Book Cannibal

Little, Big by John Crowley

2010-06-04T15:40:00.002-04:00

The universe was telling to me read this book. It's been recommended to me so many times over the last few years by so many people whose opinions I respect that I just couldn't go another day without reading it, so I ran out and bought it.

That was over two months ago and I still haven't finished it. It's a strange book. I've never read John Crowley before and had no idea what to expect. For all the people who raved about the book, no one ever really talked about what it was about, or what happened, or maybe they did and it didn't stick in my mind, and when you read the back cover you're like okay, okay, okay, but then you're still not sure what kind of novel you're standing in line to buy. And that feeling has followed me through my reading experience. I'd be enjoying the book, but when people asked me about it, I found myself oddly tongue tied. It's about this guy, Smokey, who marries this girl Daily Alice who lives in a five-sided house, each side done in a different architectural style, and seemingly more vast on the inside than the outside, and somehow a portal into another world or dimension, for some characters. And the story is so big, like family saga big, because we keep getting stories of Daily Alice's ancestors and their encounters (or lack of encounters) with "them" the people in the other world, (who I thought of as elves), and the history of the house. It was really hard for me to get a hold on this story. I'd feel like I had a pretty strong handle on it, and I'd feel involved, until I stopped to think about it a little harder, and then it all would slip away and get foggy. It's like when you're figuring out a new piece of music and you just have to trust your fingers to know what to do and where to go and if you try too hard you'll lose it altogether.

Because of this quality, I'm reading this book very slowly. So slowly that I've finished eight other books since I've started it (Robert McCammon's Mr. Slaughter, John Hart's The Last Child, Ron Rash's One Foot in Eden, Michael Connolly's The Closers, Kathryn Stockett's The Help, Dan Simmons' Hyperion, A. Lee Martinez's Gil's All Fright Diner, and Steig Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo). All of which are fabulous books that were page-turners for me and easy to understand. I was surprised when I was supposed to be surprised. With Little, Big I was more or less in a continual state of surprise or raised eyebrows. The characters never reacted like I expected them to. I couldn't adjust to their world. This led me to a philosophical question: was the author thwarting my expectations on purpose, or was I bringing my commercial expectations to a book where they just didn't apply?

The best way to describe my experience of this book is through movies. So many movies have the same narrative arc. The main character wants something. People tell them it's unattainable. Their family and friends are not supportive, or indifferent. The person does it anyhow, against enormous odds and multiple setbacks. Then you watch a movie like Once, which is about a Scottish musician working as a Hoover repairman. He wants to record an album. He doesn't have any money, but he teams up with a Czech pianist, and gets some guys off the street to play drums and backup and whatever. His dad, instead of being a nay saying asshole, is supportive. The studio guys are skeptical, but quickly won over by his talent. I kept waiting for the scene where they'd steal his album and screw him, but that didn't come. In the end, he made this beautiful album. Nothing really went wrong. I spent the whole movie full of anxiety, waiting for the axe that never fell.

Which is how I feel reading Little, Big. Is it just me, or does the author keep setting me up for something bad to happen when nothing bad does? Smokey has to jump through all these hoops to marry Daily Alice and I'm thinking, this whole book is going to be about him trying to marry her and things are going to keep going wrong and they'll never get to spend their lives together... but they actually get married pretty quickly and have four kids. Then Smokey sleeps with Daily Alice's sister and I'm thinking okay, the shit's gonna really hit the fan now, but Daily Alice is fine with it and the situation is diffused. I guess all these characters just have bigger things to worry about, like those elves that never get explained.

People who have read Little, Big: I need your encouragement. I'm half way through, and while the writing is incredible, I'm losing steam. Should I finish this thing?

How to Break The Rules

2010-02-12T11:11:00.000-05:00

This post is on behalf of the San Francisco Writers Conference, where I'm giving a talk about The Rules of Writing, and how to break them. The conference suggested this post as an alternative to showing up with 100 photocopied handouts, which would have meant not having enough space for all those little 3oz bottles and an extra pair of shoes (thank you internet!). If you attend the conference and don't receive a handout, this is for you. And for all you other rebel writers out there.

Before we can break any rules, we must first establish some. I think it's important to be mindful of when you are doing something unconventional, and do it with good reason and style. Let's start with Kurt Vonnegut's 8 Rules of Writing:*

1) Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that they will not feel the time was wasted.

2) Give the reader at least one character they can root for.

3) Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4) Every sentence must do one of two things - reveal character or advance the plot.

5) Start as close to the end as possible.

6) Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them - in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7) Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8) Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

I find most of Kurt Vonnegut's rules hard to argue with. Sure, you can cast an antihero as your main character, like American Psycho's Pat Bateman, or pretty much everyone in a Chuck Palaniuk novel, or even Amir from The Kite Runner, but if the reader doesn't find some reason to root for them they will probably stop turning the pages.

Here are Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing:

1) Never open a book with the weather.

2) Avoid prologs.

3) Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialog.

4) Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said"

5) Keep your exclamation points under control.

6) Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose"

7) Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.

8) Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.

9) Don't go into great detail describing places and things.

10) Try to leave out the parts the readers tend to skip.

Elmore Leonard's rules are much more particular. Most of these rules are easy to break and are broken regularly.

And to fill in any that Kurt and Elmore missed, here's my own list which includes rules we've all heard before:

Show, don't tell

You can't have nothing happening / bring characters on with action

Don't lecture

No dreams

Don't describe scenery

Don't bog down your opening with backstory

The protagonists shouldn't keep secrets from the reader

Write what you know

These are all wonderful rules. Writing a book is challenging enough, and most writers will find these rules instructive instead of restrictive. Following them can help you tell your story in the most entertaining and accessible way possible. But some of you people are just ornery, or chafe against any restraints, and believe that rules were made to be broken. Fair enough. You think the best way to start your novel is by describing the weather? Have a hankering for prologs? Want to keep key elements of your story a secret until the very end? Prefer to open your novel with a discourse on morality? You can do it, but you'll want to tread carefully. And you'll want to study the authors who have broken these Rules, and figure out how they got away with it.

Rule #1: Show, Don't Tell

Rule Breaker: Carolyn Parkhurst, Dogs of Babel - first page

The first paragraph of this novel breaks one of the most well-known rules of writing, the ubiquitous Show, Don't Tell. The narrator tells us very plainly that one afternoon his wife climbed an apple tree in their backyard and fell to her death. He states the date and gives his wife's full name, as if issuing a report. This opening is most assuredly Told, Not Shown. Yet somehow it is full of emotion. And I'm guessing that most of you, after reading it, want to read more.

How did she successfully break the most basic rule of writing? First, she chose to flatly narrate, or "tell" a very intriguing bit of information. The wouldn't have worked if she was "telling" about the character brushing his teeth or driving to work. Also, this is a scene that most writers would sensationalize, and her unconventional choice calls attention to itself. If you read carefully I think you can pick up on how the narrator is using this removed style in order to distance himself from the reality of his wife's bizarre death.

Rule #2: No Prologs

Rule Breaker: Donna Tartt, The Secret History - prologue

This rule is broken often and well. I chose this example, but there are hundreds of others that come to mind, particularly in the mystery and thriller genres. Prologs don't tend to work so well when they feature a character who isn't the main character, or a point in time deep in the novel's (or the universe's) past. This particular prolog works beautifully. The opening line is: "The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation." This prolog is narrated from the novel's future, after the story has ended. In a different novel, Bunny's death would be quite the spoiler, since he doesn't die until at least half way through the story. But here, knowing that Bunny will die, and knowing that the narrator will have something to do with it adds a lot of tension and suspense, and allows the author to take a lot of time developing characters and atmosphere and to linger over details that might make the book drag if you didn't know one of the main characters was going to eventually be killed by the other main characters.

Rule #3: Don't Lecture

Rule Breaker: Jed Rubenfeld, The Interpretation of Murder - first page

The opening of this novel suggests that man must chose between happiness and meaning. Live for the present moment and be happy, or live in your past to find meaning. It should be real buzz kill of an opening, but somehow it's not. How does he get away with this, and how can you? First, he keeps it short. Second, he ties it in directly to what's happening to him at that specific moment, instead of tying it to some vague impending life crisis he's been on the verge of having. The key is that he makes the lecture immediately relevant, and travels very quickly from the abstract to the specific, and to the here and now. The narrator has always chose meaning over happiness. Which is how he found himself waiting for the arrival of the "steamship George Washington, bound from Bremen, carrying to our shores the one man in the world I wanted most to meet." The author has tied the hypothetical to something important happening now.

Rule #4: Don't Open with Backstory

Rule Breaker: Dennis Lehane, Mystic River - first three pages

Dennis Lehane opens his breakout book, Mystic River, with what can only be described as backstory. The three main characters are kids, and we hear about what their fathers did for a living, get a description of the neighborhood, where they go to school. It should be boring, but it isn't. Why? He's accomplishing a lot with this backstory. Where another writer might be content to simply set the scene and give us some character background Lehane takes this opportunity to set up a dichotomy that is critical to both his plot and character development. These paragraphs are doing double duty for him. And he does the job quickly, in sweeping strokes: "So while Sean went to Saint Mike's Parochial in black pants, black tie, and blue shirt, Jimmy and Dave went to Lewis M. Dewey School on Blaxston. Kids at the Looey & Dooey got to wear street clothes, which was cool, but they usually wore the same ones three out of five days, which wasn't." In just two sentences you have a clear idea of the differences between these characters, and the shape their conflicts will take.

Rule #5: Don't Describe Scenery / Can't have nothing happening

Rule Breaker: Jim Butcher, Dead Beat - first three pages

I'm pretty sure Jim Butcher breaks a couple of rules with the opening of this 7th book in the Dresden Files. He spends the first two pages pondering the story of Cain and Abel and describing his apartment. It shouldn't be compelling, but it is. His apartment is a complete wreck, and he uses the bible story to talk about his urge to kill his half brother. So there's a conflict sewn into the description, which makes it much more interesting to read. What he's done is made the description immediately relevant, and it's serving two purposes - 1) we getting a visual of where Dresden lives, and 2) with each item he tells is out of place or destroyed, we better understand his murderous frustration with his brother/roommate. Butcher also uses humor to keep us engaged. The lesson here is that description works best when it is not limited to merely describing something physical, like a house or a town or the weather, but when it uses these features to introduce a character conflict or some problem that the character is having. On the surface, nothing much is happening here, but after these three pages of description we know enough about these two characters and their issues to want to read more.

Lets now talk more generally about one of the rules, without any more drawn out examples. Vonnegut's last rule is (to paraphrase): Give your readers as much information as possible upfront so they have a complete understanding of what is going on. This is a rule that most writers of speculative fiction will break. If it's not broken well, the result can be a very frustrating reading experience. But many writers break this rule well, and hold back key elements of their world-building until late in the story. Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union and Richard Morgan's books come to mind. Had these authors explained the ins and outs of their worlds up front it would have created a huge infodump that may have had readers skimming. Instead, they waited to reveal the details of how their worlds work, or are different from ours, until it became absolutely necessary to the story that the reader (or the characters) have this information. It's a fine line between making sure readers don't feel lost and dumping a ton of information on them all at once.

To generalize, all these rule breakers break the rules as a way to springboard readers more effectively into their stories. If it's backstory or description or even a lecture they are giving, they make it necessary information for you to understand or more fully appreciate the conflict facing the main character.

I would love to hear your feedback. Which of your favorite authors are expert rule breakers? Or maybe the question should be, do any authors actually manage to follow all of these rules?

*Kurt Vonnegut's rules were written for short story writers, though I think that they can be easily apllied to novels (with the possible exception of the 8th rule). Vonnegut also qualifies his list of rules by saying that Flannery O'Connor broke all them except the first one.

About Last Year

2010-02-04T09:48:00.001-05:00

2009 was a singular year for me. When I say singular I mean it in the Sherlock Holmes way, not the opposite-of-plural way. I've always had the habit of adopting certain words or speech patterns from the books I read, and I'm currently on a Sherlock Holmes bender. It could be worse. It has been worse. Like the time I tried to read The Canterbury Tales in Middle English.

If you don't count all the baby books and manuscripts I read last year, I didn't read a whole lot. Which partially explains the on-line silence. In truth, I was so busy figuring out how to balance my career and my new son and the death twitches of my social life that I didn't make time for pleasure reading, or blogging. That was 2009. This is 2010. I've recovered from the shock of parenthood, am moderately well-rested, and have resumed my old habits and ticks. I have goals. One of them is to update this blog at least every other week. I know, it's a big jump from twice annually. But here goes.

Another thing that got overlooked in 2009? Queries. Because when agents are crunched for time, that's one of the first things that gets pushed to the side. Queries don't seem as urgent or important as a pending translation deal, or a film contract, or submitting an author's manuscript, and for the most part, they aren't. However, for someone like me, who has found so many clients in the so called slush, I can't afford to let them go unread. I've recommitted myself to my query pile. I've vowed to do what it takes to read them within four weeks (as our website promises). Even if "what it takes" means late nights and overcaffeination and... (I'm loath to admit to this)... interns.

I've come to think of interns as publishing's dirty little secret. Sometimes I wonder if the industry would run without them. I've had interns in the past, but always to assist with the more mechanical and administrative aspects of my job. I've never trusted anyone to read my queries because, well, they're my queries and I feel absurdly protective of them. No one has quite my taste, so how will they be able to weed out what I'll like? What if they miss something? And don't I owe it to every author to personally read their query, since they personally chose to write to me? All valid concerns. But the reality was that I couldn't create enough time to read them. Interns have their drawbacks, but without one there was no way I'd be able to manage my queries efficiently give every author the response they deserve in something resembling a timely fashion.

With the help of two brilliant interns I've now read everything that was sent to me in January, and most of what came in December and November. However, with so much new material coming in daily I've decided to focus my attention on the most recent queries. From here on out, I will not continue to read old e-mail queries: so much of the material is no longer available, or is being revised, and as you can imagine, authors aren't all that pleased to hear from me after such a delay, and are not shy about expressing their displeasure. So, if you sent me a query before November and have not heard back, please feel free to resubmit. I will do my best to respond within four weeks.

On most days there is a lot to do that is more immediately lucrative reading my queries. But something keeps bringing me back to them, day after day. It's that little thing called hope. Hope that the next query you read will transport you and give you that thrill of discovery. It's not dissimilar to the hope I imagine that writers feel when they send their query off into the ether. Most days I won't find anything. But one day I will. And it will make all the other days worth it.

Declaration

2010-02-01T21:09:00.000-05:00

This weekend Amazon removed all of Macmillan's books, both print and electronic editions, from their store. What that means is that only used copies of these books are available on Amazon, so the author has no chance of making any money from any sales off Amazon. Amazon accounts for such a large percentage of overall book sales that removing these books, even just for a weekend, could be crippling.

What happened? Briefly, Macmillan wants electronic versions of hardcover new releases to be priced somewhere between $12 and $15, instead of Amazon's ubiquitous $9.99. When Amazon wouldn't budge on the price, Macmillan said they would delay the release of e-book editions 7 months after hardcover release. Maybe this was the point where Amazon went ape shit and pulled all of Macmillan's books, in a knee jerk show of anger and power.

Macmillan is the parent company to St. Martin's Press, Holt, FSG, Tor, Picador, and others. Our agency has quite a lot of authors with Macmillan, particularly with Tor and St. Martin's Press. Obviously, our authors are deeply impacted. They are puzzled over how quickly their books were taken hostage in this sudden corporate war. And they are pissed.

What really gets me is Amazon's school yard bully response. The debate is over e-book pricing, so if they had to flex their muscles and beat their chests why not just remove the electronic editions? Why extend this to print editions, when there is no issue with that format? It seems petty and mean. What could Amazon possibly gain? Not any sales, and not any good publicity. See John Scalzi's post for a play by play on how they've taken every opportunity to forfeit business and alienate customers.

Sunday afternoon Amazon caved and offered this explanation to its customers (though as of this posting none of the Macmillan titles I've checked are available of purchase). Here's the relevant part of the letter:

We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan's terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books.

This made me laugh. I don't have a business degree or anything, but saying that Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, isn't that like complaining that Crest Toothpaste has a monopoly over Crest Toothpaste? In other words, can you really call having control over your own products a monopoly? It seems like Amazon is really trying to paint a picture where they're just some small honest retailer trying their damnedest to give their customers the best deal they can, but are being undermined by big bad Macmillan and their "monopoly." Give me a break. The relationship between publishers and retailers has been ludicrously lopsided for as long as I've been in the industry, with the lion's share of the power residing with the retailer. More and more books are packaged and repackaged to please Barnes & Noble, and an outdated returns systems protects retailers and guarantees that publishers foot the bill for any unsold stock. In this environment, publishers (even Macmillan), are the little guys. It's refreshing to see one of them stand up to a retailer, and win.

Which isn't to say that I'm happy with Macmillan. They recently rewrote their publishing contracts to stipulate that authors receive 20% of net for all e-books sold. This is significantly below what has been emerging as industry standard, and so far John Sargent has been unapologetic about such low-balling. I find his reasoning infuriating, and it's somewhat gratifying to see Amazon fall victim to his stubbornness. Also, it's possible that despite the price hike, the author's share may end up being less under this new model. No, I'm not normally disposed to take Macmillan's side, but it's an easy call here.

This latest Amazon stunt has pushed me over the edge. I can no longer in good conscious buy any more stuff from them. I've had this thought before, but hesitated to make such a declarative statement, not wanting to take it back later (and I can just spend hours reading Amazon's reader reviews). But this time it's personal. Amazon has just cost me money, and not in the I-can't-believe-I-actually-ordered-these-red-glitter-grips way. Not that they will miss my business. But I'm betting a lot of other authors (particularly Macmillan authors) feel the same way as I do. And the thing about authors? They buy a lot of books.

Queries

2009-04-20T20:49:00.000-04:00

I must take a moment to talk about Queries. Because the internet is big and wide and endless and there is conflicting information about whether or not I respond to e-queries that I'm not interested in. I wish I could blame this inconsistency on someone else, but it's my fault. In a blog post from a year ago I wrote:

"I don't respond to e-queries that I'm not interested in. This is because at least 1 in every 5 writers e-mails me back to argue with my form letter, or to ask indignantly, "did you actually read my query?" and I have this stupid urge to write back and say something like "Read it? Your query and I have run off and joined the circus together. We are very happy. I hope you find similar fulfillment." Clearly, this is a vicious cycle that must be avoided, and I can't always trust my professionalism to win out over my idiotic creative impulses."

This was true at one time. But not anymore. I have been responding to every e-query I receive since last summer or so. Because it makes me feel better about myself. Really, I don't want to be that person who doesn't respond; I don't want to leave people hanging. But there are rules. You have to address the e-query to me. And the e-query has to be for a book. Simple rules, but they disqualify about 10% of the e-queries I receive.

Our agency website is and always has been up-to-date when it comes to what we do with e-queries. But I want to be consistent, hence this post.

Writers have pointed out that I have exceeded the 4 week response time as stated on our agency website. Sadly, this is true. As the astute blog reader will have guessed from my previous post, I have a baby. For the time being, I am no longer working nights and weekends. This has really cut into my Time for Queries. My response time is currently closer to 10 weeks, but I am catching up. There is some really great stuff in my inbox. If you are a writer who has sent me a query letter, or is considering it, I ask for your patience for the next month or two.

If you are a reader and wondering if I'll ever post about a book you want to read again, (i.e., a book that has nothing to do with pregnancy or babies), I will, and in the meantime, I promise not to say a damn word about The Happiest Baby on the Block.

Baby Books

2009-01-31T19:50:00.007-05:00

I'm not really sure why or how people come to this blog, but I'll bet it has nothing to do with an unplanned pregnancy. That's about to change. Lets say you suddenly find yourself "with child" and know nothing about pregnancy and childbirth except what you've picked up from novels like Chris Bohjalian's Midwives, and movies like Juno and Knocked Up. What do you do? Once you've overcome the fits of nervous/manic laughter you do the only truly comforting thing you can think of, and surround yourself with Baby Books.

The Baby Books section of the book store is really frightening for the first time browser. Which books do you chose? They all seem so bulky, and there are millions - all this at a time when you're not supposed to carry heavy loads. Can someone just give it to you straight? I'm going to try. Here's a breakdown of my most memorable reads:

What to Expect When You're Expecting, by Heidi Murkoff, Arlene Eisenberg, and Sandee Hathaway.

These ladies have something like seven kids between the three of them, and seem to really know what they are talking about. The book itself is nearly 15 years old (first published in 1984), but it's revised every few years, and the edition I bought is from 2002. This was the first pregnancy book I read, and it was very helpful, since I knew practically nothing about pregnancy or babies. For example, I learned that a baby's first dump is honored with a special name: meconium. Who says that the Right of Passage is dead in American culture?

So many people have since said to me, "I've heard that What to Expect is the worse book to read, really alarmist and it will make you so scared to be pregnant and give birth." I'm not sure why people say this. It just seems like something that's out there in the zeitgeist that people hear and repeat almost mindlessly (but with total conviction), like, "I heard Dennis Lehane's new book was disappointing," when they haven't even read it, or "Jane Eyre is my favorite book of all time."

True, some parts of What to Expect can be alarming. It's organized by month, and each month has a section called "What You May Be Concerned About." Topics for concern include some fairly hardcore concerns, like Venus Changes, Foot Problems, Skin Discoloration, Dental Problems (Bleeding Gums), Faintness and Dizziness, Pain and Numbness in the Hands, Rectal Bleeding and Hemorrhoids, Clogged Milk Duct, and my personal favorite concern, The Reality of Pregnancy. Sure, there is a lot to be concerned about. But I just skipped all the parts that didn't apply to me, which made this 500+ page book a real breeze. In any event, What to Expect has the same reassuring answer for every concern: every woman is different, and what you are experiencing is normal. These mothers are unflappable. They tell stories of doing belly plants at eight months, getting drunk and taking oral contraceptives during those early weeks before you know you're pregnant, and hey, their babies turned out fine.

Actually, what's alarming to me is how nothing seems to alarm these authors. They talk about truly frightening medical interventions in such a blase I'm Okay You're Okay tone that the reader really starts to wonder, "does anything get to them?" It's like how chronically calm people really start to get on your nerves after a while, and you start looking for ways to provoke them. I hope to someday come up with a Concern that makes Heidi, Arlene, and Sandee gasp in unison.

Mayo Clinic Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy, edited by Roger W. Harms, M.D.

My husband bought this book as a medical companion to What to Expect, but actually, it's not as medical as I had hoped. Really, I was hoping for lots of text book-like illustrations of internal organs, and where they go as the baby bullies them out of the way (I'm still not clear on that). This book is also broken down by month, and within that, by week, but the week-by-week information is really skimpy. The most interesting parts are the baby sketches that open each section and are labeled "thirty percent of actual size" or whatever, so if you wanted to spend way too much time teaching your photocopier percentages you could copy it, cut it out, and tape it to your stomach and feel like you know what's going on in there. But even so, I mean seriously Mayo Clinic, sketches? Disappointingly non-medical. I was hoping for real ultrasound photos, or those hideous 3-D photos.

There are other chapters in the Mayo Clinic book that prepare you for Your Newborn, Taking Your Baby Home, and Postpartum Care. There is also 100 pages devoted to Complications of pregnancy and childbirth. The whole tone of the book is very clinical and detached, which makes you think you're reading a text book, but without any of the illustrations. I would skip this one.

The Thinking Woman's Guide to a Better Birth, by Henci Goer.

Finally, we've got a handle on the basics and are getting to the good stuff. The Thinking Woman - that's me! When I first saw this book I sensed that Henci and I had a lot in common. Take the cover art - I could immediately see how the Thinking Woman would need to cut loose every now and then, get naked, wrap herself in toilet paper, and take some profile shots. I mean, I could write an entire post about this cover art, but I'll control myself and stick to the point.

I read this book on the heels of watching the documentary The Business of Being Born, or, as my husband refers to the experience: Watching Ricki Lake Give Birth in her Bathtub. It was an affecting documentary for me - overwrought and Michael Mooreish in places - but I knew I needed to get educated about all the drugs and procedures used on women in labor. And I sensed that Henci was seriously pissed off about them, which was a welcome change from Heidi, Arlene, and Sandee's complacency.

Henci has a serious axe to grind with the medical establishment, and western medicine in general. She, like Ricki Lake, wants to know why women give birth attended by surgeons, when the vast majority of births require no surgical intervention. The problem, as Henci sees it, is that "the typical obstetrician is trained to view pregnant and laboring women as a series of potential problems.... Obstetric belief tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It has been said that a healthy person is someone who hasn't undergone enough testing by specialists." As someone who avoids doctors and hospitals at all costs, I see her point. Whenever I enter a doctor's office or hospital, I'm driven by one simple goal - to get out as soon as possible, at whatever cost.

But Henci takes things a bit too far, even for me. The book is organized by issue, with chapter headings like "The Cesarean Epidemic: Obstetrics on the Cutting Edge," "Induction of Labor: Mother Nature Knows Best," and "Episiotomy: The Unkindest Cut." I learned a lot from reading this book, but I could have done without all the mistrust she has for doctors, which sets up a very us-against-them type of dichotomy. At one point, she warns readers to keep a sharp eye on their doctor, who may perform an Amniotomy (breaking the water with this long crochet hook like thing) without even consulting the patient! Lets picture this one - you're in labor, and the doctor's there, you look the other way for a moment (or maybe the doctor distracts you with one of those, "hey, what's that behind you?!") and before you can protest he swoops in with a sneak-Amniotomy!

In Henci's defense, she is very upfront about her prejudices. Also, she's great at citing her sources and backing up her arguments - she makes a very persuasive case for having a low tech birth.

Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnay, and Other Things I Had To Learn as a New Mom, by Stefanie Wilder-Taylor.

My friend Maria sent me this book. She's not pregnant or a mom, she's just a voracious reader of chick lit, and when she can't find any she grabs up hen lit, grief lit, and mom lit. I don't know what inspired her to read this, but I'm glad she sent it to me when she did, because it provided an excellent counterbalance to The Thinking Woman's Guide. This book is light and fun and humorous and about half as thick. And Stefanie breaks all The Thinking Woman's rules. She has a C-section. She's a bottle-feeder, and describes some very awkward and funny confrontation with "lactivists," - "if these people could breast-feed other people's babies, believe me, they would," and "stopping breast-feeding is like getting out of your Columbia Record and Tape Club membership; there are sinister forces at work that don't want to let this happen." She makes fun of all the questions you're supposed to ask when interviewing possible pediatricians (and you are supposed to interview dozens). I especially liked what she had to say about postpartum depression:

"Women experience postpartum depression in varying degrees. Mine was a pretty rough experience. A percentage of new moms don't get any depression at all. These are the same women who never suffer cramps with their periods, never experience the blinding pain of a migraine, and never had someone break up with them through e-mail. These are the sort of women who enjoyed junior high school. Feel free to resent them, everyone else does."

Another highlight was when Stefanie classified all the different kinds of moms that you will meet in the park while strollering your baby around: "Gossipy Mom," "Safety Patrol Mom," "Crunchy Mom," and "Burnout Mom" are among the categories. I also enjoyed the chapter on babysitter poaching. I didn't learn much from this book, but it was very entertaining, and just what I needed at the time.

Ina May's Guide to Childbirth, by Ina May Gaskin.
This was my favorite pregnancy read. It's pretty crunchy (which I'm sort of into), but not as angry or combative as The Thinking Woman's Guide. Ina May is a midwife who lives on a farm in Tennessee called The Farm, and has been catching babies with her fellow midwives for 20 plus years. The first half of the book is all birth stories. I loved reading these, and probably went through this part of the book three or four times. It's annoying how non-specific everyone seems to be about their labor, like they can't really remember it, or don't want to tell you - and every woman begins or ends their labor stories with the ubiquitous Every Woman is Different mantra, so it's hard to get a handle on what really goes on. That's probably why I latched onto these stories, especially the really long and detailed ones. Some are recent, but others are from the 70s and 80s, and it seemed like whenever any of these women go into labor the first thing they do is go on a hike with their husbands. Seriously. They walk through the woods and see trees and hills and animals rutting and their contractions (which are called "rushes") get stronger. The hiking phase of labor must have really made an impression on me, because at some point during my own labor I made my husband take a walk down 23rd Street with me. Like the women on The Farm, my "rushes" got so out of control that I started freaking out the homeless people - and I didn't even see a rat or squirrel.

The second half of the book talks about the phases of labor, and how your surroundings and emotional and psychological factors affect your progress. Ina May also addresses hospital procedure, and all the devices you're likely to encounter; close to 99% of American women deliver their babies in hospitals, and the vast majority of these babies are caught by obstetricians instead of the midwives. Henci had already done a thorough job of preparing me for all the nefarious hospital devices, so what I got out of this chapter was how to make myself as comfortable as possible in the hospital setting. She makes an excellent point: the cervix, like the anus, is a spincter muscle, and you have to be relaxed for it to open. Case in point - people like their privacy when they take a dump. So why are pregnant women expected to give birth in such brightly lit public places, surrounded by and hooked up to beeping machines, with nurses and doctors (and in some cases, survey takers) coming in and out?

Ina May is absolutely a proponent of natural birth ("natural" meaning unmedicated), but she's practical enough to know that most women in this country don't have that kind of birth experience, and so tailors her advice to a wider audience.

Natural Childbirth the Bradley Way, by Susan McCutcheon.

This is one of those books that's so bad it's good. Every time the word "Bradley" appears on the page (approximately 100 times per page), there's a registered trademark after it, like this: Bradley(R), or this: Bradley Method(R), which I found really amusing, and eventually really annoying. The author is adamant that childbirth doesn't have to be painful, and that for some women, herself included, it is orgasmic. (Which makes you wonder what exactly constitutes an orgasm for these women...). The primary way to have an orgasmic labor is to get your husband to massage your back just so. This is what I love about this book: it takes all the pressure off you and puts it on your husband. If he can only master the Bradley(R) massage technique, you'll climax your way through childbirth. No pressure honey!

Here's some typical advice for husbands which I'm guessing hints at Susan's husband's learning curve, and gives you an idea of the tone of the book:

"Have your hand in place before the contraction starts. Don't wait for her to tell you the contraction is under way and then try to put your hand on her back. That's sloppy. It is exactly what the untrained husband does when trying to help his wife, and it's exactly why she tells him to leave her alone."

I'm not recommending this book, but if you see it in the bookstore, you should flip through and check out the illustrations, which sketch out the Bradley(R) exercises you should be doing with your husband. Notice that the pregnant partner always performs these excises naked, while the non-pregnant partner always wears 70s style athletic shorts.

From the Hips: a Comprehensive, Open-minded, Uncensored, Totally Honest Guide to Pregnancy, Birth, and Becoming a Parent, by Rebecca Odes and Ceridwen Morris.

My neighbor lent me this book pretty late in the game, when I was pretty burned out on Baby Books and pretty much thought I knew everything there was to know. But I had fun skimming through it and reading the belly shaped bubbles that have quotes from "anonymoms". I'm very glad I read it, because it was the only book of the bunch that talked about postpartum physical stuff. Like, it's normal for women to lose a lot of hair after they give birth, so much that their hairline might recede. And you bleed for six weeks and can't take a bath. And most women still look pregnant for the first couple of weeks, so don't lose your shit when the delivery guy smiles and wants to know when you are due.

I wish I had read this book earlier. When it comes to pregnancy, it's almost as comprehensive as What to Expect, and more fun to read. It feels more current and fresh. The authors address all the big controversies without pushing any side too hard (which is nice, but at that point I wanted to read someone with an opinion, and I wished the authors would have told their birth stories). What else can I say? The subtitle pretty much has it covered.

Be Prepared: A Practical Handbook for New Dads, by Gary Greenberg and Jeannie Hayden.

I shouldn't admit this, but this is the only book I read during my pregnancy about what to do once the pregnancy is over, i.e., what to do with the resulting baby. I had been given Dr. Sears' Baby Book, (aka the attachment parenting bible), and the American Academy of Pediatrics' Your Baby's First Year, but for some reason I never made it very far into these books. I blame this on the one lesson I took away from my birthing class - that early labor would be very long, and I should STAY HOME DURING EARLY LABOR. I had big plans for Early Labor, which I'd heard could last around 18 hours. In addition to taking my nature walk down 23rd Street, I was going to pack my bag, make a Labor Mix for my iPod, call my Mom, compose an Out Of the Office Autoreply and set a Maternity Leave message on my work phone, and oh, I don't know, power through some books about what it's like to have a baby around. I don't know what was wrong with me. Perhaps, as the ladies from What To Expect might have suggested, I was still coming to grips with The Reality of Pregnancy, or at least the reality of how pregnancy generally leads to an infant.

This book is great. Since it's written for Dads, it assumes that the reader knows nothing about babies, lacks the elusive maternal instinct, bores easily, and needs accompanying illustrations. The back of the book promises to help you MacGyver your way through your baby's first year, by teaching you how to turn old socks into a diapers, and "create a decoy drawer full of old wallets, remote controls, and cell phones to throw baby off the scent of your real gear." There are some really helpful suggestions and DIY tips, all told succinctly and with humor. For example:

"If you have an aversion to the breast pump, it's completely understandable. After all, it's a bit unnerving watching a mechanical device mercilessly slurping at your partner's bare chest. You can't help but think, "If robots made pornography, this is what it would look like.""

And:

" Never, ever wake your partner for sex. It's like taking food away from a wild animal."

I've learned why babies are so impressed with Peek-A-Boo (they think your head literally disappears when you hide it), to prolong the life of pajamas that baby's grown out of by cutting off the feet, and the delicate art of transferring a sleeping baby from your arms to a crib (allowing me to finish off this post with two hands). To celebrate my increased typing speed, let's have another quote, on the necessity of babyproofing:

"As soon as your baby becomes mobile, you come to realization that she doesn't possess the greatest survival instincts. If anything, it seems like she's bent on self-destruction. If there is a staircase, she will attempt to fling herself down it; if there is an outlet, she will try to stick something into it; and if there's an inch of water anywhere, she will try to lie in it, facedown. It's like she's auditioning for some baby version of Jackass."

This is where I'll call it quits. There are only eight books reviewed here, which isn't anywhere near the number of books I originally wanted to write about, but when you have a baby around, you learn very quickly to set such grandiose goals aside, and take a damn nap.

City of Thieves by David Benioff

2008-09-27T07:50:00.009-04:00

David Benioff is probably best known for writing The 25th Hour, a gritty crime novel which he then adapted into a Spike Lee film starring Edward Norton. He also wrote the screenplay for Troy (which I won't hold against him), and adapted Khalid Hosseini's The Kite Runner (which I haven't yet seen). However, my first introduction to David Benioff was a few years ago when someone handed me his second book, a short story collection entitled When the Nines Roll Over. It's a wonderful collection, and even now, years later, two of the stories, "The Devil Comes to Orekhovo" and the last story, "Merde for Luck," (which struck me so hard that I photocopied it and mailed it to a dozen of my friends) are still floating around in my head.

But what I really want to talk about is Benioff's latest novel, City of Thieves, which was published in May and I read recently on a rather harrowing plane ride. I seem to have this bad habit of never reading the book that an author is best known for; for example: in college I read almost everything Kurt Vonnegut wrote except for Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five; I've read some Philip Roth, but not American Pastoral or Portnoy's Complaint; and just yesterday, when deciding which Connie Willis book to read, I chose To Say Nothing of the Dog over Doomsday Book, in part because I was told that she's best known for Doomsday Book. This list could go on and on. And with David Benioff - I've read two of his books, neither of which are The 25th Hour. I have every intention to read it, seriously, I do. I want to read it. But a part of me has resigned myself to the fact that it might never happen, due to whatever odd bit of psychology has kept me from reading Slaughterhouse Five all these years, despite owning two perfectly good copies. One of the many reasons I'll never be a real book reviewer or critic.

City of Thieves takes place during the siege of Leningrad, when two young men (strangers) accused of desertion are given a ludicrous mission: they have five days to steal a dozen eggs for the colonel's daughter's wedding cake. Of course, if you know your history, you'll remember that everyone in Leningrad is starving. There are no eggs. People are eating dirt. Hell, people are selling dirt to other people as food! Also for sale as food: the glue that holds books together (called Library Candy). And this colonel wants eggs to bake a cake? The concept alone felt like love at first site.

And check out the first line: "You have never been so hungry; you have never been so cold." A great opening line. But technically, this isn't really the first line - the novel has a framing story (basically a prologue) to set things up. Readers of this blog know that I'm no great lover of prologues, but this one works. In it we are introduced to David, who is writing a piece about his grandparents' experiences during the siege of Leningrad. He tells us that his grandfather talked most about one week in January 1942, when "he met my grandmother, made his best friend, and killed two Germans." This is a promise to the reader of what's to come, and it really adds a lot of fun and tension to the story. At times, reading City of Thieves reminded me of watching that bad CBS show with Neil Patrick Harris, How I Met Your Mother, because every time Lev (the grandfather) meets a woman you think, "ooh, could this be the grandmother?" You also wonder how the hell Lev, a scrawny 17-year-old and self-confessed coward, is ever going to kill two Germans.

Here's how it begins: Lev Beniov is caught out after curfew by Red Army soldiers and accused of theft and desertion. He's thrown in a cell with another boy/man, Kolya, who is also accused of desertion. Kolya is Lev's polar opposite - he's tall, blond, handsome, and charismatic, where Lev is short, scrawny, and chronically terrified. Both boys expect to be shot in the morning, and nearly are, but they are saved by the colonel who wants the eggs. They have five days to bring back a dozen eggs, and the colonel confiscates their ration cards, so they can't simply disappear.

The next five days are full of everything I look for in a story: adventure and danger and mystery, some absurdity, some emotional moments, an "ah-ha" moment or two (for the characters, not me), and good writing. I loved this book, and heartily recommend it.

Go With Me by Castle Freeman Jr.

2008-08-08T19:51:00.000-04:00

This book was recommended to me by an editor whose recommendations I've come to take seriously. The last book he sent my way was Don Winslow's The Death and the Life of Bobby Z, which is a fast read and a lot of fun. Go With Me was published earlier this year by Steerforth Press, an independent publisher in New Hampshire. I decided to take a chance and spring for it in hardcover. It's very nicely packaged as literary fiction, though the plot and pacing have more in common with genre fiction - suspense in particular. It's definitely worth the $21.95.

The plot is very straightforward - in a small rural New England town, a young woman named Lillian is being stalked by the local villain, Blackway. Her boyfriend Kevin left town in fear. When Blackway kills Lillian's cat, she goes to the Sheriff for help. The novel opens the morning after her cat's death. Lillian has slept in her car, curled up with a paring knife for protection, parked outside the Sheriff's office.

The Sheriff says he can't help her - that he can't arrest a man for what he intends to do, but hasn't done yet. But he tells her to go ask for Whizzer at the old mill, that he might be able to do something. At the mill, long defunct, Whizzer is drinking beer with a half dozen other guys. Nate the Great, a young, strong, and brash young man, and Les, who's really old but knows a lot of tricks, volunteer to help Lillian. The trio sets off to find Blackway.

From here, the narrative alternates between the search for Blackway, and Whizzer and the guys at the mill, drinking and shooting the shit and filling in the background information.

The great thing about this novel (or novella rather - it's a slim 160 pages, and easily read in one sitting) is how Freeman Jr. develops the villain, Blackway. First of all, Blackway is a classic name for a bad guy, summoning up fairy tales and old style quest stories. But the most brilliant thing is how we don't meet or see Blackway until the very end of the novel, during the final confrontation scene. We hear that he's been terrorizing Lillian, and we get a series of what seem like tall tales surrounding Blackway from Whizzer and the group of men drinking at the mill. Nate the Great repeats his answer of "I ain't afraid of Blackway," to most questions Lillian asks, and somehow, the more you hear this mantra, the more you get the impression that he really should be afraid; deeply afraid. We have no idea what Blackway looks like - tall, short, light or heavy build - or even how old he is. All we know is that everyone except Nate is scared shitless of him, including the local Sheriff. Blackway ran Lillian's boyfriend out of town with just a few words. It's a subtle, suspenseful, and effective building of a bad guy that definitely had me afraid of Blackway and thinking that if I were Lillian, I'd turn tail and get the hell out of town.

Nate the Great and Les play off each other perfectly. Nate's the young pup always ready to start a fight and prove himself, and Les is crafty enough to get them out of some really sticky situations relying solely on his wits and the surroundings (like a MacGyver of whorehouses and bar fights). They are a classic quest couple, as different and complimentary as Don Quixote and Sancho. The tension and violence increase the closer they get to Blackway, and meanwhile, the conversation among Whizzer and co. hints at new information that puts their quest in a new light. As the sun sets the trio moves toward the final confrontation. At this point I was really nervous and anxious to finally meet Blackway. And he didn't disappoint.

The whole novel takes place in the span of 24 hours. It's smart, concise, well-plotted, well-written, and very engaging. I'd recommend it to just about everyone.

Thirteen by Richard Morgan

2008-07-28T20:00:00.000-04:00

I'm a big Philip K. Dick fan - or at least I was in college, when I read most of his books - and I've been meaning to read Altered Carbon for years, but I decided to pick up Thirteen (or Th1rte3n) first. It was initially published in the UK as Black Man, (with that lovely British lack of racial sensitivity) because the main character, Carl Marsalis, is black. He's also a thirteen, which is a genetically altered male trained from birth for combat, and just general violence and aggression. The idea is that civilized society has been overly feminized, since the true alpha males (I pictured them as the cave men from those Geico commercials) have been slowly bred out. Thirteens were part of a genetic engineering experiment to bring these traits back. But thirteens are hated and feared by society, and not allowed to breed. They live on the fringes, either in hiding or trying to "pass," work as covert operatives, or have immigrated to colonial Mars.

The book is set primarily in a future America, which isn't that different from today. Civil war has split the nation in thirds - the Midwest and South are now Jesusland, governed by fundamental Christians. The West Coast succeeded and is known as the Rim States, and the North East seems to closely resemble the secularism and internationalism that New York City shoots for. Carl Marsalis works for UN, hunting down rogue thirteens. He's totally alone - normal humans are terrified of him, and other thirteens consider him a traitor. On the way back from his latest mission he gets stuck in Florida, picked up on a vice charge, and thrown into a Jesusland prison. After four months he's finally offered a way out - if he agrees to hunt down a thirteen who has somehow escaped from Mars and is killing seemingly random people all over the former US.

His partners are Tom Norton and Sevgi Ertekin. Sevgi is a former NYPD cop, who now works for COLIN, the CIA type organization that busted Marsalis out of jail. She's a great character - her parents are Turkish immigrants, she grew up Muslim and does her best to hold on to her faith in the face of scientific evidence to the contrary, and in spite of being a modern woman. She previously dated a thirteen who was "passing," so is no stranger to the type of prejudice and alienation they experience. There's an immediate attraction between her and Marsalis which leads to lots of great arguments and high-minded dialog, and eventually a deep friendship.

As a side note, I think it's worth mentioning that thirteens have a certain sex appeal, some je ne sais quoi that harks back to those primitive days when men were men and women were thrown over their shoulders or dragged off by their hair to be ravished up against the wall of some cave. Maybe it's because I live in a gay neighborhood, or because I see my fair share of underfed metrosexual hipster boys wherever I go, but the whole idea of a world that's swung too far toward the feminine really interested me. Check out this bit of dialog, which comes about halfway through the book, in a conversation between Sevgi and some Turkish guy:

"We index how civilized a nation is by the level of female participation it enjoys. We fear those societies where women are still not empowered, and with good cause. Investigating violent crime, we assume, correctly, that the perpetrator will most likely be male. We use male dominance as a predictor of trouble, and of suffering, because when all is said and done males are the problem."

It's a nice bit of stereotyping, but like the best stereotypes, it also has a ring of truth. Thirteen is full of great side issues like this, which are developed primarily through the characters' dialog, and give you some cool themes to chew on between reading sessions (because at 544 pages in hardcover, you probably won't breeze through this one in a single night). There's the whole way that the United States has split in three parts, the genetic engineering of humans (in addition to thirteens they've created bonobos, which are "primitive" women with amped up sex drives), and the way that Carl sees himself in relation to the rest of humanity, which could be read as a racial allegory.

As much as I liked this book, I did have some gripes. It begins with a very short prologue, and you don't figure out how that prologue relates to anything until at least 100 pages in (maybe more). This is a pet peeve of mine - I'm really not a fan of what I call the short cliff hanger prologue, where the author attempts to build suspense and tension by making the reader wonder, hey, what the hell was that prologue all about? And how does it relate to the main character, or chapters 1, 2, and 3, or, um, anything? When I have to ask these questions, my instinct is not to read the book with intensity and attention to detail, because I'm just burning for answers. My instinct is to be annoyed.

Also, though the story starts with Carl Marsalis, and this great fight/action scene, we only stay with him for two chapters, and then we bounce around between a bunch of other characters all over the former US. Again, not a technique that I'm fond of, especially so early in a book. We don't get back in Carl until page 110. I suppose the author makes it work, because eventually, all these characters are woven back into the story, even the very minor ones. However, I'm not sure if the satisfaction of seeing these (mostly minor) characters come back around, and the sense of recognition I got from that, was really worth the disorientation I felt in the beginning. I wasn't hooked into this story easily, or quickly.

However, once we get back to Carl the plot really takes off, and I was hooked. It's a dystopian noir crime novel, but when Carl wraps up the primary plot earlier than you'd expect, the story takes a deeper and sharper turn that I really liked. Some people complained about this early denouement, and I can see their point, because some of the danger and urgency gets sucked out of the story with 150 pages left to go, but this actually worked for me. I won't go into detail here, because I don't want to spoil the book for anyone. Suffice it to say that there are larger forces at work than the characters (or the reader) had imagined (mwah-hah-hah!).

Though the pacing feels uneven at times, I think Morgan hits a great balance between on-the-edge-of-your-seat action scenes, and long stretches of dialog, which he uses to develop and strenghthen the characters, and do some world-building. There's a know-it-all character, who is prone to lecturing and answering simple questions with long-winded rants that explain how the state of the world got from where it is now to where it is in the book. This character reminded me a bit of Jubal Harshaw from Heinlein's Stranger In a Strange Land. I liked him, and hey, there are worse ways to world-build, but I also found it gratifying when Carl, at one point, kicks his articulate ass for not getting to the point fast enough.

All things considered, this is a great book that I'm happy to recommend. Even if you have to push yourself through the first 100 pages or so, and a some pretty slow stretches (like when Sevgi's in the hospital), it's well worth the read.

Also, I read an interview with Richard Morgan where he says some smart things about dystopias and heroes and anti-heroes. Here's a blurb that I liked:

"Well, it’s really not that hard to write dystopias – you only have to take a look around at what’s going on in the real world, and then extrapolate with pessimistic intent. Human beings have a habit of fucking things up, no matter what technological advances are made available, and the worst aspects of human nature never seem to be far from emerging in all their malicious glory. None of the manifest scientific, social or cultural progress of the last century was able to prevent a catastrophic invasion of Iraq for small-minded corporate and geopolitical gain, or to bring Palestine any closer to a peaceful settlement than it was nearly sixty years ago in 1948. Greed and fear continue to dominate our political landscape despite everything we've achieved, and the hard won rationalism of the Enlightenment is now under renewed attack from a ferocious array of slobbering religious and superstitious morons. To be honest, you have to be remarkably optimistic to look all that in the face, and then imagine a future that ISN’T dystopian."

And on that happy note, I'll take my leave. Read the full interview here.

Chelsea Cain

2008-07-05T09:30:00.001-04:00

It's been a long time since my last substantial post. I've been doing a lot of reading, but between all the manuscripts and a new (and too banal to mention) category I've been obsessively researching, I haven't had much time for the type of book that I get excited enough to share here. I know, woe is me, right? Enough whining.

The point is that I've only read a handful of published books worth mentioning in the last few months. One was The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead. It was really fun in a cranial sort of way. It's all about elevators. If you think about it (and Colson Whitehead obviously has), we owe a lot to elevators - like the way we live and the shape of our cities. The Intuitionist is set in a city reminiscent of a newly industrialized New York, where people really appreciate elevators, and elevator inspectors are very highly regarded. You need a post-graduate degree to be one, and within the elite study of elevators there are two camps: the Empiricists, who inspect the elevators in the way you'd expect, by going to the engine room and checking out the machinery manually, and the Intuitionists, who just ride in the elevator, and "intuit" whether or not everything is alright. This story focuses on an Intuitionist who also happens to be the only black female elevator inspector. She gives a clean bill of health to an elevator that malfunctions and crashes the very next day. How could this happen? She's a master Intuitionist, but many people want to see her fail, because of her race and her sex, and discredit Intuitionism altogether. The mystery unfolds from there. And the reader does a lot of thinking about elevators.

Though here's something that the author doesn't address: without elevators, would we still have stair masters? As much as I have this new appreciation for elevators, they are probably responsible for some loathsome gym equipment.

There are also people who inspect escalators in the book, but they are looked down upon by everyone, and given no respect.

Other than the Colson Whitehead book, I've read two novels that I hope are the beginning of a continuing series: Chelsea Cain's Heartsick and Sweetheart. These are serial killer thrillers that feature a brilliant and psychotic female serial killer, Gretchen Lowell, who is known as the Beauty Killer (because she's gorgeous, and also because of the way she carves up her victims). She's tortured and murdered nearly 200 people, and when the novel opens she is in jail. Her 200th victim was Detective Archie Sheridan, who led the Beauty Killer task force, and was kidnapped and tortured by Gretchen for ten days before she saved his life by calling the paramedics and turning herself in. When the novel opens, a badly damaged and Vicodin-addicted Archie has been assigned to a lead a new task force to catch a new serial killer. Archie consults with Gretchen every Sunday during visiting hours, partly because she continues to give up the location of her corpses, but mostly because he has a strange and unhealthy attachment to her and just can't stay away.

It's obvious that this set-up owes a lot to Thomas Harris' Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs (Cain even gives Harris a shout-out in one of her scenes, when Gretchen snidely calls the reporter visiting her "Clarice"). Sure, it's derivative, but I wasn't too bothered by that. Cain manages to distinguish her plot just enough, and gives the story some great twists that make it fresh. Also, the dialog between Archie and Gretchen is just great.

There are two point of views in the novel, Archie's, and the aforementioned reporter, Susan Ward's. For reasons that aren't clear until later in the book, Archie decides to have Susan profile him as he goes about hunting this new serial killer, dubbed the After School Killer. Interspersed with the present day action are flashbacks to the ten days when Archie was tortured by Gretchen. She is one sadistic homicidal psychopath, and Cain perfectly balances conveying the torture scenes with detail, but keeping them bearable for squeamish readers. There's a lot going on in Heartsick, and I found myself equally interested in the murder investigation, Archie and Gretchen's past, and the way that Susan's own past turns out to be relevant. Gretchen is revealed as a mastermind worthy of our awe and fear, and this novel kept surprising me, even after the murder is solved. Cain is a writer who really knows how to craft a plot.

I began reading Sweetheart right on the heels of Heartsick. Though Sweetheart doesn't come out until September, I'd picked up a galley in London, and the back cover copy promises that "Chelsea Cain is back... and so is Gretchen. She's on the loose, and looking for her SWEETHEART." Cheesy and tawdry, I know, but I was still alarmed and totally amped. Gretchen escapes from jail?! Awesome. Actually she doesn't escape until page 133, about a third of the way through the book, and the story dragged a bit for me until then. (It could have been the edition I was reading though, which was a really bad UK galley with a lot of typesetting errors, a strange squat shape, and an extremely stiff spine that took me at least a third of the book to break in.)

So, the book opens with a murder investigation underway. A senator is dead and there are unidentified bodies found in the woods. These deaths are certainly tied to a story that Susan Ward was just about to break - the biggest of her career. Before I go on, let me say something about Susan. While Archie has the most-physically-and-emotionally-fucked-up-character slot secured, Susan has her own flaws. She has this chronic tendency to sleep with much older men - authority figures - which she's currently trying to get over by sleeping with her co-worker. Her hair color fluctuates between pink and turquoise. She has a crush on Archie that she can't hide. I love that the three main characters in this book - Archie, Susan, and Gretchen - are all pretty screwed up.

The story really takes off once Gretchen gets free, and I found it impossible to put it down. Archie had stopped his Sunday visits to Gretchen, moved back in with his wife and children, and seemed to be on his way back to a somewhat normal life. All this progress in undone once Gretchen escapes, and his obsession with her consumes him once again. Quite brilliantly, Cain has hidden something about Archie and Gretchen's past that she only reveals about two-thirds of the way through this book. I just loved this reveal, and thought it was so smart of Cain to hold it back until late in the second book, when readers will assume that we've already learned everything there was to know about their "relationship" in the first book. This extra backstory adds yet another dimension to Archie's tortured character. He engineers a dangerous way to capture her, though the reader is never sure what his plan entails. This is a risky choice on Cain's part, and one that usually pisses me off when other authors try and pull it off - I really hate it when the main characters hide stuff from me. But it works here - maybe because the point of view is third person, maybe because Archie is such the secretive type, or maybe because there's so much mystery surrounding Archie and Gretchen that it seemed natural for me to be in the dark a bit. In any case, the plan Archie concocts is a good one, and relies heavily on Susan to use her smarts and reporting skills to save him from himself and Gretchen.

I won't say anymore. If you like dark thrillers, these books are for you.

Tagged

2008-05-01T14:06:00.000-04:00

Sarah tagged me the other day. I usually ignore this sort of thing - blog tagging is on par with those surveys your friends send you where you have to answer questions like, what kind of underwear are you wearing right now? or, if you were an animal, what animal would you be? or that creepy Tibetan forward with the music where you have to figure out which colors remind you of which friends, and in the end it's revealed that the way you feel about coffee is actually the way you feel about sex - but lets face it, I haven't posted anything in a long time, so here goes:

Rules:
* Link to the person that tagged you.
* Post the rules on your blog.
*Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself.
*Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs. [I am breaking this rule. It ends here. I'm not afraid of seven years of bad luck, or whatever]
*Let each random person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website.

1) Lately I've picked up the absentminded habit of putting non-recyclables in our recycling box, such as my breakfast cereals, and one time, my shoes. But Sarah, just to clarify, that guy we got a building-wide memo about who tried to recycle a bowling ball? NOT ME.

2) I consider laundry to be a competitive sport. Or better yet, a reality show: there are winners, and there are losers, and I'm there to win. Don't smile at me, or make small talk - I know the game, and you're just trying to distract me from my spin cycle so you can sneak your stuff in the empty dryer I've been eyeing.

3) I don't respond to e-queries that I'm not interested in. This is because at least 1 in every 5 writers e-mails me back to argue with my form letter, or to ask indignantly, "did you actually read my query?" and I have this stupid urge to write back and say something like "Read it? Your query and I have run off and joined the circus together. We are very happy. I hope you find similar fulfillment." Clearly, this is a vicious cycle that must be avoided, and I can't always trust my professionalism to win out over my idiotic creative impulses.

4) If I had a cheese characteristic, it would probably be, as Sarah suggested, tangy or spicy. But I wish it were smooth.

5) At least once a week my husband and I have an argument about who is "the funny one" in our relationship. Contrary to what you might think, these arguments are never funny.

6) I live in an up-and-coming neighborhood, which means that everything is under construction. Consequently, we have no sidewalk, and the city has barricaded half a lane of traffic off for pedestrian use. When it rains, this walkway completely floods, and you have to balance on the barricade, and leap from dry spot to dry spot, trying not to jump into a) other pedestrians, b) their dogs, c) their baby strollers, d) their abandoned groceries, e) the fire hydrant. (My husband has jumped into the fire hydrant twice). It's been like this for over a year. I still think it's a pretty fun obstacle course, and secretly think it's lame that everyone calls 311 to complain.

New Haven Review of Books

2008-03-26T13:39:00.000-04:00

I've taken quite a vacation from this blog, but I certainly haven't taken a break from reading, or the occassional book review. If you've missed me, you can find my review of a wonderful cozy mystery, Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station by Dorothy Gillman, posted at a new review venue, The New Haven Review of Books.

The New Haven Review of Books will be posting a new short (300ish words) review every Monday. Attentive readers will notice that my review is not nearly as long, rambling and self-indulgent as the reviews on this site, though it still manages to "out-word-count" the other four reviews. The NHRB has two basic rules for reviews: 1) that the review be positive (they are not interested in slamming books), and 2) the the book be overlooked by other, larger, review venues. Now, you cozy readers out there know that the Mrs. Pollifax series is very popular among mystery readers, so there's a bit of an exception to rule #2 - if the book is well-known within a genre, but remains unknown to general readers, (or perhaps, in the case of Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station, is over 20 years old) then it counts as overlooked.

The NHRB is looking for reviewers, so please get in touch (with them) if you have a brilliant and underappreciated book that you'd like to write about.

In other review news, I thought this article in the New York Times blog, about the 7 most overused words in book reviews, was pretty funny. I think I'm guiltly of using (or overusing) at least four....

Books on a Plane, Part II: Books = Home Wreckers

2008-01-03T20:31:00.000-05:00

Recently I was on a plane. With books. And my husband. He also likes to read. He reads faster than me, so has to bring even more books on the plane. Together, we are absolutely hopeless. We never have any legroom.

We were flying non-stop from New York to LA, which is a six hour flight. Across the aisle from us, there was this old Russian guy. He was drunk. And really friendly. He kept talking to the all the passengers, like, he would tap the passenger directly in front of him on the shoulder and start up a conversation. Do you know how uncomfortable it is to turn around and attempt conversation with the person directly behind you in Delta coach? The Russian didn't. Our flight left at seven in the morning. How did he get so drunk so early?

I'm a friendly person. People who sit by me on planes often pick up on this, and they talk to me about all kinds of things. Keeping this in mind I applied what I call Double Insulation against the Russian. I engaged in reading while simultaneously listening to my headphones. This is a really effective strategy on NYC public transportation. You can ignore crazy people without seeming rude. It worked on the Russian too, for a time.

The Russian talked and talked - he never stopped. He kept drinking too. Those damn Delta stewardesses kept serving him, and he also had his own stash. He pissed a couple of people off, but I only half paid attention. Then, when there was no one left to talk to, he turned his attention on my husband and I.

I took note because he kept touching my husband in slightly inappropriate places, like the upper upper thigh and the top of his head and his cheek. My husband put the hood of his sweatshirt on, and pulled the drawstrings tight - a strategy he uses when we are watching a particularly bad movie, or, when someone (usually me) says something really stupid. The Russian was impervious. He wanted to know, what were we reading? And this is kind of embarrassing, because we were, at the moment, both reading hardcovers by Jim Butcher. I was reading the Dresden Files, and by husband was reading the latest Codex Alera book. We had to show our books to the whole plane practically, and I could tell they all thought we were one of those Dungeon & Dragons couples. The Russian said, "This is most important thing in life, that you both have same intellect." He thumped our books on his seat back tray table for emphasis. "This is most important thing for marriage, you both can read!"

The Russian loved us. He knew that we would live happily ever after and never get divorced or throw plates at each other. Couples who read together stay together. He didn't say this. He said twenty minutes worth of drivel that amounted to the same thing. He also gave us advice. He said, "the most important thing is for you love each other. And to cherish each other." We told him that seemed like a good idea. We'd give it a shot. And then, very politely, we attempted to resume reading.

The Russian took no hints and was undeterred. He kept on talking. Finally, he went to the restroom. Then he came back. I suspect he had thrown back some shots with the stewardesses. His mood had changed.

He sat down and started moaning: "no, no, no, no, NO, no, no, no, NO, no, no, no, NO!" The Russian stared at us. We stared at our books. My husband's sweatshirt draw stings were pulled so tight I could only see his nose. The Russian slapped his open book with his flat meaty hand: "This, THIS IS BULLSHIT!" he said. And then he tried to rip the pages. My husband has quick reflexes, and he slapped his hand away. "Please," he said, "we're reading now, we don't want to talk anymore." The Russian resumed his weird moaning. He rocked back and forth in his chair. It was sort of like how someone might dance to a Gregorian chant.

This went on for some time. The other passengers were too scared to intervene. They had all had their interactions with the Russian, and were trying their best to act invisible. The Russian started saying, "your wife, she will leave you. She will leave you, because you read." He said this over and over, in a slurred prophetic voice. "You always read. She will leave you. When I see my wife, in the LAX, I will take her, and I will talk with her, and I will kiss on her. I love my wife!" He paused here to slap my husband's upper upper thigh. "Talk to your wife! Kiss on your wife! You must love her! Stop with this, this bullshit!" And here he'd slap the book. "Your wife, she will leave you."

Slowly but surely, my shit was beginning to unravel. How much can the modern woman take of being talked about like she ain't right there? Then, the Russian crossed the line. He said, "your wife, she will fuck with other men." I'd had it. I jumped out of my seat and lurched for the Russian. At least, that was the general idea. Somewhere along the line, we had began our initial descent, and my seat and tray table were in their upright positions, and more importantly, my seat belt was fastened. I didn't get far. I said some choice words to the Russian. The Russian looked appropriately stunned. My husband echoed my sentiments, because he knew that the Russian had to hear it from a man. The Russian spent the next 30 minutes apologizing to us, and to the rest of the plane. He apologized to everyone personally. He shook everyone's hands. He was incapable of not talking.

I thought that being harassed for reading stopped somewhere around the age 15. But no, books pose an even more serious threat in adulthood, undermining the hallowed institution of marriage. I looked for the Russian in baggage claim. I wanted to see him kissing on his wife, who, if my math was correct, he had married at the age of 14, and his son, who he fathered at the age of 15. I never saw him again. When we left the plane we were surrounded by the other passengers, who congratulated my husband on his calm and patience, and apologized for not interfering. They wanted to help us file a complaint. The men slapped him on the shoulder. The women looked up at him admiringly.

Not one person asked us for a book recommendation.

The Bridge by Gay Talese

2007-12-30T14:07:00.000-05:00

Everyone has a plan B. This is what you'll do when the economy collapses, when the apocalypse happens, when you have some sort of cheesy American movie light-bulb moment - whenever something big and impacting enough happens for you to finally do whatever slightly dumb and romantic thing it is that you've always wanted to do.

Me, I'll be a bike mechanic. Ten years ago, my plan was to climb electrical poles in third world countries and do whatever it is exactly that people do up there with all those tools in their tool belts. I have this idea that I'm mechanically inclined because I like to take things apart and put them back together, and because I'm always the one who ends up assembling the shower caddy, or the wine tower, or the entertainment center. I know how naive this sounds, but blue collar work just seems so honest. I like getting my hands all greasy. I like to sweat. And to curse. I even like the cuts, the way they sting is a reassurance, a reminder, and later, the small scars. At the end of the day, you've accomplished something that you can lay your dirty cut up bruised hands on. You go to the bar and have a beer and bullshit and feel like you're part of something. That's what I'll do when the shit hits the fan. Become a 1950s man.

In the meantime, I'll read books like The Bridge.

It's a slim book, just 147 pages, and sort of squat and square shaped, with some really cool pictures and drawings of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in various stages of completion. The Verrazano connects Bay Ridge Brooklyn to Staten Island, and is the longest suspension bridge in the US. The bridge was completed in 1964, and the book was published that same year (though I read a revised paperback edition published in 2003). At that time Talese was a reporter for the New York Times, and writes that he often donned a hard hat and joined the workers on the catwalks. Talese romanticizes the workers quite a bit, even though many of the individual stories he tells end with premature death, comas, or crippling accidents. Here's how he opens chapter one:

"They drive into town in big cars, and live in furnished rooms, and drink whiskey with beer chasers, and chase women they will soon forget. They linger only a little while, only until they have built the bridge; then they are off again to another town, another bridge, linking everything but their lives.... They are part circus, part gypsy - graceful in the air, restless on the ground; it is as if the wide-open road below lacks for them the clear direction of an eight-inch beam stretching across the sky six hundred feet above the sea."

Maybe it seems silly to some to write like this about bridge builders - can you imagine similar odes to bus drivers, or trash men, or plumbers? - but I'm feeling it. I'm one of those readers who thought Christopher "Alexander Supertramp" McCandless was idealistic and brave, not foolhardy and suicidal, when I read Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild. Also, I've got this thing for bridges. Someday, I will design and complete the Ultimate Bridge Ride, where I ride my bike over 17 or 18 of the New York City bridges in one day. But until then, well, there's my couch and The Bridge.

Talese touches on quite a few historical heavy weights. This book could have been a whole lot longer - in league with something like Thomas Kelly's Empire Rising - and I wouldn't have minded. He mentions Robert Moses as a polarizing figure, but like a good reporter doesn't take a stance on how he personally feels about him displacing so many families and businesses in Bay Ridge for the bridge. (As a side note, I find it super absurd that Robert Moses, champion of car culture, never learned to drive!) Talese mentions James J. Braddock, the "Cinderella Man," who years after winning the heavyweight title in 1938 ends up working as an oiler, maintaining a welding machine, nearly 60-years-old. The assassination of John F. Kennedy and its effects are briefly noted.

But for me, the best part of this book was learning about the building of the bridge itself. Listen to this:

"But now the Verranzano-Narrows Bridge presented Ammann with an even larger task. And to master its gigantic design he would even have to take into account the curvature of the earth. The two 693-foot towers, though exactly perpendicular to the earth's surface, would have to be one and five-eighths inches farther apart at their summits than at their bases....It's steel cables would swell when hot and contract when cold, and its roadway would be twelve feet closer to the water in summer than in winter. Sometimes, on long hot summer days, the sun would beat down on one side of the structure with such intensity that it might warp the steel slightly, making the bridge a fraction lower on its hot side than on its shady side."

For the most part bridges seem immovable to me - so solid and unbending - I certainly never think of their cables capable of fluctuating twelve feet! However, Talese writes that in the mid 1800s, as many as forty bridges might collapse in a single year, meaning that for every four bridges built, one would fall down. The most memorable story of bridge collapse is the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which fell into the waters of Puget Sound in 1940. The fashion of the time was for increasingly slimmer and sleeker suspension bridges, and it was cheaper to to build the span and roadway floor with solid plate girders, instead of trusses that wind could pass through. The result was that on a windy day, the Tacoma Narrows bridge kicked up and down, and earned the cutesy (instead of terrifying) nickname "Galloping Gertie." Apparently, no one was bothered by this, until one night it started "kicking" up and down by about twenty eight feet, and twisting in the wind at a forty five degree angle. Bridge Authorities closed the bridge, and it fell the next morning.

In terms of maintenance, every ten years the Verrazano has to be scraped of rust (and, perhaps, pigeon shit?) and repainted. That process takes five years and costs about 75 million dollars. In the afterward Talese wrote that 250,000 vehicles cross the bridge every day, and deposit a daily sum of 1 million dollars. I could go on and on, but by now you probably have an idea whether or not this book is for you. I enjoyed it immensely, and my only complaint is that it's not longer and more detailed. It's a quick read that scratches the surface of a lot of different issues, and has me reaching for more in-depth books about bridges and urban planning and manly dirty men.

Books on a Plane

2007-12-03T22:21:00.000-05:00

Flying makes me nervous. Not for all the usual reasons, like fear of cold water landings, fear of crashing and death, fear of sitting next to obese people, or chronic sneezers, or having some gun wielding maniac shoot a hole in the plane and consequently getting sucked through a tiny bullet hole due to air pressure differential (thanks, Fifth Grade Teacher). No. I get nervous about reading material. Do I have enough to read? What if we are delayed on the runway? What if we have to circle forever because of, I don't know, for whatever reason that happens? What if I run out of stuff to read?!

This has never happened, because I always board planes with my messenger bag full of books, magazines, and manuscripts. But that doesn't fully assuage my fear. What if I packed books that I don't like? That really pisses me off. Because they take up space. Especially the hardcovers. I want to tell all these authors who have failed me on planes, I gave up my leg room for you! Seriously. I try not to take any chances with books on planes.

I don't want to rely on airport book stores, so I chose my books in advance, and very carefully. It takes me just as long to pack my books as my clothes and beauty products. The most agonizing decisions are whether or not to take really gripping books that I've almost finished. My need to know how the book ends butts against the fact that I'll be done with it in half an hour or so, and then it will just take up space. I was recently on the fence about whether or not to bring The Center Cannot Hold , a memoir about schizophrenia. I was half way done with it, and though I was enjoying it, the writing seemed uninspired to me, particularly the narrative voice, making it less of a page turner, and it's a hardcover (though one of those small trim hardcovers), so I stared at it for quite some time, and furrowed my brow or whatever, and left it on the floor.

It's like this:

I'm having one of those days characterized by restless over-thinking, so I put together these charts, to share with you my decision making process. (These charts were inspired by Indexed, though they are nowhere near as cool as hers)

I was feeling good about my decision to bring Then We Came To The End on the plane. I was 50 pages in, and really enjoying it. It's not what I would call a page turner, but I wanted to stay in the world, which is narrated in a gossipy and intimate first person plural (we), and had the curious effect of making me nostalgic for my office and office interactions. Honestly, this book will make you miss your 9 to 5, and if you don't have one, it may make you want to go get one. After all, work (not baseball) is the great American past time.

As the cover hints, reading it is sort of like watching Office Space or The Office, but much, much better, and not just because I prefer reading to watching television, but because it's got so much more heart. There are these scenes that are both hilarious and absurd but also really heart wrenching and sad at the same time, like when Pam and Jim feel so bad for Dwight that they spend the weekend at his Bed & Breakfast/farm, except even better. I love it when authors can pull off a scene where you're not sure whether to laugh or to cry - you want to do both at the same time.

So I'm getting really into this book, but then something awful happens - I'm on page 120, and the next page is 185. I thought for a second that maybe this was on purpose, like Joshua Ferris was making some sort of metafictional point? But no, it was true, I was missing 60+ pages. I was pissed. And panicky.

After much deliberation (which I won't put in chart form) I ended up reading the rest of the book anyhow, and I could sort of infer what I'd missed. I got a complete copy after the flight, so I filled in the missing pages. Has this ever happened to y'all? It's like when you rent a movie that's really great, watch 1/4 of it, and then it gets all staticky or something. Except worse, because books are more expensive than movies and you're more invested in the entertainment experience.

Maybe, it's time I got a Kindle.

The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta

2007-11-20T14:22:00.000-05:00

I read this book on a four hour plane ride, sitting next to an overly perfumed elderly woman who was reading what appeared to be an 800 page tome titled something like Exploring the Gospel of John. Not the most comfortable circumstances, to say the least. She kept giving my book dirty looks, as if she knew it was making fun of her book. And by the time I finished The Abstinence Teacher, I'm not sure I blamed her.

I had extremely high expectations for this novel. So you know where I'm coming from, let me say right away that I'm not a religious person. However, many of the people I love and care about are. Half of my family are serious Christians - not Left Behind Christians, but they love Jesus and aren't shy about saying so. Because of the various discussions and arguments we've had over the years, I like to think I have a bit of insight into how serious Christians think, and I do my best to treat their beliefs with compassion and respect. I was expecting similar even handedness from The Abstinence Teacher, (especially after reading the NYTBR review where the reviewer claims that Perrotta "gives space and speeches to proselytizers and scoffers alike, letting readers form their own conclusions"), but in this I was disappointed. Perrotta seemed to me to be preaching to the choir, as I imagine most of his readers identify with the non-religious protagonist, Ruth, and I completed the novel with no more insight into fundamentalist Christian sects than when I started.

Don't get me wrong - as someone who's not a fan of organized religion, it was satisfying to read a book where the secular humanist side wins out over the "Jesus freaks." But to be fair, the Jesus contingency weren't putting up much of a fight.

Here's the story: Forty-one year old Ruth Ramsey is a divorced Sex-Ed high school teacher who recently got into trouble for saying that "some people enjoy it" ("it" being oral sex). One of her students, who belongs to the Tabernacle, a new fundamentalist Christian organization that condemns drinking, dancing, premarital sex, homosexuality, and everything else you'd expect, misquotes Ruth as advocating oral sex in the classroom. The Christian community threatens suit, and to appease them, the school adopts a new program of Abstinence (called Wise Choices) that Ruth must teach. Ruth of course, objects to the program, calling it unrealistic and uninformed (one of their stats puts the failure rates of condoms as high as 36%).

In the meantime, Ruth's 10-year-old daughter Maggie is one of the top players on her soccer team. When Ruth attends a game and Maggie's coach, Tim Mason (also a member of the Tabernacle), leads the team in prayer after a victory, Ruth yanks Maggie out of the prayer circle and threatens to take her off the team.

Thus begins the dialog and strange attraction between Ruth and Tim. Their arguments about theology were some of the most anticipated scenes in the novel for me. Here's an exchange that had me particularly interested:

Ruth: "I'm being silly? You're the one trying to sell me a theological system that puts Hitler and Gandhi on the same level."

Tim: "It does not."

Ruth: "According to what you told me, they're both burning in hell for not being Christians."

Tim: "I'm sure God's capable of making a distinction between Hitler and Gandhi."

Ruth: "I hope so. But somebody apparently forgot to mention that in the Bible."

...this continues on, but here's the clinching line...

Tim: "Look, Ruth. You can trap me in a hundred contradictions that smarter people would be able to explain away. But that's not what this is about for me."

This is typically where this type of arguments ends for me, too. What Tim says sums up my frustration with his character - why can't he be one of the "smarter people" that could explain away Ruth's contradictions? Now that's a discussion I'd like to be privy to.

Tim is a recent Christian convert who came to religion once he hit rock bottom. He was an alcoholic and drug addict whose vices cost him his house, wife, and daughter. He seems to have used Jesus as a crutch to begin rebuilding his life - when the story opens he is holding down a full time job, coaching his daughter's soccer team, and has been awarded custody of her once a week. The other Christian characters also seem to have accepted Jesus out of sheer desperation. Pastor Dennis had what could only be described as a psychotic break while working as a Best Buy employee: he went from a functioning member of society to a man who saw a Bible glowing on his desk and was consequently inspired to destroy thousands of dollars worth of electronic equipment while screaming things like "Whore!" and "Abomination!" Tim's young Christian wife reveals on her wedding night that not only is she not a virgin, but she once slept with a dozen men in the space of two weeks. The Christian student in Ruth's class is puritanically dour and scowling and bent on taking Ruth down. I eventually had to wonder why there weren't any Christian characters who were more, um, "Christian."

I'm not one to plug Christianity, but I know plenty of people who are mentally and emotionally stable, don't have a history of substance abuse or rampant promiscuity, and still convert to Christianity or are practicing Christians. I understand why Perrotta made the choices he did, because it creates for more contrast and drama, but I'd have been more interested to see a less hypocritical Christian butt up against Ruth.

This isn't to say that I didn't enjoy the novel - I did. I read it in a single sitting, and it kept me turning the pages. The characters are extremely well drawn, especially Ruth. Here's something she said that I particularly enjoyed:

"If there was one thing that rankled about being a woman, it was this conviction, drummed into your head before you had a chance to defend yourself, that it was your job - your obligation - to always look your best, even in situations when you had no logical reason to care."

There are some stylistically genius sections in the book, like when Perrotta alternates between Ruth being stuck in an Abstinence training program, with the assignment to write about "A Sexual Experience That I Regret," and her date with an old high school fling the night before. Ruth mischievously writes about what happened that night - how she turned down the opportunity for sex, and wishes she hadn't. Then there's the blond bombshell promotional speaker from Wise Choices, who speaks at Ruth's high school about her decision to remain a virgin until after marriage. Along with the expected cautionary tales of genital warts and herpes, gonorrhea and AIDS, she presents a slide show of her model boyfriend, both of them in swimwear on some Carri bean island, and says:

"As you might imagine, it's not easy saying no to a superhot guy like Ed. But when it gets hard, I just remind myself of my wedding night, and how amazing it's going to be when I give myself to my husband with a pure heart, a clean conscience, and a perfectly intact body. Because that's going to be my reward, and mark my words, people - it is going to be soooo good, oh my God, better than you can even imagine."

Those of you who have had sex with a male virgin can appreciate how thick the irony is here.

Obviously, the US is sharply divided on religious issues. In this area especially, people seem incapable or unwilling to see things from "the others'" perspective. That's why I think a novel like this has a bigger job to do than just entertain: specifically, it should help all the non-hardcore-Christians that comprise the majority of Perrotta's readership understand just where the rest of the country is coming from with their Chastity Balls, intelligent design, pro-life and pro-death-penalty sentiments, and the overall blurring of the line between Church and State. In this, Perrotta was unsuccessful.

I read The Abstinence Teacher for my book club, and I'm sure they'll have a lot to say about it once we meet. I hope you do too.

What The Dead Know by Laura Lippman

2007-11-16T20:20:00.000-05:00

When I read mysteries for pleasure I'm extremely bad at guessing the ending / who done it. Even Jodi Picoult? She always surprises me. Gone Baby Gone the movie? I read the book years ago, and I still managed to forget the climatic twist. I remember reading Ruth Francisco's Good Morning, Darkness and being totally shocked by the ending, even though I should have seen it coming. I have a theory that I somehow, subconsciously or something, obfuscate the clues and conventions of the genre, or avoid thinking about them, so I can guard my moment of surprise. Or maybe, deep down, I just want to please. I want to be the perfect reader - that reader who every writer hopes for - who stays in suspense until the writer hands her the story in a neat package. Or maybe I'm just, um, dense.

So when I figured out the mystery to What The Dead Know a whole ten pages (!!) before it's revealed to the reader, I was quite proud of myself. Am I getting better at this?, I wondered. And if so, it that really a reason to celebrate? I do like surprises, after all.

But enough.

In the opening of this book, a woman is in a car accident. When the police come, she refuses to show any identification, and claims to be one of the Bethany girls, who disappeared from the local mall nearly 30 years ago and were never found.

The facts were these: Easter weekend 1975 Sunny Bethany (15) and Heather Bethany (12) took the bus to the mall and never came home. The mystery woman claims to be the younger sister, Heather Bethany, but can offer no proof, only deliberately vague clues. Detective Infante investigates. There are flashbacks.

The novel is narrated from multiple view points, with the mystery woman (we'll call her Heather) being the main character. She's the most fascinating character by far. We know she's lying about some things, but telling the truth about others, but we don't know which is which. Neither do any of the other characters. Her skill as a liar is shown in this scene, where Heather and Kay are late to a meeting with Heather's lawyer, Gloria:

Heather: ""I'll call her on your cell, explain we're running behind." Without waiting for Kay's agreement, Heather grabbed the phone from the cup holder between the seats and used its received-calls log to find Gloria's number.... "Gloria? It's Heather. We're just getting on the road. Kay's ex-husband was late picking up the kids, and we couldn't very well leave them there, could we?" She didn't give Gloria time to reply. "See you in a few." What a brilliant excuse, Kay thought. She pinned it on someone that no one knows, that no one would think to question.

It took a split second, but the larger implications of this observation seemed to vibrate beneath her tires as she merged onto the long, sweeping exit to Security Boulevard."

I especially like this scene because of how it also connects with the title of the book. If you think about it, What the Dead Know is a resonant title for any mystery, but especially this one. Little by little it comes out that "Heather" has gone by many names. Her story is that she was kidnapped that Saturday afternoon at the mall by a former cop, who killed her older sister and kept her as some sort of sex slave. He completely breaks her; convinces her that her parents would never take her back, and eventually she no longer needs to be restrained. The cop finds an alternate identity for her - that of a child whose family all died in a fire - and enrolls her in a parochial school under the name Ruth Leibig. When Heather/Ruth leaves at the age of 18, the cop shows her how to research death records, take names and social security numbers of dead children, and make their identities her own. Heather/Ruth starts over. Many times.

What the Dead Know was chosen as one of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of the Year last week. Here's their preamble to the contest:

"Three thousand books are published daily in the U.S., and PW reviewed more than 6,000 of them in 2007, in print and online. From that astounding number, we've culled a best books list covering our favorites in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, comics, religion, lifestyle and children's—150 in all."

Laura Lippman's in great company, with National Book Award winner Dennis Johnson's Tree of Smoke, and Joe Hill's Heart-Shaped Box, which I haven't read but really want to (the book sounds great and he's Stephen King's son). I'm not sure why What the Dead Know was included in the general fiction category instead of the mystery category (mystery winners include Ruth Rendell and Thomas Cook), and I'm also not sure why it's referred to as a thriller in the logline:

"In this outstanding stand-alone thriller, a driver who flees a car accident breathes new life into a 30-year-old mystery—the disappearance of two young sisters at a shopping mall—when she tells the police she's one of the missing girls."

Not to get overly technical, but I always felt that thrillers need to feature an element of danger as a primary part of the plot. Someone needs to be threatened, or in trouble. People should be dying. There should be a ticking clock. Most of this story takes place in the past. There's no killer on the lose, or threat of a repeat crime. One by one, the villains are revealed to be dead or incapacitated. Personally, I don't think of this as a thriller, but whatever.

This book is definitely worth the read. Heather is a great character, and the mystery kept me wondering and turning the pages, though I bet many readers will guess at the ending rather early in the novel. Even so, the reveal is enormously satisfying, as you look back at everything that happened and think, "of course!" There is a sense of what I like to call inevitable surprise. My only complaint is a minor one - none of the other characters were as compelling as Heather. Her mother, father, and Sunny are extremely well drawn (I ached for Sunny), and Lippman does a great job of conveying the parents' grief, but during the sections that belonged to playboy Detective Infante or Kay the social worker, I found myself getting a bit restless. I wanted to spend all my time with the Bethany family. What the Dead Know is as much a close look at familial relationships and how people grieve as it is a "thriller."

Gun, With Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem

2007-09-09T20:00:00.000-04:00

I've had this book on my shelf for over a year, and I was finally done putting it off. I suspected it would be one of those books that would suck me in and force me to put everything else off until I'd finished it, even really basic things like eating, flossing my teeth, responding to the carbon monoxide alarm, etc. And that's basically what happened, except as soon as I finished this book, I immediately began reading it again. So it was a much better/worse book/situation than I had feared.

After reading a book twice, you'd think I'd have a ton to say. But my feelings can be summed up into the type of lovely yet cliched love song lyrics that you hear repeated at weddings and anniversaries and in high school year books and stuff. I love this book, and I'm going to K.I.T. It's just the type of genre blend of noir/fantasy that I like, though I don't know if I'd call it fantasy. It's more imaginative than what fantasy usually implies, in that you won't find any vampires or werewolves or ghosts - it's more of a distopia a la George Orwell or Aldous Huxley or Philip K. Dick. It takes place in a world where asking questions is taboo - almost illegal. The only people who can ask questions come from the Office of the Inquisitor, or they are P.I.s, like the protagonist, Conrad Metcalf. These people carry a license to ask questions. Everyone carries cards that keep track of their karmic levels, and when it gets really low, or down to zero, they go in The Freezer, which is like jail, except not as boring, because you're just frozen for a couple of years or whatever, and you wake up having done your time without any threat of rape or bad food or barbell accidents. I mean, the characters in the novel all feel very threatened by The Freezer, but I personally didn't understand why it was so bad. Don't get me wrong - getting frozen and waking up ten years later, but feeling like ten years ago was just yesterday, that would be disorienting, and you'd have a lot of catching up to do with friends and family and world news, but doesn't it seem preferable to just sitting in jail for ten years?

So the question you should be asking yourselves, while you're reading this book is, is this really a distopia? The jail threat doesn't really seem like a threat - to wake up months or years after your sentence and voila! you're free, and no time has passed. Also, Metcalf is constantly snorting his personalized blend of make, which seemed super rock star to me, and also, the make is completely free. You can pick it up from the makery whenever you run out. The scales are sliding towards utopia. Here's Metcalf's morning routine:

"So I showered an shaved and got my gums bleeding with a toothbrush, then stumbled into the kitchen to cauterize the wounds with some scalding coffee. The mirror was still out, with fat, half-snorted lines of my blend stretching across it like double-jointed white fingers. I picked up the razor blade and steered the drugs back into a wax-paper envelope, and brushed the mirror off with my sleeve."

Except of course the make is dangerous, because nothing good ever comes for free (except maybe consensual back-scratches). Everyone's make is a unique blend of the following ingredients: Acceptol, Forgettal, Avoidol, Regrettol, Believol, whatever, and always Addictol. And certain components of make can be especially debilitating, like Blanketrol:

""They withdrew it when they found out it was completely hollowing out the inner life of the test subjects. The users went on functioning, but just by rote." He pinched at the nose of his glasses again. "Think of it as the opposite of deja vu - nothing reminds you of anything, not even of itself.""

Who's thinking of One Hundred Years of Solitude right now, when the town all gets the insomnia sickness, and forgets what everything is for? To be sure, Gun is nothing like Gabriel Garcia Marquez's books, in fact, the cover blurb on my edition says, "marries Chandler's style and Philip K. Dick's vision," and I'd say that's a very accurate description. Except that Metcalf doesn't take himself as seriously as Marlow, which I really appreciate. It makes him capable of thinking lines like this:

"I was playing this case existential, maybe a bit too existential. I needed a lead. I needed a client. Hell, I even needed a sandwich. There was probably little chance of Celeste Stanhunt coming downstairs and offering me a sandwich."

Or sometimes after delivering a really hard boiled line Metcalf will reflect, "Even I wasn't sure what that meant."

And Lethem turns some of the noir conventions on their ears. For example, Celeste Stanhunt is the desperate blonde who knows too much and intermittently presses up against Metcalf, full of lust. However, years ago Metcalf had this little operation where he switched nerve endings with an ex-girlfriend, supposedly just temporarily, for a night or two, so a woman can feel what it's like to be a man, and vice versa, but the ex ran off before they could have the operation reversed. So Metcalf is left with his male anatomy, but female sensations. At these times the quality of Lethem's imagination reminds me of the most memorable and tastiest little set-ups in Marquez, or even Italo Calvino short stories.

Anyhow, Gun is a brilliant who-done-it set in an inventive near-future. I won't go into the details of the mystery, because the world itself is much more fun to describe, and you'll need to pay close attention to the rules of this world to even have a prayer of solving the mystery before Metcalf does. There are evolved animals, who walk upright on two feet and talk. The muscle for a gangster is provided by a kangaroo, there's a P.I. who's an ape, and there are kittens learning to read and rabbits selling subscriptions door-to-door. There are babyheads, which are an entire generation of babies who were given some sort of evolution therapy to make them grow up faster, but it went wrong somewhere, and the results are somewhat mature adults trapped in the bodies of infants, drinking themselves to oblivion in Baby Bars. There is the Office of the Inquisitor, which just sounds bad-ass and feudal, and where Metcalf used to work, before his conscious got the better of him.

The only thing that didn't work so well for me was that Metcalf didn't seem to have much of a reason to get involved in the case in the first place. He didn't strike me as the type of idealist to defend the innocent just because it's the right thing to do, but in fact, that's what he does. He gets a stronger motive about half way in.

Gun, With Occasional Music is a quick and very cleverly plotted read, with lots of fun jolts to the imagination. And the title eventually makes sense. It takes a long time, but it's well worth the wait.

To Hype, or Not To Hype

2007-08-09T01:03:00.000-04:00

When I started this blog I made some rules:

1) Don't talk about my life as an agent. I'm more interested in talking about my life as a reader.

2) Don't plug my own books. And don't plug our agency's books.*

I've forgotten what the other rules were. I think Don't Talk About Bestsellers was one, and Don't Talk About Authors Who Are Dead; Don't Talk About Books I Hate was definitely a rule; Don't Talk About Books In The Same Genre Over And Over Again; Don't Talk About Books That Have Won the Nobel Prize...

I've probably broken most of these rules by now. And I'm about to break another one to hype one of my clients: Brian Francis Slattery, author of Spaceman Blues: A Love Song.

Spaceman Blues was just published this week, simultaneously in hardcover and trade paperback. I could tell you all about it, or you could just read this great review in The Village Voice, which may be a wee bit more objective than any gushy review I would ever write, (as if book reviews could ever be considered objective - ha!). Brian was also interviewed on NPR's The Leonard Lopate Show , where he gave some very smart answers to some very smart questions.

Yes, I'm bragging.

*Rule #2 is the only thing that keeps me from turning this blog into a Jim Butcher fan site every time the next book in The Dresden Files comes out.

A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews

2007-08-06T22:48:00.000-04:00

Some books aren't meant to be read in just one or two sittings. I think A Complicated Kindness is one of those books. I read it too quickly, and it pushed me into some sort of scarred Mennonite funk, and my head is buzzing with all the funny and apt and beautiful and poignant quotes I loved. The atmosphere of the book is absolutely oppressive. The main character, 17-year-old Nomi Nickel, talks about how silent and severe the town is, and when she says, "people here just can't wait to die," you feel it in your bones. Reading this book made me feel like I was drowning, and I kept coming up for air, but then, after a short time of reflection, or an actual "real world" conversation, I couldn't help but jump back in.

Miriam Toews is a damn good writer. She tells the story in a pretty linear way, though there is a lot of jumping around, both in terms of flashbacks and moving in and out Nomi's head, and purposefully abrupt scene switches. The bulk of the story is in the flashbacks. Right away we read this great sentence:

"Half of our family, the better-looking half, is missing."

And I'm hooked. From there Nomi introduces us to her tiny and totally insular Mennonite community in Canada, where American tourists come in the summers to see how people lived centuries ago (the "simple life"). The town's industry is split between tourism (all of which is faked by teens who wear bonnets and pose knitting by old school fire places or churn butter) and Happy Family Farms, where Nomi is fated to work in an assembly line killing chickens as soon as she graduates high school.

At the time she's telling the story, Nomi is a pissed off and sarcastic teen a la Holden Caulfield. Even so, through flashbacks we meet a younger Nomi who was devoutly Mennonite and fervently prayed for her family. Through these, we see how comforting it can be to be under the wing of a belief system that puts everything in black and white. And there's a sort of Red Tent aspect to the town that's attractive. Sort of. To me at least.

The story begins with Nomi talking about her father, the only member of her immediate family she has left. We learn later that her sister Tash has run off with her boyfriend, and her mother Trudi was excommunicated, and has chosen to leave her family rather than become a "ghost" (Mennonites must shun the excommunicated, and Trudi didn't want to her husband and daughter to have to chose between her and the church). At least that's what we think. At first. To stay away from spoilers, I won't got any further. Just read this passage, which nearly broke my heart:

"The other day I found her [Trudi's] passport in her drawer when I was putting away my dad's laundered handkerchiefs. I wish I hadn't. For the purpose of my story, she should have it with her. I sat on my dad's bed and flipped through page after empty page. No stamps. No exotic locales. No travel-worn smudges or creases. Just the ID information and my mother's black-and-white photo which if it were used in a psychology textbook on the meaning of facial expressions would be labeled: Obscenely, heartbreakingly hopeful."

As the story progresses we learn more about Mennonites, which are named for Menno Simons, and called "Mennos," (at least in Nomi's head). Nomi's uncle, The Mouth, has recently taken over the church (and by extension, the town), and rules with an ultraconservative anti-fun iron fist. By the time Nomi is 17, The Mouth has shut down everything in town except the cinema, and forced all the teachers to follow his own curriculum ("our textbook could have been called Proven Theories We Decry").

Even so, Nomi manages to get a boyfriend and a tobacco addiction and wear halter tops and buy drugs from someone she calls The Comb. And we've got her voice and humor to lighten the mood. And the mood does lift, especially when she's pointing out the absurdities of what's on Menno's shit list and what isn't, and wondering what sort of douchebag names a religious movement after his first name, but promotes total humility. Nomi's voice picks up the humor in trying to hold her family - now just her and her dad Ray - together. Also, check out how Toews doesn't use quotation marks, or any kind of marker, to point out the distinction between dialog and thoughts (like Cormac McCarthy in The Road; another book that gave me the "I'm drowning" sensation) -

"That's cool though, I said thinking Jesus, let's not be the kind of family that tidies up the dump at night. The dump is the dump though Dad, I said. The central idea at work in a dump is that it's not a clean place. Ray said: Well, yes, but I organize the garbage in a way I feel makes sense."

And then, in a blink, we're right back to heart-wrenching:

"The dump was kind of like a department store for Ray, but even more like a holy cemetery where he could organize abandoned dreams and wreaked things into families, in a way, that stayed together."

Overall, A Complicated Kindness is fairly light on the complications, and on the kindness. It's a rather straight forward condemnation of religious fundamentalism. The church completely wreaks Nomi's family. Ray seems to be the only one who's left with his faith somewhat intact, and he's a very quiet character. I would have liked to have heard more from him.

Instead, the bulk of the complicated feelings are expressed by Nomi and her mother. Toews does a wonderful job of balancing when they are being sarcastic, or criticizing, and when they are being sincere. Someone once told me that no one loses their religion for intellectual reasons, and at the heart of every apostate is a much more personal and emotional beef. That seems right to me. Who turns their back on the comfort and order of an entire belief system just because some fossils and carbon dating techniques contradict the biblical time line? Even once Nomi is well on her way to excommunication, she can't help but pine for religious conviction, and admire those who have it:

"I wanted what she had. I wanted to know what it really felt like to think you were saving someone's life."

I took this statement to be totally lacking in sarcasm.

I got this book from Sarah, who recommended it in this post. The other night we were talking about it, and she made some really good points. It's interesting what stuck in her head as memorable, because it was stuff that I'd completely forgot. Throughout the book, Nomi keeps telling us how bad she is at endings. She writes various essays and papers for her English teacher, Mr. Quiring, and he also tells her she's lousy at endings too. Sarah asked me: "Weren't you disappointed with the ending?"

Me: "Not really. It was sort of anti-climatic, I guess." For some reason, I hadn't given the ending all that much thought. "Maybe I was mildly disappointed."

Sarah: "It seemed like the author was preparing us for a bad ending, because Nomi kept saying how bad she was at endings throughout the book."

Me: "Oh yeah." I'd forgotten about how Nomi said that, even though she said it enough that readers would take note. I'm struck silent by how smart my friends are. I mean, that was a comment for the upper-class lit discussion group. Was Miriam Toews covering her ass by making her "main character" bad at endings? Or would an author purposefully write a less-than-satisfying ending, to give her main character continuity?

I don't know. Here's what I want to know: do y'all think that some books, particularly literary fiction, are meant to be read slowly? We all know that some books are "page-turners," but are there books that are the opposite of page-turners? And I don't mean boring books, or books like Jane Eyre, that took me two months to read. I mean books that you are meant to savor over a longer period of time, like a week or two, and not because you're busy, or you're just not that into it, or because it's a textbook, but because you want to give yourself time to absorb it. Or is that an outdated idea, like the way that people read back before TV and cell phones and electricity?

Is it possible to read a book too fast?

The Mystery of the Decapitated Cover Models

2007-07-23T02:59:00.000-04:00

I recently discovered Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Novels' Covers Gone Wild page (which is awesome and hilarious), and it inspired me to do some cover art naval gazing of my own.

There are certain trends in publishing that baffle me. For example, why have there been so many books published in the last few years with the word "daughter" in the title? (The Memory Keeper's Daughter, The Gravedigger's Daughter, The Bonesetter's Daughter, The Hummingbird's Daughter, The Abortionist's Daughter etc.) And, even more intriguing, what's with all these covers that feature half of some girl's face? Seriously, these covers are everywhere, in every genre. You've already seen the Gossip Girl collection. Here are some more.

Literary / Historical Fiction

Mystery / Thriller

Science Fiction / Fantasy

Biographies and auto-biographies get full faces. History books get full faces. All in all, I'd venture to say that writing non-fiction increases your chance of getting a full face on your cover.

But then there are books like Mary, about Mary Todd Lincoln, by a first time author, which scored a full face, even though it's fiction. Isabelle Allende gets full faces. Authors like Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper) and Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore, Norwegian Wood) come perilously close to having uninterrupted faces on their covers. And A.M. Homes' new book - The Mistress's Daughter - gets a full frontal face! Something is afoot.

As I've hinted at in previous posts, Jane Eyre always gets a full face. Why? Who better to benefit from our current trend of decapitation than Jane Eyre?

I was having lunch last week with an editor, and she gave me a book I've been wanting to read. On the cover is a teenage boy wielding a sword. The boy has no head. The cover cuts off right at his neck. I couldn't help myself - I had to put it out there: what's up with all these headless models? The editor explained that B&N wants covers with live models (as opposed to scenery, or abstract painting, or an icon). Sometimes, the models aren't quite the right age (I'm guessing this is the case re: Gossip Girls), but if you cut off part of their face, voila! Youth. You can slice away the years. From the Gossip Girls we learn that we all look our youngest around the mouth.

Also, perhaps it's less expensive to use half a face than the whole face.

Please chime in. I'm a sucker for a good conspiracy theory.

Jane Eyre: The Comeback

2007-07-16T10:19:00.000-04:00

Right around page 200, when Mr. Rochester impersonates an old gypsy woman, Jane Eyre sunk it's claws into me. I couldn't stop reading this book - in the bathroom, waiting in line for a sandwich, on various modes of public transportation, very late at night, over breakfast - Jane Eyre and I have been inseparable these past few days.

I overcame with ease my baser nature in order to love this book. I skimmed over the narrator's recurrent use of the verb "ejaculated" to describe people rushing in and out of rooms, or conversing, (words ejaculating from one's mouth) with nary a Beevis and Butthead snicker. I didn't trip over Mr. Rochester's way of calling Jane his "little friend" (are you not my little friend?), which seems oddly contemporary ghetto to me (like, if I started dating one of the construction workers on my block, maybe he'd call me his little friend?). And let us not forget that I publicly advertised my passionate reading of a book with this cover:
Another member of my book club read the Penguin edition with this cover:
Notice that Jane Eyre looks like she could be attractive in this edition - maybe if someone took the doily off her neck, and put her in a dress that had less of a parachute effect. This book club member finished the book nearly six weeks before I did. Dear Reader, is there a connection?

Jane Eyre is ugly. Mr. Rochester is ugly. But it doesn't matter, because they see each other as beautiful / handsome. This is true love, which is, after all, blind. Jane is sensible enough to know that Mr. Rochester is not a handsome man, or even a moral man, but she comes to love his every imperfection in a way that turns it into a fetish. We've all turned this corner before in relationships - where it becomes impossible to see your lover's receding hairline, or ability to spend an entire Saturday without leaving the couch as anything less than adorable.

Jane Eyre became a powerful aphrodisiac for me, as it accomplishes what most contemporary romance novels don't. In category romance the hero and heroine are younger and way more attractive than the reader could ever hope to be, and have only minor baggage / issues. The real difficulty, as a writer, is coming up with a reason for these two characters, who are obviously perfect for each other, to stay apart / hate each other for most of the novel. In Jane Eyre, Rochester is married to a lunatic, so obviously they can never be together! They are totally hot for each other, but all these morals and bigamy laws get in the way. So much sexual tension = so much gratitude for twenty-first century relationships.

Another thing I really came to love was Jane Eyre's no nonsense attitude. Rochester tells her she's beautiful, or compliments her and she's like, I know I'm plain, and I'm over it, so stop flattering me, let's talk about something else, okay? And the narrator really doesn't let you forget that Jane isn't cute. She reunites with a nanny she had as a child, and the nanny says something like, wow, Jane, I thought that maybe you would bloom into an attractive woman when you grew up, but what a disappointment that hope turned out to be. Or when Jane's recuperating with the Rivers, and she overhears Mary and Diana talking about how ill-planned her face is. She never lets this get her down though.

So, I have to say, Amanda, wherever you are (probably Chicago), I get why this is your favorite book. It's not my favorite book, due to some pretty serious nineteenth century pacing issues in the first 200 pages, but I get it. I get Jane Eyre. In a photo finish I completed it a mere day before the Book Club Deadline, July 15th. And it felt good.

I'm gonna go rent the movie now.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

2007-07-09T22:20:00.000-04:00

A couple of days ago I finished up Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. It wasn't as difficult to get through as Jane Eyre (which I'm still working on; made it to Volume II; 153 pages and counting!), but I didn't exactly speed through it either. I picked it up, not knowing anything about Ishiguro other than he wrote The Remains of the Day, which won the Man Booker Prize, and that Never Let Me Go has sci-fi/fantasy elements. Sounded like a great combo to me.

This book is very, very slow. Have y'all seen that movie The Island, with Scarlett Johansson and Ewan McGregor, who are in this sort of self contained dome where everyone is wearing white track suits and drinking protein shakes, and they can't ever go outside because supposedly the world has been contaminated/destroyed, but they break free, because they are intrepid Americans, and figure out that the world is just fine and they are clones, or "insurance policies" for really rich people, and when the time comes, whoever cloned them will harvest their organs, like Scarlett Johansson is a clone for this model who wants new skin, and Ewan McGregor is a clone for this guy who has some disease, maybe AIDS or something resulting from wild sex in his youth, I don't remember all the details, because at this point the movie became absolutely ridiculous and I stopped paying attention. But the premise of the The Island - that people can clone themselves and create living insurance policies, and what if those "insurance policies" escape? - is really cool; right out of a Philip K. Dick or Robert Sheckley short story.

Never Let Me Go has a very similar premise. The main character, Kathy, is looking back on the minutia of her life; in particular, her time at Hailsham, a sort of boarding school for "very special" students (i.e. clones). Right from the start of this novel a sense of paranormal or irreality is established, because I kept thinking, in what sort of world are really boring memories and details like this important? Do I really need to be paying close attention here? Ooh, they just said "maths," is that like, sci-fi, or just British?

Kathy introduces us to Tommy, another of the main characters, by talking about how he had this nice blue shirt, and he kept getting mud on it, and damn won't he be out of sorts when he finds out. But when he finds out, he's only mildly disappointed. Whew! Kathy narrates like an absent minded senior citizen, constantly saying stuff like, oh, before I tell you about this, you really need to know about that (yes, she uses the second person, just like she's talking to me, which is a device I almost always find annoying), and then she'll finally come around to the point, which will be something really anti-climatic anyhow, (like, will Kathy ever find that cassette tape she lost?) or she'll just lead into a new chapter with another rambling story.

Ishiguro uses cliff-hanger sentences like these to get your hopes up that something is going to happen soon:

"So I wasn't prepared at all for what happened at the churchyard several days later."

or,

"But then everything changed again, and that was because of the boat."

By the time this boat was mentioned, on page 215, I was on to Ishiguro, and I didn't fall for his little trick. I knew that nothing was going to happen because of that boat, and that the boat scene would let me down, like all the other false promises scattered throughout this book.

In a similar way, Ishiguro keeps the reader in suspense about the novel's fantasy world and how it works for way too long. In the first third of the book, everyone at Hailsham is very focused on being creative. They create art, poems, stories, whatever, and it's this very big deal that everyone takes seriously, except for Tommy, who has a temper, and doesn't seem to like art, and so doesn't participate in the Exchanges (where students trade their work with each other). Nobody knows why it's so important for the students to create this art, especially not the reader, who keeps dutifully turning the pages and waiting, waiting, waiting for some sort of pay-off. Every so often, Madame comes and takes the best of the students' art for her Gallery. No one knows what this Gallery is for. Never Let Me Go is an extremely quiet novel, full of nuance, and in all honestly, not my type of read. Why don't these kids run away or something, like Scarlett and Ewan? Why don't they do something that would give this book more of a plot?!

Really, there's no pay-off for the reader, or even a clear idea of how the world works until the very end, when as adults, Kathy and Tommy hunt down Madame, and confront her in her house. This scene is actually pretty damn heartbreaking, so in true Kathy style, I better back up and give you some backstory:

At this point, you've picked up on the fact that Kathy, Tommy, and friends are clones, and were cloned from the dregs of the society - drunks, homeless people, drug addicts, prostitutes: ostensibly people who won't talk and give these secrets away. (I kept hoping one of these people would have cleaned up and sought out their clone, but alas, Ishiguro keeps it way too real). You also know that they were cloned to have their organs harvested at some later date. You also know that there's been this rumor going around, that if two people can prove that they are in love, then they can get a deferral for five years, and they can live in peace and not have to continue donating all their vital organs until they "complete."

So Kathy and Tommy show up at Madame's house and tell her their theory about The Gallery, that it's used to substantiate a couple's claim that they are really in love. Madame laughs at them and says, no, we took that art to prove to the scientific community that y'all clones have souls, and that you deserved to be treated humanely up until it's time to harvest all your organs to cure cancer. But now that Hailsham's closed down, we've gotten rid of The Gallery. No one believes that clones ought to be nurtured anymore.

This big reveal was too close to what I suspected to be surprising and fulfilling. And afterwards, Kathy and Tommy just go on with their lives. Tommy completes after his fourth donation. Kathy takes a long drive and mulls over her memories.

I realize that my comments imply that I'm trying to turn this quiet, evocative, and sometimes effecting novel into a Hollywood action movie, or yet another work of American Values that affirms the undeniable pull of freedom, and our right to blaze our own paths, determine our own futures, even for clones. That's not exactly what I'm saying. Never Let Me Go just seemed too much like real life. Which is a great compliment, or a great criticism, depending on what you're looking for in fiction.

*Other books I've read by authors who've won the Man Booker Prize:

Man Booker: A Prize for Thorough Introspection.

The Bigger They Come, by A.A. Fair

2007-07-01T21:24:00.000-04:00

For reasons I won't go into, I've been on this kick where I want to read mysteries with fat female detectives, a la The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. My boss recommended this book, which, as you can see from the cover, is written by Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of Perry Mason. I couldn't find any cover art of this book on-line, so I just took a picture of it. It was originally published in 1939 by William Morrow. My edition was published in 1943 by Pocket Books. Brand new, it cost 45 cents. On the back of the book is an ad for Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl, which "was for many weeks a record seller!" It cost 75 cents brand new.

But back to the fat female detective: The Bigger They Come has a great one - Bertha Cool, of the Cool Detective Agency. She's self-possessed, no-nonsense, cheap as hell, and astoundingly fat. She's summed up nicely here:

"Mrs. Cool, perfectly at ease, continued to hold down the desk with her elbows. She had that motionless immobility which characterizes the very fat. Thin people are constantly making jerky motions to alleviate the nervous pressure which possesses them. Mrs. Cool didn't have a fidget in her system. When she sat down, she was placed. She had the majesty of a snow-capped mountain, and assurance of a steam roller."

The narrator is Donald Lam, a penniless shrimp of a man who doesn't weigh a pound over 120, and is hired as "The Muscle" for the Cool Agency. Yeah, I know, I know - A Bertha "Cool" and Donald "Lam" Mystery, but whatever, I didn't let it bother me.

Lam is hired by Cool to serve a man named Morgan Birks with divorce papers. The problem is that Morgan's a fugitive, so he's in hiding. His wife, Sandra Birks, refers Lam to her brother Bleatie to help find him. Despite a recent car accident that has left Bleatie's head in a bandage, he leads Lam to Morgan's lover, who in turn leads Lam to a hotel, where she will ostensibly meet with Morgan. Lam waits in the room next door to Morgan's lover for Morgan to appear.

In the meantime, Sandra and Bleatie show up at the hotel too. Sandra can't wait to give Morgan a piece of her mind, and Bleatie is there for suspicious reasons - it seems like he's working for Morgan, and is very afraid of being accused of having led Lam and Sandra to Morgan. When Morgan finally shows up, Lam serves him the papers, Sandra screams at him and his lover, and Bleatie pleads for forgiveness. It's quite a scene. The job is over. Except, of course, it's not. It's really just began.

SPOILER ALERT - SKIP THIS PARAGRAPH IF YOU PLAN TO READ THE BOOK!

Lam gets kidnapped by toughs the minute he steps outside of the hotel, and the plot, as they say, thickens. I won't go into all the details, except to say the Lam deduces from a fashion faux-pas that Bleatie and Morgan are the same person! It's an almost Queer Eye for the Straight Guy or What Not to Wear moment, when Lam reasons, "would a guy with a two inch diameter bald spot really part his hair down the middle? Of course not!" With that, the whole head bandage / broken nose disguise falls apart. This was a great moment, and, it seemed to me, one that a writer today would never try and pull off. It's my theory that today's writers think in much more cinematic terms, and some part of their minds are picturing the movie adaptations of their book when they write. This technique - where one character is pretending to be two people - is hard to pull off on screen, so I wonder if writers who've considered it have just let it drop. Not that they didn't have television in 1939, but it wasn't the cultural centerpiece that it is today.

SPOILER'S OVER NOW - CARRY ON

But that great Ah-Ha moment is only the half way point in the unfolding of the plot. At the beginning of the novel, we learn that Lam was disbarred for claiming to know a legal loophole in which you can commit murder and get away with it. And true to his word, Lam shows us, quite brilliantly, how it's done.

Between Lam's brains and Bertha's size and poise, this was a great read for me. It's the most ingeniously plotted mystery I've read in a while, though I must admit to getting a little bogged down with the legal intricacies of Lam's murder-without-consequence scheme. But I've already ordered the next two books in the Bertha Cool - Donald Lam series.

It's impossible for me to read a book this old and not wonder about what the publishing environment was like when it was published, and how much the business has changed since. I've been reading this print-out from Columbia University called Best and Worst of Times: The Changing Business of Trade Books, 1975 - 2002 by Gayle Feldman (thanks Stephen!). Even though 1939 and 1975 don't have very much in common, they are both Before My Time In The Publishing Industry, so I thought I'd share some of the more interesting stats in this report:

-"The number of new books being published each year increased more than 300%, from 39,000 in 1975 to 122,000 in 2000....[however] total unit sales only increased 150%, from 955 million in 1975 to almost 2.5 billion in 2000. The overall title/unit sales ratio, therefore, effectively shows a decrease in sales."

-"Book prices have risen in every format....Mass market paperback prices have quadrupled since 1975."

-"In the past, we'd sell ten mass market paperbacks for every hardcover. Today we sell two mass markets for every hardcover. We sell one trade paperback for every hardcover, except for the exceptions of course!" - Carolyn Reidy

(This is the fault of Boomers, who like to buy Hardcovers)

-"In 1975, novels had long stays on the bestseller list; in 2000, more novels made the list but generally enjoyed far shorter stays, with a few exceptions."

-"Twenty-five years ago, a book's shelf life was far longer. Today, many new books only stay on the shelf for three months, and in some cases, even less."

-"And acquiring big books became the badge of the successful editor. Farrar, Straus's Elisabeth Sifton says that by the 1990's, it was clear that "editors were valued for the deals they could do, not for work well done or talent nurtured."

Unfortunately, the stats I find interesting could also be considered depressing. I'm not one of those Doom and Gloom people, out predicting the apocalypse of the publishing industry. Just chew on this.

Jane Eyre: A Call To Arms

2007-06-26T00:11:00.000-04:00

I was up on the roof with some friends, and friends of friends, and conversation turned to Jane Eyre. Actually, I turned the conversation to Jane Eyre, which I've been trying to read, along with my book club, for the last two months.

Me: (casually) "So, have y'all read Jane Eyre?"

Everyone: (including some really masculine guys with deep voices and ESPN subscriptions): Resounding yes.

Girl named Amanda: "I've read it three times; it's my favorite book of all time!"

Crap. You can't throw a stone without hitting someone whose favorite book of all time is Jane Eyre. I mean, the book must rival the Holy Bible in terms of copies sold. But my book club (which, in all fairness, only consists of three people, including me) hasn't been able to get hooked. Why?

Me: "Yeah, well, I'm having trouble getting into it, because, you know, it's pretty slow, I mean the story doesn't start until page 100 or so, with Mr. Rochester's horse slipping on the ice scene" (murmurs from the crowd; one of the ESPN subscribers stares at me, looks away, and shakes his head sadly; I start to backpedal fast) - "I mean, what's wrong with me? This is obviously a great book, a seminal book, and I can't get into it. I think it might be because I already know the story? You know, I've seen a couple of movie and made-for-TV adaptations, and the story is such a big part of our culture, that maybe I just had expectations that were way too high..."

Everyone: (exchanging meaningful glances with each which clearly question my ability to participate in Western Civilization) "Jane Eyre is a great book... but it's not for everyone..." (like, not for dumbasses)

Me: "Yeah, because I read a lot of genre fiction, so I like stories that are fast paced." (This point is undermined by my participation in a previous discussion about Philip Roth. Damn!)

Amanda: "Well, you should read it in conjuction with The Wide Sargasso Sea, which is the story of the crazy lady in the attic."

God, a Jane Eyre spin off? I struggle to keep my mounting alarm off my face. Please, please don't let my book club find out about this...

Amanda: (beginning to truly feel sorry for me)"And I read Jane Eyre when I was on this whole women's studies kick..."

Yeah, the Brontes were real feminists for their time. "Their time" being a really long time ago. I'm a feminist, I love feminists, I love feminist books (most of them), but I want to read something more contemporary. Maybe if Jane Eyre was embroiled in a fight against her new evil and sexist health insurance company, which charges a minimum of $40.00 for birth control, and only five bucks for generic Viagra...now there's something I can really relate to. There's some feminism I can really get behind.

Me: "Yeah, I can see that, totally. It's just hard for me to read. And I really want to read it. The other night, I read thirty pages, and got this wonderful sense of accomplishment - I felt really fulfilled, in a literary way - like how you might feel after running a marathon, or scoring a goal" (my attempt at sports analogies and "literary stamina" go ignored), "but I still don't feel a strong urge to pick it back up."

Later, back in the apartment with my boyfriend, I can't let it go.

Boyfriend: "The problem is that you're reading it wrong. You can't just read it before bed, or on your lunch break, or when you have free time. You need to make a commitment. You need to read at least a hundred pages at a clip. You need to let yourself get lost in Jane Eyre's world."

My boyfriend is full of surprising and unacknowledged bursts of wisdom. I'm speechless.

But not for long.

Me: "Um, you're right. You're right. But look" (I can't stop myself, even though my arguments are getting thinner and thinner), "I think the real problem is that the two main characters are unattractive, and the narrator does nothing to hide that, and I'm a shallow 21st century bitch. I mean, look at this cover! Who wants to read about this girl?" (I am shaking the book precariously close to his calm and lovely face. Really, couldn't the Jane Eyre art department take a clue from Chick Lit?)

Boyfriend: (Shrugs). "I don't think she's unattractive. By the end, I thought she was attractive."

Great. I'm mildly disturbed by my boyfriend's taste in women, but I soldier on:

Me: "Maybe my problem with Jane Eyre is that I credit it with spawning the romance genre, and you know that I've been irrevocably traumatized by reading too many of my grandmother's romance novels at a young and tender and impressionable age..." (this is true, my Middle School Dating Strategies were formulated soley based on cowboy romances)

Boyfriend: "I don't think you can credit Jane Eyre with creating the whole romance genre. There were a lot of other authors who contributed..." (begins to list authors...I sigh loudly in defeat)

I'm all out of arguments. I must embrace Jane Eyre or alienate myself from all of my friends, to say nothing of Western Culture. All at once, I feel a surge of sympathy for Tall Katie, a friend I had years ago who claimed to dislike Catch 22. Obviously, we knew she was just lying to get attention. How is it possible to feel anything but intense love and admiration for Catch 22?!

This is a call to arms. All who are struggling through Jane Eyre unite! All who have lied about having read this book, and having loved it, tell your story as an anonymous comment! I know I'm not alone! I can't be the only one.

In the meantime, I will keep on trying. Our book club has set a deadline of July 15th: Jane Eyre or bust.

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

2007-06-18T19:52:00.000-04:00

Hands down, the darkest book that I've read since, um, I don't know. This may very well be the darkest book I've ever read. I mean, Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot scared the shit out of me, and I still have the occasional nightmare about my best friends turning into vampires and levitating outside the window of my fourth floor apt. window, but here's the thing: there are no vampires in Sharp Objects. Nothing supernatural. It's real. And really disturbing.

Naturally, being a drawn-to-the-dark-side kind of girl, I absolutely loved this book. It didn't quite give me nightmares, but I had very vivid and creepy dreams while I was reading it. Flynn creates such a strong sense of atmosphere that it's jarring to put the book down and realize that you're wedged in a > 600 square foot apartment, don't have a gorgeous and cruel ice-queen mother or word scars cut all over your skin, and aren't a chronic bourbon drinker.*

The voice is spare and honest, and the characters are shamelessly fucked up. There are no good people in this book. Well, I suppose I should say that there are no good women. Flynn admits to adoring evil stepmothers and wicked queens from the Brothers Grimm, and casually confesses that she was not a nice little girl. She's set out to write a story about female violence, and the uniquely destructive relationships between women - a type of viciousness that is wholly feminine. Here's an excerpt from the novel that doesn't quite make that point, but gives a sharp piece of insight nonetheless:

"Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. I have known so many sick women all my life. Women with chronic pain, with ever-gestating diseases. Women with conditions. Men, sure, they have bone snaps, they have backaches, they have a surgery or two, yank out a tonsil, insert a shiny plastic hip. Women get consumed. Not surprising, considering the sheer amount of traffic a woman's body experiences. Tampons and speculums. Cocks, fingers, vibrators and more, between the legs, from behind, in the mouth. Consumed. Men love to put things inside women, don't they? Cucumbers and bananas and bottles, a string of pearls, a Magic Marker, a fist. Once a guy wanted to wedge a telephone receiver inside of me. I declined."

Flynn's main character, Camille Preaker, is a cutter who cuts words into her skin like cherry, virgin, cunt, yelp. She can feel certain words pulse on her skin depending on circumstance and mood - words like punish, wicked, lipstick. She's been a cutter so long, and with such ferocity, that the only clear spot left on her body (other than her face) is a small unmarked circle in the center of her back where she can't reach with a blade.

At the start, Camille is called back to her small home town of Wind Gap, Missouri, when her boss at a Chicago newspaper asks her to report on the murder of one nine-year-old girl, and the disappearance of another. Shortly after Camille comes to town the second girl is found. Both girls had been strangled, had their teeth pulled out, and then arranged lovingly to be found (lip gloss applied, hair brushed, eyebrows plucked). Camille hasn't been back to Wind Gap in over eight years. Needless to say, her homecoming stirs up a lot of memories (not the least of which is the death of her younger sister when Camille was eighteen) and strains her extremely disfuctional relationship with her mother.

The town of Wind Gap is best summed up on page 74:

"I didn't mind the idea of spilling Wind Gap's stories to Richard [out of town cop character]. I felt no particular allegiance to the town. This was the place my sister died, the place I started cutting myself. A town so suffocating and small, you tripped over people you hated every day. People who knew things about you. It's the kind of place that leaves a mark."

Overall, Stephen King put it best in his blurb: "...Then, after the lights were out, the story just stayed there in my head, coiled and hissing, like a snake in a cave. An admirably nasty piece of work, elevated by sharp writing and sharper insights."

Over two months after I read it, Sharp Objects is still "coiled and hissing" in my head. This is an extremely powerful book that I'd recommend to anyone who likes their fiction dark and thoughtful.** And NASTY.

*Actually, this book played a key role in kicking off my love affair with Woodford Reserve.
**In case you're one of those readers wondering what I mean by Literary Mysteries, this would be one. Not only is the writing great, but Sharp Objects deals with a lot of serious social issues, along with other fascinating issues.

PS - I picked this book up at BEA 2006, and it took me almost a year to realize what's on the cover - an old school razor blade! (No, I have no idea what I thought it was....some Rorschach thing?)

PSS - If reading Nineteen Minutes made you never ever want to have sons, Sharp Objects will make you never want to have daughters.

Generation Me by Jean M. Twenge, Ph.D.

2007-03-15T18:47:00.000-04:00

The full title of this book is Generation Me: Why Today's Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled - and More Miserable Than Ever Before, which would imply, at least to me, that this book will measure the pros and cons of my generation (Twenge defines Gen Me as everyong under 35). The Ph.D. part after her name implied that too.

A better title for this book is Generation Me: The Narcisisitic Spoiled Brats That Make Reality TV Possible, and Why They Are All Ho-Bags, Have So Many Damn Tattoos and so many cases of ADHD and Believe They Can Be Anything They Want Be to When They Grow Up, by Dr. Twenge; and by Dr. Twenge I mean a writer who sometimes wishes she was part of the boomer generation. (Why is it impossible for me not to either smirk or cringe when I read the word "boomer?")

Twenge spends the first half of the book pointing out why Gen Me is the most selfish, godless, slutty, mannerless and brainless generation yet, then spends the second half of the book feeling sorry for us.

What killed me about this book, over and over again, as I read it, was how Twenge failed to acknowledge the role that the increased visibility and acceptance of the Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgender/Queer community contributed to our current generational climate of acceptance. She seems nostalgic for the fact that women no longer feel that having children is compulsory, or even grow up dreaming about their wedding day and getting married. Minorities (by this she means women and people of color) have so many choices today! So many choices that we are stymied and miserable. Some of the college students she talked to admired the institution of arranged marriage, because they were sick of dating, and being lonely, and being single. Poor, poor Gen Me. We are facing a New World, without the road maps to guide us through. Well, I get that. But if you're writing a book centered on how different we are from the boomers, you should at least acknowledge somewhere, (before chapter 7), the part that the GBLTQ community has played in breaking out traditional gender roles. Not only that, but they've helped show Gen Me that there is more than one way to be happy and have a family.

My dislike of Twenge's arguments is not to say that she doesn't have some good points. We do move around a lot more than boomers did, in terms of jobs, cities, even counties. It's more difficult for us to form friendships and relationships. There exists a website - Cuddle Party - for people who don't get enough welcomed human touching and interaction. We don't have real neighbors to speak of, or a sense of community. This last point in particular resonated. If I was out of eggs, or sugar, or flour or whatever, what would I do? I would go to Gristedes.

Speaking of my local Gristedes, Twenge seems to have overlooked (until chapter 7) one of obvious reasons why our generation is less likely to have friendships, or even spark up conversation with our neighbors and those whom we see around our neighborhoods: today's America is much less homogenous than it was during the 50s, 60s, and even 70s. It's hard to form a friendship, or even spark up a conversation when not everyone speaks the same language.

Twenge: on one of the many benefits of the boomer generation: "This may be the key to the low rate of depression among older generations: despite all the deprivation and war they experienced, they could always count on each other. People had strong feelings of community; they knew the same people all their lives; and they married young and stayed married. It may not have been exciting, and it stymied the dreams of many, but it was a stable life that avoided the melancholy that is so common now." --page 116

Twenge: on the chronic loneliness of Gen Me: "It's almost as if we are starving for affection. "There is a kind of famine of warm interpersonal relations, or easy-to-reach neighbors, of encircling, inclusive memberships, and of solid family life," argues one political scientist Robert Lane. To take the analogy a little further, we're malnourished from eating a junk-food diet of instant messages, e-mail, and phone calls, rather than the healthy food of live, in-person interaction." --page 110

I definitely agree with Twenge that we have it harder than previous generations. It is more difficult for Gen Me to afford life, and afford ourselves. We want more. We have higher expectations. We had teachers who were afraid to grade us too harshly, lest it damage our self-esteem. We were told that we could be whatever we wanted to be, do whatever we wanted to do. We believed we would be richer than our parents. I felt a strange sense of satisfaction when I read about how much more expensive our lives are now: "Fixed costs like housing, health insurance, and child care have doubled since the 1970s, while discretionary income has gone down." Yeah, I've like, noticed.

Where are Americans getting enough money to afford themselves? Twenge says it's coming from women's salaries. She quotes Robert Putnam, a social scientist, concluding, "Virtually all of the increase in full-time employment of American women over the last twenty years is attributable to financial pressures, not personal fulfillment." What?! Apparently Twenge agrees with this statement, since she doesn't even comment on this Putnam's old school patriarchal opinion. Twenge sort of redeems herself by calling attention to how the media likes to pretend that the Boomer generation was full of femmenists who married late and put their careers first, and in reaction, GenMe apparently wants to turn back the clock. My girlfriends and I have been baffled by articles like this. Twenge calls this particular 1997 article in Time Magazine unmitigated crap: "[GenMe is] reacting in part to what they perceive as miscues by their older siblings, not to mention their parents, who attacked life with a single-minded career focus and a no-ties-to-hold-you-back attitude - and ended up with no ties at all."

I'm probably not being fair to Twenge. The 7th chapter in this 8 chapter book is titled "The Equality Revolution: Minorites, Women, and Gays and Lesbians," so she does address how these groups have had an impact on our generation. However, I wanted more from this chapter, and I wished that Twenge would have addressed the impact of minorities in the opening chapters, when she was writing about Gen Me's isolation, or Gen Me's dislike of absolutes, and embrace of ideas like "do whatever is right for you." I think the increased power and visibility of minorities is one of the biggest differences between GenMe and the boomer generation. It deserves more attention.

But maybe most of my problem with this book is its structure, and not necessarily its content. Generation Me is published by the Free Press, the same S&S imprint that brought us Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinst Pigs, so maybe I should have expected a book that made my whole world make sense in one section, but made me to throw the book against the wall after reading the next one.

Twenge is tackling a huge and difficult issue in Generation Me. It's probably not something that can be resolved in just one book. The defining features of our generation (whether it ends up being called GenMe, iGen, Generation net, or whatever) will be part of the cultural conversation for years to come. I'll look forward to hearing our generations' reaction to this book. Hopefully that reaction will take the shape of another book that is a bit more thorough and compassionate. Until then, I'm not sorry I spent my time and money on Generation Me, though I wish I would have got a higher discount, and I won't be recommending it to friends.

Look at Me by Jennifer Egan

2007-03-10T10:27:00.000-05:00

"We had ridden in silence before. Top down. A brimming, windy silence.
This one was vacant. It roused in me an urgent need for talk: "Road." "Signs." "Sky." "How was?" "Where were?" "Radio." "Temperature." Forced conversation hovering over a void.
Z listened to my efforts with a dazed look. With each word, I was becoming less the person he imagined.
I saw this clearly. But I couldn't stop."

--Jennifer Egan, Look at Me, page 392

This novel is full of concise, gut-wrenchingly recognizable scenes like the one above. This scene is amazing to me. There isn't much going on there, but there's more tension and emotion than the action-packed scenes in other books where someone is being held at gunpoint, someone is mourning, a mother is frantically searching for her missing child, something of even greater importance is being lost. This scene falls into place with a thud. It lodged in my chest when I read it. I, too, talk to much! (Last night Danilanh mentioned that men say an average of 7,000 words a day, and women say 20,000 - almost three times as much!) Jennifer Egan gives these smallest of moments drama and tragedy. Bravo.

There are four main characters in Look at Me:

1) Charlotte, a 35-year-old model who is in a horrible car accident in her home town (Rockford, IL), and has so much reconstructive surgery, and so many titanium screw in her face (80), that (though she is still beautiful) her booking agent and other friends no longer recognize her.

2) Charlotte, 17-year-old daughter of Ellen; Ellen was (35)Charlotte's best friend growing up. Even though Ellen was gorgeous as a teen, (17)Charlotte is homely. I was initially disappointed with this fact - everyone else in the novel lived in New York and were unbelievably beautiful and sheik and savvy, and now we have to hear about an awkward teen in the town that (35)Charlotte so despises (Rockford, IL)? But (17)Charlotte grew on me. Big time.

3) Moose. He is (17)Charlotte's uncle. (35)Charlotte and Moose went to school together. Moose was really hot, and still is, but this is dampened by his growing craziness. Ever since his epiphany about the nature of sight (which he wrote a couple of academic books on) he has become reclusive, studying the history of his home town (Rockford, IL, where he now lives). He tries to mentor (17)Charlotte

4) Z / Michael West. His identity is elusive. In New York, he was known as Z, and was one of (35)Charlotte's lovers. He was part of the celebrity club scene, and then vanished with a bunch of money that wasn't his. No one knows where he went. Private Detective Anthony Halliday is trying to find him, and squeezes information from (35)Charlotte. She allegedly doesn't know anything, but as the book progresses, we suspect that he was involved in her accident. Meanwhile, the reader realizes that Z is living as Michael West, a math teacher in Rockford, IL, with whom (17)Charlotte begins an affair.

Whew! Do you see the way that everyone is connected, and it all comes down to Rockford? And how themes of sight and invisibility and beauty are running rampant, just in that summary? It's a tangled, tangled web, and one that I didn't even come close to unravelling, but Egan presents it very well (if with a heavy hand), and it was cool how there wasn't really one main character in the novel, but four. We start with (35)Charlotte, then we get (17)Charlotte, then we get Moose, then Michael West. We get snippets from other characters too - Anthony Halliday, Irene (a reporter who interviews (35)Charlotte about her accident), Ellen ((17)Charlotte's mother and (35)Charlotte's high school friend), and many more. Egan moves in and out of her many characters thoughts seamlessly, which continually impressed me (no simple skill). The point of view is complex and ever-changing, but not all confusing. Egan has total control.

What's less impressive is her handling of the male characters. While I loved the two Charlottes', and found them completely real and believable, I had trouble believing Z/Michael West and Moose. When Moose's sections came up, I found myself groaning a bit, "augh, him again?" Moose does a lot of thinking in the novel, and spends more than two pages justifying to himself his spur-of-the-moment decision to drive to Chicago. If Danilanh is right, and guys say only 1/3 of the words that girls do, does this mean guys think 1/3 of the thoughts that girls do? I don't know. But Moose's inner-monologue was working triple time. I got bored.

I think Egan put Moose in the book to hammer home her point about sight and perceptions. He's one of those characters who is supposed to represent a type of person, or an idea. I hate it when authors do this. It makes for books with really strong themes, but this device robbed Moose of whatever it is that makes characters in books come alive for readers. I didn't get him, but not only that, it didn't feel like Egan "got" him either. She didn't empathize with him. Or if she did, it didn't come out on the page. The effect was like reading A Confederacy of Dunces: the author spends the whole book making fun of his main character, Ignatius. Even though I enjoyed A Confederacy of Dunces for a lot of reasons, (it's really funny and clever, but at all the jokes are at Ignatius' expense). But as an author, why center your book around a character that you think is absolutely ridiculous? I mean, just look at this cover art:

To get back to what I liked about Look at Me; I read it on the heels of Jodi Picoult's My Sister's Keeper. Both novels have characters with leukemia, and both employ over four main characters' points of views. Picoult uses chapter breaks and different fonts to her distinguish six different characters' povs. Egan uses chapter breaks too, at first, but as the novel progresses, she switches back and forth between each pov. It works really well when she switches between two of the characters who live in Rockford, like from (17)Charlotte to Moose, or Michael West. The two characters will be together in the same scene, and Egan will leave one's head and hop into the other's. I admired how well she pulled this off.

Overall, I'm not sure I'd recommend Look at Me to friends. I was hoping for a stronger and more structured plot. You think that all the characters are going to collide in the end, (the two Charlottes (they do) Moose and Z / Michael West (they don't) and we'll get answers about Charlotte's accident that way. But that doesn't happen. The cause of her accident is revealed in the most static way possible - through her inner thoughts. Why didn't she just think this earlier? She has enough opportunity - we hear her thoughts constantly throughout her sections.

I read Look at Me quickly, and was engrossed, but I had been told it was a "literary thriller" by two people, and it's called an "intellectual thriller" on the back of the book (what is an "intellectual thriller" anyhow? I guess when the main character just decides to "think" the answer to the main mystery?), but the "thrilling" parts that were full of tension and anticipation all had to do with character development, or emotions running rampant, or insightful exchanges of dialog. I was, in part, on the edge of my proverbial seat reading Look at Me, waiting for something big to happen that never did.

A Brief History of the Dead, by Keven Brockmeier

2007-02-16T12:51:00.000-05:00

Reading this book, I started developing a theory about literary fiction; the ones I like the most (and maybe the most widely read?) literary novels have some sort of genre element at their centers, driving the plot. A Brief History of the Dead was probably sold as literary fiction, considering the author's publishing history, or perhaps it was pitched as "speculative fiction," or literary fiction containing fantastical elements. But really, it's a well-written fantasy.

Like most theories that are percolating in the far reaches of my brain, it just sort of slipped out of my mouth one day at lunch, and I immediately began to wonder if it was true. Look at The Time Traveler's Wife (sci-fi, fantasy), Mystic River (mystery, and yes, I consider it literary), The Girl in the Glass and The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque (mystery/fantasy by Jeffrey Ford), The Interpretation of Murder, A Conspiracy of Paper, and one of my favorite books, The Dogs of Babel, where the main character, a linguist, tries to teach his dog to talk so the dog can tell him how his wife died. Even books like Midwives and Toni Morrison's opus have really strong genre elements of plot styles running through them.

Of course, there are books that disprove my theory - The Kite Runner, The Life of Pi, The Secret History, The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex, A Heart Breaking Work of Staggering Genius, Douglas Coupland, Snow, and on and on and on. But let's not talk about these books. Let's talk about literary fiction that has genre elements. Because I like to read it. And I'm hoping there will be a lot more of it.

The premise of A Brief History of the Dead is taken from the tendency of some African communities to divide humans into three categories: 1) People who are still alive on earth 2) People who just recently died, and are still remembered by people who are alive. These people are not truly dead, and live in The City. They will stay in The City until the last person who knew them dies. 3) If no one on earth remembers a person, then that person is truly dead. The African name for this is zumani. They can still be remembered in general way, or the way that famous people are remembered (Socrates, Hitler, Elvis, etc.), but no one has seen their faces, so it doesn't count.

Half of the novel is set in The City, where all the remembered dead people are (this living dead). Their lives are basically the same, except they don't have a heartbeat (or maybe even a heart), which is very convenient for people who had high cholesterol or other heart problems. Once the last person who knew them on earth dies, they simply vanish. No one knows where they go.

The other half of the novel is set in Antartica, where Laura Byrd is totally isolated from all other humans, and is slowly running out of supplies. Her isolation is an asset, because a deadly virus sweeps the earth (The Blinks) and kills everyone but her. The reader doesn't know this right away, but you figure it out from the chapters set in The City, which is changing hourly. Because so many people are dying so fast, they crowd the city, but an hour or two later, when there is no one left on Earth to remember them, they disappear. The city is getting smaller and smaller fast. Soon, the only people left are those who Laura remembers.

What will happen to this after life set-up if Laura dies? Where do people go when they leave The City? Who caused the virus, and how did it spread? What happens to The City if it is completely emptied? Does it disappear? These are the questions that keep you reading. Which brings me to the other difference between books like this one (literary fiction with genre influences), and straight up genre fiction - in genre fiction, all your questions get answered. Usually. Not so in A Brief History of the Dead. Not so in most of the literary fiction that I read.

We find out about the virus. We have an idea of what will happen (and what is happening) to The City, sort of. The last chapters of the novel are these dreamy scenes, which were gorgeously written, (like the rest of the novel), but I didn't find satisfying. Brockmeier spends a lot of detail on these last, fleeting, surreal scenes, which I found pretty pointless. I didn't understand the importance of these scenes. Maybe the answers I'm looking for are there. But I don't think so.

An interesting side note is that I picked up a copy of Kevin Brockmeier's Things That Fall from the Sky a couple of years ago, which is a short story collection. I didn't like it. I don't think I like Brockmeier unless he's writing stuff with genre elements. Which puts him in the same category as Jonathan Lethem. To me at least.

Gripes aside, The Brief History of the Dead is a good and fast read. Y'all should read it.

Critics Just Wanna Have Fun

2006-11-06T22:36:00.000-05:00

It's fun to completely slam a book. It's like when you're in Junior High, and you come up with a really creative and dregrading nickname for a hated classmate, and your friends all give you high fives. It's fun to think up snarky and clever jabs that articulately describe why a particular character, or scene, or subplot, or spot of dialog totally blows. Some reviews are so scathing that you can literally see the reviewer body slamming the book - in a witty and detached way, of course. Body slam reviews have two goals: they warn readers about a bad book, and (perhaps more importantly), they make the reviewer look smart.

Take, for example, a New York Times Book Review of A Futile and Stupid Gesture: How Doug Kenney and National Lampoon Changed Comedy Forever, by Josh Karp, which appeared a couple of Sundays ago. The reviewer, Virginia Heffernan, a television critic, body slammed this book. Not only does she hate the book, but from the review it appears that she also hates National Lampoon's brand of slap-stick comedy. The majority of her review addressed her low opinion of the kind of comedy National Lampoon spawned, which she credits for spreading the ubiquity of panty raids, toga parties, and date-rape culture. I could get really worked up about these ridiculous statements - but I won't. I'll just ask why Virginia Heffernan, who obviously has no love or appreciation for this type of comedy, reveiwed this book!* Hmm, NYTBR? And why, NYTBR, did you chose to print this horrible review, when you could have printed a different, less ridiculous, and better informed review by a reviewer who actually liked the book they read?

I don't particularly like romance novels. But because I spent nearly two years reading them, (shout out, Diana Palmer!) I have a working knowledge of what makes a good one and what makes a bad one. This makes me the perfect person to writes a clever and scathing review of a romance novel. But why would I do that? (Other than for the opportunity to use big, impressive, degrading vocabulary words?) Do you see where I'm going with this?

Sometimes, I just really don't understand the point of bad reviews.

No, wait, I take that back. I understand a lot of the bad reviews on Amazon, because that's a site where people go to think about directly and immediately purchasing a book. And reveiws on Amazon may affect whether or not one buys a book. I read those customer reveiws. And if there are a lot of bad reviews, I won't buy the book. Because, whether this is accurate or not, I think of Amazon reviewers as people like me: people who love books and love to read and don't want to spend their hard earned cash on a bad book, and when they do, they want to make sure others don't make the same mistake.

For the most part, I sincerely appreciate Amazon's customer reviews. For example, I remember seeing Marie right after she finished Pure by Rebbecca Ray (which, for some reason, has now been retitled as A Certain Age, can anyone explain this?), and she was shaking with anger. She had just spent a couple of days reading this book in public, (on the subway, held in clear view (she was pretty much advertising the book, as we all do when we read on public transportation)), and had this to say - Marie on Pure. Her review is short and to the point. The point is, don't waste your money or your time on this book.

I appreciate bad reviews like that. No showing off. Just an honest warning, from one reader to another.

An Amazon reviewer that I've come to trust is Someone's Mom from Virginia. She warned me about Anne Kingston's The Meaning of Wife, and did I listen? No. I bought that book two weeks ago. And after only thirty pages, I was sorry.

But the NYTBR is a different story. I would love to know what the correllation is between people who read a glowing review in the NYTBR and people who buy that book. Or people who plan to buy a certain book, see it slammed in the NYTBR, and then don't buy it. In other words, how much does the NYTBR matter? Every author dreams of having their book reviewed in it - but why? Do reviews lead to higher sales? Do bookstores order more copies after a favorable review, or will they showcase the book or recommend it to customers? Or does an NYTBR review serve primarily as a status symbol? In the same vein as the idea that All Publicity Is Good Publicity, it is commonly believed that being body slammed by the NYTBR is better than being ignored.

Then there are the occassional NYTBR reviews that I just don't know what to make of. Troy Patterson (another television critic) reveiwed Mark Danielewski's new book, Only Revolutions, in yesterday's review. It should be said that Danielewski is not your average American novelist. He has been compared to Thomas Pynchon and Jacques Derrida - his novels are considered "modernist" or "postermodernist". While I would think he's trying to do more than tell a story, I don't think his inventive structure is designed as "a trap to catch reviewers," as Patterson figures. Right. Danielewski spent six years writing this novel to "catch reviewers." Only a paragraph above Patterson mentions that Only Revolutions has been nominated for the National Book Award.

You wouldn't call Patterson's review positive, but it's not really a body slam either. He didn't seem to really get the book. The review reads like work - Patterson is just doing his job. Which is sometimes the problem with reviews - they just aren't always inspiring.** I want to read reviews that make me run out and buy those great books that made the cut. Otherwise, I mean, for the most part, life is too short to talk about bad books.

*PS - This guy hated Virginia Heffernan's review more than I did, and for better reasons.

**When it comes to holding my attention on a hangover Sunday, I'm going to need a lot more passion and excitement, NYTBR.

The Friend Who Got Away, edited by Jenny Offill & Elissa Schappell

2006-10-17T20:35:00.000-04:00

The worst thing about this book is its cover. It's orange. And there's a silhouette of this woman in these short heels - heels so low that you wonder what the point in wearing them is, I mean, if you're going to have uncomfortable feet, why not be as tall as you can be? And she's wearing a businessy skirt and a pony tail. Quite a contradiction.

I whipped out this book on a plane, and the woman sitting next to me, with whom I am aquainted, and who is normally a very polite and well-spoken woman, glanced at the cover and said, "you're reading that?!"

Yes. Yes I am. I've been waiting to read The Friend Who Got Away for quite some time now because, as stated in the introduction,

"The loss of a friendship can be nearly as painful as a bitter divorce or death. And yet it is a strange sort of heartbreak, one that is rarely discussed, even in our tell-all society. Tales of disastrous loves abound, but there is something about a failed friendship that makes those involved guard it like a shameful secret."

Hmm. Yeah. That sounds about right. I can immediately think of two friends that I've lost. One I'm mostly okay with having lost, but the other friend - well it makes shudder to think of how close we were, and how poorly I treated her in the end. The way our friendship sputtered out, and how we half-heartedly tried to reconnect every now and again, but never could even get on the same page, and were always somehow offending each other, sometimes accidentally but sometimes on purpose, that is one of my shameful secrets. I never talk about it, (at least not without tearing up), and try not to even think about it, because it makes me feel like a bad friend, and even worse, a bad person. Friendship has the potential to last forever, and when it doesn't, it can really make us feel horrible.

There are twenty stories in this collection - true stories of lost friendship - and I enjoyed most of them. My favorites are the opening story, Katie Roiphe's "Torch Song," Mary Morris' "The Other Face," and Beverly Gologorsky's "In a Whirlwind." The first is about Katie as a college student, who carelessly sleeps with her friend's crush. Katie didn't even like the boy, and hardly found him attractive. Even today, she can't say why she did it, except to remark, "I was fulfilling some misplaced idea of myself. I was finally someone who took things lightly." The second is about Mary, her life long family friend Lauren, and the perils of borrowing money from a friend. The third touched me mostly because Beverly and Jessica came of age in such a different era - the late sixties and early seventies. They were both involved in various protests and civil rights movements, and fell out during a disagreement over whether men should be able to walk in a march for women's rights. Their friendship was lost over ideological conviction. Damn.

Emily White's "End Days," nearly makes the cut of my top three. It's about a friendship between two sixth graders, a hardcore Christian girl who believes the apocolypse will happen any day now and Emily, whose family doesn't have religion. Doesn't everyone have those cringe-worthy memories where we've made fun of someone who was perfectly nice, even wonderful to us? Some good person with "wacky" beliefs? I certainly have.

My least favorite stories were (surprisingly) Dorothy Allison's, which wasn't just about one friend, but various friends and lovers, and didn't have the type of focus I was looking for in this anthology, though it had some beautiful writing - Patricia Marx's, which was too short and too vague, too much like an outline of a friendship without the characters and details - and, I'm sort of embarassed to say, but Jennifer Gilmore's "The Kindness of Strangers" was very hard for me to read. It's about Jennifer as a twenty-something who has to have her colon removed, and her rancorous and jealous thoughts. I'm sure the story was therapuetic for Gilmore to write, but after reading about how miserable her life was, I was hoping for some sort of redemption. Even a cheesy epilog would have helped. Because each of these stories has such a sad ending (except for Nuar Alsadir, whose "friend" really needed to get lost), and Gilmore's illness was so grueling, I felt like the anthology needed to end on a somewhat happy note.

I wouldn't recommend reading this collection in one sitting. Are collections or anthologies meant to be read in one sitting? I'm not sure, but after reading maybe five or seven stories in a row I started to read each new one with a palpable sense of almost dread - like a mix of sadness and dread, because you know that all of these wonderful friendships will fail. It's gets depressing after a while. But it's also a bit thrilling to so intimately eavesdrop on an aspect of these womens' lives. The topic of lost friends is something that I simply can't talk about with this kind of honesty and objectivity with my friends. And I talk about everything with my friends!

Even though it's far from perfect, and you will certainly get some funny looks if you read it in public, I would recommend The Friend Who Got Away to any woman who's ever lost a friend, and feels guilty. Which is to say, I'd recommend it to every woman.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl

2006-09-27T10:33:00.000-04:00

This bulky-but-worth-it novel opens with the narrator and protagonist, Blue Von Meer, announcing her intention to tell us her Life Story from her dorm room at Harvard. She begins with her parents upbringing and marriage (her mother's family was extremely wealthy, her father's wasn't), then her mother's tragic death (when Blue was six - she fell asleep at the wheel after spending yet another late night working on her butterflies), then stories of countless small towns and an entire decade worth of time spent driving around America in a car, just Blue and her father, reading everything from Shakespeare to Hollywood biographies aloud to each other as they moved from place to place, sometimes living in 3 different towns a years. Blue's father, Gareth, is a civil war professor and was spreading his teachings to the most rural outposts of America. The story truly begins when Blue and Gareth settle in Stockton, North Carolina, and Blue begins her senior year of high school at St. Gallway, a prestigious private school.

From there, the story begins to closely resemble Donna Tartt's The Secret History - there is an exclusive clique that Blue refers to as The Bluebloods that consist of the five most eccentric, popular, beautiful, and mysterious seniors at St. Gallway. Every Sunday night they have a long and lavish dinner at Hannah Schneider's house, who is the enigmatic part time film teacher at St. Gallway's. After much snubbing and ostracizing, Blue is slowly accepted into the Bluebloods' group, and becomes privvy to many shocking secrets. Then someone is murdered.

But there's a mystery here, which caused me to read everything a bit more carefully than I read The Secret History. Why does Hannah take such a keen interest in Blue? She practically forces Blue on the Bluebloods, much to their annoyance. Hannah is an arresting character - she is gorgeous, tall, knife thin, and has a strong presence - so why isn't Blue's father Gareth, a known womanizer, (Blue refers to all his girlfriends as June Bugs), interested in her? And why doesn't Hannah ever talk about her past? And why does she hang around all these rich high school students anyway? When Hannah takes the group camping and ends up dead in the woods, hanging by an electrical cord, just before she was about to entrust Blue with an important secret, Blue begins to solve the mystery of Hannah's life, and her death.

The mystery plot is solid, and Pessl manages to wrap it up very nicely without making it feel overwrought. I don't think readers have a shot at deducing the who-dun-it, but then again, I'm starting to suspect that I'm a rather gullible reader (Darkly Dreaming Dexter took me by surprise - it didn't seem trite to me at all - and I would never have unravelled the mystery in The Interpretation of Murder, though two of my friends claim to have guessed at the ending immediately). Maybe I'm just a lazy reader. I'm beginning to suspect that when I read for pleasure, I simply don't spend a lot of energy trying to solve mysteries before I reach the denouement. I enjoy being led through a well told story far too much. Or perhaps I'm just trying to justify how bad I am at solving mysteries before I reach the last page. Anyone else surprised by the last page of Jodi Picoult's Salem Falls? Anyone? Really, I didn't see it coming.

Plot aside, the language, voice, and Gareth's character are what really makes Special Topics stand out. This novel is longer than it needs to be, and Hannah doesn't die until you've read more than three quarters of the novel, but because of the imaginative similes and metaphors (comparisons have been made to Lorrie Moore), I didn't mind too much. Blue is a precocious sixteen-year-old who is constantly referrencing books as she narrates, or inserting her Dad's opinion on everything in the form of rather wordy and philosophical quotes. Sound annoying? Well it's not. I actually enjoyed most of "Dad's" quotes - he has some very opinionated, original, and articulate things to say - and Blue is saved from being an unbearably precocious and pretencious character by her standard new-kid qualities. Blue's child genius side is tempered by her archetypal desire to be accepted by the Bluebloods, her unconcealed fascination with Hannah, and the way she openly loves and admires her Dad. Even when Blue is at a bar with Jade and Leulah, (two of the Bluebloods), picking up men, she can't stop talking about her father. She tells strangers about him, and repeats his oft-repeated quotes (if not aloud then in her head) constantly throughout the narrative. Because Blue is at an age where most teens despise their parents (or at least pretend to), her behavior is striking, and helps convey how tightly she clings to her father after the death of one parent.

Though Blue narrates, her father is truly the protagonist of the novel.

When this book was originally sold to Viking, a lot of fuss was made over another high advance paid for a young and attractive female author. It seems like everytime someone young and remotely attractive gets a book deal, the publishing industry and reviewers take a skeptical stance, suggesting it is the author's looks, and their publicity prospects that the publisher has paid for - and not necessarily the story. In the case of Marisha Pessl, this is just not true. To read an interview with the seemingly down-to-earth author, check out BookSlut

I would recommend this book to all my friends who enjoy literary fiction.

Jeffrey Ford, I think I love you...

2006-08-18T20:45:00.000-04:00

I've been having an incredibly satisfying literary love affair with Jeffrey Ford. So far, we've only had two dates - both literary mysteries: Girl in the Glass and The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, and I usually don't let myself get so hopeful so soon, but I just have a feeling that he may be The One.

His storytelling has everything I could possibly want in a novel: a sense of mystery at its core, quirky hooks, (by that I mean almost unbelievable happenings and plot twists), the perfect blend of commercial and literary writing, (which for me means an author who writes exceptionally well and with authority, but doesn't show off or engage in meta-fiction), fascinating and little-known historical detail, just a touch of the fantastic, and of course, likable and lively characters.

I'm not sure what to do next. Jeffrey Ford's latest book just came out in April - a story collection titled The Empire of Ice Cream, which happens to be the title of one of my favorite Wallace Stevens poems. Already, the combination of Jeffrey Ford, that wonderful title, (which always brings to mind an embelished past of unbridled hedonism), and some great reviews, have given me sky high hopes. I'm nervous. Will The Empire of Ice Cream live up to my astral expectations? And do I deserve such literary happiness? Will a story collection contain everything I love about his recent novels? Should I read another novel next? This is a truly tough decision, and will eventually test my devotion to Jeffrey Ford, who has written what appears to be a quest fantasy trilogy. I'm not a big fan of quest fantasy - in fact, the only type of fantasy that I get really excited about is urban fantasy - but maybe for Jeffrey Ford, just this once, I could pick up a quest fantasy trilogy for the first time in at least 10 years.

But isn't that what love is all about? Don't we all find ourselves doing ridiculous, and even embarrassing things that our cynical pre-love selves vowed with a laugh of condescension that we would never do?

I heard from Jeffrey Ford's editor that he's working on a new novel that's more in the vein of The Girl in the Glass and The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, but I don't think I can wait that long for my next Ford fix. So I'll keep y'all posted on whether or not The Empire of Ice Cream lives up to its title, and whether or not I love his fantasy trilogy as much as his mysteries.

Darkly Dreaming Dexter, by Jeff Lindsay

2006-08-16T11:35:00.000-04:00

Dexter Morgan is a blood-spatter specialist for the Miami cops by day, and a serial killer who only kills other serial killers by night. But when a serial killer starts killing hookers in an artistic way that mirrors Dexter's own murders, Dexter doesn't want to stop him. In fact, Dexter can't wait to see his next victim displayed. Is it just Dexter's imagination, or is the killer trying to communicate with him through his "art?" Or, could Dexter somehow be unconsciously committing these crimes himself? The end has a really good twist.

One of the many amazing things about this novel is that Lindsay gets us to sympathize with, and even admire Dexter, a serial killer. In this novel Dexter's urge to kill is treated like any other uncontrollable craving (like for chocolate or potato chips, say), in that Dexter can only keep from killing people by exerting superhuman self-restraint. (Dexter underwent a terrible trauma as a child that he can't remember - his need to kill is linked to this incident). Harry, Dexter's foster father, and a cop, recognizes these urges in Dexter as a teenager, when Dexter kills neighborhood cats in a ritualistic way. Instead of locking Dexter away in a psychiatric ward, the hardened cop gives him some very unconventional advice: there are people out there who deserve to be killed, and Dexter should find those people and use them to satisfy his needs. He teaches Dexter how to find and research bad people, track them, and kill them without leaving any forensic evidence. Though Harry has been dead for years before the beginning of this novel, Dexter has always followed his rules, and has never been caught. That is, until he sees this new killer's work...

Another unique aspect of this novel is Dexter's lack of emotions. He has none, but has become a master of faking them. This makes the scenes between Dexter and his girlfriend (who for other reasons is just as uninterested in sex as he is, making her the perfect cover), and LaGuerta, the lead homicide detective who has a crush on Dexter, extremely fresh and interesting. He's a more personable and comical Hannibal Lector, and some parts of this novel are a bit reminiscent of Red Dragon, but with a lighter tone. For example, Dexter's foster sister Deb is sick of dressing up like a hooker to work Miami's vice beat - she desperately wants into homicide. She gets her chance with the serial hooker killings, and Dexter gives her clues and insights into the killer to help her solve the crimes and impress her superiors (sort of like Lector and Graham). Of course, he can't give her too much information, lest she become suspicious of Dexter or actually catch the killer, whom Dexter isn't sure he wants caught.

Dexter's world is fully developed, (his job, his family and love life, and his murders), and there is truly never a dull moment. Lindsay writes with tension and humor, and perfectly sets the scene for the second in the series, Dearly Devoted Dexter, which I plan on reading as soon as it comes out in paperback.

Publishing Industry Gossip: Jeff Lindsay is not the debut novelist that his publisher (Doubleday) wants us to believe, but a veteran author who has written a number of novels under his full name, Jeffrey P. Lindsay. This use of a pseudonym raises questions about the value of touting a novel as a "debut novel" - or were Jeffery P. Lindsay's previous novels really that unremarkable? Here's an interesting tidbit:

"Darkly Dreaming Dexter was dropped from the Mystery Writers of America's Best First Novel category after the group learned that Lindsay had, according to MWA rep Margery Flax, "put out a few books under his full name in the mid '90's"

And more general remarks...

"Aside from the marketing advantage of becoming a debut author with the use of a pseudonym, David Montgomery, editor of the Web site mysteryink.com, assumes some authors are forced into hiding their identity in order to get published. Publishers often turn away a previously published author with a less-than-compelling sales history because his book might stumble getting into the chains."

Montgomery later notes, "it's a disappointing trend (disguising veteran novelists as debut novelists) - and not a particularly honest one - but as long as the readers don't care, and I don't think they do, it's probably here to stay."

-Quotes taken from the March 13, 2006 issue of Publishers Weekly.

The Immortal Class: Bike Messengers and the Cult of Human Power, by Travis Hugh Culley

2006-08-16T11:34:00.000-04:00

If I love bikes, and I love books, it then follows that I would fall recklessly in love with a book about bikes. Then why was The Immortal Class: Bike Messengers and the Cult of Human Power such a disappointment? I'll tell you why, in numbered paragraphs:

1)Sky High Expectations. Just so you know where I'm coming from, this is what I expected from a book titled The Immortal Class: Bike Messengers and the Cult of Human Power. First of all, if you're going to put the word “immortal” in your title, you should probably talk about bike messengers other than yourself and your peers. What was bike messengering like 20 years ago? 50 years ago? In cities before cars, where the bike messengers had to dodge horse-and-buggies and heaping piles of steaming dung? What will it be like in the future? What is it like in other cities, and other countries?

--But Culley did a great job of expressing how immortal he felt on a bike. I loved these passages, and completely related to how it feels to blast through a six-lane intersection and feel the cars whooshing all around you but miraculously not crash and die… that's a huge rush! That makes me feel immortal, at least until the next time I crash. So Culley didn't give us any historical context (or any context outside of his experience in Chicago), but he sure did make the bike scenes come alive.

2) Title Gripe Continued. When you put a phrase like “The Cult of Human Power” in your title, I expect you to address the politics of car culture in a lot more depth, and describe how choosing to bike is a political, social, and even cultural statement. Where is this “cult” in your book other than the very last chapter? You talk to no one outside of your immediate social circle, much less interview anyone qualified to weigh in on some of the key issues, like Critical Mass participants, the cops who arrest them, Transportation Alternative organizers, bicycle manufacturing companies, automobile companies, lobbyists on both sides, environmental groups, city planners, …etc. In a world where every other television commercial is a car commercial and every third American is overweight you could’t find a “cult of human power” that existed outside of your own head?

--But Culley does address these issues tangentially in the last three chapters of the book, though not in as much depth as I would have liked.

3)Too Memoir-ish. Travis, if I wanted to know about your life as a struggling artist and your Christmas break with the fam and your vacations with assorted relatives I would have bought, “Travis’ Random Thoughts and Musings with just a tad of Bike Messengering on the Side.” Wait, I think I did buy that book…

--Whoa, that was harsh. But what was that whole sit-by-the-lake-and-ponder-while-visiting-relatives bit all about?

4)Too much Purple Prose. There is a lot of writing in here that says, “I am trying too hard to be literary and/or lyrical and/or philosophical.” This stuff made me wince, and then skim. Why is there so much filler in these pages about the soul of the city, and the ghost who won’t show his eyes? Can we get back to the gritty biking scenes? That was really cool when you got doored and flew through the air and skidded on the asphalt and scraped off most of your shoulder, and how you said how it was kind of fun to fly through the air, and I've felt that way too, but that's about as much philosophical musing as I can take. Let’s skip the part where you ponder what it means that your skin is now one with the street.

I very strictly follow the philosophy that life is too short to read bad books, so it should count for something that I finished this one. There are some great parts - even some inspiring parts - you just have to be willing to slog through some heavy handed descriptions and self-indulgent writing to find them. But when you do, these paragraphs are truly like diamonds in the rough.

Here are some diamonds: Chapter 10: Ambush. This chapter is amazing. It has everything I look for in this kind of book: Legal and social issues highlighted by a compelling personal story, and a Critical Mass ride that provokes various confrontations - massers vs. police, messengers vs. commuters - and discusses different strategies of resistance. It has inflammatory stuff like this:

"The Illinois Supreme Court phrased it this way: "We do not believe that bicycle riders are, like drivers of vehicles, intended and permitted users of Illinois streets and highways."

And this:

"Today in the heartland of America, if a cyclist, a motorist, and a runner fall into the same five-foot ditch in any average intersection, the bicyclist alone will not have the right to sue."

Other than chapter 10, the other great parts of this book are interspersed throughout. The Alley Cat Race is pretty awesome (Chapter 9), and there's a cool scene where the author races this other messenger with a stripped down track bike (Chapter 6) and then says:

"In time, I too would learn that an experienced messenger can see anywhere from five to thirty seconds into the future. The traffic can be read so closely that he is rarely caught off guard. Most people think this comes from having good reflexes, but who needs reflexes when you can actually see the future?"

I also enjoyed the small details that Culley drops about messenger life, like how messengers use their U-Locks to threaten cabbies and other cars, and how during his first winter he used gardening gloves with the first two fingers cut off, and how your hands go numb after riding over torn up city streets all day, and how he can "skitch" a car's hub (grab the back of a car and get towed at high speeds). I've never tried that.

Overall, if you don't know anything about being a bike messenger I imagine this book would be illuminating. Even considering all the boring parts and the author's blatant self-absorption, I'm glad to have read it. But as a rabid biker and ex-messenger myself, I expected a broader scope, and a much more detailed look at the issues of biking in today's American cities.

The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler

2006-08-16T11:32:00.000-04:00

Full disclosure: this is the first Raymond Chandler book I have ever read. Really. Ever. I've been meaning to read Chandler for years, and every time his name came up or popped into my head I would experience massive literary guilt. You manic readers and book lovers out there know what I'm talking about... I am brought low by literary guilt at least once a week. You know, when you're talking book and someone names an author that you haven't read but feel you should have? Say a book like Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead or the Harry Potter series, neither of which I've read, but have lied about reading at one time or another, and will probably continue to do so until my literary guilt peaks and I pick them up off the shelf. Hey, doesn't everyone do this?

Since it is my goal to establish myself as an expert in literary crime fiction and mysteries, I knew I had to pick up a Chandler novel. Actually, I picked up four (I have a friend at Vintage), but started with The Big Sleep. This novel is relentless. It takes place over the course of a week, and it is a week packed with action: blackmail, murder, sexy women, and the infamously unflappable Marlow, a thirty-eight-year-old private dick moving through the seamy side of 1930's Los Angeles. Unflappable is not an overstatement - I mean this guy is so smooth and so smart that he is never surprised. He is such a good detective that he almost doesn't seem human. Two incredibly rich and sexy women, sisters nonetheless, throw themselves at him and he coolly rebuffs them, even when they say things like, "Hold me close, you beast," or sneak into his apartment, climb into his bed naked, and wait for his return. This prompts Marlow to muse, "It's so hard for women - even nice women - to realize that their bodies are not irresistible." The only thing that Marlow finds irresistible is solving crimes; being a dedicated detective.Riding along with Marlow you know you're in good hands. You know he won't get himself in a situation that he can't escape from, and you have absolute confidence that he'll solve the crime with panache.

It's cool to be so intimate with such a bad ass, but for me Marlow's very invincibility was the one downside of this novel. I like my detectives to have flaws, tics, weaknesses, vulnerabilities. I like it when they get themselves into impossible situations that they can't see their way out of, but somehow miraculously and surprisingly escape. I was never scared for Marlow, and while this novel was a fast and gripping read, it didn't raise my pulse.Hmm, perhaps I just described the difference between a classic detective novel and a contemporary mystery/suspense/thriller? Holmes is unflappable in much the same way, but in his case we have Watson to identify with. I seem to remember Poe's Auguste Dupin had these same characteristics, but his genius is moderated by the narrator, who is of a more average intelligence.

Marlow works alone, or at least he does in this novel, and while I admired him greatly and was often in awe of his smooth talk and logic, I had a hard time identifying with him.Despite my one complaint, (which may be a complaint against the genre and not Chandler in particular), I have three more Chandler novels to read, and I'm looking forward to them.

Favorite quote: "I went upstairs and sat in my chair thinking about Harry Jones and his story. It seemed a little too pat. It had the austere simplicity of fiction rather than the tangled woof of fact."

The Butcher's Boy, by Thomas Perry

2006-08-16T11:31:00.001-04:00

The Butcher's Boy is a hired assassin who commits two perfect murders and goes to Las Vegas to collect his fee, only to find that his employers are trying to kill him. He must first figure out who his employers are (most likely one of three organized crime bosses), and kill them.

Killing a mob boss is no easy feat, but the butcher's boy is really good. He is so smart and clever, and pulls so many awesome stunts during the novel that I never doubted he could succeed. And despite his being as assassin, I really wanted him to win.

The other main character is Elizabeth Waring, an analyst from the Justice Department who is out to solve the murders commited by the butcher's boy. She's really smart too, but not smart enough.The scenes are split between hers and his narratives, which occasionally is a jarring tactic. Or perhaps it is a testament to Perry's great scene writing that he seemed to switch it up just when I was feeling extremely invested in a particular scene and character. We get Elizabeth's point of view initially, and at first I was a bit put off by going inside the killer's head (this is a tactic so often used poorly that I've come to generally mistrust it), but over time the butcher's boy's scenes became so much more prominent and interesting than Elizabeth's that I didn't want to spend any time away from him.

Most of the fun in this novel is in watching the butcher's boy work, and trying to figure out why he's doing whatever he's doing; and he always has a perfectly plotted reason for his intriguing actions that left me wondering, "how did he ever hatch that plan so quickly?" In one scene he breaks into a backyard and starts clipping and moving hoses and wires and then gets in the pool with this rifle and just when I'm feeling really stumped this fire starts, and when a guy with a gun comes out to investigate, this hose is rigged to spray him in the face and distract him so the butcher's boy can shoot him from the pool, and beleive it or not this is just the beginning of a more complicated and brilliantly thought out plot to kill lots of people. At times like these, the butcher's boy reminded me of a deadly McGyver (yes, I had a huge crush on McGyver; I always fantasized that we'd run away to some deserted island where he'd construct us a five star hut using only the island's natural resources, some dental floss, and chewing gum).

One of my pet peeves in mystery novels is when the main characters keep secrets from the reader. However, I didn't mind at all when the butcher's boy didn't explain his intricate plots to me because watching them play out was always more satisfying than hearing them explained in advance.

The reader's relationship to the two main characters is perfectly done: the butcher's boy is much smarter than us and is constantly surprising and impressing us with his leaps in reasoning and action, while Elizabeth is not quite as saavy as us, and she makes two critical mistakes that I totally saw coming and tried to warn her about, but of course she didn't listen to me, and it was somewhat satisfying to see her get duped in an "I told you so" way.

The writing is smooth and commercial - Perry doesn't let anything get in the way of telling his story (and he's got a great story to tell). However, I enjoy a bit of literary flair here and there, and for that reason I don't think I'm going to read another book by Perry any time soon. But for readers looking for a no literary frills mystery with a truly fantastic plot this book is a must read. It won the Edgar Award for best first novel when it was first published over twenty years ago and is still in print today, so obviously I'm not the only one who thinks it's worth a read.

Motherless Brooklyn, by Jonathan Lethem

2006-08-16T11:31:00.000-04:00

Lionel Essrog is an outstanding protagonist for this literary crime novel - he's a detective who has Tourettes Syndrome (I'm a total sucker for the honorable yet flawed detective type).Lionel's constant Tourettic impulses give the author an excuse to recklessly play with language and explore his character's relationship with words in a way that would seem really pedantic and self-indulgent in a novel with a less structured plot.

This novel is true and amazing "literary crime fiction" and in my opinion has the best of both of these worlds: Lethem's detective genre plotting saves this novel from being the literary slog of some of his other works (The Fortress of Solitude comes to mind), while the more cranial musings on the nature of Tourettes and the high quality of the writing elevate this to more than a mere who-dun-it. I feel like I have a greater understanding of what it's like to have Tourettes, and was even a bit jealous at times that I didn't have it. (I'm very susceptible to these kinds of feelings - sort of like a hypochondriac - I started shouting silly and lewd words and tapping my friends equally on both shoulders while I was reading this book). There are scenes where Lionel is hiding, or needs to be unassuming, and the tension is even higher than usual here because you just know he's going to tic and blow his cover.

The other aspect I really enjoyed about this novel was the setting. It's set in Brooklyn, and because I've biked all over the northern part of the borough I was familiar with many landmarks. For example, there's this great scene in the beginning of the novel where Lionel is tailing his boss, Frank Minna. Minna's in a car with a dangerous man, and he's wearing a wire so Lionel can hear what's going on while he's following them. However, Minna's car loses Lionel, so Minna tries to give Lional unsuspecting clues as to their location. The first one comes right after they've passed through the Queens Midtown Tunnel, and Minna mouths off about Polish pierogies. Lionel is stumped, and I'm practically jumping on the couch, shouting at the book, "the Polanski bridge! He's going across the Polanski! Get 'em Lionel!" (The Polanski is a small, rather unimpressive bridge connecting Long Island City to Greenpoint (Queens to Brooklyn) which I've biked across countless times on my way to Prospect Park from my old apartment in Astoria). There were a few more moments like these where the characters were stumped but I was not. As a reader, I cherish these small moments of victory.

One very small disappointment: the title, Motherless Brooklyn, refers to Lionel and his fellow detectives, all orphans that Frank Minna took under his wing and trained. In a short but touching dinner scene Frank tells his mother, "This is exciting for you Ma? I got all of motherless Brooklyn up here for you. Merry Christmas." Anyhow, throughout the novel Lionel calls the three different Essrogs in the Brooklyn phone book, flirting with the idea that one of them is his family. However, this thread is never flushed out.Overall, this was an entertaining and enlightening read - one that I highly recommend to those who like mysteries (especially Raymond Chandler fans - the novel gives The Big Sleep some shout outs), and readers with a more literary bend.

Self Made Man, by Norah Vincent

2006-08-16T11:16:00.000-04:00

This book is about a lesbian who successfully impersonates a man and details her experiences, throwing light on the differences of the sexes. It's a good fast read and has moments of exceptional clarity, like when the author postulates that men embrace the concept of brotherhood much better than women and sisterhood: she argues that men have a greater tendency to be sincerely happy for each other, without those feelings being tinged with jealousy, as they are in women. I'm not sure if I agree with this statement, but it's certainly hard to launch an argument - has any other woman been taken for and treated like a man? I'd say Norah has a lock on this one.

For a feminist lesbian, Vincent is surprisingly (and I thought at times almost too) compassionate towards men. Her pity for them in the chapters titled "Sex" (her experiences at strip clubs) and "Love" (her experiences dating women) is sometimes a bit too cloying and condescending. (Ironically, it reminded me of the way my father feels about gays and lesbians - "I just feel so sorry for them, poor people, I'd never wish that on anyone...".)

The "Work" chapter illuminated the overwhelming pressure men feel to succeed in their jobs. Ned (the author's man name) goes to work as a door-to-door salesman, and this inevitably reminded me of a dark patch in my own employment history when I worked for Cutco one summer selling expensive cutlery sets door-to-door. Me and Ned's jobs shared the same cultish environment, the same overstated masculine carrot of "if you work hard you'll get to drive a Mercedes like me" aspect, (even though my boss was a young petite Indian girl and it was obvious to anyone who took their eyes off the script long enough to have independent thoughts that her Daddy had bought her the Benz). Even so, while I worked at Cutco it became an important part of my identity to prove my prowess as a salesman. Also, I've found that I used some of the same male genitalia themed figures of speech to psych myself up for intimidating office tasks that Vincent's prototypical men use in this chapter. "C'mon, show your balls," I tell myself before I phone someone I have a professional crush on. "No one has any balls!" I say when no offers come in on a short story collection or literary drug novella I'm shopping. "Don't shoot your load all at once," I advise a co-worker who, in my opinion, is sending a project out to too many places at once. I know these phrases are ridiculous when I say them, and that, in part, is why I say them. I suppose I'm being one of Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs trying to join the never ending frat party of the male experience (or at least the males who use these types of phrases without irony).

"Ned's" experiences in a monestary and a men's therapy group struck me as a bit cliched, but alas, cliches exist for a reason, and I never doubted the veracity of these experiences.

Low point #1: Norah's take on strip clubs struck me as a tad biased - she presents them as cesspools of masculine depression and shame. Perhaps this is because she's apparently only visited a few small dilapidated rural outposts with warehouse-like interiors, old beer gutted men with filthy fingernails, and washed up vericose veined stippers. Since she is billing herself as a strip club expert, and enlightening all us naive women who have never, ever been, couldn't she have gone somewhere where the strippers and clientell were somewhat attractive? Or at the very least somewhere that didn't so strongly channel the adjective "weathered?" I agree that strip clubs may not be as tittilating as their advertisements, (in my experience the men's interest is usually split 50/50 between the strippers and the sports channel), but Norah's take is just as misleading.

Low point #2: Norah's class conciousness eventually started to wear on me. I suppose she is just being honest, but she frequently reminds us that as a college educated New Yorker it's a real culture shock for her to go bowling or sell coupons door-to-door. I, too, consider myself a college educated New Yorker, but somehow I don't consider it such an imaginative leap to identify with the rest of the country.

Overall, Self Made Man is very smoothly and nicely written, . It's eye-opening, and saves most of the thoughtful introspection for the last chapter. I recommend it, but with limited enthusiasm.

Favorite excerpt: "I had thought that by being a guy I would get to do all the things I didn't get to do as a woman, things I'd always envied about boyhood when I was a child: the perceived freedoms of being unafraid in the world, stamping around loudly with my legs apart. But when it actually came to the business of being Ned I rarely felt free at all. For from being loose, I found myself clamping down instead.I curtailed everything: my laugh, my word choice, my gestures, my expressions. Spontaneity went out the window, replaced by terseness, dissimulation and control. I hardened and denied to the point of almost ossification."

Another good one: "I believe we are that different in agenda, in expression, in outlook, in nature, so much so that I can't help almost believing, after having been Ned, that we live in parallel worlds, that there is at bottom really no such thing as that mystical unifying creature we call a human being, but only male human beings and female human beings, as separate as sects."