In Brief: Recent Reads

November 13, 2014November 13, 2014 / Carolyn O / 10 Comments

Friends, Romans, countrypersons: if I had my druthers, I’d review every book I read in-depth, but alas, my druthers never seem to be had. Herewith, three recent—and very different—titles in brief.

The High Divide** by Lin Enger

Perfect if you’re looking for a Western with big themes.

One day, Ulysses Pope walks away from his home, his wife Gretta, and their two sons, Eli and Danny—without any explanation. Eli and Danny decide to follow him, and Gretta them, and their odyssey (you knew that was coming, right?) becomes both a search for survival in a changing Western environment and a search for forgiveness. Mr. Enger writes women very well, has a knack for the perfect detail, and somehow kept me reading even though child endangerment (in this case, running away on trains) usually scares me off. And I loved the book’s ending. Highly recommended.

Rooms* by Lauren Oliver

Perfect if you’re still craving spooky after Halloween.

Ms. Oliver is known for her young adult fiction (which I haven’t read); Rooms is her first novel for adults. It’s a ghost story, in a way, but with a nice twist: the house is a ghost, or rather, ghosts. A family (dipsomaniac mother, nymphomaniac daughter, depressed son) returns to their country home after the death of the estranged patriarch. Mysteries—theirs and the ghosts’—ensue. Rooms is a great example of a novel with near-completely unlikable protagonists that is nonetheless compelling. The ghosts are a treat to read, and for a few days the normal sounds of house (creaks, buzzes, sighs) might seem very strange.

The Divorce Papers** by Susan Rieger

Perfect for the plane (which is where I read it).

The Divorce Papers is amusing but not laugh-out-loud funny. Despite its chick-lit pink cover (detest, detest, detest), the book features some seriously interesting legal writing (Ms. Rieger is a lawyer, and this is her first novel). Sophie is a criminal lawyer in the fictional state of Narragansett who’s pulled into a high-profile divorce case against her better judgment. As the title suggests, The Divorce Papers is an epistolary novel, combining Sophie’s memos, legal briefs, court cases, emails, rage notes between soon-to-be-ex-spouses, and other documents. I liked the (invented) legal cases the best; Sophie’s emails to her boss (both personal and professional) made me cringe — no lawyer I know would ever in million years write in such a fashion to her (or his) boss, but that’s artistic license, I suppose. A subplot about sexism in law firms had great potential, but fell flat. I’d like to see what Ms. Rieger could do with a protagonist who doesn’t whine about being teased for going to Yale Law (seriously?) and a subject other than divorce, especially given the detail and wonderful voices of her case summaries.

*I received this book from the publisher for review purposes, which did not affect the content of my review.

** I received these books from Library Thing’s Early Reviewers Program, which did not affect the content of my reviews.

“Who now shall refill the cup for me?”

November 11, 2014November 11, 2014 / Carolyn O / 6 Comments

Today is Veterans Day in the United States, and Armistice Day and Remembrance Day in other parts of the world; we honor military veterans on this date because the armistice that ended World War I went into effect in the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

I thought I’d mark the day by discussing a poem by one of the war poets; as regular readers know, the literature of the Great War is one of my particular areas of interest, though I’ve been delayed when it comes to my World War I Reading List post (I should have it in time for the centenary of the end of the war . . . ). However, since I’ve talked about Sassoon, Owen, Graves, Rosenberg, and Blunden already this year, I thought I’d detour (though that’s a misleading word) into the work of one of their contemporaries.

“Tolkien 1916”. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tolkien_1916.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Tolkien_1916.jpg

Typically pictured as a twinkly-eyed, pipe-smoking scholar, J.R.R. Tolkien is not often remembered as a veteran, though readers of The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and The Hobbit may know that he served during the First World War; he fought in the Battle of the Somme. Most of his comrades were killed after he was sent back to England to recover from an illness; he spent the rest of the war weak and ill, though he served in various garrisons on the home front.

In the preface to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien wrote, contradicting those who supposed the work was an allegory for the Second World War, that the book was not an allegory, and that in any case the war that shaped him first began in 1914: “By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.” In 1918 Tolkien was twenty-six.

Here’s a link to Tolkien reading “Namárië,” or Galadriel’s Lament, the poem of the week in honor of Tolkien and all other veterans. He reads the poem in Elvish (Quenya, for those keeping score), and you can read the English version below the video.

If you’d like to read more about Tolkien’s experiences during the First World War and their influence on his writing, reliable sources recommend John Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth.

Review: The Woman Who Would Be King, by Kara Cooney

October 30, 2014October 30, 2014 / Carolyn O / 7 Comments

Kara Cooney’s The Woman Who Would Be King* is what I would call a speculative biography. The subject of the book, Hatshepsut, Egypt’s second female king, is shrouded in mystery for the very simple fact that she lived a very long time ago and thus very little is known about the details of her reign.

Egyptologist Kara Cooney (you may recognize her name, since she produced a Discovery Channel series on Ancient Egypt) attempts to fill in the gaps with The Woman Who Would Be King. Ms. Cooney is careful to note which of her conclusions are speculative, and which are based in archaeological evidence (the book’s Notes section is extensive), though the book necessarily relies heavily on the former.

Hatshepsut, though she ruled for a period of over twenty years, has been overlooked in history compared to, say, Cleopatra VII, Ms. Cooney argues, because Hatshepsut does not fit patriarchal culture’s paradigm of a powerful woman ruler. Based on the extant evidence, Hatshepsut did not come to power through treachery or force, nor did she make a bad end. Her reign was marked by peace and prosperity for Egypt’s people (though not for Egypt’s southern neighbor, Nubia).

Though I am an ardent feminist, I found this argument less interesting than the history Ms. Cooney presents in The Woman Who Would Be King. In its pages we learn about the elaborate religious rituals Egyptian kings were expected to perform (I’d rather like to see such strenuous feats as a requirement for members of the U.S. Congress), the ways that royal families consolidated and retained power, and why it’s so difficult to understand the psychology of important historical figures like Hatshepsut, her adviser Senenmut, and her co-king Thutmose III.

Hatshepsut’s story, in Ms. Cooney’s telling, is one of political savvy, astute emphasis of her important religious role, and careful cultivation of a changing public gender identity. Were she alive today, I suspect Hatshepsut would be the world’s foremost expert on re-branding.

I think The Woman Who Would Be King will be be of particular interest to readers of historical nonfiction, people with an interest in Ancient Egypt, and anyone who enjoyed Ms. Cooney’s Out of Egypt series. I’d be very interested to read Ms. Cooney’s perspective on a historical figure for whom we have more records and artifacts in the future.

Ms. Cooney explores so many possible ways of thinking about Hatshepsut’s life that I found myself wishing I could read one narrative all the way through to its end. I haven’t read any historical fiction about Hatshepsut, but my friend and fellow blogger Audra at Unabridged Chick, who reads tons of historical fiction, recommends Daughter of the Gods, by Stephanie Thornton.

*I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review purposes, which did not affect the content of my review.

“We were born before the wind”: Van Morrison’s Lit Up Inside: Selected Lyrics

October 28, 2014October 27, 2014 / Carolyn O / 4 Comments

Van Morrison’s collection of lyrics, Lit Up Inside*, is out today, and if you’re a fan, you’re going to want to pick it up. Famously private, Mr. Morrison doesn’t often comment on his work, so this selection (roughly 100), which is about a third of his total output, is itself a statement.

The lyrics chosen range from the famous early work (“Moondance,” “Gloria,” “Brown Eyed Girl”) to songs from his recent catalogue. Many are grounded in the singer’s native Ireland, in its cities and working people (the introduction by Eammon Hughes focuses in particular on urban geography), and of course in Van Morrison’s romantic lyricism and interest in the divine.

Like his music, the lyrics collected in Lit Up Inside often defy categorization; some are really lyrics alone, requiring music to reach their potential greatness; some read like Beat poetry; some are prayers. All of them made me want to listen to Van Morrison, which is perhaps the best compliment I can pay the book.

Thanks to Lit Up Inside, I just revisited two of my favorite albums. Astral Weeks is just plain brilliant, and who doesn’t love Moondance? “And It Stoned Me” is one of the best songs about childhood of all time. “Crazy Love” is on my top-five list of greatest love songs. “Everyone” was our wedding recessional, and now our son likes to dance to it on sunny Sunday mornings.

I have maybe five of his forty-odd albums, so I’m not a die-hard Van Morrison fan by any means, but this selection gave me the opportunity to focus on the lyrics alone, and thus Mr. Morrison’s engagement with literature, religion, history, and social concerns (reflected in Mr. Morrison’s choice of the venerable and independent City Lights as the United States publisher). But it also made me think about how poetry and music make each other, and I think for Van Morrison, even more than, say, Leonard Cohen, the two are inextricably linked. If you’d like to know Van Morrison better, I wholeheartedly recommend Lit Up Inside.

Here’s a link to “Into the Mystic,” which is the poem of the week.

*I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review purposes, which did not affect the content of my review.

“the stooping haunted readers”: Louis MacNeice’s “The British Museum Reading Room”

October 21, 2014October 22, 2014 / Carolyn O / 2 Comments

I just got a copy of Van Morrison’s Lit Up Inside (City Lights), and I’m looking forward to diving in soon (I hope to talk about it in next week’s poetry post).

In the meantime, here’s a poem by another Irishman, Louis MacNeice, which has nothing to do with brown-eyed girls. “The British Museum Reading Room” is, I think, my favorite poem of his, and I hope you’ll tell me what you think in the comments!

Literary Wives: Wife 22, by Melanie Gideon

October 6, 2014March 1, 2015 / Carolyn O / 7 Comments

If you’re new to Literary Wives, here’s the summary: we’re an online bookclub of five to six book bloggers, and we post every other month about a different book with the word “wife” in the title. When we read these books, we have two questions in mind:

1. What does this book say about wives or the experience of being a wife?

2. In what way does this woman define “wife”—or in what way is she defined by “wife”?

This month, we’re talking about Melanie Gideon’s 2012 novel, Wife 22. We invite you to join the discussion by commenting on our blogs (links below) or posting your own review on our shiny new Facebook page.

We also hope you’ll join us next time, on Monday, December 1, when we’ll be discussing Adriana Trigiani’s The Shoemaker’s Wife.

Here’s the jacket copy/summary from the publisher:

Maybe it was those extra five pounds I’d gained. Maybe it was because I was about to turn the same age my mother was when I lost her. Maybe it was because after almost twenty years of marriage my husband and I seemed to be running out of things to say to each other.

But when the anonymous online study called “Marriage in the 21st Century” showed up in my inbox, I had no idea how profoundly it would change my life. It wasn’t long before I was assigned both a pseudonym (Wife 22) and a caseworker (Researcher 101).

And, just like that, I found myself answering questions.

7. Sometimes I tell him he’s snoring when he’s not snoring so he’ll sleep in the guest room and I can have the bed all to myself.
61. Chet Baker on the tape player. He was cutting peppers for the salad. I looked at those hands and thought, I am going to have this man’s children.
67. To not want what you don’t have. What you can’t have. What you shouldn’t have.
32. That if we weren’t careful, it was possible to forget one another.

Before the study, my life was an endless blur of school lunches and doctor’s appointments, family dinners, budgets, and trying to discern the fastest-moving line at the grocery store. I was Alice Buckle: spouse of William and mother to Zoe and Peter, drama teacher and Facebook chatter, downloader of memories and Googler of solutions.

But these days, I’m also Wife 22. And somehow, my anonymous correspondence with Researcher 101 has taken an unexpectedly personal turn. Soon, I’ll have to make a decision—one that will affect my family, my marriage, my whole life. But at the moment, I’m too busy answering questions.

As it turns out, confession can be a very powerful aphrodisiac.

Meet Alice Buckle. She’s a former playwright, current children’s drama teacher, and her marriage to William, an ad executive, is not failing, exactly, but it’s not going exactly well, either. Both love their children; she loves their dog. They live in the Bay Area in a nice house, and have suitably cool friends. [Memo to novelists and screenwriters: enough with the token the San Francisco non-white lesbian friend, ok? Maybe try a non-white San Francisco lesbian as a main character? Sheesh.]

And of course she’s in the middle of a mid-life crisis, because “having a secret is the most powerful aphrodisiac in the world and, by necessity, exactly what’s missing in a marriage” (88).

In Wife 22, being a wife is difficult because it involves boredom and stagnation, and because the wife in question has difficulty communicating directly with her spouse. Motherhood seems equally difficult (for different reasons) but more rewarding.

The novel’s plot is predictable, the characters mostly so, and the commentary bland, but the dialogue is lively and the format keeps things moving. If Alice narrated the whole thing, I don’t think I would have enjoyed the novel, but Ms. Gideon uses e-mails, Google searches, Facebook messages, and discussion board postings (that made me fear PTA parents) to break up the text. I did think that providing Alice’s answers to the survey questions without providing the questions themselves until the end of the book was pretty gimmicky.

Wife 22 is about a very specific type of marriage: white, affluent, heterosexual, urban; Alice and William’s struggles feel frivolous and self-indulgent given the experiences of the great majority of couples in the United States and, indeed, the world.

But perhaps that’s not a fair assessment, since Wife 22 is really light reading. It has its moments of perceptiveness, of course, like this one, when Alice meets with her support group composed of women who, like her, have lost their mothers:

[. . .] we offered shoulders to lean on, hands to hold, and ears to bend. And when we failed at that, there was lumpia and waterproof mascara samples, links to articles, and yes, vodka-laced tomato juice.

But mostly there was the ease that came from not having to pretend you had ever recovered. The world wanted you to go on. The world needed you to go on. But the Mumble Bumbles understood that the loss soundtrack was always playing in the background. Sometimes it was on mute, and sometimes it was blasting away on ten, making you deaf. (106)

And it can be quite funny, especially when the novel focuses on the couple’s two kids, or when Alice makes an unexpected comparison.

I want to have a conversation with my husband that goes deeper than insurance policies and taxes and what time will you be home and did you call the guy about the gutters, but we seem to be stuck here floating around on the surface of our lives like kids in the pool propped up on those Styrofoam noodles. (33)

Wife 22 is like, I think, a slightly more serious version of a post-2000 Nancy Meyers movie, only without the divorce. It’s good-natured, well-intentioned entertainment about a subset of Americans who get more than their fair share of screen (and page) time.

Please visit the other Literary Wives bloggers to get their takes on the book!

Emily at The Bookshelf of Emily J.

Ariel at One Little Library

Cecilia at Only You

Kay at WhatMeRead

Lynn at Smoke and Mirrors

(Audra at Unabridged Chick is on hiatus)