Two short reviews

Only Human: A Divine Comedy, by Jenny Diski

I mooched this book from April Boland after reading about it on her Sunday Salon post. It’s a retelling of the story of Abraham and Sarah, with a twist: the story is narrated alternately in the third person from Sarah’s point of view, and in the (omniscient?) first person, by God.

God is by far the most interesting character in the book. God is “only human” in a lot of ways; he (she?) experiences confusion, jealousy, loneliness, love, desire, dismay. And what I liked most is that the author has come up with a completely coherent explanation for God’s actions, all the way up to the sacrifice of Isaac. Whatever your religious beliefs, there is lots of food for thought here.

Where this book falls short? Alas, in the storytelling department. I found myself wishing for more detail, more color, more description, more dialogue, more showing and less telling. A lot of the time I felt like I was reading an essay rather than a novel.

Garden Spells, by Sarah Addison Allen

I read two reviews of this book, one glowing and the other vitriolic. Of course, I failed to bookmark either one, and now I can’t find them. Needless to say, I was sufficiently intrigued by the two extremes that I felt like I really should read it myself.

This was quite a contrast with Only Human. No problems in the storytelling department here! It’s a light romance, with a bit of magic. Lots of color, detail, dialogue, action. Totally predictable plot, but don’t all light romances have totally predicable plots? The fun is in the charming characters, the “garden spells,” the humor, the quirkiness. This book certainly won’t change your worldview, but it’s a nice way to spend a rainy afternoon. Two thumbs up. :-)

Posted on August 30, 2008, 8:07 am by Julie | Filed in Reviews | Comments (4)

Sunday Salon: a mixed bag

salon.pngHello, Saloners!

I have missed a couple of Sundays in a row because of first being away and second having no wireless connection. Needless to say, I am glad to be back and looking forward to finding out what y’all have been reading.

I’ve been reading quite a bit in the last couple of weeks. Here are some of the highlights.

Lotte’s Locket, by Virginia Sorensen. This was an RCF (re-read of a childhood favorite) and I was dying to see if it was as good as I remembered it. Basically, it’s about a little girl growing up in post-WWII Denmark. Her father was killed in the war and now her mother is getting ready to remarry an American and they will move to Texas. And Lotte doesn’t want to go. It’s sort of a quiet book, a “mood & setting” book more than anything else. I loved the same thing about it now that I remember loving then: the details about Denmark. Lots of Danish words with their mysteriously fascinating ås and øs, lots of references to foods, customs, and Hans Christian Andersen. But one thing I only notice now, as an adult, is how incredibly conservative Lotte is. There were times when I wanted to slap her: come on, Lotte, you’re about to go on an exciting adventure! Change is good! Travel is thrilling! Even so, this is a great book and I highly recommend it to upper-elementary bookworms.

In Praise of Lies, by Patricia Melo. I got this one from BookMooch. I mooched it after reading a review of it at This Book is For You. It totally lived up to expectations, and then some! Not only is it a brilliant homage to the masters of noir fiction (think Double Indemnity) but it’s also a totally hilarious send-up of the publishing industry. It’s got crimes of passion, snakes, and self-help books. What more could you possibly ask for?

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, by Gertrude Stein. Ok, I’ve only read half of this so far. But it is amazing. Gertrude Stein, where have you been all my life? Reading it, within the first few pages — actually, as soon as I read page 69 — I felt the shock of recognition: this is a kindred spirit.

Posted on August 24, 2008, 8:54 am by Julie | Filed in Sunday Salon | Comments (9)

On reading short stories

So, not to keep you in suspense, the second faerie book I read was The Ladies of Grace Adieu, by Susanna Clarke, which I first heard about from Ella. Susanna Clarke is also the author of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, a book that I am very fond of not only because it was a terrifically entertaining good read but also because it was the subject of my very first blog post. Awwww!

This too was a terrifically entertaining good read. These stories are all set in the same world (more or less) as Strange & Norrell, and they are written in the same style and with the same sly humor and even with some of the same characters. If you liked Strange & Norrell you’ll definitely like this. If you tried to like Strange & Norrell but found it too long and rambling, well, you just might like this anyway.

Now I must admit I approached this book with some trepidation, not because I didn’t like Strange & Norrell, but because I don’t usually like short stories. I try, but I always feel like I’m missing something, especially the kind of stories that are (I guess) meant to show a slice o’ life and don’t have much plot. I have thought a lot about why this is and one of the conclusions I’ve come to is this: I don’t know when the story is going to end. With a novel you can tell “where you are” by how many pages you have left. I don’t mean this as a “gee only fifty more pages and I’m done” kind of thing. Rather, it’s being able to comprehend the structure of the story. Knowing “where I am” helps me to appreciate the writer’s craft, I think. And with a short story in a collection, unless it’s the last one in the book, I often feel like I’m flying blind.

I used to read tons of science fiction short stories and I never felt like I was flying blind. And I didn’t feel that way with The Ladies of Grace Adieu either. I enjoyed them one hundred percent, with no worries that a story would end unexpectedly. I believe this is because these faerie tales (like sci fi shorts) follow a very conventional plot arc, with an obvious beginning, middle, and end, and often with typical fairy tale plot twists like things coming in sets of three. From the very beginning of the story you know there’s going to be build-up, tension, and a satisfactory resolution. Voilà!

Now, I don’t think that a short story has to have a conventional plot arc in order for me to like it. I think maybe I would appreciate more “literary” short stories if I could just know “where I am” while I’m reading them. I suppose I could place a bookmark at the end of the story, but I don’t think that’s as good as simply being aware of the thickness of the stack of remaining pages. A bookmark would require conscious checking.

I recently subscribed to One Story. It’s a little magazine that publishes a single short story at a time, one every three weeks. I received the first one (haven’t read it yet) and it’s exactly as advertised: it’s simply a cute little pamphlet that contains nothing but the one story. No ads, nothing. And because it’s just the one story, I’ll always know “where I am,” even if the story turns out to be a slice o’ lifer with no plotline. So, heh heh, I can test my hypothesis.

What do you think? Do you like short stories?

Posted on August 21, 2008, 7:27 am by Julie | Filed in Reading, Reviews | Comments (15)

Faerie tales

Quite by coincidence I happened to read two books in a row about the sidhe. You know: the Little Folk; the “people of the hills”; the fey creatures whose name you don’t want to say out loud or your milk will go sour; who are afraid of iron; who if you wander into their kingdom you’ll be there for three hundred years but it’ll only feel like three days

The first book was Magic Street, by Orson Scott Card. Now the thing about Orson Scott Card is, he only writes one story. I know this because over the years I have read practically everything of his that I could find, including even his Mormon fiction. OSC is a storytelling genius. His pacing, structure, narrative, tension & resolution, are superb. I’ve never felt disappointed by an ending or annoyed by plot loopholes. Some of his imagery and ideas have profoundly affected my worldview. (Some of his other ideas make me want to plug my ears and sing “la la la, I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you,” but that’s a topic for different post.) However, the fact remains that he only writes one story, and his cast of characters is limited. Ender is Alvin Maker is Nafai is Bean — close your eyes and you can’t tell one voice from another. Make a list of the main themes of each novel and they’re the same too. He is very big on: ethics, personal responsibility, the nature of “community,” what it means to be a leader. It doesn’t matter whether the setting is hardcore sci-fi, alternate history, high fantasy, a retelling of the Book of Mormon, or, in Magic Street, a present-day middle-class black neighborhood in Los Angeles that’s infested with faeries. The story is the same.

The story is the same, but it’s a really good story, and I for one don’t mind reading it over and over again. And I was really interested to see what he would do with this particular plot hook. First, and this is a very interesting issue not just for OSC but for any writer: his setting, the middle-class black neighborhood in LA, is one that he obviously has absolutely no personal experience of. Is it brave or foolhardy of him to write about it? It’s not as though we see it through the eyes of an outsider; all the characters in the story (the human characters, that is) are actual residents of the neighborhood. To OSC’s credit, though, I completely stopped worrying by the time I was about two chapters in. And even more to his credit, he gives a very satisfactory explanation for his choice of setting in the acknowledgements.

I was also really interested to see how he would handle the faeries. I would not have thought the fey would be a good vehicle for OSC, since (forgive the geeky D&D jargon) they are so chaotic and he is so lawful. Not to mention the fact that they are so Celtic and he is so American! Well, I must admit he didn’t do such a good job with this. The faeries definitely had a lawful cast of mind and they felt very American, too. I suppose that if you can accept the idea of faeries in LA, you could also accept that they might gravitate towards leather and motorcycles. I was fine with this myself, but purists might not be.

All in all, this book was extremely entertaining. If you like Orson Scott Card, and if you’re not too picky about your faeries, you will definitely like this.

* * *

Welllllll… I had originally intended to write a comparison of two different books about faeries. I didn’t realize I would have this much to say about the first one. I think I’ll leave the second one for a separate post.

Posted on August 19, 2008, 10:45 am by Julie | Filed in Reviews | Comments (8)

Back online

Actually, we returned from camp ten days ago, but this the first day I’ve been able to post. This is going to sound so lame and whiney, but all last week we had no wireless internet. That is, we (the four of us in the family who use the internet) could take turns plugging laptops directly into the modem, but even aside from the bickering about whose turn it was and how long the turns should last, this was a less than satisfactory solution. There’s not a lot of room to put a laptop where the modem is, so we’d end up sitting on this hard-backed chair with the laptop literally in our laps, hunched over it in such a position that our necks would start to hurt in about five seconds. It was okay for answering the most urgent emails and taking my pathetic turns in a humiliating game of Wordscraper but not for blogging.

Now we’ve got the router finally working and I spent a lot of the day catching up on the important but not super urgent emails that were too hard to answer while hunched over in the hard-backed chair. I did great. Cleaned out my inbox, made my to-do list for the upcoming week, got everything under control… And then I checked my feed reader. Gulp. Over four hundred posts!

I’m sorry!

I couldn’t do it. Much as I love all the blogs I subscribe to, l took a deep breath and marked everything “read” in one fell swoop. Huge guilt, but if I didn’t, I’d procrastinate for days and feel like I couldn’t write a blog post until I’d read & commented on everyone else’s first. And I’ve been reading some interesting books lately, plus I have a long overdue post about graphic novels in the works, not to mention the most recent Weekly Geeks assignment (author photos) which looks very fun. So… I’m starting fresh from this point on. Stay tuned for some more bookish posts coming soon.

And just to spice up this boring “housekeeping” post, here’s a vacation photo.

Our cabin was near a little wooded area. This little guy and his sister, and sometimes his mom also, were frequent visitors in our sideyard.

Posted on August 18, 2008, 5:07 pm by Julie | Filed in Blogging, Photos | Comments (4)

It’s that time of year again

lanyard…when our clan makes its way up to beautiful northern Michigan for a week at family camp.

Here is my post from two summers ago — I believe this post gets more search engine hits than any other I’ve ever written. It seems there are lots of people who want to know what “twisted box stitch” looks like, and even more who apparently are looking for material for their own “how I spent my summer vacation” essay.

So we’re in a frenzy of laundry and packing and organizing and of course the biggest decision of all, what books to bring. Oh my gosh you won’t believe this. I was already excited enough about all my recent BookMooch acquisitions, and then what should happen but my sister-in-law, known to you as Aunt Sara, came to town because she is part of the clan going up north. And what should she bring along but a copy of the childhood favorite that I’ve been pining for: Lotte’s Locket by Virginia Sorensen. She found a beautiful used copy with library binding and card pocket intact (the book was last checked out in 1993), with pages slightly yellow and oh-so-soft around the edges and that delicious library book smell… oh! Thank you Sara!!!

Then of course I will bring The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. And what else? I have In Praise of Lies by Patricia Melo, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Prep, another serial killer book, and a few others that are upstairs and I can’t remember the titles. I think Capt. Corelli would be appropriate now that I am the proud owner and plucker of a real mandolin but I am open to suggestions.

I’ll be back next week, and I look forward to catching up when I return. Happy reading, everyone!

Posted on August 1, 2008, 5:03 pm by Julie | Filed in Diversions, Family, Reading | Comments (7)

Wondering what to read next?

I just had to take a quick break from The Eyre Affair to share this great idea with you, which I heard from M. According to Marshall McLuhan, a great way to predict whether you will like a book is to read page 69. That’s it. M tried it, although as she pointed out, her sample was a bit skewed because the books whose page 69s she read were books that had already made it to her TBR list for one reason or another.

I happen to have a book right here next to me that just arrived via BookMooch this morning. It’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which I mooched only because my book group (not me) picked it for next month. I have never read it (obviously) and I know almost nothing about it. Like, why is it called an autobiography if it’s not written by Alice B. Toklas? I have no idea.

So, let’s take a look at page 69… Oh my word… heh heh… !!!

Luckily this is a small paperback and there isn’t a lot on page 69. It’s the beginning of a chapter, and it ends in a complete paragraph, so I will give it to you here in its entirety, with original typography and punctuation intact.

Chapter 4. GERTRUDE STEIN BEFORE SHE CAME TO PARIS

Once more I have come to Paris and now I am one of the habitués of the rue de Fleurus. Gertrude Stein was writing The Making of Americans and she had just commenced correcting the proofs of Three Lives. I helped her correct them.

Gertrude Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. As I am an ardent californian and as she spent her youth there I have often begged her to be born in California but she has always remained firmly born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. She left it when she was six months old and has never seen it again and now it no longer exists being all of it Pittsburgh. She used however to delight in being born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania when during the war, in connection with war work, we used to have papers made out and they always immediately wanted to know one’s birth-place. She used to say if she had been really born in California as I wanted her to have been she would never have had the pleasure of seeing the various french officials try to write, Allegheny, Pennsylvania.

Well, hey, if Marshall McLuhan is right, I’m in for a ride on this one! I can hardly wait!

* * *

Anyone else want to test The Page 69 Theory?

Posted on July 29, 2008, 12:19 pm by Julie | Filed in Reading | Comments (11)