April Books, part II
April books, part II:
Because it's exam time, I think I'll try a themed grading system.
Top of the Class:
Over the past few years, I have repeatedly picked up The Doctor's Daughter, by Hilma Wolitzer, skimmed the back, and put it down again. The fact that it promised to be a book in which a woman worries she has cancer put me off. As a rule, I don't like to read about cancer. I'm so glad that I finally gave TDD a try, because it ended up being funny and smart and well-written. Another Wolitzer, Meg, didn't disappoint with The Wife, the story of Joan, on the way to Finland with her famous writer husband, who's receiving the Helsinki prize for his body of work, reflecting back on the course of her marriage and where it all went wrong. We Are All Welcome Here, a Berg re-read, tells the story of a mother raising her daughter while crippled from polio and in an iron lung, and it managed not to be either maudlin or grim, but funny and genuinely sweet so EB gets extra points for that. A Crime in the Neighborhood by Berne was a good book about a child's murder during the Watergate scandal that sets a pleasant suburban neighborhood on its head as the same time that the entire country is experiencing a loss of innocence. A small little gem of a book.
Gentleman's C:
Sadly, the majority of the books I read this month seemed to fall in this category. John Irving and I just do not get along. I enjoyed about 2/3 of A Widow for One Year but the other 1/3 just felt stupid and pointless to me. Mansay's Midnight Champagne wasn't inherently flawed but I did find myself wondering, while reading: "Why do I CARE about any of these people?" Her Vinegar Hill was too grim to be enjoyable, the kind of fiction that Jennifer Weiner calls Gray Ladies. It is meant to teach you Important Lessons About Life, including the fact that Life Is Sometimes Awful. We know this. Let's move along. Occasionally, Elizabeth Berg phones it in and The Art of Mending was one of those occasions. Object Lessons was fine but lacked that je ne sais quoi which sets a good book apart from a just-OK book. Somewhere off the Coast of Maine is fairly good representation of what happened to the hippies during the heydey of the 1980s, but too short: you don't get enough time to get to know the characters before its over.
You Fail It:
It is incredibly rare that I do not finish a book but Oystercatchers didn't stand a chance. The most overwritten, deadly poetically shit I've ever read. Ostensibly a book about a girl visiting her sister in a coma, it devolves into 20-page ramblings about the way that ice looks in the morning on the surface of the sea, the sensation of chewing on one's hair, the way wet shoelaces sound on pavement, and the appearance of a toad as it is bisected in biology class. This writer had nothing to say but didn't know it. After reading Anita Diamant's The Red Tent years ago and liking it I decided to break my cancer-rule and read Good Harbor, which was so bad it made me wonder if the same person could have written both. Testimony, the story of a sex scandal at a New England boarding school wasn't a bad book but it was poorly-written enough to make it a waste of a good premise, and that is unforgiveable. And I guess I'm jaded by life and YouTube and all that, but I just couldn't see three sixteen years olds having an orgy on tape as so shocking as I think Shreve intended it to be. Generational thing, I guess. I can't see the national media reporting on it, or it being on the cover of people, or anything like that.
What are you reading?
- A Widow for One Year, by John Irving.
- Oystercatchers by Susan Fletcher
- The Doctor’s Daughter by Hilma Wolitzer
- A Crime in the Neighborhood by Suzanne Berne
- Midnight Champagne, by A. Manette Ansay
- Testimony, by Anita Shreve
- The Wife, by Meg Wolitzer
- Vinegar Hill, by A. Manette Ansay
- The Art of Mending, by Elizabeth Berg
- We Are All Welcome Here, by Elizabeth Berg (re-read)
- Object Lessons, by Anna Quindlen
- Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine, by Ann Hood
- Good Harbor, by Anita Diamant.
Because it's exam time, I think I'll try a themed grading system.
Top of the Class:
Over the past few years, I have repeatedly picked up The Doctor's Daughter, by Hilma Wolitzer, skimmed the back, and put it down again. The fact that it promised to be a book in which a woman worries she has cancer put me off. As a rule, I don't like to read about cancer. I'm so glad that I finally gave TDD a try, because it ended up being funny and smart and well-written. Another Wolitzer, Meg, didn't disappoint with The Wife, the story of Joan, on the way to Finland with her famous writer husband, who's receiving the Helsinki prize for his body of work, reflecting back on the course of her marriage and where it all went wrong. We Are All Welcome Here, a Berg re-read, tells the story of a mother raising her daughter while crippled from polio and in an iron lung, and it managed not to be either maudlin or grim, but funny and genuinely sweet so EB gets extra points for that. A Crime in the Neighborhood by Berne was a good book about a child's murder during the Watergate scandal that sets a pleasant suburban neighborhood on its head as the same time that the entire country is experiencing a loss of innocence. A small little gem of a book.
Gentleman's C:
Sadly, the majority of the books I read this month seemed to fall in this category. John Irving and I just do not get along. I enjoyed about 2/3 of A Widow for One Year but the other 1/3 just felt stupid and pointless to me. Mansay's Midnight Champagne wasn't inherently flawed but I did find myself wondering, while reading: "Why do I CARE about any of these people?" Her Vinegar Hill was too grim to be enjoyable, the kind of fiction that Jennifer Weiner calls Gray Ladies. It is meant to teach you Important Lessons About Life, including the fact that Life Is Sometimes Awful. We know this. Let's move along. Occasionally, Elizabeth Berg phones it in and The Art of Mending was one of those occasions. Object Lessons was fine but lacked that je ne sais quoi which sets a good book apart from a just-OK book. Somewhere off the Coast of Maine is fairly good representation of what happened to the hippies during the heydey of the 1980s, but too short: you don't get enough time to get to know the characters before its over.
You Fail It:
It is incredibly rare that I do not finish a book but Oystercatchers didn't stand a chance. The most overwritten, deadly poetically shit I've ever read. Ostensibly a book about a girl visiting her sister in a coma, it devolves into 20-page ramblings about the way that ice looks in the morning on the surface of the sea, the sensation of chewing on one's hair, the way wet shoelaces sound on pavement, and the appearance of a toad as it is bisected in biology class. This writer had nothing to say but didn't know it. After reading Anita Diamant's The Red Tent years ago and liking it I decided to break my cancer-rule and read Good Harbor, which was so bad it made me wonder if the same person could have written both. Testimony, the story of a sex scandal at a New England boarding school wasn't a bad book but it was poorly-written enough to make it a waste of a good premise, and that is unforgiveable. And I guess I'm jaded by life and YouTube and all that, but I just couldn't see three sixteen years olds having an orgy on tape as so shocking as I think Shreve intended it to be. Generational thing, I guess. I can't see the national media reporting on it, or it being on the cover of people, or anything like that.
What are you reading?