist enough for me right now, though, so it will have to wait.  In the meantime, just started Dissolution by C. J. Sansom, which I think I saw / came across a reference to somewhere and wanted to read - and, because I then said that in this blog, I remembered!  And was able to track it down!  Honestly, I'm only a few pages in, but I'm not so sure it would have been a terrible thing if I had forgotten about it, but I am sure it'll be an acceptable time while-away-er (whiler away?).  It's a mystery set during Tom Cromwell's abbey-dissolving days under Henry VIII, featuring a hunchback, Protestant, lawyer-cum-detective [okay, that cum I put in just because I could - but, still, it works].

Weekend update

Am so far behind on my "book reports" - 1) Haunting Bombay, by Shilpa Agarwal, was really quite good.  A little uneven; parts were fantastic, parts not so much - the big surprises were not really that surprising, and the author and/or editors seem to not be quite sure what to do with the "Indian" stuff - ie, which words are italicized, which not, which need to be explained, which not, and that can get a little bumpy.  Ha - they did NOT choose to translate "benchot," but now I know how to spell my favorite Hindi swear, good times.  Over all, I really liked it, though, and I would definitely recommend it (with reservations, to the right people) and look for other books by the same author.  OH MY GOD, MIGHT TAKE THAT BACK.  Just googled Agarwal, and went to her website to see if she had any other books - and there is a TRAILER for the NOVEL.  WTF?  It is the most cheesy, ridiculous thing I have ever seen - ye olde exotic India.  Bah.  But...the book was good, so I guess I should let it go.  There's a reading guide on the website (haven't looked at it), but I think that makes sense - as I read the book I was thinking this would be a good novel for a book club to take on, because there's lots of room for interpretation and debate.  
After Haunting Bombay I read The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti which I just loved, loved,  loved.  I finished it on the T, and I was trying to hard not to cry at points, and not many books make me tear up, but it was touching and sweet, along with moments of finely delineated cruelty and ugliness and more than a few hilarious lines and scenes.  There were also a few words I had to go and look up, which I always appreciate in a book.  My only issue with the book was that I was never totally clear on when in time it was happening; I was thinking early nineteenth century at first, but then I was thinking maybe just before the Civil War?  A copy of James Fennimore Cooper's The Deerslayer plays a role in the book, and when I checked on the publication date, I knew we had to be talking post-1841.  Additionally, there was a lot of talk of older orphan boys being drafted into the army - but there was no mention of the war (that I recall), and they seem to have been mostly used out in the West, so maybe the Mexican-American War (late 1840s)?  That might make sense: the army needed free boys, but wasn't drafting - because there were all sorts of men wandering aimlessly around, so it DEFINITELY wasn't during the Civil War.  Ultimately it didn't really matter to me that I didn't have a firm idea of "when" we were in time, with the story,  but it was a minor, nagging issue.  Oddly enough, I am experiencing the same unsettlement with the book I'm reading right now, East of the Sun (or something like that), which is about English girls in India in the late 1940s (or 50s?), but the whole thing where the random white girls are swanning around being all memsahib-y while their husbands play polo with their regiments through simmering unrest is so totally classic English-in-India that it could be the 1840s or 50s and I keep forgetting when, exactly, we're supposed to be, until there's a mention of, say, Gandhi, rather than the sepoys.  In any case, more about that book later, when I have finished it.  Finally, we have
Bitter is the New Black: Confessions of a Condescending, Egomaniacal, Self-Centered, Smart-Ass, or why you should never carry  Prada Bag to the unemployment office, by Jen Lancaster.  I am not sure now, but I think I requested this book from deposit after reading that Lauren Willig was reading/liked it (or the author?), figuring that since I like LW's books, I might like what she likes.  That said, at first I HATED it.  I mean, seriously, Lancaster comes across as a raging b*tch, for real.  And I know that "raging b*tch" is a way over-used phrase, but "shrieking, insensitive, self-centered harpy" doesn't begin to describe it.  I almost put the book down after the first few pages because I hated the narrator so much, but I was stuck on the T (it didn't help that I was still trying to blink away tears from finishing The Good Thief) so I kept reading.  And I guess I'm glad I did.  Lancaster is definitely funny, and sloooooowly some evidence of nice character traits started to emerge.  The book is a memoir of sorts that takes us through Lancaster being laid off, and her increasingly desperate search for work, including the blog she starts chronicling her life, the job hunt, and the job rejections and pitfalls.  And the time she brought the Prada bag to the unemployment office.  Eventually the blog gets her noticed by a literary agent, and she gets a book deal (for Bitter), but not before hitting some really rough times with her boyfriend/husband.  It's a pretty predictable progression - she gets nicer as life gets harder - but it works.  I think we were supposed to find her initial horridness funny, but it was just too over the top for me (honestly, I was baffled for most of the book by why her boyfriend was even with her), but by the second half of the book I was laughing more, maybe because then she seemed more like a real person and less like a caricature.  Finished the book Friday night (3-4 days ago), and not sure how I feel.  Liked parts, hated parts, not sure if I loved any parts.  Don't feel like it was a waste of time, but not sure if I would read more by her...maybe.  Jury's out.

Belle of Amherst

Just came across an interesting little piece in the New York Times, "My Hero, the Outlaw of Amherst," by Holland Cotter.  It's just a reflection on what Emily Dickinson meant to the author, and a little about how she had been perceived / written about over the years and in different books.  It was nice timing because earlier today I checked out from Widener Emily Dickinson: A Biography, by Connie Ann Kirk (2004), as a start to a semi-planned Dickinson investigation.  I decided a while ago that I really know much too little about her, given what an important (canonically, at least) poet she is, and given the Amherst connection.  I don't do well with a lot of poetry, but she is an Amherstian, Carlin Barton likes her, and she is (I think) somewhat connected to "my" family (the Porter-Phelps-Huntington clan of my honors thesis), so I should be more familiar with her even if I never become a fan.  And even if I never get really into the poetry, the whole life & times bit seems potentially fascinating.  I actually avoided her for a while in part because it was a little overwhelming actually in Amherst (she's everywhere), but now that just benefits as far as the nostalgia factor.  The whole sexuality deal was also sort of a burn-out kind of roadblock for me, since it, too, was just SO constantly front and center in every aspect of scholastic life in the Valley, but I think I can handle it now :) 

So, I am going to start with the Kirk biography because it is recent (and so hopefully not totally bound up in crazy "no, really, she was the epitome of proper Victorian womanhood" thing in the older books, but also past the 1970s, '80s, and '90s "let make her a poster girl for X" enthusiasm), and super skinny & easily available.  I'll start digging in more after that.  If I get bored, a Secret Life of Emily Dickinson by Jerome Charyn was published recently, which looks and sounds (based on the cover and title, I mean, and a super brief reference in the Cotter essay) totally frothy and ridiculous, so that might be good to gear me back up if the lit crit stuff gets too much.  A new biography, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds, by Lyndall Gordon, is coming out next month, and according to Cotter it's something of a soap opera, so that should be fun.  Title is awesome, anyways!

Not sure how this all is going to play out, but I am looking forward to it...