NABLOPOMO FAIL. But a kick ass book

Yeah, I know. Three days into NABLOPOMO and I blew it on this blog. Well, in my defense, I was rocking a big fat sinus infection and was hopped up on Robitussin with codeine; so chances are I wouldn't have had much of any coherence or interest last night.

I am *this* close to being finished Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen. I have so enjoyed Janzen's voice, humor and brutal honesty as she examines her roots, her rebellion against those roots and the eventual appreciation and respect (at a distance, of course) she finds for the belief system that in so many ways shaped her life.

Throughout the hilarious style of her writing--the endearing, adoring way she pokes fun of her mother, the sarcastic and self-deprecating multiple-choice quiz boxes, and her development of her very own 12-step program--she interlaces insightful and deeply philosophical snippets of the person she truly is, beyond the self-effacing "I'm such a goofball! How could I be anything else with this life?! Ha Ha!" image that so much of her book portrays. Take this passage, for example,

"But I have come to believe that virtue isn't a condition of character. It's an elected action. It's a choice we keep making, over and over, hoping that someday we'll create a habit so strong it will carry us through our bouts of pettiness and meanness. Until recently I dismissed Niccolo Machiavelli's brutish philosophy that the ends justify the means, but lately I've begun to question that. If in the service of choosing virtuous behavior we need to practice some odd belief, where's the harm? Don't we all have our weird little rehearsals and rituals? Sure, from a ratiocinative point of view, the intervention of angels on the wall seems an unlikely way to achieve virtue in praxis. Or take the case of the nuns. Insisting that you are the bride of Christ is pretty wacky, in my opinion. So is the bizarre corollary, giving up sex on purpose. Yet these choices, odd as they are, harm nobody. It seems to me that there are many paths to virtue, many ways of creating the patterns of behavior that result in habitual resistance to human badnness....

At this stage of my life, I am willing to accept not only that there are many paths to virtue, but that our experiences on these varied paths might be real. We can't measure the existence of supernatural beings any more than we can control our partners. And anyhow, I don't want to measure supernatural beings or control my partner. What I want to measure, what I can control, is my own response to life's challenges," 175-176)

But when she's not waxing philosophical? Freaking hilarious. I have about 10 pages left to read and I'm bummed. I wish this book were 500 pages long.

Comfort Read

For one of the two book clubs I've joined, I read Ruth Reichl's Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table. In keeping with the reading public's recent love affair with all things cooking (thank you, Julie Powell and Julia Child), this memoir is about how Reichl's life was shaped by food.

One part cookbook, one part travel guide, one part family drama, the book is entertaining on many fronts. Reichl's search for connection and community resonates with this reader, having found myself moving at a pretty steady clip for the past few years.

Reichl's love affair with food began not with an adoration over the one perfect dish, but from the concern for the well-being of anyone who came in contact with her mother's cooking. Apt to throw all things into the stew pot at once for dinner (including meat past it's safe-to-eat-by date), Reichl's mother is the foil against which Reichl's journey is set. Just as some children of Republicans rebel by becoming liberal Democrats, or children of sheltering teetotalers rebel by sneaking out of the house and binge drinking, Reichl rebelled against her mother's disastrous kitchen creations by developing a love affair with good food, food created with love and with history, not just tossed together from half-rotten ingredients as a backdrop for her manic-depression.

Good book. Entertaining, super fast read. I'm not sure it's one that will stick with me forever, but I'm finding more and more that memoir fascinates me; how someone picks the theme of their life and the moments that illustrate those themes is thrilling to me.

I'm Still Reading.

I'm not sure what has kept me away from this blog for THREE months. I've been reading. And reading some fantastic books. But for some reason, I've ignored this blog. I'm sure there's some deeply rooted psychological reason, but eh. I'm not going to sweat it. I'm just going to jump right back in.

I won't bother going back through everything I've read in the past few months right now. But as I have committed to participating in NaBloPoMo with all three of my blogs, I might revisit books I've read since July at some point.

Since I last wrote, I moved to a new location: from Los Angeles to Northern California. Which means making new friends. Again. This time I've decided to attempt to make new friends through literature. I've joined two reading groups that I will meet with for the first time this month. Hopefully one will resonate with me and I'll find a little place for myself. If not, I might attempt to start my own book club. Because seriously. A girl has GOT to talk about books.

I expect that this month, in addition to talking about what I've read in the past few months, I will write more about each book I'm reading, rather than waiting to complete a book and talk about it in its entirety. Maybe I'll write about a character, or a passage, or something that stuck out in my mind from the night before's reading. I'm not sure. Of all three blogs, this will be the most challenging one to keep up with.

Right now I'm reading Mennonite In a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home by Rhoda Janzen. It is truly hilarious and poignant and wonderful so far. Janzen is in one breath hilariously self-deprecating as she talks about the end of her marriage (her husband leaves her for a man he met on Gay.com) and in the next breath waxing philosophical on the concept of G-d. I'm loving it, and I'm sure I'll be talking a lot more about it. It's for one of the two reading groups meeting in the next couple of weeks.

Thanks for checking back in!

A Woman's Worth

The 19th Wife, by David Ebershoff, is two stories intertwined to illustrate the history of polygamy in the Mormon church. Seen through the eyes of Brigham Young's rebellious 19th wife, Anne Eliza, in the late 1800's, and also in the present, through the eyes of a young man who's mother is the 19th wife of a prominent Firsts member (the branch of Mormon that maintained polygamy after the church officially banned it), the novel reveals the struggle and despair of life in the church and it's practice of plural marriage.

Written to be part historical research and part murder mystery, the novel has pretty much every element a reader could want. Anne Eliza's story reveals both the anguish of being a plural wife--not only sharing a husband's affection, but his resources and, at times, his basic good will, and also the strength and power of the feminine spirit. Jordan Scott, excommunicated as a young man from the fundmentalist sect of the Firsts, digs through the society's secrets to clear his mother of a murder charge.

What I loved about this book, aside from the characters (in particular Anne Eliza) was the questions it raised about a person's beliefs and to what length one would go to uphold those beliefs. And how do we come to embrace our belief systems in the first place? Sitting on the outside of this community, we shake our heads and say, "I could never, ever believe that being one of 50+ wives is what's going to ensure my happiness in the afterlife". It's absurd to even contemplate. But the book makes note, over and over again, that this is the only message young women in the society in question ever heard. To think beyond that was just, well, unthinkable.

What infuriated me about this book was the idea that, while a man married to many wives was considered more of a man, the wives were disposable. When a husband grew tired of a wife, he simply "stopped visiting" her. She remained married to him, bound to him as property, but no longer required or received any of his attention or resources.

The book made me think about the polygamist ranch in Texas that was in the news last year. And how all those children were taken from their parents. And then returned. But to what? We've heard nothing of them since, have we? I shudder to think at what their lives are today. I shudder to think this still goes on in parts of our country today.

First Love, Family Conflict and Neuroses...

Meh. I am one of those people who gushed about Weiner's first book, Good in Bed, raved about In Her Shoes and fell all over myself to run out and get Little Earthquakes the second it hit the shelves. But I have to say, much as it pains me, the last few books I've read by Weiner have been less than inspired. Which sucks, because when I start to feel attached to an author, like I "get" her and like she can do no wrong (hello, Barbara Kingsolver---write a new novel for me so I can bask in your Barbara Kingsovler-y goodness, pretty please), I am fairly distraught when I read something by them that is unimpresses. I hate to think or speak badly of a favorite writer because truth be told, they're doing a hell of a lot better than I could, so who am I to complain?

But this book just fell a bit flat for me. I loved the premise--the return of Cannie Shapiro, the protagonist of Good in Bed, and her relationship with the child she gives birth to at the end of that novel, Joy, who is now 13 and preparing for her Bat-Mitzvah. The plot focuses around Joy's utter mortification at finding Cannie's published novel, both because of the main character's (based on her own mother) promiscuity and because of the way in which the main character deals emotionally with the news that she is pregnant (with Joy). If teenager doesn't have enough to feel insecure and angst-ridden about normally, reading about how your mom thought her life was over when she found out she was pregnant with you will certainly give you something to talk about in therapy. The subplot is one between Cannie and her husband and their thoughts on expanding their family, a topic complicated by Cannie's lack of a uterus (which she lost upon giving birth to Joy). Sounds like it's going to be an awesome and complex look at family dynamic and the developing sense of self of a teenage girl.

Somewhere along the way, though, the story just got boring to me. I don't know if it was because Cannie, as a character, seemed a million miles away from who she was in the first book and I just didn't care about her as much. Or if it's because I really didn't like Joy (I'm generally not that fond of 13 year olds to begin with---no offense to any 13 year olds out there. It was a tough age for me and I project....). For whatever reason, I felt as though I was trudging through it and it was a big fat bummer to feel that way about a Jennifer Weiner book (although I really wanted to gouge my eyes out while I was reading Goodnight Nobody, so I guess I should just realize now that it's going to be hit or miss for me).


Patricia Marx's Him Her Him Again The End of Him was freaking hilarious. I had no idea it even existed until one of my best friends (who is on a bit of a book-buying jag & I love her for it) sent it to me. It is the story of a wayward graduate student, who isn't even quite sure what her thesis is on, falling in love with the most neurotic, self-obsessed cad this side of...well, anywhere. Marx is a former SNL-writer (which makes it utterly hilarious when her heroine--if you can call her that--takes a job as a writer for a show called Taped, but Proud), and her sense of humor and style of writing reminded me both of Steve Martin (who I adore in a very daddy-complex kind of way) and Woody Allen.

Totally off the wall and bizarre in parts, the story doesn't really invite you into the true hearts of the characters the way most fiction does. But it puts such a spotlight on the neuroses of this wacky people that you can't help but love them (or love to hate them, as is the case with the love interest, Eugene, who is an expert in Ego Studies and teaches a seminar called "Towards a Philosophy of the Number Two".

The utter inaneness (is that a word?) of these peoples' lives, even through career turmoil, lascivious affairs and what may or may not be murder, is what makes this story so hilarious.

Jaime Ford's debut novel will stick with me for a very long time. Set alternately in the mid-1980's and the early 1940's, it is the story of Henry Lee, an aging Chinese man in Seattle, looking back on his first real friendship and love, with a young girl, Keiko, who happened to be Japanese and living in Seattle after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

There is so much in this story--the bitter and heartbreaking conflict between 12 year old Henry and his father, who harbors a passionate hatred against all Japanese. The struggle of his mother to pacify both men in her life, seeming to have no will or beliefs of her own. The friendship, which grows to love, between two outcasts, Henry and Keiko, both sent to an Caucasian school by their parents to enforce the idea of their American identity, while at the same time their cultural backgrounds force them down paths away from each other that seem irreversible.

I often find that it's hardest for me to write about books that I really loved reading and found beautiful and touching. I fear I cannot possibly do it justice with my own meager ramblings. I feel that way about this book. There is such powerful emotion and sacrifice and generosity of spirit and bravery in the main characters of this book that trying to describe fully seems impossible.

The other truly difficult part of this book is, of course, as it is set in the early 1940's and one of it's main characters is Japanese, it deals with the Japanese interment camps set up after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Ford does an amazing job describing the way in which families were rounded up and robbed of their dignity as they are sent to live, first in oversized horse stalls, and then to the permanent camps that they built with their own toil and sweat. This is a part of American history that gets tucked away and ignored by so many educators. When we think about America's crimes against it's own people, we tend to think about the decimation of the Native Americans or the scourge of slavery prior to the Civil War (and even those we don't learn enough about). I don't think I ever heard one word about the Japanese interment when I learned about WWII in the 1980's. I'm glad to see that our country's literature is catching up to it's history and providing that education where our formal education system has fallen short.

Saving Fish From Drowning, Amy Tan

A pious man explained to his followers: "It is evil to take lives and noble to save them. Each day I pledge to save a hundred lives. I drop my net in the lake and scoop out a hundred fishes. I place the fishes on the bank, where they flop and twirl. 'Don't be scared,' I tell those fishes. 'I am saving you from drowning.' Soon enough, the fishes grow calm and lie still. Yet, sad to say, I am always too late. The fishes expire. And because it is evil to waste anything, I take those dead fishes to market and I sell them for a good price. With the money I receive, I buy more nets so I can save more fishes." - Anonymous

Thus starts Amy Tan's novel, Saving Fish From Drowning. Narrated by Bibi Chen (via a medium), who has recently been found dead, of mysterious causes, the story follows a tour group of her friends from the Himalayan mountains to the jungle of Burma. It is a trip she had intended to lead, sharing with her friends her vast knowledge of Chinese and Burmese history, culture and art.

The group decides to go on without her (primarily because they'd lose their deposits if they didn't), and fate twists and turns in all manner of barely believable ways to lead them to a quiet lake in Burma, on which they disappear, taken hostage by a paranoid, but kind-hearted and actually pretty funny, splinter group, hiding from the Burmese officials, the SLORC. Tan creates characters as she always does---sympathetic but so very flawed, and it is impossible to dislike any of them, even as they are grating on each other's (and your) nerves.

Most impressive is that Amy Tan weaves the theme of the introductory quote, the best of intentions leading to the worst of outcomes, into so many levels of her story, that even days after having finished it, I am finding myself saying, "ooooooh. wow."

It wasn't my favorite Tan book; that distinction, I think, will always go to The Joy Luck Club. Part of my the drawback of this book was the unfortunate timing of reading it while I was sick with a cold; so between cold medicine and general ickiness, I am fuzzy on a lot of the details (and some major events) in the book. But it was good and I'm glad I read it, but I'm sure I would have gotten more out of it had I read it when I wasn't hacking up a lung or nodding off between every paragraph.

I'm taking a little bit of a break from substantive reading---I'm going to indulge my Chick Lit craving for the next few weeks or a month, starting with Jennifer Weiner's Certain Girls.

So Noone Told You Life Was Going to be This Way...

It seems like the last few books I've read have centered around the power for friendship as opposed to that of romantic love. Certainly, The Space Between Us, A Thousand Splendid Suns, and Snowflower and the Secret Fan, have all focused on the relationships between women as they navigate their way through fairly hostile male-dominated societies. Even These Granite Islands and Love Walked In are far more about the dynamics between the female characters than they are about the love affairs out the outskirts of the plot lines.

So I guess I'm not surprised that I was drawn to both Belong To Me, by Marisa de los Santos and Wednesday Sisters, by Meg Waite Clayton. Each follows the lives and interactions of a main character and those closest to her---while each main character is married and has a homelife with it's own challenges, the writers in each case seem more drawn to the relationships her main character forges with the women around her.



Belong To Me is the continuation of Santos' Love Walked In. This time, Cornelia Brown has left the big city to make a home in the suburbs with her husband. I could truly relate to Cornelia's reluctance to leave the energy and diversity of her urban Philadelphia for the quiet, seemingly fondant-icing perfection of the 'burbs. I've always struggled with those separate parts of my pscyhe---the thrill and the feeling of being a part of something huge and vital that comes from living in a bustling urban environment versus the security, comfort and sense of community that comes from living in a suburb where neighbors stop to chat on the sidewalks and you can let your kids play in the backyard because...well, you actually have a backyard.

Cornelia is faced with restocking her supply of friends once she makes her way into the new neighborhood and finds that what lies behind the perfectly manicured lawns of her neighbors is not quite as sweet and charming as she had initially thought.

Piper, Elizabeth and Lake are the women of Cornelia's neighborhood--one, a total uptight snoot of a woman (think Bree Van de Camp from Desperate Housewives, but with a bit more spit and vinegar), one dying of cancer and the other an enigma who has a secret that, while Cornelia doesn't know it, threatens her happiness.

I really enjoyed this book. Cornelia is so likeable as a main character and Santos is marvelous at weaving separate story lines together to make a cohesive experience that her books tend to play like a movie in my mind, much more so than many of the other books I've read.

I did think the twist in this book was actually pretty superfluous, given that it turned the focus away from Cornelia and the women back to the relationship between her and her husband. I found that I wasn't all that interested in him. I wanted to read more about the friends---in particular Piper who, ironically enough, initially made my skin crawl.



Similarly, The Wednesday Sisters are all married woman with families of some form of their own. But I really didn't care so much about the families any farther than that sometimes their actions impacted the relationships of the women who comprised the writing group. It was the closeness and emotional intimacy between the women, and not what their kids are like or what their husband do (although this is all they really think to talk about initially), that made this book so powerful to me.

Meeting by chance at a local park in the late 1960's, these young mothers find a common connection through their writing. They establish a Wednesday morning "meeting" at the park while their kids play, to write and share their writing with one another. It is through their writing (sometimes stories, drafts of novels, just journal entries) that these five women come to know each other's greatest dreams, heartbreaks and fears.

Set against the backdrop of both the women's liberation movement and the civil rights movement, the main character, Frankie, shows us how the paradigm shift of our country's consciousness impacted the lives of these women and challenged their own, sometimes shameful, beliefs.

I love that Clayton connected her characters to great literary works of the past--each one of them bringing a favorite author, character or classic piece of literature to the table with them as an inspiration.

I found the book touching and inspiring, reminding me of my own love of writing and the one or two friends who've shared that love with me for decades.