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

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

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

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

Real Live Boyfriends

By E. Lockhart
★★★☆☆

Three Things I liked about Real Live Boyfriends:

1. Clever footnotes.

2. Ruby using Tums as pebbles at her boyfriend’s window.

3. Adorable and witty rapport with said boyfriend, including dates planned by the ‘Mutual Admiration Society.’

I have a running list in my head of fictional characters I’d like to befriend* and Ruby Oliver definitely makes the cut.  A vegetarian film buff and perpetual list-maker who lives on a houseboat in Seattle, has a personal dress code of fishnets and vintage dresses, overanalyzes everything, and hums heavy metal to ward off anxiety attacks that flare up when she’s stressed, Ruby is a little too quirky to quite fit in at Tate Prep, the private school she attends on scholarship. To earn spending money, she works in a zoo mucking animal stalls (while discussing life, love, and the pursuit of happiness with her favorite pygmy goat, Robespierre) and in a shoe store where she sells Birkenstocks to hippies with horrid feet. Oh, and she’s on an ongoing mission to consume the ultimate deliciousness in cake form. Don’t you like her already?

This is the fourth installment in Lockhart’s Ruby Oliver quartet. It’s the summer before senior year, and Ruby’s relationship with her new Real Live Boyfriend Noel is perfection… until it’s not. Noel comes back from a trip to visit his brother in New York subdued and uncommunicative, refusing to admit anything’s wrong. The strain causes them to fall out and Ruby must continue her senior year (including making a documentary for her film school applications, dealing with her erratic and eccentric parents, attending her shrink appointments, and repairing an old friendship) alone. Will Ruby survive senior year while sorting out the chaos that is her life? Will she learn to control her panic attacks? Will she work things out with Noel? And most importantly, will she achieve success in her pursuit of deliciousness? Your guess is as good as mine**.

In my opinion, there’s a fine line between amusingly quirky and outright ridiculous, and this Ruby Oliver installment aired on the side of ridiculousness. Exhibit A: Her mother (whose behavior is more childish than her daughter’s, Exhibit B) hatches a plan to start Seattle’s (and the world’s, no doubt) first meatloafery, a Coldstone-esque, make-your-own approach to meatloaf. Fortunately, her family puts the kibosh on her plans before it ever leaves the kitchen. Exhibit C: Her father, morose over the recent loss of his mother, forgets to come home one night due to being cheered up by playing Guitar Hero Metallica with a buddy until 4 a.m. The list goes on. Some of the ridiculousness is amusing, and some of it is simply scoff-worthy (meatloafery, ‘nuff said).

Verdict? As my mother often says, “It is what it is.” Real Live Boyfriends is a quick*** and entertaining read, but don’t expect more than that.

Side Note: Is it just me, or are covers with Real Live People on them irritating?

* Such as: the Harry Potter trio (obviously), James Sveck, Elizabeth Bennett, Rory Gilmore, Veronica Mars, Juno MacGuff and Paulie Bleeker, Mary “Jacky” Faber, etc.

** Oh, play along. It’s more fun if you pretend like you don’t know what’s coming.

*** I read it in a grand total of about 3 ½ hours.

Same Story, Different Review:
The Crooked Bookshelf

Books Read This Year: 11

Top 100 Progress: 39/100

Possession (Top 100 #39)

By A.S. Byatt

★★★☆☆

When my roommate first noticed this book sitting on my desk, waiting to be read, she laughed and thought it to be some kind of mass-market paperback caliber romance novel. With a title like Possession, I don’t blame her! But in fact, Possession resides in a completely different realm of literature. It won Byatt the Booker Prize – England’s highest literary honor – in 1990 and is included in the BBC Top 100 list I’m slowly but surely working my way through*.

I think the fact that the title is so misleading is largely due to the connotations of the word ‘possession,’ which first conjures up notions of obsessive romance. While romance is an integral aspect of Possession, the novel does not limit itself to it but spans the word’s multifaceted connotations.

Possession, n. The act or state of being possessed**; the physical control or occupancy of land, property, etc, whether or not accompanied by ownership; domination, actuation, or obsession by a feeling, idea, etc.

Contemporary scholars of the Victorian poets Randolph Ash and Christabel LaMotte, Roland Mitchell and Maud Bailey are united by academic intrigue when Roland discovers a letter hinting at a hitherto unknown connection between the two poets. The academic investigation that ensues not only overhauls Roland and Maud’s understandings of the poets they’ve devoted their lives to, but overhauls the lives of the academics themselves as the unveiling of the connection between the presumed devoted husband and lifelong spinster becomes increasingly high stakes and personal. As far as that pesky word ‘possession’ and it’s multifaceted connotations, Possession explores the obvious possession rendered by love, as well as the possession of historical documents and artifacts, and even the possession of historical figures by the people who study them – and vice versa.

Depending how you look at it, Possession is either the most theatrical novel about academia you’ve ever read, or the dullest and densest mystery novel you’ve ever read. 

My problem with this book is that Byatt interrupts the narrative to insert excerpts from the poets’ epic poems, drafts of their personal letters, and even blurbs from biographies and analytical essays that often went on a bit too long and were – let’s face it –just plain dry. I get why she did this, I really do. She wanted the reader to feel they were immersed in the investigation too; she wanted us to feel as though we knew the poets as intimately as Roland and Maud. But the end result was disruptive and would disengage me every time I really started to be drawn in to the story – and it was a compelling story. I just thought it went on a bit too long.

Now, metaphors and themes and foreshadowing aside, the point of writing a novel – any novel, chick lit, classic, or otherwise – is to tell a story, is it not? And thus it follows that a successful novel is one whose story draws the reader in, whereas an unsuccessful novel fails to do so, resulting in a novel which is an effort of diligence and toil to read. The question, then, becomes: Is a novel successful if it is literarily admirable without being engaging? Conversely, is it successful if it’s engaging without being particularly literarily admirable? I’ll leave you to ponder. If you come up with anything decisive, let me know.

* There's also a movie based on it, but I watched the trailer and I don't think I'll bother watching it. Partly because Aaron Eckhart bothers me, and partly because it just doesn't look good.
** Illuminating, no? I hate definitions that use a different conjugation of the word to explain the meaning of the form in question.

Books Read This Year: 10

Top 100 Progress: 39/100

On The Good Life

By Cicero

★★★☆☆

Correct me if I’m wrong, but Cicero’s one of those names everyone seems to recognize even if most people haven’t a clue what he’s known for (see: Plato, Socrates, Aristotle…). I was no different. Cicero, Socrates… what’s the difference? But in actual fact Cicero is nothing like Socrates.* (Thank God.) Nor Plato, aside from a minor use of monologue disguised as dialogue.

A good chunk of this book is devoted to Cicero’s essays On Duties and On Friendship. On Duties is kind of an ancient version of How To Win Friends and Influence People. Cicero claims that one must be well-liked in order to achieve much of anything, which ties in with his overarching philosophy that the human beings are inexorably intertwined with one another. We’re symbiotic, if you will. On Duties outlines how to earn and maintain popular favor, and what to do with it once you’ve got it. I’ve never been very comfortable with the whole idea of self-marketing, so I wasn’t super keen on this section, though it was interesting to read. I did like his theory that our symbiosis can be an agent for the greatest good and the fiercest detriment, however, which sort of segues into his ideas in On Friendship, where he cites friendship as the best thing one can achieve in life, but friendship gone bad as one of life’s greatest failings and dangers.

For the most part I enjoyed On Friendship – it tiptoed into the territory of social psychology, which I love – but I thought Cicero’s adamant ideals of wholly genuine friendship verged into a sort of platonic take on True Love. It’s beautiful in theory, but I’m not sure I buy the idea that there are any friendships entirely devoid of the occasional falsity and pretense. We are only human, after all. Cicero’s talk about the sincere, unpretentious, and unambiguous institution of friendship felt reminiscent to me of how Ayn Rand speaks of the Self, and I question whether it's any more practical in real life. That being said, I did enjoy his distinctions between different types of friendship, and his theories on what brings friends together and what catalysts start fraying the threads that bind. College is notoriously a period of social upheaval, and I found myself identifying with much of his commentary on these shifting dynamics. In fact, that’s the major thing that sets Cicero apart from some of our other readings in my mind – he’s relevant to modern society in a more manifest way than the Greek philosophers and their more abstract conjectures. You can underline passages and apply them verbatim to our present society, as though human beings haven’t changed as much as we think they have in the past 2,000 years. And that’s just plain cool. 

* Interesting Fact: We have no published works by Socrates. He only exists in other philosopher’s characterizations of him! Nuggets like this are why I go to college, truly.


Books Read This Year: 4

Top 100 Progress: 38/100