When I moaned the other night that I was behind in my reading, my husband G. Grod patiently explained that I had already met my book challenge for the year, then chosen to increase it, so I was really ahead, and not behind.
Nonetheless, it does feel as if some of the books I’ve read lately have taken up more of my time than they were worth. That, though, probably isn’t so much about slow reading as it is about unworthy books.
#55 in my book challenge for the year, The Year of Secret Assignments is a really good young adult novel. It’s mostly epistolary, told in letters by six students in a pen-pal project, plus in journal and notebook entries. It is both funny and touching, centering on friendship, loss, finding oneself, plus a teensy bit of revenge. The main characters are likeable and engaging, and the book moves at a quick pace.
#54 in my book challenge for the year is the latest graphic novel collection of Y the Last Man, Vaughan’s tale of the only man who wasn’t killed off in a plague that killed all male animals on the planet. I read it cover to cover in one sitting. The story, the characters, and the art are all strong. We finally find out why Yorick survived, and it’s an interesting, believable addition to the plot that still leaves some questions. The collection has a good, cliff-hanger ending, and leaves me excited for the next installment of the story.
#53 in my book challenge for the year is another excellent entry in the Rush Hour series, an anthology of short pieces for teen readers and those of us who admire teen literature. In fact, the anthology might have done its job too well. It featured several excerpts from to-be published novels, and over the next few days, I kept thinking, where was that character I just read. Three of the novel excerpts made such a strong impression–”Open Ice”, “Humble and Grand” and “The Center of the World”–that I felt as if I was still hanging out with the characters.
#52 in my book challenge for the year, and finally, a really good book! It feels as if I haven’t read one in a while. Housekeeping centers around two young sisters and the family members that care for them. It is a meditation on family, loss, home, transcience, and more. The editors of a recent anthology of contemporary writing noted that most of the submissions from women writers ahd been “disapointingly domestic.” Domestic does not mean disappointing, as Robinson’s novel clearly demonstrates. Her writing is lovely, the characters full-fleshed and compelling, the sense of place concrete, and the story pulls the reader right through. Housekeeping met with much critical acclaim when it was published in 1980, and it was only last year that Robinson published her second novel, Gilead, which I am now eager to read.
#51 in my book challenge for the year, In the Shadow of the Law is a legal thriller. It is sure to be compared to Grisham, which is unfortunate, because In the Shadow of the Law is a solidly written, non-formulaic thriller.
Roosevelt is a professor of law and former Supreme Court clerk. His prose is sometimes more exuberant than necessary, but perhaps fiction provides a welcome departure from legal-ese. There is plenty of the latter in this book. One of the characters, Mark, is a clueless first-year student, who regularly asks other characters what is going on. His ignorance means others explain legal facts to him and thus to the reader. While this is useful to the plot and informative in general, sometimes the explanations are long and result in unbelievable dialogue.
The best developed character is Walker, the former Supreme Court clerk who eventually looks to escape the crush of the firm by becoming a law professor. While some of the other characters were a little too easily categorized, each was given a good amount of complex and believable backstory. There was Mark, the clueless one, Katja, the hardworking one, Peter the soulless head of the firm, and Ryan, the boorish one who thinks he’s smarter than he is. Ryan is so obnoxious that I found the chapters on him difficult to read. I became excited when it looked as if Ryan might die a quick and nasty death. Instead, he goes on to an interesting fate that I did not foresee.
At one point, I thought I had foreseen a key plot point to the ending, but it it turned out to be merely one of several factors. The book centers on two cases, a chemical fire and a death-row appeal. Both the cases in the plot were tied up well and believably. The case endings and the fates of the characters were pleasant surprises, not formulaic or predictable. This was a smart, promising legal thriller.
I have reached and now surpassed my 50 book challenge for the year, coming squeakily close to doing it by the end of June, if it hadn’t been for the overlong Prep. Since I managed to reach my goal just past the middle of the year, I have re-evaluated. In general, the goal is a good one–approximately one book a week for a year. But I also read graphic novels and teen fiction, both of which are usually very fast reads. I wondered if I should stop counting these books, and only list the so-called adult books. Yet that seems unfair. They may be faster to read, but they’re still books, and books deserving of wider attention and appreciation than they’re usually given. Based on my personal choice of reading matter, I think a goal of 100 books for the year would be a more suitable challenge. It would urge me to read, on average, one “big” book and one young adult or graphic novel a week. The new goal, then, is 100 books for the year. I’m already behind!
#50 in my 50 book challenge for the year was Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld, about a midwestern girl who attends an exclusive east-coast prep school on scholarship. Sittenfeld recently wrote a mean-spirited review of Melissa Bank’s The Wonder Spot, which I thought was a sweet, well-written book. When a friend gave me her copy of Prep, I decided to judge for myself whether Sittenfeld had written a good book, and whether it was better than Bank’s.
The answer was no, on both counts. Prep reminded me in tone of Alexander Payne’s film About Schmidt. It dwelt on the awkward, the ugly and the embarrassing in human nature with scarce redemption to balance the pain. My friend had noted, “the main character is a little self-involved. Sometimes I wanted to slap her upside the head and tell her to get over herself.” My friend is much kinder than I am. I found the main character, Lee Fiora, so self-involved that she was almost completely unsympathetic, and I spent most of the book’s 400+ pages wanting to shake some sense into her. Lee was an uncomfortable mix–hyper-observant of others, yet uninsightful about herself. Her actions consistently hurt those around her. Four hundred pages lacking in self-awareness, growth, and plot did not make for an enjoyable or rewarding reading experience. Prep read like an uncomfortably realistic high-school girl’s journal, with the boring, overwrought and turgid bits left in.
Prep, though, is not without merit. Sittenfeld’s prose was overall good, and she had some excellent insights into issues of class, as cwhen Lee notes how she sometimes wears her non-scholarship roommates clothes: “And I could have offered her something of mine, but she didn’t wear my clothes, which was not a fact we discussed.” (P. 252)
A weird thing that bothered me was that Sittenfeld used semi-colons so liberally that I suspect many of them had to be edited out. Most pages had a semi-colon and frequent em-dashes, and as a former copyeditor I found these punctuation marks to be distractingly frequent.
A weird thing I liked, though, was the cover, which has a pink and green grosgrain belt that is realistically crinkly to the touch.
One is that the book has almost identical elements to All This Heavenly Glory by Elizabeth Crane. Both followed a female protagonist from girlhood to adulthood and centered on family, friends, boyfriends and jobs. Both books had the protagonist in a decent job with a younger boyfriend at the end.
What was unique about The Wonder Spot, though, was that Bank did not have a page or pages for acknowledgements. I usually enjoy reading these, because they often name the author’s teachers and members of their writing group. They can be straightforward, long and self-indulgent (the most painful I have read was in The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger), and funny. But it is singular not to have one, so I found this lack in The Wonder Spot to be curious. I’m choosing to interpret it as modest and self-effacing, in line with Bank’s writing style.
#49 in my 50 book challenge for the year, Necklace of Kisses revisits Block’s most famous character Weetzie Bat at 40. A kind friend lent me an advance reader’s edition, as this book has not yet been released. “Where were the kisses, Weetzie Bat wondered”, as she considers her failing relationship with My Secret Agent Lover Man. In the wake of 9/11 he has shut her out, and now goes by Max. Weetzie escapes to a pink hotel. We are treated to tantalizing and too-brief chapters on the supporting characters, including Max, Witch Baby (who now goes by Lily), and Cherokee Bat. Most of the book concerns Weetzie’s magical adventures at the hotel as she encounters a surgically altered mermaid, a satyr, a sweet transvestite, fairies on the run, and more. Some of the encounters are charming, some are menacing, and all are underscored by Weetzie’s desire to meet with Zane Starling, a boy from her youth that she didn’t kiss and now wishes that she had.
Block’s prose is lyrical and well suited to her story of magical realism. Both the story and the characters are more grounded than many of Block’s previous works. It was a bold and interesting move to take the ethereal character of Weetzie and to bring her forward from 80’s LA to situate her more squarely in the harsh light of modern time. I suspect that the increased realism is informed by Block’s own relatively recent motherhood, since many of Weetzie’s meditations concern raising Witch Baby and Cherokee. There is a touching scene in which the daughters admonish Weetzie to dress her age, grow up and go home. “And now they had looked at her so coolly, as if she were only monstrous in her orange sneakers.”
Necklace of Kisses is a sequel to a well-loved and critically acclaimed teen-fiction series (collected as Dangerous Angels), yet I believe it will be marketed by publisher HarperCollins as adult fiction, or more accurately a crossover book, one that will be shelved in adult sections in libraries and bookstores, but purchased by both adults and teens.
I am hesitant to critique the book because I have such affection for the characters and their author. While I was thrilled to revisit some of my favorite characters, I’m not sure I liked them as well as I did their 80’s selves. One of the things I love about Block’s books is how she writes about food. Here, though, Weetzie is a lactose-intolerant, sugar-eschewing, teetotalling vegetarian. The descriptions of food were still good, but I found the numerous dietary restrictions distracting, and the food in this book didn’t sound as delicious as in previous books. Also, there were a few too many awkward brand name mentions. What discomfited me most, though, is the dreadful cover featuring a photo-realistic sparkly pink suitcase. (Weetzie’s suitcase in the novel is covered with tiny pink rosebuds.) I was embarrassed to be seen reading a book with that cover. I wished for a cover that was more impressionistic and ethereal, yet I wished that for the characters and the book as well. I wanted more balance between the magic and the realism, and instead Block veered too sharply between their extremes.
#48 in my 50 book challenge for the year. Block is one of my favorite authors. Wasteland, a teen-fiction novel, is the spare, bittersweet story of Marina, and her sorrow in the wake of her brother Lex’s death. Marina casts about for reasons, aided by her friend West. The book is narrated alternately by all three, even by Lex, seemingly from beyond the dead. The book is powerful and provocative, but I felt Block pulled her punches at the end with a soap-opera-convention plot turn. It is filled with late 70’s/early 80’s detail, and does not have much of Block’s characteristic poetic prose and magical realism, though it is nonetheless beautifully written.
You died. You were sitting on the bleachers in P.E. when Ms. Sand told you to go to the principal’s office. You were peeling the yellow rubber thing that said N.H.H.S. off of your green gym shorts and chewing your fingernails on the other hand. You could taste the bitter peel of polish. You were staring down through the slats of the bleachers to the gym floor. You were not even forcing tears back down because there weren’t any because you were dead.
You, that’s me. You called me you and I called you you. That was our name for each other. When you died I did and so it didn’t matter. (P. 19)
My husband and I got married and moved in together in 1998. We bought a condo in 2001. We had our son Drake in 2003. We bought a house last fall. Yet G. Grod swears that he didn’t witness true commitment on my part until last month, when I finally merged our comic book collections. For years, his Green Lanterns, Wolverines, and Uncanny X-Men have been sequestered in their own boxes. And for a while, I fiddled around with an elaborate filing system that had completed series in one place and titles I was continuing to buy in another. My friend the Big Brain rolled his eyes, and advised me that there should only be two piles–read, and unread. So I merged all our titles, filed them alphabetically, and the only ones out are the ones unread. Additionally, I put all the graphic novels together, too, filed mostly by title, though a few are by author’s last name. They are arrayed in one line above the computer as I type. It feels good to know that I am both better organized, and that my husband thinks I’ve finally committed to this relationship.
#47 in my 50 book challenge for the year. This graphic novel picks up where Persepolis left off, with the teenaged Marji sent to Europe to escape war-torn Iran. Abroad she finds a universal truth–at home she felt repressed, but abroad she feels alienated, so neither can give her comfort. My favorite section was the visit from her mother, and the affection conveyed between them. Satrapi returns to Iran to find it both changed and the same. The simple art evokes the story and emotions well. Like Persepolis before it, I found it easy to engage with the story of a woman whose life is very different from mine, and think this is both an excellent story as well as good insight into a different culture.
#46 in my 50 book challenge for the year. Though not labelled as such, this is a novel in stories. We meet Sophie Applebaum with her family at her cousin’s bat mitzvah, and re-visit them periodically through the next two decades of life changes. The book could be read simplistically, and wrongly, as Sophie’s quest to find a man. Instead, I found Bank created a tapestried life for Sophie that also included her evolution in self-awareness, jobs, friendships and family relations. Bank’s writing is deceptive. Her style is spare yet razor sharp. She is able to convey characters and nuances in relationships with very few words. Her characters are recognizable without being cliches. I loved the charming but unreliable crush in “Teen Romance” and the should-be-right-but-isn’t guy of “The One After You.” The book is both funny and sad. It ends with Sophie getting the best of an old boyfriend at a party in Brooklyn as she leaves with a new one, and in a job that she isn’t embarrassed to admit. It wasn’t so much a happily-ever-after ending, as much as the highest, happiest point she had yet reached, one that she might yet go beyond.
On our second cigarette break, he offered me his jacket, and I took it without a word. He said, “So, what line of work are you in, Applebaum?”
When I told him I wrote advertising copy, he asked if he’d seen any of my ads.
“Live live live girls girls girls?” I said. “That’s mine.”
He seemed to know that I’d made this joke before; he went right by it. (P. 214)
Yet another great graphic novel collaboration for Brian Bendis and Alex Maleev. Strong story, strong art, and book #45 in my 50 book challenge for the year. This story jumps between three main points in time. Each part of the story is drawn in a different style, suited to the comics history of the time. The flashbacks are seamless, and both story and art lend to good characterization. We are also introduced to a new superhero. This could be a standalone graphic novel, but I recommend you go back and start with Volume 4: Underboss, and keep reading. Daredevil is a great character, and this team has put together a series of really good books.
A friend of mine, complaining about the general crappiness of most comics, wondered, “Why can’t Grant Morrison write all the comics?”
Well, because some of them have to be non-ultra-violent, and more than token-ish-ly redemptive.
Which is somewhat unfair, because WE3 is a very good graphic novel, and was book 44 in my 50 book challenge for the year. I just wish I’d been warned about how extremely violent it was–ahem, G. Grod, Blogenheimer–and that said violence involved animals. Morrison’s story is, as usual, dark, violent, clever and insightful. Quitely’s art is, as usual, exquisitely detailed. The story concerns a dog, cat and rabbit who have been conscripted by the US military and upgraded with robotics for killing purposes. Then they get loose, and it’s rather like Homeward Bound meets the Terminator, or any of a jillion other comparisons–this one probably isn’t original, but I’m sure you get the idea. This is a sad, sad story that even the ending can’t redeem completely. If you have a soft heart for small creatures, you might want to skip this. It’s quite wrenching.
We all know that each child differs from the next and that their academic needs are best met when we take these differences seriously. We also know that schools have enormous difficulties in this regard and are openly desperate to do better. Two pillars of the current education debate–tracking of students and class size–are intimately connected to this larger question of individualizing education. Yet the novel approaches and creative solutions thus far conjured by educators have not altered the primary design flaw of schools: They are mass institutions and thus by definition ill suited to the academic needs of individuals.
Homeschooling parents have a distinct advantage over public-school teachers when it comes to individualizing education. (P. 20)
Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense by David Guterson, was book #43 in my 50 book challenge for the year. I’ve already received some flak because I’m considering home school for my child. (I’m considering public school as well, but no one gives me sh!t about that, do they?) But Guterson, a high school teacher who is also the father of three home-schooled children, makes a compelling case for it. Beyond the point I quote above, which I think is a very strong one, he also continuously emphasizes that parents should be actively involved in their children’s education, whether it is in a school or at home.
Writing has never been the strong point of the Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale collaborations. Loeb’s story is usually workman-like and dependable, while Sale’s art is striking and distinctive. I found the writing in Hulk: Gray, book #42 in my 50 book challenge for the year, quite disappointing. The framing conceit is that Bruce Banner has called a psychiatrist friend of his in the middle of the night. The eventual conclusions of the book rest on psychological implications for the characters, all of which are interesting and valid. I think the same conclusions could have been done with a less forced method. There are several scenes in which Bruce isn’t present. While it’s possible that one of the characters there could have told him later, it is exactly this kind of question–how did he know what happened if he wasn’t there–that weakens the entire book. And while there aren’t many characters in the book, none of them feels much more than two-dimensional. Perhaps if the reader brought a prior knowledge of these characters to the book then the flimsy characterization wouldn’t be such a problem. These graphic novels, though, are meant to stand alone and not rest on intimate knowledge of Marvel Universe continuity. Sale’s art is the best thing about this book, but is not enough for me to recommend it.
Was anyone else struck by how many references there were to over-the-counter, brand-name medicines in Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories? I seemed like once a chapter a character was taking this or that. Was I sensitive to this because the brand names were English and thus not what Americans would use? Or was there some significance to all the “drug” use in the book?
Batman and I go way back. My first celebrity crush was on Adam West, when I was in first grade. I watched Batman every day, even if I’d seen the episode before. I remember lying to my mother that they only re-ran episodes once to try to get out of a trip to the store. I missed whatever episode that was (Batman and Robin trapped in a beehive, perhaps?) but I did get a few comics that day. Then my comic reading and Batman appreciation went dormant for many years, emerging much later when a boyfriend handed me the two graphic novel standards–Watchmen by Alan Moore and The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller. I was back into Batman, and back into comics, and have not abandoned either in the fifteen (!) years since. Soon after those initial graphic novels, I read Batman Year One, also by Frank Miller, and I liked it even more than I did Dark Knight Returns. (This view, I know, borders on heresy in the geek-dom.) It was a dark story, very much of its time in the 80’s, that emphasized the all-too-human aspects of the characters Batman, James Gordon, and to a lesser extent, Catwoman.
Therefore it was with some trepidation that I saw that a Batman origin movie was coming to the screen. I’d seen all four Batman movies, liking each one less, and actually feeling ashamed at having seen the last one. I had to be reminded who it was who played Batman in it–that was how forgettable George Clooney was in the role. Part of the problem of a Batman movie is the casting of Batman. Most actors can play either rich playboy Bruce Wayne or Batman, but not both. But when the reviews started to come in that Batman Begins was good and Christian Bale was well cast, I began to hope. And when a friend offered to watch Drake so that my husband G. Grod and I could actually go out and see a movie together, we knew immediately what we wanted to see.
Batman Begins was movie #29 in my 50 movie challenge for the year. And it was great fun. It was dark and atmospheric with good special effects. Everyone there played it straight, even the villains–there was no overacting or kitsch factor. There were a few throwaway one-liners to please the groundlings, but overall, it was extremely well done. This is not a movie of Batman Year One. The director and Frank Miller have been reminding people of that in recent interviews. It is, however, a well-done work on the origin of the man behind and within the mask. And because of that, I think it’s a fitting homage to one of my favorite graphic novels.