Friday February Books!

Yeah, I still do read. Probably as much as you do and on less sleep too! Not to make you feel bad about yourself or anything.

Now, thanks the awesomeness of Xmas, I can read on my Kindle. Didn't think I would, but I kind of love it. Reading Anna Karenina on it now and for the foreseeable future. That's a long book and I'm in the farming/Levin part, which is slightly as tedious as they say, but I am enjoying the romance. I also read Room and I Remember Nothing on the Kindle. The Ephron wasn't worth it. I liked I Feel Bad About My Neck, but this one felt like I Still Feel Bad About My Neck Except I Already Made A Killing Off This Idea Before So Maybe If I Call It Something Else But Keep It Very Similar No One Will Catch On. IRN made me question if I would actually like Nora if we were to say, meet and have coffee. Room is a total head trip. A very fast read, certain to give you 1-2 nights of weird dreams, but something you really can't stop reading. Also, it gave me A LOT of perspective on being housebound with kids. If you think your place is small, imagine an 11X11 foot shed.

In book form, I just finished Major Pettigrew's Last Stand. I liked it, in a quiet, comforting way. It took me longer to read than it should have. I think it would be an excellent book for a trans-Atlantic flight, which isn't meant as a dis in any way because I did like it.

And I've finally read all of the Diary of A Wimpy Kids in the past two or so months, which is good because it's been kind of embarrassing checking them out of the library when it's obvious that The Bean is just not reading yet. They are funny. And you can read one in about an hour, which is pretty much my standard these days.

Friday Books!! (Really!)

First, a very happy birthday to the even older Old Man!

I finished Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson a few nights ago. It took me almost two months to read and it's not a hard or boring or bad book. If I had to describe it with one word that would be: quiet. It's Scandinavian so I guess that makes sense. It enjoyable, but not exactly thrilling. In fact, I'm not really sure what I have to say about it and I'm feeling lazy. This guy had more so read this if you want more details. Happy weekend.

Friday....

It's 8:30 PM on a Friday night and I'm the only one up right now. The Bean is an early sleeper---she's usually beat by 6:00 although I would like her to go to bed a little later so that eight hour of sleep (!) doesn't mean getting up to nurse at 2:00 AM. 4:00 or 5:00 AM would be better. But anyway it's normal for Beanie to be a snoozin now, but poor N. is super sick. He stayed home from work today and just got sicker and sicker. We were supposed to go out for pizza and beer tonight, which is our annual frak-Valentine's Day tradition, but I had to cancel our sitter. Bummer!

I'm not really tired, but my computer isn't charged enough for me to do that much on it and I don't feel like going into the living room to get the cord because that's where N. is sleeping. I'm very glad we bought our new pull-out couch. I love my husband, but I really don't want to sleep next to a germy guy. Oh, this is very scattered, but I was going to say that I'm not tired, but I'm so not into the book I'm reading, which is Twilight. Yeah the silly YA book that they made a silly (and lame!) YA movie about a few months back. I don't know why I bought the book...it's about Vampires. I'm so not into that....I guess I wanted to see what all the fuss was about, but man is the writing just terrible. And it's so long. And I have this weird hang up about having to finish books that I've read more than 100 pages or half of. So I know I'm going to finish it (eventually) but I'm so not into reading it.

I read An Abundance of Katherines by John Green a few weeks ago. That's another YA and why it's not perfect, it's very very smart and funny and good. I recommend that. Most especially if your reading level has gone down to that of a 7th grader.

My computer is about to lose its juice. Cross your fingers that Ms. Bean doesn't get her daddy's bug. She's much too little to get that sick.

Happy V-day for those that subscribe to that kinda stuff. Have a Bud and slice for me and N.

Friday Books!!

Yes, it's Friday and yes, there are books to be blogged. I would also like to say that with the windchill it's -23 degrees here in NH, but, out of the goodness of heart, I have not yet filed for divorce.

But back to the books.

About six weeks ago I read The Gathering by Anne Einright. My high school English teacher/ friend recommended it quite highly. I will say that it was quite readable---Einright is a good, somewhat lyrical writer. As the book itself--I guess I'd give it a B+. I really didn't like the narrator and although a likable narrator isn't at all a requirement for a good book, in this particular case, the narrator came off so selfish and just wanting to lick her wounds it sort of held me back a bit. I don't want to be a spoiler, but suffice it to say, one major plot point seemed a bit over done and almost, sad to say, cliche.

But, don't listen to me! It won the 2007 Man/Booker and everyone else I know really liked it.

The other book I read was the 2008 Man/Booker winner The White Tiger by I'm too lazy to go upstairs to get it so just google it if you're that interested. This book is basically about the class divide in contemporary India. What's interesting is that for the first 50-75 pages I really disliked the narrator because he's so obnoxious and self-involved and hard to relate to. But then after the first 75 pages or so I changed my mind. I realized he had a right to be obnoxious and self-involved and of course I couldn't relate to him because I'm white and in America and certainly "rich" by his standards. The book got more interesting the more I read and I've thought a lot about since finishing it yesterday.

Oh...yesterday! The Bean took 3! naps...each one over an hour. And then she slept from 6:40-2:00 AM! But today. Well, let's just say I'm not reading much today. I am going to make some hot chocolate cuz baby it's cold outside.

Happy Weekend.

Friday Books!!

I was psyched to see my moms had a copy of Assisted Loving by Bob Morris on her shelf back when I was home in November. I always liked reading Morris' columns in the Style section of the Times and in radio interviews he was pretty fun. My mom lent me the book over Thanksgiving and I just finished it, but only because it was light and easy and I was too lazy to find something better.

The basic premise of the memoir is that Morris and his 80-year old recently widowed father are both dating. The problem with the book is the cover. Really. It's such an obnoxious cover that I think it brings the whole book down. It sets the wrong tone and seems to really exaggerate Morris' father's flaws. Less superficially, I think the book itself is dumbed down---the cute overrides any interesting story. I got to page 50 and thought I could really stop reading this right now because I'm not exactly enjoying it, but then out of laziness I didn't. But I feel like that also speaks to the author. I just can't believe that Morris--a total fashionista/snob--would like the cover. But one would not say no to a publisher who would push such a cover. I also bet his editor pushed him to dumb down the book. Maybe they're hoping Hollywood would buy it and they probably have, but it seems to be to the detriment of the story. The cuteness just doesn't work.

Friday Books: Please Kill Me and The Ten-Year Nap

Actually, Boris, I have been reading. While in NH, I began reading N's Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain. The book is a series of interviews with people in and around the 1970's Punk scene. I found it interesting, easy, and light---the kind of book you can pick up here and there without losing any plot points. It was a good to read when I was up in the middle of the night since it's pretty much gossip about all the boozing and sex that went on back in the days of Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, The Ramones, The Sex Pistols, Television, MC5, The Velvet Underground.

Man, those people could party. At nine months pregnant with nary a memory of the last time I stayed up past 1 AM, I felt pretty removed from the scene. But it was fun to read about.

Closer to home, I finished Meg Wolitzer's The Ten-Year Nap. It's her most recent book and I enjoyed it. I don't know if it's because I took a break between her novels or if I just found the topic more interesting. My problem with The Position was that I wasn't sure if it was supposed to tragic or comedic. I found The Ten-Year Nap a solidly good summer novel.

The book is about these four mothers raising young kids who aren't young enough to necessarily warrant them still staying at home. The kids are in school and a lot of the women and their families struggle financially in New York City. Yet, something holds them back from returning to the working world. The chapters dealing with the four women---a failed painter, a lawyer, a failed academic/film producer, a math whiz /econ person---are intersected with stories about their mothers--many women who had to work or truly enjoyed working. These parts tended to be shorter and at first I felt they were gimicky, but by the end, I enjoyed them more and recognized why Wolitzer needed this device.

Wolitzer remains, in my opinion, a terrific, line by line writer. She really nails the human condition and has a great sense of endings. Read this book but get it from the library. I don't see why you'd need to own it.

Friday Books: The Position

The Position by Meg Wolitzer was the second novel I read by her in about two weeks. It was good--like The Wife, it's incredibly readable and Wolitzer still captures the intimacies of human nature. Although I liked the book and would recommend it for someone who needs a good beach or plane book (it's not trashy but it's engaging and easy without being stupid) I didn't like it as much as I liked The Wife.

The premise of the book is certainly compelling. The Mellow children discover a sex manual that their parents have written complete with illustrations of them screwing in different positions. Aren't you glad your parents weren't on the forefront of the sexual revolution? And if they were, that they didn't write a book about it? The book follows the children and the parents from the moment after the discovery of the book. Each chapter is about a different character and they're all pretty interesting and screwed up.

I know I'm not explaining myself particularly eloquently here but I guess my issue with the book is that I wasn't sure what world it fit into. Like, the whole conceit of the the position (it's called Electric Forgiveness) and the kids finding the book is, I think, inherently funny in a 1970's kind of way. But the following chapters, the lives characters go on the lead are pretty sad and in some cases, downright depressing. I'm not saying that a book can't be both funny and depressing---probably the best books are, but somehow the world Wolitzer creates in The Position felt off kilter. I wasn't sure where I was to put it simply.

So, I'm going to take a mini breather from Wolitzer but I will read The Ten Year Nap sooner rather than later. This week I might try to read a comic that N. thinks is the bomb.

TWO! Friday Books: Julie and Julia and The Wife

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?

Friday Books 3.0:I Was Told There'd Be Cake

Yes, it's been a while but I'm reading again. I read two stories in this week's fiction themed The New Yorker. The Mary Gaitskill one because she's a literary hero of mine and the Annie Proulx one because "Tits-Up In A Ditch" is possibly one of the greatest titles of all time. Man, Proulx's story is really depressing. They're both worth reading but don't expect to laugh much.

A less depressing read was Sloane Crosley's I Was Told There'd Be Cake collection of essays.

I don't have a ton to say about the book except that it was a fun, quick, easy, readable read. N. will tell you that I'm a big user of the adjective readable. But I think it fits a purpose. When I describe something as readable, I put it in category of being somewhat light, not great, but not something you need to put down on page 30 either. As a writer, I aim to write a readble book (before a great one) just because it seems like mostly you'd want your book to be read. Duh. I think there's a time and a place for the readable as opposed to the great work of literature. Airplanes, beaches, times in your life when there's a lot going on (like babies and moves).

IWTTBC was a good book to somewhat impulsively buy at the Borders in NH last week. I was able to get into the essays about life in NYC, moving, her family, camp, relationships, bad bosses right away.

I read and enjoyed the book but halfway through I decided that when I finished it I'd give it to a friend who's jetting off to Europe this week. Like, I said, a good read when you're 30,000 feet above sea level. After that, you can pass it on rather than make room on your overcrowded shelf.

Crosley is the kind of person you might want to hate because she's less than 30 and according to the Internet everyone loves her. But she's a good enough, funny enough writer that I didn't really hate her. Plus, I heard from a source that she's kind of a spaz in real life. And you just can't hate the spaz. Or cake. Isn't cake wonderful?

FRIDAY BOOKS 2.0

I had to speed read The Book of Dahlia by Elissa Albert because it was from my mom's library--the non-Brooklyn branch and she didn't want a fine. I hadn't heard of it; she got it because she read some great review of it or something. She lent it to me because she didn't get past the first twenty pages. I know why. It seems geared to people more my age than hers. It turns out I took a few yoga classes with Albert back when I was doing community yoga down on Atlantic Ave.

The book is as non-Jhumpa Lahiri as you could ask for. Not that I want every book to be like Lahiri, but Albert's writing is cool and cute and snappy with tons of pop culture references while Lahiri's feels more timeless and classic. Albert is a good writer but I didn't love the book. I found it readable because of the snappy writing but the characters were so unlikeable that I found it a bit tedious.

I'll admit that the conceit of the book is interesting: Dahlia Finger, 29 year old fuck up, who spends her father's money, smokes tons of pot, sleeps around, watches old movies religiously, gets diagnosed with a brain tumor. A serious, going to kill you, brain tumor. The first chapter is terrific--extremely tight in executing the plot and establishing the character. But while you sympathize with Dahlia for her illness, you never (ever) like her. I kept wanting her to change in some way and she never does. In a way this is interesting since one of the rules you often hear in writing workshops is that your characters need to change--even if the change is seemingly minute. I read somewhere that Dahlia is the anti-heroine of the novel and while I guess it's an interesting conceit and explains why she wouldn't change, I found her frustrating and tedious. Her relationship with her brother is a good example. They're best buds till he's a teenager and then he becomes a total asshole. From page 20 on, it's Dahlia's futile attempts to make her brother like her. Maybe 150 past that she realizes he's not going to change and from then on it's just this verbal diarrhea of what an ass he is. His assholeness is true, sure, but it's so extreme that he doesn't even feel real.

The same can be said for Dahlia's mother. She's so selfish that at some point around page 75 I felt like okay, how long do I have to spend with these awful people. But the writing is good and I guess that sort of saves it.

I read online that Albert's own brother had a brain tumor and it did make me feel a little differently towards to the book. Maybe more sympathetic. I'm not sure that this information should effect my reading of it but it did put it in a new light.

Now, I have nothing to read, which is a bit of a bummer. Luckily there's always Net Flix and TV.

More Library Books

Just so my 3.5 readers understand that there's more to me than just detailing my angst about leaving Brooklyn, moving to Red Sock Country, and being pregnant with the Bean, let's have another book review.

Perhaps this will be the start of a semi-regular series. Friday books. This is until it gets too hot for me to read, of course.

Yesterday I finished Jhumpa Lahiri's second collection of short stories Unaccustomed Earth. Unlike the book before this, the novel The Namesake, I found it very satisfying. I think Lahiri is a much better short story writer than novelist. For me, the novel fell apart on page 200 (I think it was about 350 pages) because I found the parents in the first part of the book much more compelling and believable. On page 200 when the main character leaves home/his parents I found him to be flat and somewhat cliche in his relationships with American women.

The stories in Unaccustomed Earth deal with the same themes Lahiri writes about in The Namesake and her first and excellent story collection Interpreter of Maladies: the Bengali experience in America, most likely in suburbaney-urban places like Seattle and Cambridge and Philadelphia. In this way there's something comforting about reading Lahiri's stories because you feel like you already know these people. But it also seems like Lahiri is stretching her characters too--rather than mostly dealing with the Indian/Cambridge divide, the characters in the new book deal with sibling alcoholism, parent death, remarriage, secret illness, class/assimilation issues, isolation in suburbia, empty but consuming relationships. The last three stories are connected in a satisfying way--Lahiri naturally seems like a novella-ist. Her stories are long but not quite long enough for the novel so the three connected stories seem like a good bridge to this.

Lahiri is a classic, very writerly (I know writerly is a terrible word to use but I can't think of another) writer. Her sentences aren't cool like Richard Price or cute but have a strong sense of old-school narrative. She writes real stories about real people with real problems that feel set in real time.

Michiko Kakutani put it a lot more elegantly in her April 4th review:

Ms. Lahiri writes about these people in “Unaccustomed Earth” with an intimate knowledge of their conflicted hearts, using her lapidary eye for detail to conjure their daily lives with extraordinary precision: the faint taste of coconut in the Nice cookies that a man associates with his dead wife; the Wonder Bread sandwiches, tinted green with curry, that a Bengali mother makes for her embarrassed daughter to take to school. A Chekhovian sense of loss blows through these new stories: a reminder of Ms. Lahiri’s appreciation of the wages of time and mortality and her understanding too of the missed connections that plague her husbands and wives, parents and children, lovers and friends.

I think it's the "Chekhovian sense of loss blows" is why Kakutani writes for the Times and I just write in my kitchen.