Recommended Reading

Recommended Reading: If You Could Be Mine, by Sara Farizan

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Happy Thanksgiving, dear Readers! And Happy Thursday, non-American friends!

If You Could Be MineAs you may have noticed, YA fiction doesn’t make it onto my reading list very often, but in the spirit of omnivorous reading, I thought I should try out a new YA novel (a couple years ago I read The Hunger Games trilogy, which I quite liked). I chose Sara Farizan’s If You Could Be Mine, because I’m interested in reading fiction set in other countries, and because the novel focuses on LBGT* issues (near and dear to my heart).

Sahar has been in love with her best friend, Nasrin, since they were children. Nasrin loves Sahar too, but also feels the pull of a traditional life trajectory — marriage, children, a house and social position. And they live in Iran, where homosexuality is punishable by death — even for teenagers like Sahar and Nasrin.

Then Nasrin’s family arranges a marriage for her, and Sahar, desperate to save their relationship, explores drastic measures to keep them together.

Sahar’s narration makes me want to give her a big hug, and I loved the careful construction of the secondary characters, especially Sahar’s father and Nasrin’s mother.  The language is geared toward younger readers, which I was expecting, but I wasn’t expecting the frank discussions of transsexuality that’s an integral part of the novel. I appreciated Sahar’s honesty and humanity, and the unflinching portrayal of how difficult life is for the gender-nonconforming in modern Iran.

And, of course, there’s plenty about the dangers of being a woman. You know, stuff like your sleeve inching past your elbow or wearing too much makeup getting you raped or beaten. Shudder.

Nasrin is often annoying, and doesn’t seem like a worthy object for Sahar’s affection, except insofar as she listens to Sahar attentively (as Sahar points out). At first, I felt that this was a flaw in the novel, because as a reader, I wanted to be invested in both girls. About midway through, however, Nasrin grew on me. She rebels against the strictures of her society in her own way, even if it’s not the way Sahar wants (or we want, for that matter). Nasrin’s flaws make the story more real, more relatable, and all the more heartbreaking for Sahar.

If You Could Be Mine would pair well with the first volume of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, especially in a teaching setting, and I think the pair together would make a great Christmas/Hannukah/Festivus/Yule/December present.

Coming Up in December:

/ Carolyn O / 4 Comments

I will eviscerate Peter Jackson’s first Hobbit movie, so you can be fully equipped with rage for the second movie.

Reviews of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, Life after Life, Orkney, and Snow Hunters

Poetry by John Donne and John Milton

Announcement of my super-rad 2014 read-along

My list of suggested prezzies for the book lovers in your life

A year-in-review type of deal, possibly with best-of lists

Yuletide cheer.

Recommended Reading: The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman

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Unless you’ve been insensate for the last ten years or so, you know that Mr. Gaiman is a book world superstar with novels, short stories, and children’s books to his credit. I loved American Gods and Smoke and Mirrors, so I knew I was in for a treat when I picked up The Ocean at the End of the Lane. It’s received amazing press and Mr. Gaiman commands round-the-block lines whenever he reads at a local bookstore. photo (26)

Now, I found American Gods suspenseful, and Smoke and Mirrors occasionally chilling, but The Ocean At the End of the Lane is downright terrifying. It’s a tribute to Mr. Gaiman’s storytelling that I kept reading, because the whole novel turns around big time child endangerment, which is almost always a book-closer for me. I went into this one not knowing anything about the plot, though, so I wasn’t really prepared for how frightening the book would become.

To say much about the plot would make me feel like a thief in the night, so I’ll refrain.

But you should read this. You’re going to fall in love with the Hempstock family.

 

Recommended Reading: The Obituary Writer and Comfort, by Ann Hood

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Ann Hood, Comfort, photo by CR OliverAbout five years ago, when I was going through a Very Bad Time, my wonderful friend Mary gave me Ann Hood’s memoir Comfort (in which Ms. Hood very graciously penned a note for me). Comfort‘s chapters deal with the experience of grief; Ms. Hood’s five-year-old daughter died from a virulent form of strep in 2002. The book is gut-wrenching, and the first chapter is the best, truest writing on grief that I’ve ever read.

That grief clearly informs The Obituary Writer, Ms. Hood’s novel that’s out this year. The novel gives us two stories in parallel. We follow Vivien in 1919 San Francisco (and environs) as she comes to grips with the disappearance of her lover in the earthquake of 1906, and Claire in 1960 Virginia, feeling trapped in a loveless marriage and catapulted suddenly into an affair. Their lives intersect, of course, but the contrast between the two women is fascinating.  How did women shape their lives when their roles were so constricted, so defined?

Ann Hood, The Obituary Writer, photo by CR OliverI found as I read that I wanted to know more about Vivien’s relationship with her lover, and how they negotiated social situations and taboos, and I was disappointed to be left in the dark about that aspect of Vivien’s life. However, that disappointment was overmatched by my interest in Claire’s fascination with Jackie Kennedy. I’m a New Englander, but I’ve never felt the affection for the Kennedy family that the rest of Boston perpetually evinces. It wasn’t until I read this book that I came up with a possible explanation for why women loved Jackie: her life, on the outside, at least, was the best, materially speaking, a housewife in 1960 could wish for. Jackie was beautiful, cultured, spoke French, married a handsome man, had two adorable children, and was never in danger of running out of money. The reality of her situation was different, of course, but I suspect that her presence in the White House gave women who felt stifled at home something to aspire to as they engaged with the parameters of their lives. But that’s just a theory.

Have you read Comfort or The Obituary Writer? What did you think?

Recommended Reading: Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, by Robin Sloane

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Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is a great big love letter to bookstores, technology, history, urban life, and, above all,  friendship. I loved it. Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore photo by CR Oliver

However, it’s difficult to talk about without giving away plot, so I’ll be brief: Clay is a laid-off designer who finds himself working as the night clerk (I know — how much do you wish your bookstores were open twenty-four hours a day?) at a small bookstore in San Francisco. The bookstore’s clientele is mysterious, weird, and impossible to ignore. Soon, Clay is drawn into cryptography, the world of Google, and his employer’s confidence.

I loved that the line between real and not-real is faint, and might shift over time. Someone reading this in 2020 may accept as fact some of the things that Kat, the novel’s main Googler, says that Google can do. The self-driving car? Check. We’ve read about that already. But some of the other stuff strains the imagination. Except when it doesn’t.

(Read the novel. It was published in 2012. Go ahead. I’ll wait. Ok. Now read this, published in September 2013. See what I mean?)

As we follow Clay on his gallivanting, we also meet his friends, all brilliant and different and skilled in fascinating ways. I love books in which friends are the focus, instead of love interestes (uteruses before duderuses, as Leslie Knope would say), because friendships are often the closest, longest-lasting relationships of our lives, pre-dating marriages, for example. Clay comes to rely on his friends, and I hope Mr. Sloan will too — I want to find out what happens to the roommates.

When’s the last time you said that about a book?

An Eighteenth-Century Gentleman Who Hated Exercise Even More Than I Do

/ Carolyn O / 7 Comments

One of my favorite acquisitions from my summer of bookstore love is this little gem, The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes (1975). It’s just what the title suggests: little anecdotes about famous literary figures, from Caedmon to Dylan Thomas. The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes photo by C.R. Oliver

Now, as I’ve written before, my parents are prolific readers who read aloud to me and my siblings well into our teenage years. My dad read me Queen Margot (Dumas), From Dawn to Decadence (Barzun), and Moby-Dick, among others.

But we never made it through Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, not because I disagreed with his analysis of the decline in civic virtue, but because I was bored to tears. Gibbon is a renowned stylist, and his footnotes are chatty and ironic. But frankly, my dear Gibbon, I don’t give a damn. I’m fairly certain that this was the start of my distaste for the eighteenth century’s history and literature. After all, it’s pretty difficult to top Paradise Lost and the Defenestration of Prague.

However, reading this little anecdote—

Gibbon took very little exercise. He had been staying some time with Lord Sheffield in the country; and when he was about to go away, the servants could not find his hat. ‘Bless me,’ said Gibbon, ‘I certainly left it in the hall on my arrival here.’ He had not stirred out of doors during the whole of the visit. (109)

—made me feel as if perhaps the pudgy English lord and I would have gotten along after all. As long as we didn’t talk about the Roman Empire.

Scary Read: Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus, by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy

/ Carolyn O / 9 Comments

RabidA tip o’ the hat to my friend Kate, who pointed me to a podcast about the most fascinating story in this already-fascinating book a couple months ago.

Rabid, by veterinarian Monica Murphy and her husband, Wired editor Bill Wasik, examines rabies from a cultural standpoint — but you probably got that much from the title. I went in with the my knowledge of rabies confined to that one episode of The Office, something about twenty shots in your stomach, and a settled dislike for raccoons.

Now on the other side, I’ve got a better handle on the whole subject. The rabies vaccine is only four shots in one’s arm, for one thing. And rabies is the most deadly virus identified, with 100% human mortality (as far as we know) if the disease goes untreated. And 55,000 people die from rabies every year. I guess it’s only a joke if you live in Scranton.

The best chapters in Rabid deal with Pasteur, who invented the rabies vaccine, and with human survivors of rabies, Jeanna Giese in particular (whose case is the subject of that podcast), and how an island community like Bali deals with a sudden outbreak of the disease.

Less mesmerizing are the book’s forays into literary subjects the authors associate with rabies (the bit about the Iliad is particularly unfortunate); the authors are much better equipped to deal with the scientific and veterinary aspects of the disease’s history. Based on the last three chapters alone, Rabid is worth a look. And you’ll definitely look twice the next time you see a raccoon. Or a skunk. Or a stray dog.

Recommended Reading: The Niagara River, by Kay Ryan

/ Carolyn O / 2 Comments

Back in late July, I featured a poem called “Thin,” by Kay Ryan.  I liked it so much that I went to the library that week to find a full-length book of hers, and the library obligingly provided The Niagara River. As a child, I spent many happy summer afternoons jumping into the Niagara River from my Uncle Bill and Aunt Mary Kay’s dock, so the whole thing seemed beshert.

Image courtesy of George Stojkovic / Freedigitalphotos.net

Image courtesy of George Stojkovic / Freedigitalphotos.net

I love these poems. They’re unlike any others in my pretty extensive poetry library. They’re short, rarely flowing from one page onto another, and the lines are short as well, often just three or four syllables in length. I found the rhythm, and the occasional rhymes, jarring, but not unpleasantly so. Many of the poems end with a subtle twist, a line that forces the whole poem into sharper focus. These poems call for slow reading and then re-reading; I wanted to savor and remember them.

Some of my favorites in this volume are “Carrying a Ladder,” “Sharks’ Teeth,” “Green Hills,” “Ideal Audience,” “Hide and Seek,” and “The Well or the Cup.” I hope you’ll have a look at them for yourself.

November News

/ Carolyn O / 6 Comments

Winner-180x180Hiya folks. This November, I’m going to act like a crazy person and do NaNoWriMo again. Let me know if you’re on board too, and then we can commiserate about word counts like a couple of college sophomores during finals week.

I have the usual array of posts stacked up for the month, but I’ll be a bit slower on the uptake with comments and reading your lovely blogs, so please do forgive.

Also, if anyone has a spare plot lying around . . . ?

 

Recommended Reading: Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury

/ Carolyn O / 7 Comments

Yes, it’s another installment in Books Carolyn Is Utterly Embarrassed Not to Have Read by Now.

Image courtesy of Manostphoto/ Freedigitalphotos.net

Image courtesy of Manostphoto/ Freedigitalphotos.net

As a voracious reader and lover of sci-fi, it’s pretty amazing that Fahrenheit 451 has missed my to-read pile for so long. Maybe it’s because the contours of the story are so familiar; I felt going in as if I already knew the plot.

Something that startled me was the sheer number of technological advances that Bradbury saw coming in 1953 (because of his long career, I’d always assumed that Fahrenheit was a late 60s/ early 70s book — quite wrongly): wall-sized TV screens, in-ear headphones, drones. I wonder if Suzanne Collins was thinking of the Mechanical Hound when she created some of the monsters in The Hunger Games trilogy.

I’ll skip the plot summary, since you’ve probably got the gist of it, and instead highlight my favorite section: Montag’s meeting with Grayson and the other people of the book, who remind themselves, “we’re nothing more than dust jackets for books, of no significance otherwise.” Grayson goes on to tell Montag how great works of literature are preserved: “Why, there’s one town in Maryland, only twenty-seven people, no bomb’ll ever touch that town, is the complete essays of a man named Bertrand Russell” (179; the grammar’s a little off, but I can’t tell if that’s Grayson’s overexcitement or a faulty edition at work). I found the work of memory, the instinct to preserve ideas and language, deeply moving.

I wonder, though, if regarding oneself as merely a dust jacket for a book is entirely admirable. Certainly there’s a sense embedded in this idea of taking a larger, longer perspective (I’m reminded of Carl Sagan and the blue dot, or Rick’s speech at the end of Casablanca), a way of realizing our individual insignificance over the span of time. On the other hand, one person with a great deal of insight, or fortitude, or kindness, can change the world for the better. But I suppose you do need the world.