Reunited--Brit Chick Lit Extravaganza

Okay, well, maybe not extravaganza, since it was only two books, but while I was away on vacation last week, I opted not to take anything "heavy" with me and instead took books by two of my absolute favorite authors--Anna Maxted and Marian Keyes. I first fell in love with them during the Bridget Jones' Diary explosion of the late 1990's; British chick lit became my #1 go to for reading. The dry British sarcasm and the much-longed for setting of London and its surroundings drew me back time and again until I'd inhaled everything they'd written to date.

After becoming a mother and turning my sights to first every book on parenting available and then to the likes of Jodi Picoult and Phillipa Gregory for my more mindless (read: enjoyable but highly formulaic and predictable) reading, I lost sight of Maxted and Keyes, only recently discovering that they had both published again since I last picked them up. So I grabbed This Charming Man & A Tale of Two Sisters at the library before heading off to Hawaii and devoured both books by the pool over the course of 3-4 days.

What I love about these two authors is that while they definitely have a Bridget Jonesian breezy chick lit feel to them, they also tackle some straight-to-the-heart issues that impact women in real and often painful ways. There are strained familial relationships, infidelities, fertility issues, alcoholisms, depressions, career turmoils. Each author creates characters who are fully fleshed out, compelling and utterly believable. They write the type of books that you fall into.

Endings with these two, admittedly tend towards the almost unrealistically happy, no loose ends remaining and perfect satisfaction for all involved. But really, when you're on vacation, isn't that what you want? And while it's not entirely 100% believable, it's also not without precedent--all of Shakespeare's comedies end, regardless of how outlandish, with happiness, marriage, celebration, the fulfillment of the main characters' wishes.

A Tale of Two Sister, by Anna Maxted, chronicles the lives of Cassie and Lisbet, who, though sisters and friends, could not be more different. Raised by bumbling and emotionally closed-off parents (this seems to be a running theme through most British chick lit), the ramifications of their upbringing lead them to one miscommunication (or failure to communicate) after another. Then when Lisbet, who has no desire to become a mother, finds herself pregnant, after Cassie and her husband have been trying for upwards of two years---things for the sisters start to fall apart.

I had a hard time with this book, much as I enjoyed it. Having recently put an end to my own disappointing journey through infertility, watching the lives of these two women play out was particularly painful for me at times. The sadness and sense of loss that weaves through the novel was particularly striking to me, but in a way gave me a small sense of closure on my own journey, although it in very little way resembled Maxted's story. Watching characters work their way through the tangled emotional web of infertility and the depression that comes with it, making you a stranger to yourself and others, reassured me that I was, in some small way, not alone.

Marian Keyes' This Charming Man, though a quick and at times, hilarious, read, also tackles some serious issues--most notably domestic violence. Each chapter starts with an excerpt from some later point in the book, a tableau of abuse, which spreads out like an undercurrent through the lives of the main characters. These shocking images wind their way through the stories of four women, two of them sisters, but all of them connected through their experiences with one man named Paddy de Courcy, a leader of the New Ireland political party.

Keyes' four narrators are beautifully distinctive, not only in their experiences, but in their voices. I love the way Keyes creates character through voice--multiple narrators without highly specific narrative styles tend to fall flat, in my reading experience, so I loved that you could tell each woman's voice within the first line of their chapter. Each woman is dealing with her own relationship to Paddy de Courcy (whether it was in the past or present) and the turmoil the relationship has introduced into her life--depression, infidelity, anxiety, alcoholism, etc. For "light" reading, there were times when it felt particularly heavy, but at the end, incredibly satisfying.

I'm so glad I reconnected to these authors and almost "squeeee'd" outloud when I saw that Maxted has another book I was unaware of, called Rich Again, and that Keyes just published The Brightest Star in the Sky earlier this year. They're going straight to the top of my list...

Eden and Happiness

It's kind of a relief when I don't love a book. Sometimes I worry that I don't have very discriminating tastes because I so often LOOOOOVE whatever I'm reading. So when I finish a book and think, "meh. It was all right," a little part of me wipes my forehead and says, "phew!"

Eve, by Elissa Elliot is a good book, but it did not wow me or knock my socks off. It was an easy and quick enough read, but it will not stick with me. The story of the first woman (well, really, the first family), it had the potential to be an extraordinary book, not just good. Starting on Eve's deathbed and then flashing back through her years in Eden and her family's life in exile, the book bounces back and forth between several narrators and that's part of how the book lost me. I love a book with multiple narrators. But not when the book is titled for one character and subtitled: A Novel of the First Woman.

It is persnickity, I know. But it irritated me that I expected to read an entire book from Eve's perspective and in her voice, but instead I read a few chapters from her point of view and exponentially more chapters from the various voices of her daughters.

I was also disappointed that Elliott never touches the subject of Lilith, Adam's "first wife." According to lore, Lilith makes several appearances in Adam's life and it seemed to me like potentially fabulous fodder for Eve's drama. But nope. Not a mention, unless I was nodding off at some point and missed it, (which, to be fair, I read at night and sometimes I am a bit noddy--I'm not dissing Elliott).

There is plenty of existential angst and marital angst and sibling rivalry angst and mother/daughter angst and how-to-exist-peacefully-with-those-non-Edenite-city-dwellers angst, and it's interesting. And I know I shouldn't blame the book for not being what I expected it to be. But I kind of do.

I'm also reading:

Gretchen Rubin's Happiness Project is the memoir of one woman's quest to spend a year of her life searching for and more fully appreciating the happiness in her life. It's inspired me to go through the next 12 months, one (or 3) "resolution" at a time, in an attempt to live a more mindful and happy life. It's not phenomenal literature, a tiny bit dry at points, but the subject matter and the journey is inspiring and I'm loving it.

In my search for a greater understanding of happiness (per the Happiness Project thing), I've decided to read different books about happiness--happiness in different cultures, raising happy kids, different philosophers' thoughts on how to live a truly happy life. No worries, I'm not looking to find some sort of "how to be happy" self-help recipe. I'm just curious what the idea of happiness means to other people.

Eric Weiner's book, The Geography of Bliss, is an entertaining journey. A self-proclaimed "grump," Weiner travels the world to find, as he says, "the happiest place on earth." For a grump, he's pretty freaking hilarious (although he is pretty sarcastic, which is the grump's sense of humor, after all). He visits a variety of countries, interviews citizens about how happy they are (or aren't) and picks apart the myths of happiness in each place.

I've been looking at this book since it was published and I'm so glad that I found it in my library and that, yay!!!, it fits into my happiness project, thereby making it, clearly, a MUST read! Yay!

Still Frustrated

Mostly because I can't seem to keep up with this blog. Not sure what my issue is--perhaps I am so hopped up to talk about books that I feel intimidated by the greatness of some of the stuff I'm reading and fear that whatever I have to say about it won't be "enough"--insightful enough, written well-enough, whatever.

But the only option other than forging ahead with the blog is giving up the blog and I'm really not willing to do that. If there's one thing I know about myself it is that I am inherently compelled to talk about books. And when I'm not writing this blog, I tend to want to pin down anyone who makes eye contact in a "what have you read recently? Was it good? Let me tell you about what I just read....." sort of invasion of personal mental space. Today a girl friend of mine asked me to pick out a good book for her from my collection and in my excitement to share a book with a friend and SQUEEEE!!! potentially talk about it with her, I barraged her with questions about what type of book she'd like, what genre, what type of stories---historical fiction? family dynamics? memoir?! WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE?! I'VE GOT IT ALL AND I CAN'T WAIT TO SHHHHHHHHARE!!! I am fairly certain that as she chuckled and said, "really, just a book," she was really thinking, "What have I gotten into with this one??? I need to get new friends." When one of my best friends came to visit for a week last month, we talked briefly about books and I ended up emerging from my room one day with a stack of books for her to "borrow" (she lives on the other side of the country, so "borrow" really means "have" in this case). She laughed at me and chose a couple of the best ones, because really, she'd need an entire suitcase dedicated to the mini-library I'd selected for her.

I like to share books. Because I like to talk about them. And since I am hard-pressed to find any nerds here as nerdy as myself, I find I will have to pour myself back into this blog and share my books with you, you lucky interweb.

I won't go into full detailed reviews of all the books I've read since December 1st, but I will share with you a list of and a few thoughts about the ones I've really enjoyed in the past few months. I am also planning to write here at least every Wednesday.

How the Light Gets In, by M.J. Hyland, is the story of an Australian girl who leaves her impoverished home to become an exchange student in a wealthy Chicago suburb. She struggles to fit into her new "family" while bristling against the superficiality of her new environment. It is almost as though Hyland envisioned Holden Caulfield, the angst-ridden teen, dropped into the middle of the film American Beauty, where everything looks to be perfect, but is actually a hot mess waiting to explode. The results are tragic, as Lou comes face-to-face with the disillusionment of her dream and the consequences of her actions (and the actions of those around her). I have read some unflattering reviews of this book, but I think most of them miss the mark; this book is not just about Lou and her self-destructive behavior. Just like Salinger in Catcher in the Rye, Hyland seems to be lamenting the isolation and angst of being a teenager in a world that seems to set you up for failure.

As a New Englander and a mother, Strout's Olive Kitteridge struck such a chord in me. A series of stories strung together to create a cohesive novel with Olive Kitteridge as it's main character, the book creates an image of Crosby, Maine during a time of transition. The theme of New England stoicism runs through so much of the book, with so many characters opting for stern silence rather than expressing their feelings, that at times I felt viscerally uncomfortable reading it. Having been brought up with that veneer of "every is fine," even when everything is falling to pieces, it was difficult to watch characters swallow their feelings and allow life to happen to them. And it was epic when a character truly spoke his/her mind. The book is so achingly beautiful--Strout's development of the characters and the relationships between them, some deeply painful--like Olive's relationship with her only child--I found it almost impossible to put down.

I adore Barbara Kingsolver. From Bean Trees to the Poisonwood Bible and Prodigal Summer, her books, her gift for character, theme, description, all of it, has mesmerized me. It was everything in me not to snatch this book up the day it was released (it had been almost TEN years since she published a work of fiction; I was dying!)

So I was a bit frantic when I wasn't drawn into the story on the firs page. Or the 20th. Or the 50th. The story of Harrison William Shepherd, The Lacuna chronicles his life from 1929 to 1951. Shuttled back and forth between his Mexican mother and his American father, Harrison writes everything down in his notebooks. A boy of seemingly little consequence in the world, Harrison finds himself in the household of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, serving as a domestic and eventually, a confidant. His path also crosses that of Leon Trotsky as Trotsky seeks refuge in the Rivera-Kahlo household. After his return to the United States, these connections find him embroiled in one of the most tumultuous debacles of American history, McCarthyism.

The book was hard to get into. It took about 100 pages before I was completely enrapt and could not put the book down. The symbolism of the lacuna, in the book an underwater cave, but more generally, a gap or missing piece, is developed from the first page to the last so exquisitely that Kingsolver had me fooled up until the end. I literally gasped when I got to her final twist. It is not The Poisonwood Bible, I sincerely believe that Kingsolver wouldn't have wanted it to be--this book is entirely different from anything Kingsolver's written before and is amazing and worthy in its own right.

I adored The Red Tent by Diamant, so I was thrilled to pick up Day After Night. Diamant has a gift of creating female characters and weaving them into complicated relationships and forging their bonds through stories of adversity and salvation. The experiences of four women in the British-operated Palestinian interment camp after the Holocaust (hello, did NOT know those even existed--history's untold stories are vast and disturbing, people! Read about the camps here), the novel is beautifully written and emotionally compelling. Each woman's tale is different from the other--one spent time in a concentration camp, one was hidden in the Dutch countryside, one was a Polish Zionist fighting with the resistance and one survived occupied Paris using her wits and her body.

The women's stories demonstrate how every person's experience of the Holocaust is unique and how they deal with the aftermath is equally individual. But regardless of the differences of their own stories, each woman shows remarkable strength and resolve in enduring the next step of their journey towards freedom, from their pasts and from the Atlit detention center.

Oh my goodness. If you even remotely liked The Time Traveler's Wife, you HAVE to go get Niffenegger's second book, Her Fearful Symmetry. I've never read anyone who can dip into the supernatural and make it seem so effortless, creating a story so believable, even though it is utterly against the rules of time and space, that the reader can absolutely suspend her disbelief for the duration of the novel. This is the second time Niffenegger has done this.

I believe she's able to do it because she creates characters who are so utterly compelling and captivating that you are willing to take the journey wherever it goes in order to get to know them better, even when it wanders boldly outside of the boundaries of our widely accepted notion of realistic possibilities.

Set outside of London's Highgate Cemetery, the novel is the story of two generations of twins and the ways in which they twist their identities around each other and what happens when they attempt to extricate themselves from their twins' grasps. One of the elder twins, Elspeth Noblin, dies and leaves her estate, including an apartment just outside of Highgate Cemetery, to her nieces, her sister's twin daughters, whom she has never met. Julia & Valentina, the second generation of twins, arrive in London, move into her Elspeth's apartment. As an only child, I've always been fascinating by sibling relationships, especially those of twins; perhaps that's why I was unable to put this book down. I at once wished for the connection these women had and felt utterly grateful not to feel the responsibility and connection to another human being that could so sap my sense of freedom and individuality.

I am hesitant to reveal anything further because the book is just a marvel, in my eyes, of twists and turns. Just, really, read the book.

***** ***** *****

Okay, so that gets us pretty much caught up; there are a couple other books I've read recently that I might add into later reviews, but I think that's enough for now?!

Happy reading!

Some books I read...

Yeah, I know. Sigh. Not so much with the NaBloPoMo on this blog. I find that trying to keep up with three blogs takes away from my reading time and that's something I've never been willing to sacrifice, so that's just how that has to be. But anyway, I read some books.

Julia Glass's I See You Everywhere fascinated me because I'm an only child and this story revolves around the complicated relationship between two very different sister. One conscientious and relatively grounded, the other free spirited and rebellious, they are paradoxically miss-matched and intertwined at the same time (as the cover image of the book suggests by the shared woven braid).

The book spans 25 years and the one thing that really detracted from the story for me was the way in which the narrative jumped. I love a novel that spans decades and is told through multiple narrators, but for some reason it made this book difficult to fully sink into.

I found that I didn't truly love either Louisa or Clem as individuals, but I did love them together. Perhaps that is part of Glass's overall goal, to illustrated the interconnectedness and the interdependency the sisters had to comprise their full character. Indeed two starkly opposite sides of a whole, they together create one well-rounded entity. Alone, they are each "too much" of what they are.

While I don't think I loved it as much as I did Glass's first novel, Three Junes, which to me was resonating down to my very core. But I See You Everywhere is definitely a worth-while read and a beautiful, painful, sometimes funny, ultimately tragic exploration of the sibling relationship.

Those Who Save Us, by Jenna Blum will never leave me. The story of the Schlemmer women (mother Anna and daughter Trudy) is a richly told and agonizingly raw account of how people both survive unthinkable cruelty and inhumanity, and how those who come after try to make peace with the knowledge that they come from a people who perpetrated such atrocities as the Holocaust on their fellow human beings.

Anna Schlemmer, the daughter of an ambitious German with his sights set on impressing the leaders of the Nazi party, disgraces her father by trying to hide a Jew in the crawl space of their home. Upon being found out, she flees, pregnant with the Jew's child, to become an apprentice in a small bakery. There she gives birth to her child and covertly works with the bakery owner, Matilde, to smuggle bread to the prisoners at Buchenwald, smuggling messages from the prisoners out to the resistance.

During a turn of events that claims the life of the baker owner, Anna is visited by the Obersturmfuhrer of Buchenwald, who she believes will kill her and Trudy. Instead he takes a sick fascination in her and Anna, her sense of self unraveled to its very barest, knows what she must do to ensure her own survival and that of her daughter.

Now an old woman, Anna, has never spoken of the Obersturmfuhrer or of her life in Germany. Her daughter, Trudy, is now a middle-aged, divorced, college-professor. In her desire to further understand her mother's experience of the Holocaust (she has no information from Anna, save an old picture she found of herself, Anna and the Nazi officer), Trudy undertakes a series of oral history interviews with Germans willing to talk about their experiences in WWII. Through her interviews she encounters a variety of individuals with very different recollections of what they did and didn't know at the time of the Holocaust--some interviews renew Trudy's hope in humanity's goodness; others dash it to pieces.

As Trudy gains a deeper insight to what her mother endured, and what she accomplished, during the Holocaust, the story, and Anna's legacy come full-circle in a way that, if the books were not so beautifully and brilliantly written, *might* seem a bit hokey. But Blum's ability to weave characters with such coherence and integrity gives the story unquestionable believability.

I haven't read a book in a long time that touched me as deeply as this one.

The New Yorkers by Cathleen Schine is an entertaining look at a neighborhood of characters, all linked in one way or another by their affection for, or loathing of, dogs. Very sort of Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin, but in New York instead of San Francisco, and with more dogs.

The characters represent a plethora of personalities and mindsets: the middle-aged divorced man, the hopeless romantic "spinster" teacher, the aimless gen-Xer and the heart-broken perfectionist, to name a few. Each is lost in some way and is found through their connection to a canine companion and in some cases, each other.

Although it was not soul-touching in the same way as Those Who Save Us was for me, The New Yorkers was an entertaining and sweet look at the lives of ordinary people, going about their days in the busiest city in the world, trying not to get, or stay, lost in the shuffle, and finding a sense of self, purpose and joy in the dogs who love them unconditionally. Perhaps it is that, the sense of unconditional love, that Schine is commenting on in this novel. As humans, we rarely receive that kind of unwavering devotion from those other humans around us--maybe it is why so many of us feel so lost so much of the time.

Speaking of blogs....

Not that we were, but since you're here reading mine, I'm guessing you probably know of a few other good book blogs (erm, a few good book blogs. saying "other" implies mine is good. Ha!)

I'm still reading I See You Everywhere and it's growing on me. I'm actually off to bed now because I'm too tired to even stare at the TV screen. Perhaps I'll squeeze in a few pages before my brain checks out completely and find myself more invested.

It's always disheartening when a book doesn't suck you in immediately, but how much of that is the writer's issue versus your own overblown sense of expectation. I feel that way about John Irving; since reading Prayer for Owen Meany, I have just not felt any of his work resonate in the same way. Not his fault. I just fell so deeply in love with that Owen Meany's story that nothing else Irving has created since has struck as much of a chord with me.

So, good book blogs? thanks!

I'm Just Not That Into You...

I love Julia Glass. Her debut novel, Three Junes, was one of the best books I've ever read. I KNOW I will love this book. I'm sure of it. But I cannot get into it.

I started it three nights ago. I got to page 14 before I fell asleep. Last night when I picked up on page 14, I had no idea what I was reading, so I went back to the first page and started over. As I get ready to go to bed and read now, I am trying to remember what I read last night. Something about an old aunt dying, a trip home and tension between two sister, whose personalities and lives are completely opposite of one another's. That's all I've got.

I am always so disappointed when I don't feel connected to a book immediately; especially if it is by an author I adore. I heard Julia Glass speaking on an NPR show recently and just fell in love. So I feel like I'm letting her down by not immediately engaging with her work the way I did with Three Junes. Which really is weird--I mean, do I, as a reader, have any obligation whatsoever to the author? Probably not.

But I hope when I write tomorrow I can report that somewhere on page 15 or 25, I hit my stride and find myself immersed in the world Glass is creating on the page.

In Praise of Bookstores

I hate to admit it, but I am a flat out sucker for a Borders or Barnes and Noble. I want to be all "down with the big book chains!!" in a righteous Meg Ryan "You've Got Mail" kind of way. I wish I was in love with "The Book Shop on the Corner," but give me a "Fox's Books" type of store, please. Yes, I'm hanging my head in shame.

This morning, as I wandered through Borders with my grande chai (for the first time this season, in a holiday cup!!! Yay!!), I decided to call one of my best friends, Tress. She picked up her end, and as I meandered through the newly configured holiday-sized stacks, we chatted about our lives. What was up in them, and down in them.

As the conversation got more in depth (you know how girlfriends are, right? Well, if not, read Wednesday Sisters), I found myself sitting in the self-help section--IRONY--in a well-worn, utterly comfortable leather chair. Tress and I batted ideas back and forth, exchanged some deep thoughts (ha!) and had some laughs. I may as well have been in my own living room, for how comfortable I felt sipping my tea and having an intensely personal conversation with one of my closest (yet farthest) friends.

On Tuesdays, I head to Barnes and Noble after my WW meeting. I sit in their cafe, reading blogs, writing in my blogs, drinking my tea and enjoying my place in the world. It is another home away from home.

No worries, I do more than chat on the phone and hog free wi-fi; I give these stores oodles of business. But it's not that I can run in to the store, find a book and buy it that makes these places so special to me. It's the sense of hominess I feel there, and that I can go into any Borders or Barnes and Noble, pretty much anywhere in the country (world?) and feel "oh, this is familiar. This makes me feel safe."