Christopher Plummer, nominated for Best Supporting Actor in The Last Station:
I’m absolutely delighted that Helen Mirren and I have both been nominated by the Academy for portraying that stormy couple, The Tolstoy’s. As I’ve just turned 80, there’s no way it will go to my head.
Book 6 in Cannonball Read 2
The Hunger Games has everything I want in a book: it’s entertaining; it has a complex, not always likeable but always interesting main character; and it raises some Serious Issues without being overly portentous or heavy-handed. It’s also a page-turner and a quick read, and while it manages to hit all the plot points you might have predicted, it gets there in unexpected ways.
The Hunger Games takes place in a country with a rich, opulent capital, surrounded by 13 districts. Every year, one girl and one boy from each district are selected as tributes to the capital. All the tributes compete in the Hunger Games, which take place in a giant arena. For days, sometimes weeks, they fight each other until only one remains alive. Back in the districts, people are required to watch the games and cheer on their district’s tributes.
Collins’ narrative focuses on Katniss Everdeen, a young girl from one of the poorer districts who ends up in the games. About half of the book covers the time leading up to the games - Katniss hunting and gathering for her mother and sister on the day of selection; the selection itself; the glamourous processionals and interviews that she must participate in before the games begin; and the training she undergoes. Even though Collins takes time getting to the games themselves, the story never lags in this early part of the book; in fact, it is just as riveting as the action described later on.
Collins brings in many issues - the disparity between the wealth in the capital and the poverty in some of the districts; the way that many poorer children are almost forced to put themselves at higher risk of being selected in order to provide food for their families; and the way the games are a constant reminder of the overwhelming power that the capital wields in the lives of the citizens.
Perhaps most interesting is the way Collins portrays the various people who help to plan and implement the games each year. As mentioned above, the capital wields great power, power that is difficult to resist in any meaningful way. Some of the people who work for the games buy into the system wholeheartedly - the idea that the games are an exciting event to be celebrated, and that the districts should be proud of ‘their’ competitors. Others, such as Katniss’ stylist, seem to be just finding a way to do something that they enjoy within the context of the games. There’s also Haymitch, a previous winner of the games who is supposed to be training Katniss, but is mostly just drunk a lot of the time, probably due to the emotional weight of preparing two people each year to go into the arena and die. Collins complicates the picture beyond simply those who resist the capital and those who support the system blindly; in this world, as in our own, there are varying levels of resistance and collaboration, and varying levels of rationalization.
The Hunger Games would be a great read even without the layers of characterization Collins adds; the story is simply engrossing. That, for me, is the true test of a book that includes some kind of commentary or connection to bigger issues: does the story stand on it’s own? If the characters are memorable, and the story is good, then I’ll read it, but I won’t read a book that allegedly has some grand social commentary but fails to tell a story I want to hear. That’s what non-fiction is for.
Book 5 in Cannonball Read 2
I picked up Julie and Julia, Julie Powell’s book about the year she cooked every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and blogged about it, after watching the movie. I did not find the Julie storyline very interesting, but I was intrigued by the actual food she was making and thought I could hear a bit more detail about the cooking, instead of it being the backdrop for a not that interesting story.
Sadly, the book, just like the movie, contains a lot more about Julie’s personal life than it does about the project she has undertaken. That personal life is not so interesting. Basically, she does all of the following things a lot: 1. drinks, 2. orders bacon pizza, and 3. struggles with her project. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with those things, but it does not make for fascinating reading unless the writer is truly great. Julie Powell is not a great writer; she’s not bad, but if she had not undertaken a fairly complex and interesting project, no one would take much interest in her writing.
It also suffers from Powell’s own self-image. Did anyone else, when they were watching Adaptation, think there was no way Charlie Kaufman could be so unlikeable as he made himself in that screenplay? There’s a little of that going on here. The Julie Powell in her autobiographical work is fairly insufferable, becoming self-centered and acting as if the whole world revolves around her project. She is repeatedly rude and dismissive towards her husband - and this is only made worse by the fact that she recognizes she is being pretty awful to him but then continues to do it anyway. I have a feeling that this is Powell’s attempt to put on a certain personality, a flawed but lovable and self-deprecating cutie-pie - ‘oh look at me, I got carried away but I’m mocking myself for it later’ - but it just doesn’t work. She comes off as grating, cold, and self-absorbed.
My next move is to go straight to the source and read Julia Child’s cookbook. That’s all I wanted - writing about food, detailed writing about the process of cooking and the way different methods impact the result. Sorry Julie Powell, and Amy Adams, you’re not really worth my time.
Book 4 in Cannonball Read 2
I will just get one thing out of the way before I start: short stories are not my thing. I mean that a. they are not a favorite genre, so even the most well-crafted collection does not inspire the same personal reaction as a novel that has the same level of craft (though I can and do appreciate individual stories at a higher level), and b. I am not good at talking about/writing about short story collections. In fact, I have a suspicion that I am complete shit at it. So, here goes my very uninformed attempt at conveying my thoughts on Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Interpreter of Maladies.
Interpreter of Maladies is pretty amazing. Each story creates its own world, and lets you know a great amount about the characters in a small amount of time. You can picture the characters, the settings, and the actions perfectly. You understand the actions and feelings of the characters.
Lahiri’s stories are mostly about Indian immigrants in the U.S. Some of the characters moved to the U.S. in their lifetime, some of them are the children of immigrants. Like Lahiri’s novel The Namesake, Interpreter of Maladies explores the meaning of identity, ethnicity and culture in the U.S. Sometimes these issues are in the foreground, sometimes they are only background; in all of the stories, the subject is difficulty in relationship and communication.
The first and last stories - ‘A Temporary Matter’ and ‘The Third and Final Continent’ - were probably my favorites. ‘A Temporary Matter’ is about a young married couple who have grown apart since the wife miscarried. The bulk of the story takes place during a series of power outages, as each night they confide secrets to each other. The sadness and longing in the story is palpable, and Lahiri uses the concrete details of meals - both the food prepared and the physical setting - to give the story a sense of place, something that happens frequently in the stories that make up Interpreter of Maladies (and in The Namesake as well). The story is told from the husband’s perspective, and he - at first - interprets this confessions by candlelight as a sign that their relationship is on the mend; however, after the power outages are over, his wife tells him she is filing for a divorce. Lahiri gracefully shows how the secrets are not the kind that bonds them together, but the kind that reveal how far apart they now stand.
In ‘The Third and Final Continent’, a young Indian man moves into a boarding house in Boston to prepare for his wife’s arrival. The story details the strange house he lives in, with a well-meaning but elderly and increasingly infirm landlord, Ms. Croft. He develops a friendship with her, but moves out when his wife arrives after six weeks. At first, he does not like her very much (they only know each other from the wedding in India). When he takes her to meet Ms. Croft, the events that transpire are the beginning of the two warming to each other and falling in love.
The stories in Interpreter of Maladies are graceful and often melancholy. Lahiri gives a full picture, such that I can look back on each title and remember the main characters, and even specific images or interactions from the story. Maybe good short stories for me are like obscenity for Potter Stewart: I can’t define them, but I know them when I see them.
Book 3 in Cannonball Read 2
Water for Elephants is the kind of book that has tons of cliched characters, rushes some of the central relationships, and seems completely implausible - but somehow it works. It does not get up to the level of greatness, but it is likeable and readable.
The bulk of the novel is set during the Great Depression, and the main character, Jacob, is about to finish veterinary school when his parents die. The bank forecloses on the house, he can’t finish his exams, so he runs away and joins the circus. No, really, that’s what happens, and I rolled my eyes then, and a few other times - like when Jacob’s roommate, Kinko, goes from hating him to being his friend because Jacob did one nice thing for him; the characterization of August, the circus’ animal trainer, as an abusive asshole who doesn’t care about anything (his abuse is signaled by the way he treats the animals, and there is no way to telegraph a characters evilness that is easier than making him an animal abuser); the way that Marlena, August’s wife, falls for Jacob for no other reason than that he is there, and he is a nice guy; and lots of other details of the plot and characterizations.
The novel does work, despite these cliches. A big part of this for me, was the dual structure - the novel is told in flashback by a 90+ year old Jacob in a nursing home. These scenes take up a small part of the novel, but paint a compelling picture of the loss of autonomy that comes with aging, and the way that memory can be elusive and vague. I can’t make up my mind about the way the novel reveals what you think is the ending, but then pulls a bit of a bait and switch on what really happened - whether it was clever, or just trying to be clever and ending up too cute.
I mentioned earlier that Marlena falls for Jacob for no apparent reason, and that still stands as the novel’s most perplexing flaw. The other cliches work somehow - you find August scary, you find Kinko and Jacob’s friendship believable despite its’ shaky basis - but I really could not get my head around Marlena and Jacob’s relationship. SPOILER - although I can understand Marlena initially being drawn to someone who is nicer than her husband, they remain married for many decades until her death, so something had to be there that was just not in the novel; I guess it’s possible that, back in the day, women just married - and stayed married to - any decent guy, rather than expecting any sort of specialness about their relationship.
It’s a decent book. I can’t quite give the glowing recommendation that some friends and family have given, but even the cliches work, so Gruen must be doing something right. In the end, Water for Elephants may be a bit more complex in structure than it needs to be to tell the story, but the story that’s there is good, and deals mostly with fine, upstanding people struggling to do right against evil, mustache-twirling villains - in other words, it’s easy to identify with the protagonists and hate the bad guys. That scheme is a bit too simple to make a great book, but it does make for a good one.
Book 2 in Cannonball Read 2
So many people have recommended Octavia Butler to me, so I finally picked up one of her books at the library. As it turns out, I probably should have asked for specific book recommendations, as Fledgling is pretty mediocre, and none of the folks who recommended Butler had heard of this book, let alone read it.
Fledgling starts with an intriguing premise: a young woman, Shoreh, wakes up wounded and starving in the woods, and cannot remember anything before she woke up. She slowly heals, then explores the woods to find a small community that is burned to the ground - a community that seems familiar to her. When a stranger picks her up by the side of the road - she appears to be only twelve or thirteen years old - she drinks some of his blood, but the act binds them to one another, and the two of them start to piece together what has happened to her through bits of her memory coming back, folklore about vampires, and newspaper accounts.
The book remained interesting while Shoreh was learning the basics of survival (these vampires live in groups, each with a handful of humans who live with them, and they feed off of them and become deeply emotionally bonded to them) and trying to figure out what has happened to her and her community. She has no one to teach her even the most basic survival techniques until she meets her father, and then he is pretty quickly dispatched by the same folks who tried to kill Shoreh. Oops, spoiler. After that, she’s on her own again, with a few humans in tow that can help her out a bit, but also depend on her. Butler does a good job of crafting the narrative in these early scenes, as Shoreh uses her intuition and common sense to figure out how to survive, and is helped or hindered, depending on the situation, by her child-like appearance.
The book really starts to drag in the last third, when some vampire family that is helping Shoreh calls a vampire council. This leads to a lot of descriptions of various vampire families and their alliances to one another, which is not only incredibly boring, but contains many characters who are one-dimensional helpers or villains.
I think the biggest disappointment for me in this book is that I have heard so much about Butler as a storyteller who also engages in social criticism within her fantasy/scifi work, and this book itself proclaims that it is about testing the limits of tolerance and community. But the entire conflict is about really racist vampires who want to destroy Shoreh and call her a ‘mongrel bitch’. That’s not really the kind of social criticism I enjoy - it’s as subtle as a two-by-four over the head. Having everyone be either completely supportive of Shoreh, or a murderous racist who hates her, is not exactly a nuanced depiction, and does not bear any relation to the world that most of us inhabit where there are shades of gray.
The last criticism I have may seem like a petty gripe, but here goes. This was the worst editing I have ever seen in a book. There were words constantly misspelled (’he’, ’she’, and ‘the’ were interchangeable), quotation marks in the wrong place or completely missing, and sentences that started immediately following the period at the end of the last one, with no space in between. I tend to notice these things a lot, so I let a certain amount go, but this book was ridiculous. It got worse as it went on, like the copy editor started the book with a bottle of whiskey in hand and plowed through both the book and the bottle a little too quickly.
I am still somewhat interested in checking out Butler’s other books, such as Kindred and The Parable of the Sower, but she’s not too high on my list after Fledgling. There are some creative ideas in this book, and it unfolds in an interesting way through the first half of the book, but ultimately it became too much talk and vampire councils.
If you’ve read this book and/or Butler’s other works, please let me know what you think in the comments.
Book 1 in Cannonball Read 2
A Man of the People is decidedly different than the other Achebe books I have read (Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease). A Man of the People deals explicitly with politics: the main character, Odili, befriends Chief Nanga, a Minister in the government of an unnamed African country, but after having a personal fallout with Nanga, Odili decides to run against him in the upcoming election. Although the book has been described as ‘political satire,’ to me it felt serious, mostly due to the sad implications of the political system it satirizes.
Achebe’s writing is in fine form, but his protagonist is not so easily sympathetic as in No Longer at Ease, and the book is narrated from the viewpoint of the protagonist. The reader is meant to see things from Odili’s point of view, to identify with him as a representative of the younger generation, reforming the corrupt politics of Nanga, who represents the old guard.
Switching from an omniscient narrator to a main character narrator also abandons the almost invisible shaping that Achebe gave to No Longer at Ease. Odili just states facts, including his emotional state and interpretation of events; there is no explanation or attempt to persuade in his direction. The result for me was that I kept brushing up against the main character’s perceptions and biases, a sign, I believe, of a well-written novel in the first person.
However, one of the central arcs of the novel is Odili seeking revenge on Nanga for sleeping with a woman he wanted to sleep with and had been involved with in the past. This revenge takes the form of Odili trying to steal Nanga’s fiancee. Instead of seeing it as Odili taking revenge on a man he sees as corrupt despite being taking in momentarily by his charm, I could not get past the perception that it was basically a dick measuring contest sublimated into the political arena. Thus I could not take A Man of the People to heart, though it is well-crafted.
I keep on butting up against No Longer at Ease as it compares to this book, which is not entirely fair, as it sets the bar unreasonably high, and A Man of the People is an entirely different beast. I admire Achebe’s success with a different style than Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease, even if I hold it somewhat at arm’s length due to my lack of identification with the protaganist.
I’m gearing up for two big projects starting in November: one is National Novel Writing Month, requiring 50,000 words in the month of November. The other is Cannonball Read II, which requires only 52 books in a year, but short reviews will not be tolerated. Expect thoughts on each book beyond ‘That was an interesting read’ and ‘meh’. I have an ideal in my mind that I will also read some criticism of most books I read.
Here’s a partial list of books I will be reading for Cannonball Read, Part II:
That’s just from my hold list at the library. It should be a fun year!
A year ago, I undertook a challenge: to read one hundred books in a year. As of sometime before midnight last night, I finished. Suck it, jerkballs.
I read a wide range of books - a lot of P.G. Wodehouse, a lot of novels, some crappy pop feminism books, finally finding a streak of good non-fiction at the end (bell hooks, Michele Wallace, Joanna Russ, and Shulamith Firestone). The repeating authors include P.G. Wodehouse (11), Neil Gaiman (6), Margaret Atwood (4), bell hooks, Douglas Adams and Ian McEwan (3 each, and I can’t explain why I read a third McEwan novel after being less than enthralled with the first two), Edith Wharton, Sarah Vowell, George Pelecanos, Paul Auster, Max ‘Zombie’ Brooks and Christopher Buckley (2 each). Oh, and Charlaine Harris, as author of the Sookie Stackhouse (aka True Blood) series, and Harper Connelly mysteries with 13. Shut up!
Also, a whopping 61 of the books were novels!
I loved doing this project, and I am starting again - though this time it is only 52 (good because I got a little too focused on just finishing books! now! towards the end) with the caveat that you have to write a few paragraphs review (bad, I procrastinate and don’t write the reviews, good, thinking about what I’ve read).
Anyway, the biggest point of this post is the following: I have ranked the books I read according to category of goodness, and loosely in order of quality (descending). Please make suggestions based on my (fairly obvious) likes and dislikes as illuminated by this list. Also, please engage with me in conversation about the books. ‘Why is this here?’ and ‘Why did you like x book so much?’ are appropriate and welcome questions; ‘If you don’t like z book you are a stupid turd’ or ‘this book is clearly better than that book’ with no explanation are neither appropriate, nor questions, and will be ignored.
Good reading to all!
My Personal Canon - books I want to re-read again and again, they contain something elusive between the covers that is greater than the sum of the parts. These are books that could largely be considered ‘classics,’ and are also personal favorites.
The Greats - books that I would wholeheartedly recommend to almost anyone, they are well-crafted but didn’t quite make ‘favoritest ever ever’ status.
Pretty Good - check out these books if you are interested in the subject matter or author.
Not Anything to Write Home About - I don’t regret the time I spent reading these, but they wouldn’t come up in a conversation about books I recommend. There’s a lot of non-fiction in here that is either not that provocative (to me) in subject matter, or not that well written; a lot of the fiction is stuff that other people seem to like a lot more than I do, so there must be something appealing that just isn’t for me.
Meh - only if you are a die-hard fan of the author or obssessed with the subject matter.
Avoid at All Costs
bell hooks is a simply phenomenal writer, and I do not think I can give her justice here; these books deserve a full review at some point.
Also, I finished 100 books in a year! A round-up post will come by sometime soon, so stay tuned.