What do you know, kids? I read myself 2.5 books this week. It might have something to do with the fact that I've had about 7 minutes of work for the past week and half.
I really enjoyed The Wife. I never read Meg Wolitzer before but now she's on my A list. I'm currently 100 pages into The Position and took out her most recent novel The Ten Year Nap. The Wife is funny and serious at the same time. In many ways it's a spoof of writers and marriage. The basic plot is that the narrator marries her creative writing instructor just before he becomes a writing star. Her own life is completely built around him and their family and at age 64 she decides she's had enough. I've been told spoilers are not fun so I'm keeping it a little vague. The book is funny in the sense that you can easily imagine the egotistical writer (Jonathan Franzen comes to mind) and the woman who has to live with that/him. The main character in the novel is really likeable and smart; Wolitzer is a terrific writer, especially when it comes to nailing the details of marriage and human interaction.
I also read Julie and Julia because my high school English teacher recommended it when I was in a serious lack of reading. The premise of J and J is that Julie Powell is about to turn 30, might have trouble conceiving a child, is stuck in a secretarial job, and has a miserable commute to a crappy apartment in Queens. Her big idea is to cook all five million recipes in Julia Child's seminal Mastering The Art of French Cooking in a year.
I was curious as to how Powell would go from blog to a book. Unlike her blog, which I didn't read, I assumed she couldn't go detail every recipe every day. In the book she picks and chooses the recipes by using chapters with specific days. What I liked was how she didn't only write about the cooking; there's also her marriage, crazy friends, and Texas family, and her terrible day job working for a government agency that makes her miserable since it's filled to the gills with Republicans. Her humor is what I most enjoyed. What I didn't like and what I skipped were the intermittent fictionalized sections where she imagines life between Paul and Julia Child. I found this boring and unnecessary and after the first two I didn't even feel bad about not reading them.
It's hard not to be jealous of the success Powell got. Not only did she get a book deal from her blog (hey! I could do that!) but it sold really well and got optioned with Meryl Streep and Amy Adams in the role of Julia and Julie respectively. The movie is supposed to come out in 2009. Not too bad. But because she's funny and seems nice you don't want to hate Powell too much.
So yeah. Two books. Other than this highly literary post, what are you reading?
2 comments:
A high school English teacher's recommendations take precedence over a Mom's?
Two books in one week is impressive, but I suppose you're reading for Bean now too.
Books I hope to finish/get to this summer: Middlesex, Leaves of Grass, Last Night (stories by James Salter), the Lester Bangs Reader, and Counterpoint: Based on Eighteenth-Century Practice. I'd recommend all but the last.
Post a Comment