January Reading
In my defense, the computer was broken this month, so I have a reason for being late this time.
1. Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession
by Julie Powell
Genre: Memoir
Pages: 303
2. Her Fearful Symmetry
by Audrey Niffenegger
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 401
3. Liar
by Justine Larbalestier
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
Pages: 371
4. One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd
by Jim Fergus
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 302
5. Love in the Time of Cholera
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 348
6. People of the Book
by Geraldine Brooks
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 372
7. Year of Wonders
by Geraldine Brooks
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 304
8. Push
by Sapphire
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 150
Julie Powell's first novel, Julie and Julia was the charming story of how she pulls herself out of a quarter-life crisis by cooking her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume I. It originated as a blog and it retains the informality, chatting-with-a-friend feel of a blog. It's the kind of book you could lend to your grandmother. Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession is a whole different story. This time around, Julia is exploring the male-dominated world of butchering and she is having an obsessive love affair with a man identified only as D. Julie was the plucky heroine you could root for in her first memoir; now there's nothing to root for, except maybe for her long-suffering husband to grow a spine and leave her. Powell is still a good writer, but butchering isn't as interesting as cooking (to me) and it's kind of cringe inducing to read about her enjoyment of sado-masochistic sex with D. and total strangers. Maybe this should have been a memoir of obsessive love and not butchering, but that book has already been written by writers better than Powell.
Her Fearful Symmetry opens with Elspeth Noblin dying of cancer. She wills her London flat to her twin nieces, Julia and Valentina. Elspeth and the twins’ mother, Edie, were also twins. Elspeth and Edie were estranged allegedly because Edie stole Elspeth’s fiancée and for other mysterious reasons. Julia and Valentina will inherit the flat on the condition that they live in it for a year and their parents aren’t allowed inside it.
The flat borders London’s famous Highgate Cemetery. The downstairs neighbor is Robert, Elspeth’s younger lover. The upstairs neighbors are Marijike and Martin, who suffers from crippling obsessive compulsive disorder. We soon learn that Elspeth isn’t quite as gone as one would think.
I loved Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, but this book is something of a disappointment. I’m starting to wonder if I will ever fall in love with a writer’s first novel and not be let down by their second. The first half of this book is good-- Niffenegger deftly explores Robert’s grief and the suffocating nature of being a twin. I also liked the details about Highgate Cemetery and that the twins call their cat the Little Kitten of Death. But the book falls apart in the final third. I liked the Martin character, but it’s as if he wandered in from another novel. Robert and Valentina behave in ways that seem completely out of character. The ending is creepy and creative, but doesn’t fit the rest of the book. I think that Niffenegger didn’t know how to end the book, so she just threw some crap together.
I haven't read any young adult fiction since I was a young adult, but Liar came well-recommended, so I decided to give it a chance. Unfortunately, it wasn't my cup of tea. The narrator is a freely admitted compulsive liar whose boyfriend has been murdered under mysterious circumstances. I was already somewhat aware that the narrator had a big secret, but it takes 166 pages to get to the deep, dark secret, which was about 100 pages too many. The stream of consciousness style also annoyed me. It was an interesting choice to have a compulsive liar as a narrator, but as a result of this, I was frustrating by unanswered questions and the inability to know if any of the action of the book was really true. But I may give more young adult books a shot in the future.
One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd is historical fiction about an event that never happened. It was proposed in 1875 that the U.S. government provide one thousand white women to be brides of Cheyenne Indians. In the Cheyenne tradition, children belong to their mother's tribe, so the children of these unions would belong to the white man's tribe and facilitate peace between the two nations. This never happened, but in the book, the white women are sent. Fergus creates a lot of strong and interesting female characters and I was interested in the details of Cheyenne life. I could have done without the torn between two men subplot that comes up with May Dodd, the main narrator, which gets a little too soap opera.
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez became one of my favorite books when I first read it, but it didn't impact me as much reading it for the second time. It is a great story and Marquez transports the reader to another world like no one else.
In People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks, the Sarajevo Haggadah (a centuries old Jewish religious text) is discovered in Sarajevo just after the war in 1996. Hanna is a rare book expert charged with restoring the manuscript. Every time she finds a miniscule clue to the text's past (a piece of a butterfly's wing, a cat hair, etc.) we get a story about the Haggadah's luminous and exhilarating past. It was a little disjointing to jump from Hanna's story to the stories of the people who helped the Haggadah survive, but every story was unique and intriguing and left me wanting more. I would recommend this book. It's my favorite of all of Geraldine Brooks' works.
I was reading Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks at work (I'm allowed) and someone walked by and told me, "It's a good book but it has a bad ending." That is actually a pretty perfect review. It's an engrossing story about an English village that is struck by the plague in 1666. The villagers decide to quarantine themselves to prevent further spread of the disease. Brooks expertly describes their heartbreaking struggles for survival and every character is well-developed. But the ending is one of those "Scooby-Doo” basically-I didn't-know-how-to-end-this-book endings in which one the main characters is revealed to be the polar opposite of how he had been portrayed in the first 250 odd pages of the book and then what happens to the heroine is so implausible that it's ridiculous. I really did enjoy the majority of the book and I wouldn't discourage anyone from reading it.
Push by Sapphire is the book that the movie Precious is based on. I haven't seen the movie yet, but the book was something of a disappointment. Claireece Precious Jones is an illiterate, obese, unattractive, pregnant sixteen-year-old who has one child already. She is horrifically abused by both of her parents. She finds a small measure of hope in an alternative school program. I'm not one to insist that all books be happy but the fact that nearly every person in this story is either vile or hopeless makes it very hard to get through. I've heard that the movie shows more of Precious' fantasies and inner life, but here, she doesn't feel like a person, just a caricature drowning in misery. My favorite part of the whole book is when Precious writes in her journal, "I love my teacher," like a small child would when she's actually teenager and a mother of two. I felt like her humanity shined through in that moment in a way that it needed to but never did in the rest of the book.
1. Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession
by Julie Powell
Genre: Memoir
Pages: 303
2. Her Fearful Symmetry
by Audrey Niffenegger
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 401
3. Liar
by Justine Larbalestier
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
Pages: 371
4. One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd
by Jim Fergus
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 302
5. Love in the Time of Cholera
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 348
6. People of the Book
by Geraldine Brooks
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 372
7. Year of Wonders
by Geraldine Brooks
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 304
8. Push
by Sapphire
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 150
Julie Powell's first novel, Julie and Julia was the charming story of how she pulls herself out of a quarter-life crisis by cooking her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume I. It originated as a blog and it retains the informality, chatting-with-a-friend feel of a blog. It's the kind of book you could lend to your grandmother. Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession is a whole different story. This time around, Julia is exploring the male-dominated world of butchering and she is having an obsessive love affair with a man identified only as D. Julie was the plucky heroine you could root for in her first memoir; now there's nothing to root for, except maybe for her long-suffering husband to grow a spine and leave her. Powell is still a good writer, but butchering isn't as interesting as cooking (to me) and it's kind of cringe inducing to read about her enjoyment of sado-masochistic sex with D. and total strangers. Maybe this should have been a memoir of obsessive love and not butchering, but that book has already been written by writers better than Powell.
Her Fearful Symmetry opens with Elspeth Noblin dying of cancer. She wills her London flat to her twin nieces, Julia and Valentina. Elspeth and the twins’ mother, Edie, were also twins. Elspeth and Edie were estranged allegedly because Edie stole Elspeth’s fiancée and for other mysterious reasons. Julia and Valentina will inherit the flat on the condition that they live in it for a year and their parents aren’t allowed inside it.
The flat borders London’s famous Highgate Cemetery. The downstairs neighbor is Robert, Elspeth’s younger lover. The upstairs neighbors are Marijike and Martin, who suffers from crippling obsessive compulsive disorder. We soon learn that Elspeth isn’t quite as gone as one would think.
I loved Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, but this book is something of a disappointment. I’m starting to wonder if I will ever fall in love with a writer’s first novel and not be let down by their second. The first half of this book is good-- Niffenegger deftly explores Robert’s grief and the suffocating nature of being a twin. I also liked the details about Highgate Cemetery and that the twins call their cat the Little Kitten of Death. But the book falls apart in the final third. I liked the Martin character, but it’s as if he wandered in from another novel. Robert and Valentina behave in ways that seem completely out of character. The ending is creepy and creative, but doesn’t fit the rest of the book. I think that Niffenegger didn’t know how to end the book, so she just threw some crap together.
I haven't read any young adult fiction since I was a young adult, but Liar came well-recommended, so I decided to give it a chance. Unfortunately, it wasn't my cup of tea. The narrator is a freely admitted compulsive liar whose boyfriend has been murdered under mysterious circumstances. I was already somewhat aware that the narrator had a big secret, but it takes 166 pages to get to the deep, dark secret, which was about 100 pages too many. The stream of consciousness style also annoyed me. It was an interesting choice to have a compulsive liar as a narrator, but as a result of this, I was frustrating by unanswered questions and the inability to know if any of the action of the book was really true. But I may give more young adult books a shot in the future.
One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd is historical fiction about an event that never happened. It was proposed in 1875 that the U.S. government provide one thousand white women to be brides of Cheyenne Indians. In the Cheyenne tradition, children belong to their mother's tribe, so the children of these unions would belong to the white man's tribe and facilitate peace between the two nations. This never happened, but in the book, the white women are sent. Fergus creates a lot of strong and interesting female characters and I was interested in the details of Cheyenne life. I could have done without the torn between two men subplot that comes up with May Dodd, the main narrator, which gets a little too soap opera.
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez became one of my favorite books when I first read it, but it didn't impact me as much reading it for the second time. It is a great story and Marquez transports the reader to another world like no one else.
In People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks, the Sarajevo Haggadah (a centuries old Jewish religious text) is discovered in Sarajevo just after the war in 1996. Hanna is a rare book expert charged with restoring the manuscript. Every time she finds a miniscule clue to the text's past (a piece of a butterfly's wing, a cat hair, etc.) we get a story about the Haggadah's luminous and exhilarating past. It was a little disjointing to jump from Hanna's story to the stories of the people who helped the Haggadah survive, but every story was unique and intriguing and left me wanting more. I would recommend this book. It's my favorite of all of Geraldine Brooks' works.
I was reading Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks at work (I'm allowed) and someone walked by and told me, "It's a good book but it has a bad ending." That is actually a pretty perfect review. It's an engrossing story about an English village that is struck by the plague in 1666. The villagers decide to quarantine themselves to prevent further spread of the disease. Brooks expertly describes their heartbreaking struggles for survival and every character is well-developed. But the ending is one of those "Scooby-Doo” basically-I didn't-know-how-to-end-this-book endings in which one the main characters is revealed to be the polar opposite of how he had been portrayed in the first 250 odd pages of the book and then what happens to the heroine is so implausible that it's ridiculous. I really did enjoy the majority of the book and I wouldn't discourage anyone from reading it.
Push by Sapphire is the book that the movie Precious is based on. I haven't seen the movie yet, but the book was something of a disappointment. Claireece Precious Jones is an illiterate, obese, unattractive, pregnant sixteen-year-old who has one child already. She is horrifically abused by both of her parents. She finds a small measure of hope in an alternative school program. I'm not one to insist that all books be happy but the fact that nearly every person in this story is either vile or hopeless makes it very hard to get through. I've heard that the movie shows more of Precious' fantasies and inner life, but here, she doesn't feel like a person, just a caricature drowning in misery. My favorite part of the whole book is when Precious writes in her journal, "I love my teacher," like a small child would when she's actually teenager and a mother of two. I felt like her humanity shined through in that moment in a way that it needed to but never did in the rest of the book.