East of Eden

By John Steinbeck
★★★★★

Five Things I Liked About East of Eden:
1. Timshel
2. The slow build
3. Rich and detailed storytelling
4. Evenhanded and thorough characterization
5. Carefully constructed relationships

Steinbeck and I go way back. In 8th grade I read The Pearl and Of Mice and Men, joining my classmates in the thoughtless dismissal of literature a bit beyond our years. When I was a junior in high school, I stayed up later than I ever have before or since to finish a scrapbook-style book report on The Grapes of Wrath (which I managed to like in spite of the indignant loathing inspired by the assignment). East of Eden is the first Steinbeck I’ve read of my own accord which, to be honest, might have as much to do with the fact that this is now my favorite of his works as the novel’s own (prodigious) merit does. Anyone who’s ever been a middle and high school student knows how easy it is to dislike books assigned for class by default, on principle*. Which is a shame, really. Think how many people are wandering around with grudges against perfectly good books simply because they were forced to read them at a formative and obstinate age by teachers who didn’t know how to inspire the right kind of enthusiasm.

But I digress.

If you were to sum up East of Eden in one word, it would be this: Timshel, which means “thou mayest” in Hebrew, and in the novel signifies a man’s freewill to choose between good and evil. East of Eden is laden with biblical imagery (which ought not surprise you, considering the title), but most ubiquitous are the stories of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel, and the question they pose regarding inherited sin – whether it is an inescapable burden or a birthright to either accept or struggle to throw off. Though there are certainly good and evil characters in East of Eden, the categorization is never so simple and definitive. Every character has good in them, and every character has evil. It’s just a question of the resistance (or lack thereof) involved.

More words to describe East of Eden: gripping, powerful, sweeping, moving.

East of Eden follows several generations of two families – the Trask’s and the Hamilton’s – settled in the Salinas Valley in California, as narrated by a member of the (then) modern generation, who I presumed to be John himself. Whether it is or not doesn’t really matter all that much, however, as most of the attention is given to the first three generations: the patriarchs Cyrus Trask and Samuel Hamilton, their children – the two sons of Cyrus (Adam and Charles) and the Hamilton brood – and their children’s children, mostly Adam’s twin sons Aron and Caleb. The story’s heart is Timshel and the age-old conflict between good and evil, and its outward trappings are the conflicts that arise between and within the two families**. Steinbeck’s knack for portraying the minutia of relationships is one of my favorite talents of his. The subtleties of filial, romantic, and platonic love in East of Eden are carefully and poignantly drawn.

I loved just about everything about this story, but a couple more particulars: I loved the way he built the beginning of the story, introducing various seemingly disconnected characters individually before slowly revealing their connections. In a way, you could say that he creates his own particular brand of suspense, furthered by the fact that the story kept me guessing to the very last page, when the full reality and significance of events built throughout the novel slowly but surely sank in. I was also surprised by just how readable East of Eden is for such a dauntingly sizable book. Once you really get going on it, twenty-five pages go by like nothing. It is an easy read both from the standpoint of being much less dense than you might expect, and from being much more engaging than you might expect.

I feel like for all that it is considered a staple Great American Novel, not that many people have actually read East of Eden. I’d guess they take one look at its spine and assume that it is 1) boring and 2) long and boring. And now that I’ve read it, to me that’s a great pity. I think a lot of people would be pleasantly surprised – both by the book and by themselves – if they just gave it a chance.

Books Read This Year: 58
Top 100 Progress***: 46/100

*In fact, I only remember ever really enjoying a handful of books I had to read for school: And Then There Were None, To Kill a Mockingbird, Jane Eyre, Hamlet, The Great Gatsby and The Grapes of Wrath.
**I know that’s kind of vague, but with books this big it’s actually quite hard to define a single specific conflict.
***How is this not on the Top 100 list? I think this will be one of the few times I will ever say this, but: Stupid BBC and their blatant anglophilia.

Sisterhood Everlasting

By Ann Brashares
★★★★☆

Four Things I Liked About Sisterhood Everlasting:
1. Reuniting with old fictional friends
2. Location, location, location
3. Getting it right
4. Quick, enjoyable Atlas Shrugged detox

I am kind of perplexed as to why this book exits. Why did Ann Brashares feel the need to forcibly extend a series that had already reached a satisfyingly open-ended conclusion? Especially when this new book doesn’t appear to have been written with a specific audience in mind: It’s not really an appropriate companion novel for the first four, being very much an adult novel, not young adult as they were; nor will it appear to adult readers who haven’t read the original (young adult) series.  And especially when continuing the series meant XXXXXXXXXXXXXX. Well, I can’t tell you what it meant, because that would ruin a crucial plot point and element of surprise in the book. And I hate plot ruiners! (Ruiners can be a word if I say it is.) Suffice to say that something BIG and (in relation to the first four books, and in my opinion) unnecessary goes down in order to pave the way for this fifth installment.

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series was a fixture on my teen and preteen bookshelf, right next to The Princess Diaries and Bloody Jack. So despite some exasperation with Ann for continuing the series in an obvious ploy to reach out to her old (and probably somewhat diminished since the series “ended”) readership, I must admit I was pretty pleased by the prospect of reuniting with Lena, Tibby, Carmen, and Bridget. And, in spite of XXXXXXXXXXXXXX, I was not disappointed.

As it says on the cover, Sisterhood Everlasting picks up 10 years after Forever in Blue left off. Not that much has changed. Sure, Carmen is a successful TV actress living in New York and engaged to be married to a TV producer, Bridget is living with Eric in San Francisco, and Tibby moved with Brian to Australia two years ago, while Lena – ever static – hasn’t left Providence or RISD but has taken a professorship there and continues to pine after Kostos, but the problems they’re facing are virtually just slightly grown up versions of what they dealt with before. They’ve also felt steadily more out of sync ever since they all scattered on the winds after losing their lease on the flat they shared in New York after graduation. Good thing Tibby sends them all tickets out of the blue for an impromptu reunion trip to Greece! Or so they think. It turns out XXXXXXXXXXXXXX happens in Greece and turns their already precariously organized lives topsy-turvy. In the aftermath, the girls struggle to come to terms with XXXXXXXXXXXXXX, each other, and themselves.

The danger of writing a book like Sisterhood Everlasting is tying up satisfyingly loose ends into too neat of knots. Fortunately, Sisterhood Everlasting frays enough more ends to require plenty of its own re-tying. (Whether those ends really needed fraying is another discussion.) As I said, one of the best things to recommend this book is the prospect of once again enjoying the company of Lena, Tibby, Carmen, and Bridget. So although the end (predictably) comes together pretty neatly and as a stand alone novel this would only merit about 3 stars, as long you’re a fan of the series, I’m pretty sure you’ll enjoy the trip down memory lane.

Comment Questions:
1) If you’ve read the series, which sister was your favorite, or which did you most identify with? Mine was Lena, as much as her inertia frustrated me.
2) Will you read Sisterhood Everlasting, or are you over this series?

Books Read This Year: 51
Top 100 Progress: 44/100

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (Top 100 #44)

By Mark Haddon
★★★★★

Five Things I Liked About The Curious Incident:
1. Christopher
2. Hidden letters
3. Hot strawberry milkshakes
4. White noise
5. Palm-to-palm hugging

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time has been for years one of those books I’m aware of but never been quite intrigued enough by to buy or read. But recently I’ve heard a lot of good things about it, perhaps the most impressive being my brother’s recommendation. He’s not known for being a big reader, and what he does read tends more toward fantasy than literary fiction. So, needless to say, when I heard he enjoyed this book my curiosity was spiked. Then I found a wonderful used copy at a book sale* in my town a couple weeks ago – perfectly worn to floppy softness without being broken or ratty – and it jumped to the top of my To Read list (now a To Read pile, thanks to that book sale!). After all, it's not often that my brother and I overlap in reading material!

Have you ever read a book with an autistic narrator/protagonist before? No? Me neither. Until now. Christopher is 15 years old (though it's easy to forget and start thinking of him as much younger), hates the colors yellow and brown, being touched, and speaking with or being surrounded by strangers, likes hot strawberry milkshakes, can calculate the powers of 2 out to 245 in his head, wanders the streets in the wee hours of the night when he can’t sleep, takes everything literally, and is relentlessly logical – though not always in a way that seems logical to us. Christopher lives alone with his father, under the impression that his mother died some time ago of a sudden heart attack. One night, Christopher discovers his neighbor’s dog – Wellington – murdered in the garden with a fork. This curious incident spurs Christopher to embark on an investigation in the style of Sherlock Holmes (his literary idol and kindred spirit, both possessing powers of observation far beyond the norm) in which he uncovers not only a canine killer, but a network of cracks in his carefully organized life that threaten to cave under pressure and overwhelm him with an inundation of reality.

The power of Haddon’s writing is entirely in the construction of Christopher’s voice. Although Christopher’s story is a somewhat sad one, Haddon doesn’t make the mistake of confusing empathy with pity. You don’t need to be autistic to identify with Christopher. His neuroses are, of course, more severe than the average person’s, but we all have irrational fears, things that make us lose our cool, things that cause us angst. (My current thing is wasps… I feel vulnerable to stealth attacks and dive-bombs whenever I venture outdoors.)

Furthermore, seeing the world through Christopher’s eyes is some of the most convincing evidence to support the suggestion that we only ever use a small percentage of our brain, because it seems that for anyone to have such powers of intellect they must be working with a more powerful mental machine than the rest of us. And speaking from personal experience, I can vouch that the portrayal of Christopher’s mental capabilities seems pretty accurate to me, not an exaggeration at all. That being said, Christopher’s intelligence is as much a handicap as it is a blessing, preventing him from viewing the world in any terms other than black and white, right and wrong, yes and no.

I love this quote from the Goodreads summary: “Herein lies the key to the brilliance of Mark Haddon’s choice of narrator: The most wrenching of emotional moments are chronicled by a boy who cannot fathom emotion.” The result is a poignant, unique, and resonant novel as enjoyable for adults as teens, and for literary as non-literary readers (my brother being case in point). It's also a really quick read, so... you have no excuse.

*Calling that event a book sale is like calling The Strand a bookstore – technically true, but it doesn’t begin to cover it. Picture an ice rink. Now fill it with tables. Now strew those tables with piles of books. Now add more books stacked in boxes beneath the tables. Now put $1-3 price tags on each book. Now add a “All items half-off” sign to the door of the rink. Boggles the imagination, doesn’t it? If it hadn’t been so chilly, I’d have thought I was in heaven. 

Books Read This Year: 45

Top 100 Progress: 44/100

The Inheritance of Loss

By Kiran Desai

★★★★★

Five Things I Liked About The Inheritance of Loss:

1. Sai and Gyan’s romance

2. Mutt the dog

3. Noni and Lola’s anglophilia and sisterly banter

4. Fluid backwards and forwards chronology

5. Vividness of setting (India!)

I read The Inheritance of Loss for my English class, but it’s the kind of book I might have picked up of my own accord anyway (one of the many things I love about college reading lists). Inheritance is another Booker Prize winner, but I found it far more enjoyable than the last one I read. Also, I’m a sucker for a pretty cover, and this one’s as pretty as they come! I will be proud to display this spine on my bookshelf, for more reasons than one.

The Inheritance of Loss takes place in the foothills of the Himalayas in a small Indian town called Kalimpong, and sets the personal lives of a small but diverse cast of characters against the backdrop of an Indian-Nepali insurgency led by the Gorkha National Liberation Front*. The arrival of his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, causes the hardened shell of a solitary judge to begin to crack, letting memories of the past seep into his consciousness and disturb his carefully cultivated stoicism. Meanwhile, the judge’s cook, who steps in as a makeshift father figure for Sai, lives off the hope he harbors for his son Biju, who is making his way in the New York underworld of immigrants and restaurant workers, hoping to earn a green card and enough money to return home to his father. Back in India, the Gorkha insurgency brings to the surface undercurrents of tension in the Kalimpong community between the Westernized elite and the indigenous poor, illustrated poignantly by the romance that blooms between Sai and her Nepali tutor, Gyan. At stake is not only the judge’s peace of mind, Biju’s success in America, or the future of Sai and Gyan’s fledgling romance, but the very culture of a nation, a hierarchical and historied way of life chafing against the past, present, and future all at once.

The Inheritance of Loss is divided into chapters, which are then divided into smaller sections by scene, sometimes a couple pages long, and sometimes only a few lines. The chapters alternate between Sai, the judge, and the cook in India and Biju in America, as well as between the judge’s past and the novel’s present. Desai’s writing is rich in imagery – color, sight, sound, and smell - bringing to life the lush exoticism of the Indian countryside (spiders, snakes, and scorpions made multiple appearances as merely a matter of course, *shiver*), the distinct and shifting voices, desires and fears, and convictions of the ensemble cast, and the nuances of a highly stratified country navigating a new layer of social complexity.

For some reason, The Inheritance of Loss seemed reminiscent of Jonathan Safran Foer’s work to me. Maybe it’s their shared ability to characterize large-scale social upheaval by focusing on the personalized conflicts of a handful of individuals, or their occasional playfulness with traditional style, or the high-resolution snapshot they give you of another culture’s daily circumstances, a sharply focused foreground of mundanity against the blurred background of the remarkable.

I’d recommend The Inheritance of Loss to anyone, but perhaps particularly to those who’ve enjoyed Memoirs of a Geisha, Everything is Illuminated, or Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

*If you don’t know what the GNLF is, don’t fret – I didn’t either. Basically, the GNLF campaigned to break off the Nepali-speaking areas of northern India into an independent state. Tensions arose, ensued, and were largely not overcome. The movement continues today.

Books Read This Year:

Top 100 Progress: 42/100

The Mark of the Golden Dragon

By L.A. Meyer

★★★☆☆

Release Date: October 3rd, 2011

Three Things I Liked About The Mark of the Golden Dragon:

1. Higgins

2. Ravi 

3. The Black Highwayman

The Mark of the Golden Dragon is the 9^th installment in a series I’ve been reading since I was about 11. Unofficially dubbed ‘Bloody Jack’ (after the title of the first book), the series follows Mary “Jacky” Faber, a girl who started her illustrious (and sometimes infamous) life at sea as a woebegone London orphan who, desperate for steady food and a safe place to sleep each night, disguises herself as a boy to take up as a ship’s boy on the HMS Dolphin. Since then, Jacky’s adventures have earned her numerous nicknames (Puss in Boots, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, & etc.), taken her all over the world from the Cape of Good Hope to the northern Atlantic, and required such flexibility of loyalties that they’re blurred almost beyond distinction. Over the course of 9 novels, she’s defeated pirates and dabbled in piracy, won a medal of honor at Trafalgar, attended the prestigious Lawson Peabody School for Girls in Boston (briefly), traversed the Mississippi on a river boat, swum for shipwrecked treasure in the Caribbean, served as a spy on the French lines, met both Napoleon and George III, and been the protégé of a fearsome Chinese pirate queen… just to scratch the service. Nonetheless, though her predicaments and allegiances vary by book (and sometimes even by chapter), Jacky has always endeavored to remain true to two things: Her betrothed, Jaimy, whom she met on her very first voyage and hasn’t spent a consecutive five chapters with ever since, and doing what’s right by her friends. And she’s mostly succeeded. Usually. And she fails with the best intentions.

The Mark of the Golden Dragon sees Jacky safely rescued from a lifetime sentence to the penal colony in Australia and reunited with Jaimy, only to be washed overboard with Ravi in a typhoon off the coast of Southeast Asia. Presumed dead by her crew and loved ones on board her beloved ship, the Lorelei Lee, Jacky and Ravi manage to stay afloat until they wash up onshore. After a few months of navigating the foreign world of the East Indies followed by a fortuitous rescue by trusty ‘ole Higgins (I’m not spoiling anything; readers of the series will know Jacky is ever indefatigable), Jacky hastens back to London, where she infiltrates the London ton with the goal of procuring full pardons for both she and Jaimy (who was wrongfully convicted in the previous novel and sentenced to the same penal colony as Jacky herself), as well as rescuing Jaimy from the life of madness and revenge he has descended into since her presumed death.

Speaking of Jaimy, his vendetta against the two men he holds responsible for Jacky’s putative death has earned him a place on my list of favorite things in The Mark of the Golden Dragon, as well as the nickname “The Black Highwayman” for holding up carriages in search of his quarries, robbing rich occupants Robin Hood style. With his billowing black cloak and mask, and tortured obsession with avenging his (presumed) lost love, he cuts a very dramatic and romantic figure, quite a departure from the relatively unexciting upstanding Lieutenant of the Royal Navy and – pardon my French – whipped fiancé of Bloody Jack, infamous on both sides of the Atlantic, he’s dutifully been for the last few books. It was refreshing to see him break lose.

Jacky has personality and charisma in spades, which enthralls readers and fellow characters alike, and is one of the many reasons I’ve stuck with her for 8 years, in spite of the fact that the recipe for the books grows a bit more stale and contrived with each installment. Yes, the constant cat and mouse game between Jacky and her betrothed, Jaimy, is getting a little tiresome, as are her incorrigible flirtations during their periods of separation. Not to mention her necessary but increasingly implausible resilience and ability to worm her way out of the most dire of circumstances. But on the whole, these are flaws I put up with the way you ignore or tolerate the quirks of an old friend – because you love them, because you’ve known them forever, because their good qualities more than make up for the less so.

Read this book, I say. But first, start at the beginning. (It’s a very good place to start…*)

Conversation Starter:
Which Jacky installment has been your favorite, and what do you think of how the series has developed? How many books do you think she has left in her?

* Forgive me, I watched The Sound of Music on a daily basis as a child.

Books Read This Year: 36

Top 100 Progress: 42/100

The Last Little Blue Envelope

By Maureen Johnson
★★☆☆☆

Release Date: April 26th, 2011*

Two Things I Liked About The Last Little Blue Envelope:
1. Rainy New Year’s in Dublin.
2. English uncle.

Another sequel review, I’m afraid. I’m in the mood to keep it short and sweet, though. So bear with me.

The Last Little Blue Envelope is the sequel to 13 Little Blue Envelopes, which came out several years ago. Ginny’s aunt Peg, an eccentric artist, traipsed off to Europe two years ago, and hadn’t been heard from since. That is, until a letter arrives unannounced from the recently deceased Peg, informing Ginny of her secret battle with brain cancer and her final wish that Ginny follow the instructions in the 13 envelopes enclosed with the letter, as well as a few rules: no cell phone, laptop, company, or plan. Never one for adventure, Ginny nonetheless embarks on a European tour directed by clues in the 13 envelopes. The letters lead her from England to Paris, Rome, Amsterdam, and Greece, and help Ginny forge a farewell connection with her beloved aunt as the letters paint a picture of Peg’s final years and introduce Ginny to many of Peg’s friends and loved ones scattered across the continent. Unfortunately, Ginny’s backpack gets stolen in Greece before she can read the last letter, and so her trip comes to a premature end. But before she goes home, she stops off in London to discover and sell a collection of her aunt’s paintings left behind as Ginny’s inheritance.

The Last Little Blue Envelope picks up a few months after 13 Little Blue Envelopes. It’s December of Ginny’s senior year, and she’s wondering how to turn her summer experiences into a college essay, why her summer romantic interest – Keith, a harmless bad-boy poseur artiste she met in London – isn’t communicating as much as he used to, and what ever happened to her 13th letter and her key to closure. A couple weeks before Christmas break, she gets an email from someone in England, informing her that they have her letter and want to meet up with her. So, on a whim, she flies to London to spend the holidays with her British uncle (who married Peg before she died) – only to be faced with a couple of back-to-back setbacks: 1] Her romantic interest has a new romantic interest, and 2] Oliver, the devastatingly handsome bearer of her letter, isn’t about to just hand it over. The letter contains instructions to obtain the parts to a final piece of Peg’s art for Ginny to sell, and Oliver wants a finder’s fee of half the proceeds. Instead of spending the holidays cuddled up with Keith with mugs of tea in front of a cozy English fireplace (or something), Ginny finds herself crammed into the backseat of Keith’s dilapidated automobile with Keith, his new girlfriend, and Oliver, driving across Europe to complete Peg’s final project.

The Last Little Blue Envelope wasn’t terrible, and it had its moments – I especially got a kick out of a scene where Keith’s girlfriend, used to driving on the opposite side of the road, has to navigate the infamous Arc du Triumph traffic circle – but overall it had that stale sequel aesthetic, as if perhaps Maureen spent a little too much time away from the characters before going back to tie up the loose ends from the first novel. Oliver’s bad boy standoffishness as a mask for financial and emotional insecurity was a little too predictable, as was Ginny’s transition of romantic interest from one bad-boy to another, without enough swoon-factor to compensate, and the story in general was a little too much more of the same of the first 12 letters. Maureen said she only decided to write this sequel after getting a multitude of requests for one, and it shows – The Last Little Blue Envelope reads like an afterthought, not a planned finale.

Books Read This Year: 34
Top 100 Progress: 42/100

* I received an advance copy of The Last Little Blue Envelope through NetGalley.com

Where She Went

By Gayle Forman
★★☆☆☆

Two Things I Liked About Where She Went:
1. All-night private tour of NYC.
2. Intense impromptu cello/guitar duet.

Can we just start with a collective “ugh!” for the cover? UGH! Who approved this? It’s an eyesore! I really despise when publishers put actual human faces on covers. Drawings: okay. Profiles: if you must. Faces: abort!

Where She Went is the sequel to a novel that came out last spring and made waves on the young adult circuit, called If I Stay. If I Stay is part love story (romantic, of course, but also familial and musical) and part tragedy. In the aftermath of a car crash that kills her parents and younger brother, Mia – comatose and barely stable in the ICU, while her spirit somehow (it’s fiction, after all) roams the hospital, observing the chaos of grief for her family and fierce hope for herself amongst her remaining loved ones, including her boyfriend, Adam – is faced with the ultimate decision: should she let go, or should she stay? The story is wrenching, but it is also beautiful and moving. I read it in one sitting, tucked into the backseat of a car speeding along the autobahn in the dark, with the melancholy melodies of classical music (fitting, as music is a powerful theme in If I Stay, Mia being a Juilliard-bound cellist) sealing me into my own little bubble of story and sound, which only made it all the easier to be swept up by the emotional currents of the novel.

Not so Where She Went. I will allow that the fact that I couldn’t read it in one sitting may have impeded some of the story’s emotional momentum, but I don’t think that can be held wholly, or even mostly, responsible. Where If I Stay was a deeply felt tale of love, loss, and the ties that bid (to each other, to life), with a cast of characters, a plot, and a point of view that were refreshingly and captivating original in a genre prone to cliché, Where She Went made up for that originality in spades by conforming to clichés of the genre, the characters becoming nearly unrecognizable for the generic corruption wreaked on them. If If I Stay was as piercing and individual as a personal experience of loss, as hauntingly beautiful and melancholy as a cello solo, then Where She Went is the Hallmark card you receive from your coworker a week after the funeral.

Where She Went shifts from Mia’s point of view to her boyfriend – now ex-boyfriend – Adam’s. If I Stay explored the onset of Mia’s loss, and Where She Went explores the ongoing burden of Adam’s. Not only did he also lose Mia’s family – who had accepted into their fold – but a few months later, he lost Mia as well, when she left for Juilliard and inexplicably stopped communicating. He turned his compounded hurt and confusion into music, writing an entire album in 2 weeks, an album that gets him and his band, Shooting Star, signed and chart topping in a matter of a few whirlwind months. Now, 3 years later, he’s a bona fide rock-star with a celebrity girlfriend, constant attention from the paparazzi, a world tour – and a new smoking habit, anxiety meds, and a falling out with his band mates to show for it. He may have millions in the bank and thousands in the audience, but he’s a sad, lonely, and strung-out soul who can’t remember what he loves about the only thing he used to care about as much as Mia.

Then the night before Adam flies to London to kick off a 67-show world tour, when his manager gives him a night off to pull himself back together (he’s on the verge of a mental and ideological breakdown), he stumbles on a poster outside Carnegie Hall, advertising a concert that evening for a promising young cellist – who is, of course, none other than Mia. After the concert, Mia has him called backstage, and thus begins a night spent touring Mia’s New York and tending to old flames – to be extinguished or rekindled, depending on what the night brings.

I had a few deal-breaking issues with this book. The biggest is that I really wish Gayle hadn’t made Adam and Mia such rock-stars. This book would have been exponentially better if Shooting Star had retained its relatively anonymous indie status, and Mia was just an above average but not headlining Juilliard student. One of the fabulous things about If I Stay was the normality of the characters and their lives. The story was so affective because the characters involved weren’t so much different than you. The moment Gayle decided to make Adam a rock-star and Mia a renowned cellist, she axed that accessibility. I just couldn’t really relate as well to them anymore, especially to Adam, who spent a significant chunk of the novel hiding and running from fans, whining about his impending world tour and clingy celebrity girlfriend, and losing his temper with paparazzi.

Other qualms: The lyrics at the start of each chapter, supposedly from Adam’s career-launching record, were melodramatic and cheesy; I wish more of the novel had been spent in the present, rather than switching back and forth every other chapter to the past; Mia needed a stronger presence, because even though the novel was told from Adam’s point of view, it felt entirely too Adam-centric, compared to If I Stay, which gave a rounded portrayal of Adam even though it was told through Mia’s lens.

All things considered, I’m not sure I would even recommend Where She Went to fans of If I Stay. I felt more satisfied by the open end of If I Stay than I did by the resolution of Where She Went.

Books Read This Year: 34
Top 100 Progress: 42/100

Jitterbug Perfume

By Tom Robbins
★★★★☆

Four Things I Liked About Jitterbug Perfume:
1. Beets.
2. Magical realism.
3. Convergence of four narratives.
4. Sheer span and scope of the story - time, place, and content.

This book came highly recommended, but I wasn’t sure if it lived up to the hype until just about the last page. And even then, I wasn’t sure how I really felt about it. On the one hand, I’ve never read anything quite like it before, and I loved the way the last 20 pages coalesced the whole narrative into a final, momentous throb of significance. On the other hand, I was never fully enveloped into the story until those last 20 pages or so, and there was a lot about Robbins’ style I wasn’t sure he was pulling off. But maybe that’s part of the book’s greatness – that it is so wholly unique you don’t even know what to make of it. It certainly had me thinking the entire time, whether I was trying to draw connections between the apparently incongruous narrative threads, trying to construct meaning from a seemingly random assortment of themes and motifs, or savoring the smattering of perfect passages like melted chocolate on my tongue. In any case, I was never passively flipping pages, living only in the current scene while letting the previous one slip unnoticed out of my mind like the memory of last Monday’s breakfast. Instead I was collecting them one by one like cards in hand, on alert for the royal flush.

The novel begins with this line: “The beet is the most intense of vegetables.” And somehow, in the course of 388 pages and a couple thousand years, it evolves from rumination on the passionate qualities of the beet into an elaborate and philosophical tale of love, immortality, divinity, the sacrifices we make to modern life, and the intangible spark that keeps the human condition aflame.

The Prologue begins with a beet, then moves to Seattle, Paris, and New Orleans, before settling on ancient Bohemia, where the real action begins. In three parts, the novel primarily follows Alobar, a former king and his – for lack of a better word – wife, Kudra, who individually cheat death, cross paths, and unite to seek the path to immortality, with the help of the dying pagan god of basic human instincts, Pan. Yet while the majority of the novel is devoted to Alobar’s ongoing quest through the past, each section concludes with shorter chapters set in contemporary Seattle, Paris, and New Orleans, which follow three unlikely perfumers: a waitress by evening who tracks down an elusive formula trapped in the dregs of an old blue perfume bottle by night, the elite LeFever brothers who possess perfumery’s most infallible nose, and an enormous, fills-the-room-with-her-sheer-size-of-body-and-personality woman in charge of a rundown family business nonetheless devoted to the craft. The four separate narratives seem disconnected until the last 100 some odd pages, when Alobar’s time catches up to real time and converges with Seattle, Paris, and New Orleans.

The real power in Robbins’s writing (at least as I’ve experienced it) is in choreographing the ending. All the various threads of plots, characters, themes, and motifs were all smoothly and satisfyingly braided together into a snug and beautiful pattern worthy of an “Ooh” or “Ah.” For a book that starts with a beet, Jitterbug Perfume makes you think an awful lot about life: what it means, why its worth living, what comes afterward, who’s in control.

That being said, it is not a perfect novel. The language is outlandish, metaphors sometimes so much so that they could have been pulled from a bad metaphor list. I get that the extravagancy of Robbins’s style goes hand in hand with the extravagancy of his story, but I waffle as to whether not he pulls it off. And yet there are passages – sometimes single lines – of such acuity that they stop my eyes still on the page and arrest my attention. In lieu of a smooth conclusion, I think I shall simply live you with a couple of my favorite examples and let them speak of themselves:

“If the earth needs night as well as day, wouldn’t it follow that the soul require endarkenment to balance enlightenment?”

“Our individuality is all, all that we have. There are those who barter it for security, those who repress it for what they believe is the betterment of the whole society, but blessed in the twinkle of the morning star is the one who nurtures it and rides it, in grace and love and wit, from peculiar station to peculiar station along life’s bittersweet route.”

“People used to die from germs. Now they died from bad habits. That was what Dr. Dannyboy said. Heart disease was caused by bad personal habits, cancer was caused by bad industrial habits, war was caused by bad political habits. Dannyboy believed that even old age was a habit. And habits could be broken.”

Books Read This Year: 33
Top 100 Progress: 42/100

The Hobbit (Top 100 #42)

By J.R.R. Tolkien
★★★★☆

Four Things I Liked About The Hobbit:
1. The storytelling.
2. Bilbo*
3. Gandalf
4. Middle-Earth's vividness.

I should probably try to stop being surprised each time I end up liking something Lord of the Rings related. It first happened when my dad forced me to watch the trilogy before our trip to New Zealand**, and in spite of my petulant pre-teen reluctance, I enjoyed them enough to later embark on a Lord of the Rings marathon with my friends (we made it through the first two before our eyes glazed over from prolonged screen exposure). I likewise resisted reading The Hobbit, though my uncle gave me a lovely copy several years ago, and with the same result: I liked it, in spite of myself. The only reason I didn't give it 5 stars is because though it was enjoyable, it wasn't quite a compulsive, withdrawal inducing read, nor did I put it down and think, "WOW," which are my two main criteria for 5-star ratings. It's a precise science, I know.

Bilbo Baggins is a content hobbit. He has a snug little hobbit-hole home, several square meals a day - whenever the urge strikes - and the closest he's gotten to an adventure is listening to old tales. Until Gandalf shows up for tea with a gang of 13 unruly dwarves, a fantastic*** proposition, and high expectations for poor Bilbo, whom he intends to extract from the quiet hobbit life and recruit as the dwarves' hired burglar. The quest is to recover the dwarf king's stolen gold from the dragon Smaug, who hoards it in a mountain fortress months' travel and innumerable dangers away from Bilbo's cozy Shire. Bilbo, who has hardly set foot outside the Shire, encounters trolls, goblins, elves, a shape-shifting bear, giant spiders (think Acromantula, -shudders-) the infamous cave-dwelling creature Gollum, and a magical ring of invisibility in his trek through the forbidding wildernesses of Middle-Earth, each terrain riddled with its own particular dangers. Gandalf has placed a great responsibility on Bilbo's shoulders, and though Bilbo frets and fears and even faints, he rises admirably to the occasion, and goes home a hobbit hero (I'm not spoiling anything for you here, it's pretty clear from the get-go that our little hero comes out on top).

Bilbo is so endearing. I know he's like a 50-year-old, chubby fantasy creature who battles trolls and goblins and giant spiders and can totally take care of himself, but I thought of him kind of like a child the whole time. I think part of it was a) his perpetual complaints about inconstant food-supply, and b) his perpetual longing to be back home in his hobbit-hole. It just made him seem so cuddly and vulnerable; I wanted to give him a hug, a mug of hot tea, and a warm cookie to make it all better. And yet he is every bit the hero, saving his friends time and time again with a little ingenuity, a lot of luck, and, of course, his trusty invisible ring.

The Hobbit is a classic fantasy adventure story (go figure, Tolkien probably invented this genre), but with a level of almost unparalleled detail and creativity in the composition of the world. I was seamlessly absorbed into both the story and Middle-Earth by Tolkien's modest and subtle, yet vivid descriptions. Which is saying a lot, considering how prejudiced I was going in.

Surprises: How considerably lighter a tale it is than the Lord of the Rings trilogy; how little foreshadowing there was for the trilogy; how little time was spent dwelling on Gollum (he's never mentioned again after the initial encounter); and how readable it was (I don't know why I expected it to be a slow read, other than that I expected not to like it, which is the biggest speed impediment there is).

No more will I wrinkle my nose (mentally) when people tell me their favorite book is by Tolkien. It's not my favorite book, but I definitely know where they're coming from, and I'm actually looking forward to reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which is also on the Top 100 list. I'd recommend The Hobbit to people who were childhood fans of Tamora Pierce, Harry Potter, Dianna Wynne Jones, Ella Enchanted, or The Enchanted Forest Chronicles.

* Incidentally, in the forthcoming film adaptation, Bilbo is going to be played by Watson, from the ubiquitous (on this blog, anyway) Sherlock. Also, it goes to show how influential (and dare I say, ubiquitous?) Tolkien's work is that there's no squiggly line under the name 'Bilbo.' Testing... how about 'Voldemort'? Shucks. There goes the squiggly line (though you can't see it). Well, it's just a matter of time.
** Blogger also refutes 'Zealand' with its squiggly red line of ignorance, so it's obviously no kind of authority on what words should be recognized as real and not. Why Bilbo (endearing as he is) makes that list over a country, I do not know.
*** As in, "conceived or appearing as if conceived by an unrestrained imagination; odd and remarkable; bizarre," or "highly unrealistic or impractical," or "incredibly great or extreme," or all of the above.

Books Read This Year: 27
Top 100 Progress: 42/100

Persuasion (Top 100 #41)

By Jane Austen
★★★★☆

Four Things I Like About Persuasion:
1. Bath
2. Captain Wentworth
3. Anne's family members (for comic relief)
4. Secret letters

I'm just plugging away at the Top 100 list lately, aren't I? And I'm currently reading #42 (The Hobbit)!

I was tempted to give Persuasion only three stars, until I realized that the low rating would have been for fault of mine, not Miss Austen's. To be honest, I didn't give Persuasion the attention an Austen novel deserves. I was reading it in full distraction mode, in small blips of time on the go while in transit during my spring break - riding the D.C. metro, flying from D.C. to Indy, in the car between errands - rather than my preferred 30+ minute-long sittings. Which is all well and good to realize, but still left me in an ambiguous situation, rating-wise. Should I rate up, assuming it was better than my spotty reading was able to appreciate? Or do I rate down, on the basis of actual enjoyment, permitting that perhaps Persuasion just isn't my favorite Austen novel? I thought it over and settled on the former, deciding that I did in fact enjoy the consituent parts of the novel, even if I didn't read it closely enough to satisfactorily stich them all together.

Our heroine, Anne Elliott, and a Mr. Frederick Wentworth fell in love when she was 19, but parted ways when Anne was persuaded to break off their engagement on the grounds that he had little to offer in the way of social standing or support, and Frederick - a sailor - set off to make his fortune at sea. Seven years later, the novel opens with the Elliott family finding it necessary to relocate, Mr. Elliott having frivolously squandered the nest-egg Mrs. Elliott left behind when she died. Unable to afford the upkeep of their estate, Kellynch Hallf, they decide to rent it out to Admiral Croft, a respectable retired naval officer, and his wife. While Anne's father and her sister Elizabeth go ahead to their new lodgings in Bath, Anne first spends a month staying with her sister Mary, just three miles from Kellynch Hall. The proximity requires that Mary's family, the Musgroves, receive Mrs. Croft's brother, newly ashore from the navy - none other than Anne's former fiance, now Captain Wentworth, who has made a name and fortune for himself. The reunion proves at first almost unbearably awkward for Anne, perceiving that Captain Wentworth has not forgiven her for her rejection. But when the families move on to Bath and Anne is pursued by a new and engaging suitor, it appears that all hope may not be lost after all (much to our surprise).

Phew. I did not expect that summary to take so long. I guess Austen is more complicated than you might think, which really shouldn't surprise me considering the complexity of the social graces back then, her primary subject matter. My apologies if I've over-complicated it; I'm a bit tired, and writing this straight into the post rather than typing it out in Word, because my computer decided that spring break would be a good time to have a harddrive breakdown. Hrmph.

Persuasion has all the requisite wit, perceptiveness of social and emotional subtleties, and diverse and realistically quirky cast of characters one expects of Jane Austen, with just enough of the differences that keep her novels distinct and interesting. For one, Persuasion is the shortest Austen novel I've read, capping at just under 250 pages. For another, this is not a novel of first impressions (see: Pride and Prejudice), but second chances. Rather than detailing the many uncertainties, missteps, and excitements of falling in love, Perusasion navigates the grey area of repairing burned bridges and breathing new life into flames thought to be extinguished.

My only major qualm with Persuasion is the suddenness of the conversion from Anne and Wentworth awkwardly orbiting one another to sharing flushed, meaningful glances that ignite the short fuse from 'I'm still interested' to 'I must confess my never-forgotten love for you immediately!' I felt there could have been more time spent developing the middleground. I mean, they hardly even talked! What was supposed to have altered the balance of the status quo? Perhaps this qualm is again more a fault of my own poor reading rather than a flaw of Austen's writing, and if so, please do contest me and let me know. I've also been informed that Austen was writing Persuasion whilst ill (it was her last finished novel), so perhaps she hastened through the final stages of courtship so as to finish before a death that felt to be drawing near, I do not know. In any case, if you've read and enjoyed other Austen novels, I guarantee you will feel the same about Persuasion. 

Books Read This Year: 26
Top 100 Progress: 41/100

Zombicorns

By John Green
★★★★☆

Four Things I Like About Zombicorns:
1. John Green*
2. Mia’s dog having an existential crisis
3. Chicago/The Bean
4. Using a library as a hideout from zombie ambush

Zombicorns is not just another clever story penned (or rather, typed) by young adult author/rock-star John Green. It’s not just a zombie apocalypse novella. It is not even just a zombie apocalypse novel written by a rock-star.

It’s a profound statement about corn**. And souls. And what makes humans human. And whether that makes us better than other living things. And what, ultimately, we live for. Pretty heavy stuff for any novella, much less one with a zombie unicorn on the cover, if you ask me.

Also, despite appearances, it’s not at all about unicorns (see disclaimer beneath title). Sorry if that revelation just dealt you a heavy blow of disappointment. You’ll get over it. I promise. Just read the real story.

Mia is one of the last of her kind – that is, our kind: humans. She has cloistered herself in a Chicago cellar, eating Spam, drinking expensive wine by the bottle, and writing her memoirs about the aftermath of the sudden outbreak of D131Y – a virus spread through corn that Z’s up (aka zombifies) all who ingest it – while she debates whether continued survival is really worth the effort, or whether she should just give up and commit Zuicide. The only living, loving soul left to her in the world is her dog, Mr. President. You know, the one who suffers an existential crisis. Which was probably just Mia projecting, but I prefer to pretend it was all Mr. President. (Incidentally, I can’t blame her for the wine. I’d probably be in the cups, too, if I survived the zombie apocalypse only to have to ‘complete’ my Z’d up family so they wouldn’t force-feed me zombie corn.)

Only John Green can make a zombie apocalypse novella a profound statement of any kind.

Exhibit A: “I came to the conclusion a while ago that there is nothing romantic or supernatural about loving someone: Love is the privilege of being responsible for another.”

Exhibit B: “Being a person, I had come to realize, is a communal activity. Dogs know how to be dogs. But people do not know how to be people unless and until they learn from other people. Which got me to wondering whether it’s possible to learn how to be a person in a world where all the people are dead.”

And these are just examples short enough to include. There were several other marvelous multi-paragraph examples of John’s evidently innate ability to profoundify anything.

Also, only John Green could make me ever want to read a zombie apocalypse novella. And like it.

That being said, it’s not perfect. But it’s not supposed to be. He wrote it for fun, he didn’t ruthlessly edit the way you do before Official Publication, and he’s disseminating it for free on the Internet purely for the enjoyment of his fans. Which I think is pretty dang cool, so I am more than happy to overlook a few typos and inconsistencies and tangents here and there.

If the idea of a novella about corn and zombies intrigues you, you can watch John read the first chapter here.

You can download your very own personal copy of Zombicorns here.

* If you know anything about John Green, you know this counts as a thing to like about something he’s written. His name on the cover of a book is like a big official seal that says “This Book Is Guaranteed To Be Both Entertaining and Intelligent,” only better, because you can trust John Green’s name more than you can trust the kind of seals they slap on to try to sell more copies of subpar bestsellers.
** You know, like how it keeps cropping up in the most unlikely of places. Sugar, fuel, plastic…

Books Read This Year: 24
Top 100 Progress: 40/100

Howards End

By E.M. Forster

★★★☆☆

Three Things I Liked About Howards End:

1. England! (It never fails to excite me.)

2. The dialogue.

3. The imagery, especially music.

It's been too long. My apologies. School infringes on my reading/reviewing time. I don't approve. Happily, I'm on spring break now, so my reading rate will be amped up for the next week (yessss!).

Three days ago I spent about eight hours tucked into a corner of the library, the light of my laptop burning into my eyes as I furiously typed out a dissatisfying 5-page paper on this book. Consequently, whenever I think about it now I feel like I’m pressing my nose into the crease of the spine and trying to read. My brain goes a bit numb, so forgive me if this entry is on the short side.

Howards End is a story of two families, and the house that entwines them. The Schlegels: Margret, the eldest, a mix of pragmatism and idealism; Helen, the younger sister, passionate and full of ideals; and Tibby, the ascetic younger brother, who perceives life through self-constructed bars of knowledge and Oxford. The Wilcoxes: Ruth, the matron whose spirit is the life-force of both Howards End and Howards End; Henry, the patriarch, a stoic businessman who fails to appreciate his wife’s passion for a house; and their sons, Paul and Charles, the former sent off to Nigeria to further imperialist ventures, the latter a carbon copy of his father. The families meet on holiday in Germany, and their acquaintance is renewed when the Wilcoxes move into a flat across the street from the Schlegels’ London residence, Wickham Place. The passionate and cultured Schlegel sisters spin through the ordered lives of the Wilcoxes and through their carefully preserved status quo into upheaval.

Howards End reminds me of Jane Austen, as far as the English setting and the focus on interpersonal relationships. It has a wider scope, though, addressing not only personal relationships, but also class conflicts, imperialism, the stretching of societal gender roles, and the chafing of the industrializing modern society against the quaint pastoral lifestyle of old England.

Howards End isn’t quite a page-turner (hence only three stars; I just struggle giving anything top marks if it's not both readable AND well-written), but it’s an enjoyable read, and Forster’s dialogue is so convincing and his descriptions so poetic that one can’t help but admire them. My paper required that I watch the movie adaption as well as read the book (in order to compare and contrast them), and having done so, I really recommend them as a package deal. The movie isn’t a replacement for the book (I would never advocate so), but it’s a lovely companion, not to mention a wonderful movie in its own right, with beautiful set design, a fitting soundtrack, and outstanding acting performances*.

* Hey, Emma Thompson didn’t win her Oscar for nothing.

Books Read This Year: 21

Top 100 Progress: 39/40

A Study In Scarlet

By Arthur Conan Doyle
★★★☆☆

Three Things I Like About A Study in Scarlet:
1. Non sequiturs that emerge from Sherlock's internal logic.
2. Sherlock's manic approach to sleuthing.
3. Use of Mormon Salt Lake City as a setting for intrigue.

A couple weeks ago I came across a recommendation for a new BBC drama called Sherlock – a modern adaption of Sherlock Holmes. The series (thus far) consists of 3 90-minute episodes, based on Doyle’s novellas and short stories. I downloaded the first episode, “A Study in Pink,” based on A Study in Scarlet, and loved it.* Being a stickler about reading books before watching their movies and never having read ay Sherlock Holmes before, I decided to spend some time with the genuine article before watching the next two episodes.

A Study in Scarlet is the first Sherlock Holmes story. It begins with the first meeting of Dr. Watson and Sherlock. Dr. Watson is fresh from Afghanistan, having retired from service following an injury and subsequent illness, and is looking for a flat mate. Within 24 hours he and Sherlock have moved into 221 Baker Street and Dr. Watson is embroiled in Sherlock’s latest case – a man found murdered with the ambiguous word “Rache” written on the wall in blood, though the body has suffered no wounds. The mystery spans from the streets of London all the way to the wilderness of the American West, as the backstory unfolds in the fledgling Mormon city of Salt Lake City, Utah.

Like I said, I’ve never had any experience with Sherlock Holmes before. This was a good introduction – being that it is the introduction – but I’ve heard that Doyle’s later stories are much better, and I do have to agree that this one had its flaws. Sherlock didn't say "elementary" even once! And the backstory to the murder is excessive and takes up almost half the novel. I cut Doyle plenty of slack, though, because this was his very first novel and he wrote it in 3 weeks. Plus, how can you really criticize the work of someone who created one of the most iconic characters of all time?**

I enjoyed this novel particularly in juxtaposition with the first episode of Sherlock, which played off A Study in Scarlet without exactly replicating it. I won’t go into details for fear of spoiling either the book or the show, but the general introductory framework of A Study in Scarlet remains intact in the episode, as does the presence of the word “Rache” and the means of murder, though the actual circumstances and motives vary vastly. So if you have the time and interest, I definitely recommend reading A Study in Scarlet (it won’t even take you long, as it’s hardly 100 pages) and then watching Sherlock. I daresay you won’t be disappointed.

I’ll be reading more Sherlock Holmes soon, partly because I’m getting a kick out of him right now, and partly because The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes will be #40 on my BBC Top 100 list. Woot!


* Seriously, it’s awesome. Sherlock is played to perfection, and the modern setting is used surprisingly effectively. It kicks the recent Robert Downey Jr./Jude Law version’s butt. And there’s three times more of it! What are you still doing here?
** Random thought, but I wonder if people will be making television adaptions of Harry Potter in like 100 years. That is, if anyone still watches TV anymore.

Books Read This Year: 20
Top 100 Progress: 39/40

Before I Fall

By Lauren Oliver

★★☆☆☆

Two Things I Liked About Before I Fall:

1. Thinking about appreciation for the simplest and most important things in your life.

2. Butterfly effect.

I didn’t like this book. I thought it was inexpertly and unsubtly written – the themes and morals were heavy-handed to an extreme, holding up signs that read, “Look at me! I’m important and meaningful!” in sloppy black sharpie – and the characters, oh boy. Talk about unsympathetic.

Samantha Kingston is your average* high-school girl: she skates along in her classes, has 3 best friends and a boyfriend she’s crushed on since middle school, overcame her un-cool former self, and spends her weekends at parties with the high-school upper crust. Everyone envies her, her life is perfect**, yadda yadda … And then in one split-second on the ride home from a typical Friday night, her life as she knows it comes to an end – literally. That is, until she wakes up again in the morning. Now Sam has seven chances to relive her last day, to untangle the knot of actions and inactions that led to that last moment, and make sense of a senseless tragedy.

This is one of those books where you’re supposed to grow with the character as they learn what makes life beautiful and how to be a better person. Okay, fine. I often like those books – even love them. The problem is that the whole book aimed to add substance to a character that was by nature substanceless, a collection of stereotypes more than an actual person.

Perhaps you think I am not being fair. Perhaps you’d like more evidence.

Samantha and her best friends Elody and Ally are basically the minions of their ringleader, Lindsey, and are apparently so grateful to have been chosen into popularity that they’ll follow Lindsey’s every whim, no matter how reckless or shallow or even cruel, no questions asked. Samantha’s transgressions range from the (relatively) minor: isolating herself from her family, ignoring the (wonderful) boy who’s been in love with her since the 3rd grade, dating an (decidedly un-wonderful) idiot just because he’s hot and popular, and belittling underclassmen and peers alike; to the contemptible: frequently skipping class, smoking and drinking, and flirting with her math teacher; to the unforgivable: relentlessly tormenting a girl to the point of suicide because of some vendetta Lindsey has against her, without ever questioning why.

The kicker? Samantha closes the prologue with the line, “Is what I did really so much worse than what anybody else does? Is it really so much worse than what you do?”

Well, yes, actually. Yes it is.

Uggghhh. I know I’m supposed to sympathize with these characters – I mean, Samantha’s dead, after all, and via a means I wouldn’t wish on anyone – but they’re just so inherently clichéd and unlikeable that instead of sympathizing I just thought, “You brought this on yourself.”***

* Read: Generically stereotyped popular girl with "Real Thoughts" and "Substance" buried deep down under her cruel and conformist façade.

** Rule #1 of character development: never, ever tell me your character is perfect. Seriously. It will turn your readers against you and undermine every attempt you make to give the character substance later.

*** And she did; misdeeds aside, Samantha’s fatal mistake was being stupid enough to get in a car with a drunk Lindsey at the wheel, who’s a dangerous driver even when she’s sober. I mean, come on. It’s sad, of course, but it wouldn’t have happened if she’d made better choices. I get so mad when people end up throwing their life away for stupid things like underage drinking.

Same Story, Different Review:

The Crooked Shelf

Books Read This Year: 18

Top 100 Progress: 38/100

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

By Alan Bradley

★★☆☆☆

Two Things I Liked About Sweetness:

1. Flavia’s extensive morbid knowledge of poisons.

2. Flavia’s bike named Gladys.

You know those books you pick up every time you’re in a bookstore, read the back blurb, ponder, and then ultimately put back down? Sometimes, when you finally give in and buy it, you kick yourself for not having done so earlier because it so exceeds your expectations. Other times, it falls as flat as you feared it might. This book falls into the latter category for me.

It seemed promising enough: Flavia de Luce is an eleven-year-old mad chemist with a specialty in poisons. She lives in an old English manor house in the 1950’s with her father and her two older sisters, Ophelia and Daphne, and has a penchant for the dramatic. Much to her delight (“I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn’t. Quite the contrary. This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life.”), she finds a man sprawled in the garden and witnesses his last breath as the sun rises the morning after a dead bird showed up on their doorstep, a stamp mysteriously pierced on its beak. Flavia determines the two events must be connected, and she’s not going to relent until she finds out how.

It seemed promising enough, but… I don’t know. There wasn’t anything particularly wrong with it (except for an annoying overuse of nicknaming; case in point: Ophelia became ‘Feely’). It just didn’t excite me. It lacked that essential and difficult to define spark necessary to really kindle my interest. Flavia should have been spunky and fresh and engaging. She didn't quite succeed. The mystery should have been quirky and suspenseful and engrossing. It wasn't. The whole thing was better as an idea, as the possibility contained in the promise of a black cover blurb.

See? I can’t even get worked up enough to carry on about it in an impassioned and detailed bad review. I’m just… eh, apathetic about it.

Books Read This Year: 17

Top 100 Progress: 39/100

Never Let Me Go

By Kazuo Ishiguro

★★★★★

Five Things I Like About Never Let Me Go:

1. The pervasive aura of bittersweet nostalgia.

2. The quiet, melancholic beauty of the prose, reminiscent of English countryside.

3. The dynamics between Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth.

4. The setting.

5. It lingers.

I saw the movie adaptation of this book last fall at the arts cinema close to my house. It was gorgeous, a poignant, somehow bittersweet tragedy. I say tragedy, and I suppose that’s true – it is tragic – but tragedy seems like too… I guess too loud a word to use. Even though the story’s sad, it’s never brazen with its sadness. The sadness creeps up on you, like a high tide coming in, building and building. And then it washes out, leaving behind the empty stretch of sand.

The book is the same way, but better (of course) because it’s more stretched out. Not by there being more to the story, but just by nature of it being a book – it’s unlikely you’ll read it in a single sitting, so the story stretches out over several days, waiting patiently in a pocket of your mind until you pick it up again. And even when you do finish the book, like I said, it lingers.

Never Let Me Go is a story woven of Kathy H.’s memories of growing up at a place called Hailsham in the English countryside with her best friends Ruth and Tommy. It’s like boarding school – the students live in dorms separated by gender and age, they go to lessons, they spend lazy afternoons playing games on the lawn, and they weather the ups and downs of their relationships with their peers. Yet the students are aware, without ever thinking too carefully about it, that they at Hailsham are special. The Hailsham children will grow up to be donors, in an alternate world where cloning is a successful cure to humankind’s incurable killers. Their fate is inevitable, but as they leave Hailsham on the cusp of adulthood (and with it, donations), Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth begin to question things about their time at Hailsham – how they submitted artwork to win a place in a special gallery, how certain topics had an unspoken taboo – and what role they might play in truth of certain rumors circulating amongst Hailsham graduates, rumors of deferral. Never Let Me Go is partly a science-fiction novel, partly a novel about the ties of love and friendship and shared experience, partly a novel about growing older and entering “real life”, and even partly a novel about ethics. But mostly it’s a novel about the human soul.

Though essentially linear and never hard to follow, the narrative moves fluidly backwards and forwards in time throughout the novel, much like the meandering memory process it mimics. I think this tone is one of the things that makes the mournful poignancy of Never Let Me Go so calm and understated without subtracting from its impact – instead of being inundated with the acute flares of emotion aroused by the events as they happened, the reader experiences the contemplative reflection of someone recalling their life knowing their time is soon and realizing that regret will only embitter the memories they have left.

Ah. I can’t go on and do it any justice. Just read it. And then see the movie. Not necessarily in that order – for once I can see a benefit in reversal, in gleaning the visual mood from the movie before reading the book.

Books Read This Year: 12

Top 100 Progress: 39/100