A New Reading List

Currently Reading: Something Borrowed, by Emily Griffin

Strapless, by Deborah Davis

With a new month, comes a new book list.  I found that this month there’s so much that I want to read it was difficult to narrow down my selections.  However, I do have a final list.

• History - Never Had It So Good, by Dominic Sandbrook
  
• Biography - Strapless, by Deborah Davis
• Fiction - The Meaning of Night, by Michael Cox
  
• Best Seller – The Paris Wife, by Paula McLane
• Classic – The Iliad, by Homer
• Ancient Text - The 12 Caesars, by Suetonius
  
• Non-Fiction - Consider the Lobster, by David Foster Wallace
  
• Mystery – Cover Her Face, by P.D. James
• Romance/Chick Lit -  Something Borrowed, by Emily Griffin

There’s quite a bit of variety there in terms of subject matter, so I’m hoping that I keep myself amused especially with long beach days ahead.

Friday Linksday

A day late, but late is better than never…

• There’s plenty of controversy surrounding comments that Meghan Cox Gurdon made in The Wall Street Journal about the state of teen fiction.  Here’s the original article too.
• Amazon puts out it’s best books of 2011… so far.

Nostaligic Days

Currently Reading: Game of Thrones, by George R.R. Martin

With moving and then going home all in the space of one month, it’s difficult not to be a little nostalgic for the days when a box was a thing you played with.  Now a box is a thing you pack and then ship or move all while grumbling about how much the whole process costs.  Ah, to be a kid again.

In honor of those simpler times, I’ve put together a list of some of my favorite children’s books.  It’s far from a definitive list.  For something more along those lines I highly recommend the UK paper The Independent’s “50 Books Every Child Should Read.”  It’s a great list of the classics and some recent books thrown into the mix too.

The Giver, by Lois Lowry

The Giver is one of those books that transcends literary genres.  It is sold as a children’s book, and it is certainly that.  However, the book is too nuanced to be brushed off as “just for kids.”  The story focuses around Jonah, a boy living in a dystopian society that has eliminated pain in favor of “Sameness.”  Only one person has the ability to feel pain and pleasure and store the memories that existed before “Sameness.”  That man is the Giver.  When Johan is chosen to next fill that role, he begins to realize that the world is richer than he’s ever imagined it would be.  Jonah is faced with a choice to either stay and live the shallow life in the community or run away.  The book is controversial because it centers around some very adult themes.  This makes it sometimes difficult to categorize as a children’s books.  But like most great works of children’s literature, it never panders to the age of its reader.  Lowry presents a beautifully written, sometimes heartbreaking novel about freedom and choice.

The Redwall Series, by Brian Jacques

I found the Redwall books when I was a little girl living in Pasadena.  A wonderful independent book store, Vroman’s, played a huge role in my upbringing.  My family would travel into the shop on Colorado Boulevard at least once a week, hunting for good books on the shelves.  One of the best things about Vroman’s is the extensive children’s section with truly knowledgeable staff members (I say this only in part because one of my best friends worked in the children’s section for a summer and still recommends wonderful books that walk the line between children’s and adult literature).  I can’t recall whether I just picked Redwall up on my own or whether it was a present from a family friend.  What I do remember is that Vroman’s became my chosen hunting ground for the very latest in Jacques’ wonderful, long series.

Redwall was the first Jacques book that I read, so I usually think of the series in those terms although there are prequels and sequels aplenty in this series that stretches over 21 books (so far).  The novels chronicle the world of Redwall Abbey and the anthropomorphic animals who live in and around there.  All of the animals are native to Britain, and the fantasy series has a definite Medieval English flavor.

The plots over the nine books that I read as a child are too complicated to summarize here.  Instead, I will say that the books are charming and engaging.  The little world of woodland creatures that Jacques created is so fully actualized that you want to be allowed to slip between the pages and share cups of honey cordial at one of the abbey’s feasts.

Ella Enchanted, by Gale Carson Levine

I found Ella Enchanted later in life than you’re supposed to as a reader.  Thankfully it wasn’t through the unfortunately bad Anne Hathaway movie released in 2004.  I picked up the book at a friend’s house on an October break from classes my freshman year of college.  It took me a couple of hours to fly through the enchanting book (no pun intended).

Ella Enchanted follows a young woman cursed with obedience.  Any task that Ella’s told to do she must perform.  It’s a burden that becomes almost unbearable when her wicked stepsister orders her to never speak to her closest friend again.  Distraught, Ella runs away to find her father.  Things don’t exactly go as planned and adventures ensue complete with a charming prince and a happy ending.

The BFG & The Witches & Matilda, by Roald Dahl

It’s difficult to choose just one Roald Dahl book to talk about here.  Since it’s my blog and my rules, I’ll bring up three.  All of Dahl’s books are magical in their own way, but these three are really superior.

When I read The BFG I wanted a friend just like him who deposited dreams into children’s rooms with a glass blowing tool.  I was horrified and fascinated in the way that only a child can be when I read about witches who look like nice women but really have square feet with no toes and horrible wig rash.  And when I read Matilda I felt as though I was the only one who really understood the little girl whose greatest pleasure in life was to be caught up in a good book.

Dahl’s books are wonderful because they are simultaneously fantastic and very real.  Even better, they are charming and yet ever so slightly wicked.  He captured a child’s imagination in a rare way.

The Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein

Very few books are as touching as The Giving Tree.  I know that it is quite cliché now to gift the book to graduates as they move from one stage of their lives to another, but things become cliché for a reason.  The Giving Tree is a touching story of love and sacrifice that says different things to people in different stages of their lives.  I’ve seen adults cry at the end just as often as I’ve seen kids stare at the wonderful illustrations.  It’s a treasure of a book that I think is often overlooked because of its simplicity.

The Greengage Summer, by Rummer Gooden & I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith

These last two books have probably the strongest pull of nostalgia for me out of this entire list, both of them for the same reason.  These are two classics of the English coming of age novel.  I read both at transitional times in my life so the connection to the characters and the stories is particularly poignant.  However they stand out most of all because I associate these books with my mother.

Mum first gave me The Greengage Summer for my 16th birthday.  She told me that she had read it when she was about my age.  It’s a beautiful, cloth-bound copy that I’ve since taken with me on every move I’ve made.  The book tells the story of an English young girl growing up during one summer in France.  Her mother is taken ill at the start of their holiday, and she and her siblings basically run wild at the hotel where her mother is convalescing.  Her lovely older sister attracts the attention of the hotel owner’s lover.  Told through the perspective of this younger sister, the story moves from charmingly childish to heartbreakingly grown up.

The title of ultimate nostalgia book, in my opinion, goes to I Capture the Castle.  My mother also introduced me to this wonderful book right around when I was leaving for college.  Dodie Smith is perhaps best known for writing 101 Dalmatians, but her fame as a children’s author sometimes detracts from what she achieved in I Capture the Castle.  She writes about an impoverished English family abandoned daily by their famous author of a father who is suffering from years of writer’s block.  The story is told by the middle child, Cassandra, who writes about her eccentric family as she tries to develop her own voice as an author.  The story of first love and adolescent awkwardness is sharp and funny.  It is difficult not to find something about Cassandra that every young woman can relate to.

These are the books I go back to when I’m stressed, sad, homesick, and looking for some comfort.

Review – Northanger Abbey, by Jane Ausen

There are few authors whose entire works I can claim to have read.  Now that I am done with Northanger Abbey, I can proudly say that I have finished Jane Austen’s completed novels.  With that perspective on her whole body of work, I can also honestly report that Northanger Abbey is one of my least favorite of her books.

Now wait just one moment.  Before a rabid pack of Austen fans descends upon my tiny New York apartment, I should qualify that last statement.  Northanger Abbey is one of my least favorite Austen novels, yet just one of her books has more clarity, wit, intelligence, and charm than most authors could hope to muster over an entire lifetime of writing.

My affair with Austen began — as it does with most teenager girls of my generation — not reading the books but watching the 5 1/2 hour long BBC miniseries.  I fell in love with Colin Firth playing Mr. Darcy — soaking wet and emerging from the lake at Pemberley.  For a long time Pride and Prejudice stood proudly as my favorite book with parts of Emma giving it a run for the money.  Then I found Persuasion.

Reading Persuasion was life-changing for me.  Finally I had found a heroine who embodied all of the strengths and so many of the faults that I too felt were obvious in me.  Anne Elliot — too easily persuaded by friends and family — ruins her own chances at happiness with the young and poor Mr. Wentworth when she refuses his offer of marriage.  Years later he comes back richer and a captain.  Anne now has a shred of hope that she might find the happiness that eluded her.  As a more mature woman, she finally decides to think and act for herself.

I strongly believe that Anne Elliot is the heroine for a more mature, considered woman.  She is quiet, considered, yet there is something as hard as steel in her.  She is admirable because of her faults as well as her virtues.

Austen writes a better flawed heroine than most.  Emma Woodhouse is far from perfect.  She is spoiled and indulged and that means her wit is sometimes caustic and downright mean.  Yet Emma grows throughout the course of her novel, sometimes in uncomfortable, awkward ways that a reader can sympathize with.  Elinor in Sense and Sensibility finds that she must learn to let go of control over emotion and aspects of her life before she can live happily with or without a husband.  And then there is Elizabeth Bennett.  Elizabeth is wonderful, although she is hardly a real person.  Even her fault of prejudice is turned on its head and becomes a virtue.  Elizabeth is a woman that readers aspire to become. 

All of this talk about characters from other Austen novels may seem a strange way to get into reviewing Northanger Abbey, but for me it is everything.  Something that is difficult to explain to Austen skeptics is that not much happens in her books.  And that’s okay.  The books are really about the people that populate them and the relationships (romantic and otherwise) that spring up throughout.  If you want action, you don’t pick up an Austen novel.  The characters are the reason to read the book.

Northanger Abbey is Jane Austen’s way of poking fun at the Gothic novel, more satire than novel of manners.  Just as the plot of the book seems to be a sketch rather than a fully formed work, Catherine Morland struck me as a rather underdeveloped character.  She sees the possibility of adventure and romance in everything.  Even a simple cupboard in an unfamiliar room becomes something sinister.  She’s exuberant, excitable, and charmingly naive.  She is rather silly.  Austen writes:

“The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already set forth by the capital pen of a sister author; and to her treatment of the subject I will only add, in justice to men, that though to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them too reasonable and too well informed themselves to desire anything more in woman than ignorance.”

Catherine is made to look foolish once or twice, but few substantial things happen to her.  She hardly grows except to become a little less naive.  And of course in the end Catherine gets her man and everything ends happily as it should in Jane Austen’s books.

That lack of development left me me feeling as though I’d read a lovely bit of fluff with little substantial to take away from Northanger Abbey.  As I mentioned before, since it is Austen writing everything comes across crisp, clear, and humorous.  The book was certainly lovely to read stretched out on a lounge chair in a sunny back garden as I did.  But I believe that I took little away from the novel.  Northanger Abbey doesn’t leave you feeling as though you know something deeper about human nature — except maybe the frivolity of young girls.  Austen’s best books stay with you because they teach their readers without harping on about morals.  Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma have strong messages about the way people act and the choices they make.  Northanger Abbey like Mansfield Park (another work that I believe is less strong) doesn’t carry that weight.

My sister is a great lover of Northanger Abbey so no doubt she has a very different take on the book.  I actually decided to read it at her urging.  I’m glad I did.  I’m sure that it is unfair to ask Northanger Abbey to stand up to such complete, wonderful novels like Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Persuasion, but when you have read Austen in her entirety it is difficult to separate the book out for its more perfect siblings.

What Should I Read?

Currently Reading: Game of Thrones, by George R.R. Martin

I am a strong believer in book lists.  I think that lists give guidance to readers and open us up to books that we might never have stumbled across if it were not for the gentle suggestion of the list’s maker.  I often turn to them when I’m looking to step a little out of my comfort zone with new genres or authors.  They can be incredibly valuable for that very reason.

Yet lists also present a danger.  Often they prompt the question, “What should I read?”  Those simple four words can actually be incredibly dangerous to pleasure reading, locking us down into the mindset that we can’t really read for pleasure until we’ve ticked of all those important names.  How many of us have been saddled with a book that we simply don’t connect with because someone tells us that we should have read it?

A recent review of Allan Jacob’s The Pleasures of Reading in the Age of Distraction on the wonderful book blog The Millions addresses the issue of readers feeling that our pleasure reading should be enriching and good for us.  Like cough medicine or dieting, we treat books like something we must suffer through to make us a better version of ourselves.  Jacobs argues that we should fight against that instinct.

“We’d be happier, better readers if we stopped obsessing about what we’ve read, how much we’ve read, and what we haven’t read. We should let whim, rather than guilt or shame, propel our reading choices… Reading is not a virtuous activity, and it does not strengthen or elevate our character. Only by freeing ourselves from this misconception can we rediscover the private, at times anti-social joys of reading.”

I used to be a strong believer that I needed to read certain books.  A dutiful student for 17 years of my life, I was used to being told what I should read.  I still have some of that instinct in me, but slowly I’ve started to shake the feeling that all of my reading needs to be guided by canonical lists until I get to a certain “well read” tipping point.  The reality is that there are thousands of books that I want to read, and I only have a limited time to tackle them. 

I refuse now to read books that I don’t connect with.  I am very willing to give a book a good shot (a hundred pages or so) but if I can’t get through it, I’ll put it down.  This attitude makes for an eclectic collection of DNF (Did Not Finish) books. 

1. The Tale of Two Cities and David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens – I wrote in an earlier blog entry about my dislike of Charles Dickens.  I have read and enjoyed Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol.  I couldn’t make my way through A Tale of Two Cities or David Copperfield.  I gave both genuinely good tries of a few hundred pages.  The problem was that my heart wasn’t in them.  Give me the ordered prose of Jane Austen or Elizabeth Gaskell’s social reform motivated stories any day.  I’ll gladly pick up a copy of Anthony Trollope and plow through the multi-layered social and political plots.  Although one day I’m going to try Bleak House, I’m pretty sure that Dickens just doesn’t do it for me.

2. The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova – The Historian created buzz before it even came out because of the $2 million advance that Kostova got for her work.  After abandoning the book with less than 200 pages left, I am baffled as to why anyone would pay that much money for this book.  Since it was a New York Times best seller, perhaps my judgement doesn’t match up with the book-buying public. 

The Historian is part vampire tale and part epistolary novel — both of which I have enjoyed in the past.  Yet The Historian was so slow and uninteresting that I simply couldn’t finish them slog through to the end.  Who knew that a book about tracking down vampires could actually be sleep-inducing?  Kostova had bored me so throughly that I lost the will to finish the book.  I just didn’t care.

3.  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson – I realize that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is internationally one of the most popular books of the last few years.  Yet I hated every minute of it.  I finished it because it got such strong praise from not only critics but regular people whose taste I trust.  Yet I’m still wishing I’d abandoned The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo before the end. 

I think my love of mysteries did me in.  I’m a life-long reader of the genre thanks to my mother who has a truly impressive collection of them.  One of my middle school teachers confronted my parents at an open house night to see if it really was okay that an 11 year girl was reading James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential (it was fine).  I think that loving the genre did me a disservice when it came to Larsson’s book.  I found it to be an information dump with uninteresting characters and a thin plot.  There was very little thrilling or mysterious about Larsson’s book.

Friday Linksday

Happy Friday everyone!  Some book links to spend time with.

• In The Telegraph Mark Mason asks how many books you’ll read in your lifetime.
• Famous (and sometimes infamous) Parisian authors get redrawn. (Baudelaire is my favorite)
• Pottermore ends up being a little underwhelming.

 

Review – The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family, by Mary S. Lovell

Families fascinate me.  They can be nurturing or dysfunctional, comforting or traumatic.  Whatever they are, families are undoubtably influential in forming who we are as people.  I happen to be very lucky in that all the members of my immediate family get along and genuinely enjoy each other’s company (unless they’ve been lying to me all these years).  Perhaps that’s why I find family sagas where things all come apart incredibly compelling whether they are fictional or reality.

The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family is the ultimate crazy family story.  Mary S. Lovell’s book follows the intriguing, eccentric Mitfords — an English aristocratic family that raised four of the most interesting women in the 20th century.  The story of the seven siblings is one that forces you to examine not only your thoughts about how children are raised and the relationships between siblings but also your values and the choices you make when it comes to love, politics and family.

A little background, the Mitfords are famous for several reasons.  The first, and probably most easily recognizable to enthusiastic readers, is that Nancy Mitford is one of these seven siblings whose story Lovell sets about writing.  Nancy is the author of many caustically funny, eccentric books the most famous being The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate.  Yet she is far from the only prominent Mitford (and actually not the focus of most of the book’s attention).  Diana Mitford married the leader of the English fascist movement, Sir Oswald Mosley.  Unity Mitford became obsessed with Adolf Hitler during the run up to World War II and became one of his most outspoken English supporters.  Jessica “Decca” Mitford ran away from her family and became a prominent muckracking journalist in the United States as well as a strong supporter of the civil rights and women’s movements.  Each woman’s life individually would be interesting.  Together they weave a complex story that touches all aspects of society, social movement, politics and literature in the first half of the 20th century.

The Sisters works because of Lovell’s strong command on her material.  The book is carefully researched with interviews, diaries and letters.  The wealth of information about the family is incredible.  However, it isn’t the research that makes the book shine.  It is the sisters themselves.  Lovell chose her subject well.  The Mitford’s story is alternatively laugh out loud funny and solemn.  Parts of the book almost write themselves.

The family’s eccentricity is legendary.  There is the father David who use to let his hounds track and hunt his children across fields when foxes were scare.  He is known for hating most people outside of the family.  When tired of guests at a dinner party he “was liable to call down the table to [his wife], ‘Have these people no homes of their own?’”  And one can’t forget the children.  The youngest girls in the family created their own language — and became fluent enough to tell dirty jokes in front of adults.  A distinctly Mitford way of speaking forms in the family.  ”Sewers,” “hons,” and “counter hons” are all part of the Mitford vocabulary.  Nancy draws on the Mitford language in her novels which are highly autobiographical (and therefore the cause of much controversy among the family).

The girls’ failures and successes at love are a prominent part of the book.  Some of these stories are preposterous.  During the 20s Nancy “announced that she was unofficially engaged to arch-sewer Hamish St Clair Erskine…throughly unsuitable in various ways, not least of which that he was an obvious (though unadmitted) homosexual.”  Other stories are truly sad.  There can be little doubt that Unity Mitford was profoundly disturbed.  She fell obsessively for Hitler and torn between Germany and England on the eve of World War II tried unsuccessfully to commit suicide.  Diana Mitford gives up her marriage to Bryan Guinness to marry Sir Oswald Mosley.  She lives as two times the social outcast being both a divorced woman and the wife of the most hated man in Britain during the war.  Both Diana and Unity’s choices cause rifts in the family, and they are far from the only offenders.

Much of the book is given over to the gleeful, frantic 20s and the somber, disturbing 30s through the war.  It is horrifying and fascinating to watch Unity and Diana’s relationship with Hitler develop knowing what we do now.  It’s clear that it wasn’t just clashing personalities that tore the family apart.  Politics played a strong role in the great schisms that divided sisters, mother and father, some of which are tragically never resolved.

The Sisters manages to be both incredibly fun and profoundly tragic at the same time.  The book gives a strong sense of what life was like in the English aristocracy as events unfold.  These women touched and were touched by so many of the most influential events during the 20th century that it really is a study in living history.