oh my god.
Today was my last day at work. I had a very nice going-away lunch, and people said nice things to me and about me, and gave me some framed resident art, but I was surprisingly unemotional. I think it hasn't really sunk in yet; I feel like I'm just going on vacation. Granted, a vacation that involves a lot of packing (although I do have 10 boxes of books and 3 of random crap packed -- yay me!) and a trip across the country with all my worldly possessions and an annoyed cat, but still.
OH MY GOD JEFFREY! How I hate you and your assface! I was watching a couple of reruns earlier today while I was packing and I thought, man, there's nothing I hate as much as watching Jeffrey's face when he sees his dress go down the runway, that look he gets where he's just entranced by his own brilliance, and nothing I love as much as watching Jeffrey's face when he loses. And then tonight -- how much of a complete ass can one person be? This is one of those situations where I'm almost hoping that we get something in Tim's blog that makes it seem like this wasn't as egregiously spiteful and horrible as it seemed, not because my hate for Jeffrey does not burn with the fire of a million suns, but because I feel so bad for Angela's mom, having what must have seemed like such a fun experience turn so sour.
That's the thing -- I thought this was going to be such a great challenge, I was charmed when the moms and sisters came out, and I thought having the designers design for someone not related to them was a great twist. And it was so fun to see everyone's mom -- I loved Laura's mom especially, both of them with that hair. (And six kids for Laura, my goodness! And imagine finding out while on a reality show, especially one with the grueling hours and work of that show.) And then Jeffrey's horrible jackassery really just spoiled it. I mean, sure, Angela's mom wasn't exactly fashion forward, as they love to say on PR, and she seemed a little passive and maybe she could have been more tactful with Tim, but even granting him all of that benefit of the doubt, he was just painfully nasty. And he's so freaking insecure if anyone even suggests that they don't think he's the greatest designer on earth; it was almost funny when he was telling Angela's mom about her "insecurities" -- I was like, Pot, let me beat you over the fucking head with this KETTLE. From the previews, it looks like we're going to hear his completely fraudulent bitching about how Angela's mom "sold him out" again next week, and let me tell you, that bitch has not seen sold out. If he'd treated me like that and made me cry (okay, I don't think he could make me cry unless he shot me with a gun), I would've called him out on that runway. I would've said, Excuse me, this wasn't a misunderstanding, he's a complete jackass, and hey, Michael Kors, successful designer, how often do you make your clients cry with your errant jackassery and gratuitous spitefulness? I was glad that Michael Kors seemed to diagnose the dynamic, even if the judges didn't seem to know how seriously painful it was -- Jeffrey wants to please himself, ALWAYS, and he started off annoyed and pissed off that he'd even have a client who might, you know, have an opinion or two of her own.
When Angela's mom was crying, I did think, why don't they send in Tim to comfort her?
I thought Uli's dress should have won; the prints were unusual and beautiful and I thought Kayne's mom looked great. I was happily surprised by how much I liked Vincent's dress, though. Something about it made me start to think that maybe I'm starting to see what the judges are talking about when they talk about how he knows how to make a dress and has his own point of view. I worried when Michael said his dress would be convertible, because while that's creative a dress isn't like a convertible jacket that you can take off and show off on the runway, so I thought the judges might be a little underwhelmed. Laura's looked very cool in the drawing, not so hot on the mom, and I was glad to see that she seemed to recognize that before she heard the judges. Angela's was not great, and I have no idea where Audrey Hepburn came in. I will say, though, that I thought Laura's mom, based on the brief glimpses we saw of her, had more of a funky boho thing going on (maybe it was her hair and the necklace), and if she had said that or if Angela had said that was what she was going for, then maybe I would have bought the dress more. But that was a fuck of a lot of fringe. But if they booted her while Jeffrey was being so terrible to her mom, I think I would have had to abandon the show.
Robert, well, that was very boring. I mean, that would be boring even in the plus size section of a JC Penney, so on the runway it was ridiculous. But I'm just sorry that fucking Jeffrey wasn't booted. I mean, I guess his whatever was better than Robert's, but again they just threw so much boring cloth over these women (it was almost funny how completely stymied some of these guys were at the prospect of a larger woman, while Uli just seemed to take it in stride. They're just bigger, that's all! It's not like they have five arms or something.). At the end, when Jeffrey was saying to his mom, "they're not all good people, but Robert was a good person," I was thinking, yeah, they're not all good people, like say someone who makes someone else's mother CRY, you repulsive ass. You've made me want Vincent to hang around longer, and that's saying something.
Please, Gods of PR, bring a quick and painful retribution down on Jeffrey's ass. Thanks in advance.
And some recent reading:
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth -- I'm not a fan of Philip Roth. Doesn't that make you feel like you're going to get an unbiased review now? Anyway, I'm not a big fan - I read and liked Goodbye Columbus, but other books I've picked up, well, they're well written enough, but just didn't draw me. I picked up The Plot Against America because I was really interested in the premise - what if Charles Lindbergh had run for president in 1940, defeated FDR, and kept us out of WWII and allied us with Nazi Germany? The book looks at these events from the point of view of a young boy named Philip Roth living with his family in a Jewish neighborhood in Newark, NJ.
The alternate take on history was fascinating in itself - the look at how various public figures might have responded, but what made it for me was that all of this was filtered through the eyes of a young boy, who's somewhat politically aware but who is, like most children, most intimately concerned with what's happening at home. And all of these events do end up affecting his family very deeply. One of my favorite parts of the book was the struggle of Philip's brother, Sandy, who goes away for a summer trip to Kentucky sponsored by a program called Just Folks (don't you love that name - it's a program to introduce religious and ethnic minorities to the life lived by "real Americans" in the heartland) and comes back after having had a great time, at odds with his father, who sees the danger involved in the political situation and who is defiantly, furiously outraged at any suggestion that he is not a real American himself, already, just as he is. There's also an incredibly painful scene fairly early on, before any of the real political measures against Jews are taken, where the family goes on vacation to visit Washington, DC, and is constantly running up against anti-Semitism. And the character of Rabbi Bengelsdorf and his interactions with the family was amazing - he's a rabbi who becomes a supporter of Lindbergh early on (in the words of one of the characters, "koshering" Lindbergh for the goyim - he's not there to get Jewish people to vote for Lindbergh, but to make Christians feel like it's okay to vote for Lindbergh) and then runs the OAA, the group who sponsors Just Folks.
There's certainly parallels to today's political situation - Lindbergh is portrayed as a strong, silent hero who's prone to flying around in his airplane for political appearances, but also, when the going gets tough once he's president, to dropping in on small towns to give what another character calls "one of his ten platitudes" - "We're not at war. None of our boys are dying. Everything's fine. I came here to tell you that, and now I'm going back to Washington to keep making sure it stays that way" - that sort of thing. And the plot of the Plot is suspenseful and compelling. I stayed up later than I should because I wanted to know what would happen. The one thing that confused me, because I'm sure it was a deliberate choice, was that at various points the narrator would refer to political events that took place after WWII - Bobby Kennedy's candidacy, among others, that were exactly the same in this alternate history as they are in real history. I didn't quite understand why there wouldn't have been some ripple effects, some changes due to the events pre-1942. Was the point that even though reading this the alternate history events seem drastic, that they aren't that far from what has happened throughout history, so everything wouldn't end up changed as much as you'd think? That doesn't seem right to me. It felt like things were being mentioned deliberately as not having changed, but I didn't understand why.
Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier -- There were a lot of things I liked in this novel about a young maid who lives in Vermeer's household and becomes one of his models. It was beautifully written, and I loved all the descriptions of the mechanics of Vermeer's painting process, how they made the paints, how he kept his studio, how he worked with his models. All of that was lovingly and vividly described, and I found it so interesting. I also really liked the detailed descriptions of life in a Dutch household at this time. I found myself thinking as I read it about that fabulous nonfiction book about bourgeois Dutch life at this time that's about all the stuff they have, and when I hit the end the author credited it. (It's The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age by Simon Schama, and it's fantastic. Also, it made me think about that question about what figure alive or dead would you like to have dinner with, and I think I'd like to have dinner with Simon Schama. I feel like there's about a million books by him that I've either read and loved or am dying to read about really different historical times and people -- the man must know everything!) What I wasn't so crazy about in the book was how slow it seemed. I think the problem was that I just wasn't all that interested in the main character's conflict, I was more interested in all the secondary characters and descriptions of life. It was a short book, but it felt kind of long.
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion -- This was outstanding, an unblinking look at grief and loss in a year when the author's husband died and her daughter suffered a life-threatening illness. Didion describes the night of her husband's death, after they've come home from visiting her daughter in the hospital, and keeps coming back to a description the hospital social worker used about her -- "a cool customer." She is a cool customer, able to observe and describe her own emotions as precisely and minutely as if they were happening to someone else, but they are no less wrenching and terrible for that distance. One of the things that really struck Didion, and struck me in her descriptions, was the way in which she was able to see how some of her emotions and actions in that year were irrational, "magical thinking," but her acknowledgement of that didn't stop her from continuing to feel that way. The book is an unflinching picture of grief and a very touching and interesting picture of two writers' lives intertwined together. Her discussions of how they dealt with and supported each others' work made me want to read more by both of them.
Clara Callan by Richard B. Wright -- This was a full, fat novel about two sisters in the years before WWII, one a small-town schoolteacher in Canada and one who goes to NYC to become a radio actress. The portrait of Clara's life in her small town caught the independence and feeling of freedom, as well as the loneliness and the unfortunate danger of a woman in her position at that time, while the pictures we saw through letters of her sister's life in NYC were full of really interesting pictures of the radio world in New York at that time. I especially liked one of the sister's friend, a lesbian radio writer who goes to Hollywood to write B-pictures, and would be glad to read a whole book about her. But mostly I was really happy reading about Clara's outwardly less eventful life. There was some really beautiful description of the country in which Clara lived, and I just found her thoughts and motivations really compelling to read about. The one thing I didn't like about the book was the ending, which was a very short epilogue ostensibly written by Clara's daughter after her mother's death, which told us what happened to everyone. Really, that's basically it -- it was pretty much, "then this happened to X, and she was persecuted for being a suspected Communist but then she married a rich man," I mean, exposition isn't even the right word for it. It's weird, because as I could tell I was coming up on the end I was thinking how much I'd enjoyed the characters and how I did want to know what would happen to them in their future lives, but I didn't want a two-sentence summary on the next fifty years for each of them! It was unnecessary and poorly done, and if you read it I recommend stopping when you see the epilogue, because the ending of the chapter before that is actually a very effective and beautiful ending to the book.
Good Faith by Jane Smiley -- Jane Smiley is one of those writers whose books I see reviewed and think, yeah, I want to check that out, and then don't, even when I see it in the bookstore. I've really liked a few of her earlier books when I read them, but then I got completely bogged down in a book that was all about horses (I mean, there's a lot of horses in her books but this was like wall-to-wall horses) and then she lost me. But I needed a book to read on the plane and I borrowed this from my dad's wife. I enjoyed it quite a bit -- it's a really interesting time and environment to explore, real estate developers in the 80s as the S&L thing was getting going, and I found the main character engaging. He's very much a salesman, though not Willy Loman-ish. It was the kind of book where you could tell something's coming and vaguely what it's going to be, but I got very interested in when the main character was going to finally catch on (and also what the exact details and fallout would be). It was funny and well-observed, and I enjoyed it. It was really well-titled, too, good faith as a real estate term but the narrator was very much someone with good faith in himself and the people around him, too much to his own detriment sometimes.
Lady of Quality by Georgette Heyer -- When I'm feeling a little stressed out, sometimes there's nothing like a Georgette Heyer novel. I'm kind of sad that I've read all of her Regencies; I've never tried her mysteries and I don't know if I'd like them. This was a good example of her work: a somewhat (by the standards of the time) past her prime (I think she's 25 or something, I packed the book) on her way to a somewhat independent life in Bath with her companion comes across a runaway young girl and takes her in. The girl's guardian finds her and is, of course, incredibly rude and with a bad reputation, and, well, you know what happens. It's a formula but a really good one. I tend to prefer the novels where the heroine is a little older to Heyer's novels featuring giddy young things (although I have a huge fondness for April Lady) and so this one was perfect for a re-read to alleviate stress.
Mistresses of Mayhem by Francine Hornberger -- Man, was this a crappy book, which I guess I should have known by the title, but hey. It's subtitled The Book of Women Criminals, and I picked it up because I really like reading about women criminals, especially accompanied by some discussion of how their crimes were viewed in the times in which they lived. This was pretty much a straightforward encyclopedia of various women criminals, but it was so incredibly poorly written (I lost track very early on of how many words just did not mean what the author appeared to think they meant) and I don't think it was edited at all. It was painful. Also, I had already read about many of the crimes due to my vast reading on the subject, although since it dealt with all types of crimes and not just murder, I did find out a few new things (the entry on Tokyo Rose, for example). Anyway, rather than dwelling on how horrible this book was, I will list a few books on similar topics I have read and really enjoyed:
Women Who Kill by Ann Jones is really fantastic. It's a study of murders that women committed or were accused of committing (whether justly or not) from pre-colonial times to the 80s, I think, and was really thoughtful about the way in which these crimes were viewed by their societies, and how the identity of the woman accused affected the way in which her crime was seen. She made a real effort not to just hit the highlights (Lizzie Borden with an ax, etc.), although she did include the famous cases, but to look at a really diverse group of crimes and of women. It's a very well-written, well-researched social history, and I highly recommend it.
While Jones certainly has a feminist thesis and a point of view expressed in her book, Patricia Pearson's When She Was Bad has a much more explicit argument she makes to the reader -- women tend to get away with lighter sentences (or none at all) for murder, due to the way in which our society views women more easily and comfortably as victims and as women acted upon, not actors themselves. She deals with very recent crimes only in both her thesis and her case studies, and argues that the more feminist position is to urge that women be punished in the same way as men for similar crimes, because women are just as capable of deliberate thought, responsibility for their actions and moral agency as men are. Jones' work would certainly argue that if women are treated more lightly for murder, it is a very recent development, especially for women who are not white, upper class and conforming to their society's view of feminine, and I believe that some scholars have challenged her basic premise and said that women are not dealt with more leniently (again, especially poor women, women of color and women who are seen as sexually deviant in some way by their society, i.e. sluts or lesbians). But Pearson is a very persuasive and skilled writer, and I enjoyed following her argument, even if I did start to argue with her at several points throughout the book.
Finally, a big favorite of mine is Victorian Murderesses: A true history of thirteen respectable French and English women accused of unspeakable crimes by Mary Hartman. Each chapter examines the case of one English and one Frenchwoman accused of murder. It's an excellent look at this strata of "respectable" society in both England and France during the Age of Victoria, as well as a revealing and fascinating study of what these women's daily domestic lives were like.
A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly -- I don't really read a lot of YA novels now that I've aged out of the demographic (quite a while ago, actually), but this novel came highly recommended and I enjoyed it quite a bit. It's a story about a girl, Mattie, who's a maid at a hotel where the murder that inspired one of my favorite books, An American Tragedy (which in turn inspired a fantastic movie), although it's mostly Mattie's coming of age story. She's a great character, a great voice, and her struggle as she decides whether she can leave her family soon after her mother's death to go to college and her sexual (it's definitely not romantic) awakening are both compellingly portrayed. As I've recently put several novels that feature teenaged protagonists that are presented as adult, not YA novels, it made me wonder what would have to be changed about this novel to present it that way, and I will say that the vocabulary seemed -- very carefully chosen, I guess, to stay at a certain level. I mean, not to its detriment, and it's not out of character for anyone nor is it condescending to the reader, but I was slightly aware of it. Also, if it weren't written as a YA novel the description of Mattie's sexual feelings and first experiments might have been more explicit? Or maybe not? Also, I'm going to say completely off the top of my head, it seems to me that "regular" literary books with teenaged protagonists tend to have boys as the lead, rather than girls. I can think of several that fit that description, but I'm having a harder time thinking of a novel with a teenaged girl protagonist that's not pitches as YA. There are probably many glaring examples I'm forgetting, but -- okay, Anywhere but Here I just thought of has a teen girl POV character. Anyway, it just seemed to me off the top of my head that books with teen boy POV characters are more common/taken more seriously as adult fiction. Anyway, the whole notion just passed through my mind because of things I've been planning to read, but A Northern Light was a very satisfying read in and of itself.
OH MY GOD JEFFREY! How I hate you and your assface! I was watching a couple of reruns earlier today while I was packing and I thought, man, there's nothing I hate as much as watching Jeffrey's face when he sees his dress go down the runway, that look he gets where he's just entranced by his own brilliance, and nothing I love as much as watching Jeffrey's face when he loses. And then tonight -- how much of a complete ass can one person be? This is one of those situations where I'm almost hoping that we get something in Tim's blog that makes it seem like this wasn't as egregiously spiteful and horrible as it seemed, not because my hate for Jeffrey does not burn with the fire of a million suns, but because I feel so bad for Angela's mom, having what must have seemed like such a fun experience turn so sour.
That's the thing -- I thought this was going to be such a great challenge, I was charmed when the moms and sisters came out, and I thought having the designers design for someone not related to them was a great twist. And it was so fun to see everyone's mom -- I loved Laura's mom especially, both of them with that hair. (And six kids for Laura, my goodness! And imagine finding out while on a reality show, especially one with the grueling hours and work of that show.) And then Jeffrey's horrible jackassery really just spoiled it. I mean, sure, Angela's mom wasn't exactly fashion forward, as they love to say on PR, and she seemed a little passive and maybe she could have been more tactful with Tim, but even granting him all of that benefit of the doubt, he was just painfully nasty. And he's so freaking insecure if anyone even suggests that they don't think he's the greatest designer on earth; it was almost funny when he was telling Angela's mom about her "insecurities" -- I was like, Pot, let me beat you over the fucking head with this KETTLE. From the previews, it looks like we're going to hear his completely fraudulent bitching about how Angela's mom "sold him out" again next week, and let me tell you, that bitch has not seen sold out. If he'd treated me like that and made me cry (okay, I don't think he could make me cry unless he shot me with a gun), I would've called him out on that runway. I would've said, Excuse me, this wasn't a misunderstanding, he's a complete jackass, and hey, Michael Kors, successful designer, how often do you make your clients cry with your errant jackassery and gratuitous spitefulness? I was glad that Michael Kors seemed to diagnose the dynamic, even if the judges didn't seem to know how seriously painful it was -- Jeffrey wants to please himself, ALWAYS, and he started off annoyed and pissed off that he'd even have a client who might, you know, have an opinion or two of her own.
When Angela's mom was crying, I did think, why don't they send in Tim to comfort her?
I thought Uli's dress should have won; the prints were unusual and beautiful and I thought Kayne's mom looked great. I was happily surprised by how much I liked Vincent's dress, though. Something about it made me start to think that maybe I'm starting to see what the judges are talking about when they talk about how he knows how to make a dress and has his own point of view. I worried when Michael said his dress would be convertible, because while that's creative a dress isn't like a convertible jacket that you can take off and show off on the runway, so I thought the judges might be a little underwhelmed. Laura's looked very cool in the drawing, not so hot on the mom, and I was glad to see that she seemed to recognize that before she heard the judges. Angela's was not great, and I have no idea where Audrey Hepburn came in. I will say, though, that I thought Laura's mom, based on the brief glimpses we saw of her, had more of a funky boho thing going on (maybe it was her hair and the necklace), and if she had said that or if Angela had said that was what she was going for, then maybe I would have bought the dress more. But that was a fuck of a lot of fringe. But if they booted her while Jeffrey was being so terrible to her mom, I think I would have had to abandon the show.
Robert, well, that was very boring. I mean, that would be boring even in the plus size section of a JC Penney, so on the runway it was ridiculous. But I'm just sorry that fucking Jeffrey wasn't booted. I mean, I guess his whatever was better than Robert's, but again they just threw so much boring cloth over these women (it was almost funny how completely stymied some of these guys were at the prospect of a larger woman, while Uli just seemed to take it in stride. They're just bigger, that's all! It's not like they have five arms or something.). At the end, when Jeffrey was saying to his mom, "they're not all good people, but Robert was a good person," I was thinking, yeah, they're not all good people, like say someone who makes someone else's mother CRY, you repulsive ass. You've made me want Vincent to hang around longer, and that's saying something.
Please, Gods of PR, bring a quick and painful retribution down on Jeffrey's ass. Thanks in advance.
And some recent reading:
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth -- I'm not a fan of Philip Roth. Doesn't that make you feel like you're going to get an unbiased review now? Anyway, I'm not a big fan - I read and liked Goodbye Columbus, but other books I've picked up, well, they're well written enough, but just didn't draw me. I picked up The Plot Against America because I was really interested in the premise - what if Charles Lindbergh had run for president in 1940, defeated FDR, and kept us out of WWII and allied us with Nazi Germany? The book looks at these events from the point of view of a young boy named Philip Roth living with his family in a Jewish neighborhood in Newark, NJ.
The alternate take on history was fascinating in itself - the look at how various public figures might have responded, but what made it for me was that all of this was filtered through the eyes of a young boy, who's somewhat politically aware but who is, like most children, most intimately concerned with what's happening at home. And all of these events do end up affecting his family very deeply. One of my favorite parts of the book was the struggle of Philip's brother, Sandy, who goes away for a summer trip to Kentucky sponsored by a program called Just Folks (don't you love that name - it's a program to introduce religious and ethnic minorities to the life lived by "real Americans" in the heartland) and comes back after having had a great time, at odds with his father, who sees the danger involved in the political situation and who is defiantly, furiously outraged at any suggestion that he is not a real American himself, already, just as he is. There's also an incredibly painful scene fairly early on, before any of the real political measures against Jews are taken, where the family goes on vacation to visit Washington, DC, and is constantly running up against anti-Semitism. And the character of Rabbi Bengelsdorf and his interactions with the family was amazing - he's a rabbi who becomes a supporter of Lindbergh early on (in the words of one of the characters, "koshering" Lindbergh for the goyim - he's not there to get Jewish people to vote for Lindbergh, but to make Christians feel like it's okay to vote for Lindbergh) and then runs the OAA, the group who sponsors Just Folks.
There's certainly parallels to today's political situation - Lindbergh is portrayed as a strong, silent hero who's prone to flying around in his airplane for political appearances, but also, when the going gets tough once he's president, to dropping in on small towns to give what another character calls "one of his ten platitudes" - "We're not at war. None of our boys are dying. Everything's fine. I came here to tell you that, and now I'm going back to Washington to keep making sure it stays that way" - that sort of thing. And the plot of the Plot is suspenseful and compelling. I stayed up later than I should because I wanted to know what would happen. The one thing that confused me, because I'm sure it was a deliberate choice, was that at various points the narrator would refer to political events that took place after WWII - Bobby Kennedy's candidacy, among others, that were exactly the same in this alternate history as they are in real history. I didn't quite understand why there wouldn't have been some ripple effects, some changes due to the events pre-1942. Was the point that even though reading this the alternate history events seem drastic, that they aren't that far from what has happened throughout history, so everything wouldn't end up changed as much as you'd think? That doesn't seem right to me. It felt like things were being mentioned deliberately as not having changed, but I didn't understand why.
Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier -- There were a lot of things I liked in this novel about a young maid who lives in Vermeer's household and becomes one of his models. It was beautifully written, and I loved all the descriptions of the mechanics of Vermeer's painting process, how they made the paints, how he kept his studio, how he worked with his models. All of that was lovingly and vividly described, and I found it so interesting. I also really liked the detailed descriptions of life in a Dutch household at this time. I found myself thinking as I read it about that fabulous nonfiction book about bourgeois Dutch life at this time that's about all the stuff they have, and when I hit the end the author credited it. (It's The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age by Simon Schama, and it's fantastic. Also, it made me think about that question about what figure alive or dead would you like to have dinner with, and I think I'd like to have dinner with Simon Schama. I feel like there's about a million books by him that I've either read and loved or am dying to read about really different historical times and people -- the man must know everything!) What I wasn't so crazy about in the book was how slow it seemed. I think the problem was that I just wasn't all that interested in the main character's conflict, I was more interested in all the secondary characters and descriptions of life. It was a short book, but it felt kind of long.
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion -- This was outstanding, an unblinking look at grief and loss in a year when the author's husband died and her daughter suffered a life-threatening illness. Didion describes the night of her husband's death, after they've come home from visiting her daughter in the hospital, and keeps coming back to a description the hospital social worker used about her -- "a cool customer." She is a cool customer, able to observe and describe her own emotions as precisely and minutely as if they were happening to someone else, but they are no less wrenching and terrible for that distance. One of the things that really struck Didion, and struck me in her descriptions, was the way in which she was able to see how some of her emotions and actions in that year were irrational, "magical thinking," but her acknowledgement of that didn't stop her from continuing to feel that way. The book is an unflinching picture of grief and a very touching and interesting picture of two writers' lives intertwined together. Her discussions of how they dealt with and supported each others' work made me want to read more by both of them.
Clara Callan by Richard B. Wright -- This was a full, fat novel about two sisters in the years before WWII, one a small-town schoolteacher in Canada and one who goes to NYC to become a radio actress. The portrait of Clara's life in her small town caught the independence and feeling of freedom, as well as the loneliness and the unfortunate danger of a woman in her position at that time, while the pictures we saw through letters of her sister's life in NYC were full of really interesting pictures of the radio world in New York at that time. I especially liked one of the sister's friend, a lesbian radio writer who goes to Hollywood to write B-pictures, and would be glad to read a whole book about her. But mostly I was really happy reading about Clara's outwardly less eventful life. There was some really beautiful description of the country in which Clara lived, and I just found her thoughts and motivations really compelling to read about. The one thing I didn't like about the book was the ending, which was a very short epilogue ostensibly written by Clara's daughter after her mother's death, which told us what happened to everyone. Really, that's basically it -- it was pretty much, "then this happened to X, and she was persecuted for being a suspected Communist but then she married a rich man," I mean, exposition isn't even the right word for it. It's weird, because as I could tell I was coming up on the end I was thinking how much I'd enjoyed the characters and how I did want to know what would happen to them in their future lives, but I didn't want a two-sentence summary on the next fifty years for each of them! It was unnecessary and poorly done, and if you read it I recommend stopping when you see the epilogue, because the ending of the chapter before that is actually a very effective and beautiful ending to the book.
Good Faith by Jane Smiley -- Jane Smiley is one of those writers whose books I see reviewed and think, yeah, I want to check that out, and then don't, even when I see it in the bookstore. I've really liked a few of her earlier books when I read them, but then I got completely bogged down in a book that was all about horses (I mean, there's a lot of horses in her books but this was like wall-to-wall horses) and then she lost me. But I needed a book to read on the plane and I borrowed this from my dad's wife. I enjoyed it quite a bit -- it's a really interesting time and environment to explore, real estate developers in the 80s as the S&L thing was getting going, and I found the main character engaging. He's very much a salesman, though not Willy Loman-ish. It was the kind of book where you could tell something's coming and vaguely what it's going to be, but I got very interested in when the main character was going to finally catch on (and also what the exact details and fallout would be). It was funny and well-observed, and I enjoyed it. It was really well-titled, too, good faith as a real estate term but the narrator was very much someone with good faith in himself and the people around him, too much to his own detriment sometimes.
Lady of Quality by Georgette Heyer -- When I'm feeling a little stressed out, sometimes there's nothing like a Georgette Heyer novel. I'm kind of sad that I've read all of her Regencies; I've never tried her mysteries and I don't know if I'd like them. This was a good example of her work: a somewhat (by the standards of the time) past her prime (I think she's 25 or something, I packed the book) on her way to a somewhat independent life in Bath with her companion comes across a runaway young girl and takes her in. The girl's guardian finds her and is, of course, incredibly rude and with a bad reputation, and, well, you know what happens. It's a formula but a really good one. I tend to prefer the novels where the heroine is a little older to Heyer's novels featuring giddy young things (although I have a huge fondness for April Lady) and so this one was perfect for a re-read to alleviate stress.
Mistresses of Mayhem by Francine Hornberger -- Man, was this a crappy book, which I guess I should have known by the title, but hey. It's subtitled The Book of Women Criminals, and I picked it up because I really like reading about women criminals, especially accompanied by some discussion of how their crimes were viewed in the times in which they lived. This was pretty much a straightforward encyclopedia of various women criminals, but it was so incredibly poorly written (I lost track very early on of how many words just did not mean what the author appeared to think they meant) and I don't think it was edited at all. It was painful. Also, I had already read about many of the crimes due to my vast reading on the subject, although since it dealt with all types of crimes and not just murder, I did find out a few new things (the entry on Tokyo Rose, for example). Anyway, rather than dwelling on how horrible this book was, I will list a few books on similar topics I have read and really enjoyed:
Women Who Kill by Ann Jones is really fantastic. It's a study of murders that women committed or were accused of committing (whether justly or not) from pre-colonial times to the 80s, I think, and was really thoughtful about the way in which these crimes were viewed by their societies, and how the identity of the woman accused affected the way in which her crime was seen. She made a real effort not to just hit the highlights (Lizzie Borden with an ax, etc.), although she did include the famous cases, but to look at a really diverse group of crimes and of women. It's a very well-written, well-researched social history, and I highly recommend it.
While Jones certainly has a feminist thesis and a point of view expressed in her book, Patricia Pearson's When She Was Bad has a much more explicit argument she makes to the reader -- women tend to get away with lighter sentences (or none at all) for murder, due to the way in which our society views women more easily and comfortably as victims and as women acted upon, not actors themselves. She deals with very recent crimes only in both her thesis and her case studies, and argues that the more feminist position is to urge that women be punished in the same way as men for similar crimes, because women are just as capable of deliberate thought, responsibility for their actions and moral agency as men are. Jones' work would certainly argue that if women are treated more lightly for murder, it is a very recent development, especially for women who are not white, upper class and conforming to their society's view of feminine, and I believe that some scholars have challenged her basic premise and said that women are not dealt with more leniently (again, especially poor women, women of color and women who are seen as sexually deviant in some way by their society, i.e. sluts or lesbians). But Pearson is a very persuasive and skilled writer, and I enjoyed following her argument, even if I did start to argue with her at several points throughout the book.
Finally, a big favorite of mine is Victorian Murderesses: A true history of thirteen respectable French and English women accused of unspeakable crimes by Mary Hartman. Each chapter examines the case of one English and one Frenchwoman accused of murder. It's an excellent look at this strata of "respectable" society in both England and France during the Age of Victoria, as well as a revealing and fascinating study of what these women's daily domestic lives were like.
A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly -- I don't really read a lot of YA novels now that I've aged out of the demographic (quite a while ago, actually), but this novel came highly recommended and I enjoyed it quite a bit. It's a story about a girl, Mattie, who's a maid at a hotel where the murder that inspired one of my favorite books, An American Tragedy (which in turn inspired a fantastic movie), although it's mostly Mattie's coming of age story. She's a great character, a great voice, and her struggle as she decides whether she can leave her family soon after her mother's death to go to college and her sexual (it's definitely not romantic) awakening are both compellingly portrayed. As I've recently put several novels that feature teenaged protagonists that are presented as adult, not YA novels, it made me wonder what would have to be changed about this novel to present it that way, and I will say that the vocabulary seemed -- very carefully chosen, I guess, to stay at a certain level. I mean, not to its detriment, and it's not out of character for anyone nor is it condescending to the reader, but I was slightly aware of it. Also, if it weren't written as a YA novel the description of Mattie's sexual feelings and first experiments might have been more explicit? Or maybe not? Also, I'm going to say completely off the top of my head, it seems to me that "regular" literary books with teenaged protagonists tend to have boys as the lead, rather than girls. I can think of several that fit that description, but I'm having a harder time thinking of a novel with a teenaged girl protagonist that's not pitches as YA. There are probably many glaring examples I'm forgetting, but -- okay, Anywhere but Here I just thought of has a teen girl POV character. Anyway, it just seemed to me off the top of my head that books with teen boy POV characters are more common/taken more seriously as adult fiction. Anyway, the whole notion just passed through my mind because of things I've been planning to read, but A Northern Light was a very satisfying read in and of itself.