Watership Down, by Richard Adams

This has been one of my favorite books since I was 13. In the past, when people have asked me what this book is about, I’ve always said, “Rabbits.” But that’s kind of a crappy answer by itself. So I try to elaborate: “It’s kind of a fantasy novel… the rabbits are anthropomorphized… it’s kind of a Hero’s Journey?” And then maybe one in eight people I tell about it will end up reading it.

But reading it again this year (probably the fourth or fifth time I’ve read the novel), I realize what I should really be telling people is that it’s a book about Badass Rabbits. No, seriously.

 

How badass?

Okay. Maybe not quite this badass. But still. The rabbits in this book have their own mythology, and their folk-hero is El-ahrairah, a rabbit with the wiliness of Brer Rabbit, the resourcefulness of Odysseus, and the strategic foresight of Ozymandias. Throughout the book, the characters, who you will care about more than you’ve cared about 90% of all the human characters you’ve ever read, continually evince this kind of resourcefulness to the point of fist-pumping, knee-jerking satisfaction. Think of Neo catching Trinity in “The Matrix: Reloaded”: “Holy shit he caught her!” Yeah. It’s like that. Only with rabbits.

But it’s not an action novel, either. When I say it’s “kind of” a Hero’s Journey, what I mean is it’s exactly like a Hero’s Journey. Not only does the plot more or less follow the usual points of such a journey as described by Joseph Campbell, but it self-consciously introduces sub-stories in the form of myths about El-ahrairah and his many tricksy exploits. Hazel, a young rabbit in an established warren, is destined to become a kind of El-ahrairah to his friends after he is warned by his brother, Fiver, that doom is about to befall their home. Yes, Fiver is psychic. A psychic rabbit. Look, it just works, okay? Together they gather a scrappy band of adventurers and leave in search of a new home. They being their travels envisioning home as a physical location, but when they finally reach Watership Down, they have begun to learn that “home” also refers to a way of life, one that they will have to nourish and defend.

Though the book is frequently critical of human beings and their wasteful and violent tendencies, it is also stalwartly hopeful in its characterization of the rabbits, whose strengths and weaknesses correspond to those of humans: they are physically vulnerable and bound by habit, but forced by circumstances to overcome fears, learn new skills, and transcend their formerly limited notions of what is possible.

Watership Down is often characterized as a children’s book because the main characters are rabbits, but I find this description bafflingly reductive. It is as beautiful as Charlotte’s Web, with a similarly quiet narrative voice and with the same appreciation for nature, but darker and more threatening in its indictment of the baser human tendencies. As with all my favorite books, I find myself torn between wanting to linger over this book and being visually pulled along the lines of every page.

The Land of Decoration, by Grace McCleen

If you go by the Bible, earth was a place we were exiled to. Logically, we should be merely enduring life, showing gratitude for the gifts life does bring, but mostly waiting to get into Heaven. Most of us, though, whether we believe in Heaven or not, don’t think about the afterlife all of the time. We distract ourselves with relationships and jobs and ice cream and television, and manage to have a bit of fun between birth and death. Judith McPherson, the ten-year-old narrator of Grace McCleen’s The Land of Decoration, doesn’t have any of these things, so she consoles herself by building a model world in her room out of bits of rubbish she finds. Judith’s “Land of Decoration” is a vision of her perfect world, the world she hopes she will be taken to in the afterlife. Tellingly, it looks a lot like her real world, only with a few important tweaks.

In the Land of Decoration, Judith’s strict and phlegmatic father is able to bear looking at her. Her mother, who died giving birth to Judith, is alive and gives Judith all the things her father doesn’t believe are healthy or safe: fish and chips, hot air balloon rides. Meanwhile, in the real world, Judith is relentlessly bullied at school and ignored by her burn-out teacher. When she’s not at school, she and her father spend their free time going door to door, trying to teach people about the impending Armageddon. Judith knows a lot about God: “There weren’t many people to talk to except Father, so I began talking to God. I always supposed it was just a matter of time before He answered me.” And someone does answer, though we are never explicitly told whether that someone is God, or Judith herself, or something else altogether. Judith begins to hear what she believes is God’s voice after she performs a miracle: she makes it snow to avoid getting her head shoved into the toilet by a vile little boy at school.

The moment Judith realizes she has the power to make it snow is beautiful and thrilling. She finally feels the sense of empowerment and control over her world that all neglected children hope for. She thinks, “this had been waiting to happen to me… The miracles had been waiting all the time, and so had I. And now the waiting was over…” The moment generates an excitement that propels the reader all the way through the rest of the book, and for that moment alone, The Land of Decoration is a memorable and affecting read.

But McCleen goes further than that. She elicits a sense of magic and wonder, then tethers us, like hot air balloons, to earth by involving us in the very real-world problems that Judith’s new powers create. Whether Armageddon is coming or not, we still have to learn how to live in the world as it is. Both Judith and her father, in different ways, struggle with how to do this while maintaining their faith. In the process, they struggle with learning to understand one another. In many ways, this is a coming-of-age story for Judith. She sees herself, as most children do, as being at the center of her world, which for a sensitive child in unsympathetic surroundings is more a burden than anything else. Part of growing up means learning when we are and are not responsible for things and to what extent. She is also taught, through her religion, to see things in black-and-white, but growing up means letting go of such strict delineations.

In a way, McCleen’s novel is a clever extended metaphor for exactly the kind of middle-ground thinking Judith must learn. Judith struggles with her faith, but might losing faith in one belief simply mean gaining faith in another? The people in Judith’s world don’t see the events of the novel as miraculous, but Judith sees miracles everywhere, because her definition allows for more leeway than most. What constitutes a miracle, then? We never learn how real Judith’s interactions with God are, but does it matter? They are real enough to affect her life, and thereby the lives of the people around her.

For a book that asks such big questions, The Land of Decoration is a winningly simple story. It doesn’t answer all the questions it poses, but it does make the point that how we answer them determines how we live our time here on earth, notwithstanding the promise of any heavenly afterlife. Reading books as thoughtful and entertaining as this is a pretty good way to spend some of that time.

The Mapmaker’s War, by Ronlyn Domingue

As a child reading about hobbits and lampposts and luckdragons, I thought I longed to step into other worlds because of the many physical ways in which they differed from ours. But growing older, I think most of us would find that what we really want is simply the ability to feel awestruck by the beauty and novelty and discovery of real things. We want to know more, but mostly we want to believe that there are still things we don’t know.  The world seems bigger when we don’t know everything.

The connection between fantasy literature and the desire for discovery is one Ronlyn Domingue, author of The Mapmaker’s War, seems to understand deeply. Fittingly, then, the book’s plot does not turn on the completion of a mystical quest, but instead on an entirely mortal and largely internal struggle: a woman’s desire to first transcend her society’s expectations and then her guilt at what doing so has cost her.

In this fantasy novel, the heroine doesn’t begin by looking for a dragon. Instead, Aoife (ee-fah) wants to be a mapmaker. It is irksome enough to her mother that she seeks any employment at all outside wife- and mother-hood, but to be a mapmaker, Aoife must be able to travel far away from her village, and almost solely in the company of men. Fortunately for Aoife, her father is proud of her talents, and her superior skill is noticed by the king, who permits her to serve as a mapmaker. Her work and her growing attraction to Prince Wyl distract her from the fact that she is only as free as the king sees fit to let her be. Later, as Wyl’s wife, pregnant with children she will not be able to love as she feels she ought, she thinks, “Your place in the world shrank tight as the skin of your belly.”

The war Aoife feels she has started begins when she discovers a hidden village while traveling for her mapmaking. The people live simply but are entirely without want. They wear beautiful jewelry, and no one person seems to possess more wealth than any other. There is no word for “rape.” The women work alongside the men. Children have parents, but are cared for by everyone. These mysterious people guard a dragon and a treasure. Eventually, Aoife will stand against her family and her kingdom to protect what she has found. Her conflicts become recognizable when she is offered peace and struggles to accept that such a thing even exists.

This shifting of focus, from the trappings of a fantasy setting to the personal struggles of a single character, makes for an intimate reading experience. Adding to the intimacy is the second-person tense in which the book is written: Aoife is writing her autobiography, and she is writing to herself. In a book about boundaries drawn and undrawn, Domingue draws a circle around the reader and her narrator by having Aoife constantly address herself, and in doing so address the reader, by using “you.” I would not have believed, before reading this book, that such a voice could be sustained for the duration of a novel without being off-puttingly distracting and pretentious, but the inward-looking plot and narration echo one another elegantly.

The limitation this presents is that other characters appear as mere sketches in Aoife’s consciousness. There is little dialogue, and what conversation there is is not set off by quotation marks or other punctuation, so that it all bleeds into Aoife’s thoughts. The book is subtitled, “A Legend,” and it is true that in most legends and fairytales, we don’t need more than one or two traits to establish a character. They’re not the point: the plot and its attendant moral are. This is not the case with The Mapmaker’s War, which forgoes the flash and fanfare of traditional fantasy in favor of character development, but then neglects to give its main character sufficient supporting personalities to interact with. Aoife’s character is well-developed in itself, but there are few instances of real chemistry between her and any other characters. Her personality, and consequently, the story she tells, is richly shaded, but monochromatic.

In the end, The Mapmaker’s War is too personal to be a proper legend. While Aoife’s story comes to an end within the book, her story is itself a prologue to the larger conflict at hand, one that will likely be explored more fully in the book’s sequel, The Chronicle of Secret Riven, due to be published in 2014. Even so, there are no cliffhangers in The Mapmaker’s War; it’s just not that kind of book. It is small and quiet and hopeful in its belief that we can recognize what we are looking for when we find it.

Three Days of One-Day Books: The Sisters Brothers, by Patrick deWitt; The Good House, by Ann Leary; The Testament of Jesse Lamb, by Jane Rogers

It’s like… the Coen Brothers do Huckleberry Finn, or “Treasure of the Sierra Madre”. The formality of the speech, the strange characters, the graphic violence, and the humor in the midst of some surprisingly touching moments, all reminded me of watching “True Grit” or “O, Brother, Where Art Thou?” But The Sisters Brothers is original, engrossing, and moving enough to transcend pastiche, and I ripped through its roughly 300 pages in less than a day, laughing my ass off and trying not to read all the best parts aloud to my husband, whom I convinced to read it after me (and who also finished it in a day). The book is narrated by Eli, the younger Sisters brother, who followed his brother Charlie into a life as a hired killer. Eli is more sensitive and less sure of himself than Charlie, but no less an efficient killer for all that. On a job for “The Commodore,” Eli and Charlie begin a hunt for Herman Kermit Warm, encountering along the way a creepy old woman, a creepy young girl, a red-haired bear, a whole lot of prostitutes, a weeping man, a lost boy, and various killers even more morally ambiguous than themselves. They do eventually find Herman Kermit Warm, at which point the plot firms up and becomes less episodic. The events in this last quarter of the book play out rather briefly, but are still satisfying. There are some quietly lovely turns of phrase and enough enigmatic instances to give me the inkling that I could analyze for a symbolic narrative more closely if I chose to– but for right now, I don’t choose to. For now, I’m content simply to have enjoyed consuming it with the unctuous ease of a guilty pleasure, but absolutely without guilt. The book is smart enough to be funny to smart people, and if you’re a smart person, you know how rare that is.

The Kindle free sample feature is going to be the death of me. I download the first chapters of books, hoping that doing so will help me rule out books to read, and instead it just compels me to buy the damn book so I can keep reading it. At least The Good House made me feel I got my money’s worth. The narrator is Hildy Good, a real-estate agent in her 60s who lives in the same Massachusetts town where she grew up. A few years back, her adult daughters and other family members staged an intervention, after which she went into rehab and stopped drinking. Since then, she’s constructed a neat little narrative for herself in which she was a loving and certainly never absent or drunk mother, a successful businesswoman, and a popular woman with many friends. But when she sells a house to and then becomes friends with newcomer Rebecca, who is young, beautiful, and charismatic, Hildy begins to realize that she doesn’t have as many real friends as she thought. She becomes enamored of Rebecca, and begins drinking again– after all, in Hildy’s opinion, she’s not really an alcoholic anyway, so where’s the harm? The book is entertaining from the start, since Ann Leary, through Hildy, writes to us in an eminently distinct and believable voice. To my great delight, the book takes on a dark and suspenseful tone halfway through, when Hildy begins to have blackouts from drinking, and Rebecca stops seeming like the idyll of perfection Hildy originally thought she was. We are now forced to question Hildy’s perspective as she begins to contradict things she’s said earlier in the book, evinces ever-stronger denial about her drinking, and casually lets slip information about herself that, you know, maybe she could have told us sooner, but didn’t. This was another book I finished in a day. It’s easy to read but never pandering, exciting but never sensational, and really excellent in its portrayal of addiction and the human capacity for self-deception.

This was a YA/Sci Fi read, another first-person narrative, this time told from the perspective of 16-year-old Jessie Lamb. In Jessie’s version of our world, terrorists have unleashed a supervirus that has infected every person on earth. It lies dormant until a woman becomes pregnant, at which point it rapidly destroys her brain and kills her. While scientists struggle to find a way to keep making children, Jessie struggles to find the line where her childhood ends and her adulthood begins. She writes to us from a bedroom in which she has been imprisoned by her father, who, it is implied, is trying desperately to keep her from doing something rash– but we don’t know what just yet. The book takes the idea of women not being able to have babies and spins off into several interesting directions, none of which it explores quite fully– but I was okay with this. The fact that it doesn’t come to more solid conclusions limits the book, but there is a power in simply giving a reader a starting point for contemplation, and the book does that. I appreciated it as good sci-fi in that respect. I also found it to be good YA in its honest and agenda-free depiction of Jessie’s sexuality and romantic feelings for her friend Baz. (Oh my word, a teenage girl having sex! And enjoying it! And owning her decisions! And not being punished for liking sex! The horror.) Those of us who remember being teens will recognize Jessie’s headstrong idealism, so free from the doubts and subtleties that cloud adult minds. It’s far from the best I’ve read of either genre, but it made for a thoughtful day of reading that I can see many fans of this kind of book appreciating.

A Perfect Spy, by John Le Carré

I was shocked by how much I liked this book. I was forced to read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in grad school and hated it, so nothing less than the endorsement of Philip Pullman could induce me to try out John Le Carré once more. Apparently, it’s one of Pullman’s favorite books.

A Perfect Spy begins in earnest when British spy Magnus Pym receives a phone call telling him his father has died. He immediately disappears, leaving his wife and son, and instigating a manhunt from British intelligence, a manhunt that becomes more urgent following the revelation that Magnus may have been selling secrets to the Czechs.

The chapters alternate perspectives. Every other chapter follows Magnus’ wife, Mary, and his superior officer and friend, Jack Brotherhood, as they race to find Magnus. These chapters have the typical spy-movie feel, as we see the practical intricacies of locating a trained spy in hiding unfold against a backdrop of uncertain loyalties: Mary loves Magnus, but begins to realize that she doesn’t know him as well as she thinks she does, and Jack defends Magnus’ integrity against gathering evidence that he has been posing as a double agent.

In alternate chapters, Magnus writes a book to his young son, Tom, though he occasionally addresses Jack and others. We realize that at the same time the secret service agents are searching for Magnus, he is on a search to find himself in the pages he writes. This search is fraught with complications, as Magnus’ identities are as numerous as the roles he has played in his life as a spy.

Magnus’ cognizance of his fractured identity is partly indicated by the fact that he refers to his younger self in the third person, as “Pym.” He also assumes the identity of “Mr. Canterbury” while he is in hiding. Through Magnus, Le Carré introduces a cast of characters from Magnus’ past, who exist for him not as real people, but as Dickensian caricatures that loom larger than life. Magnus himself lies at the center of this network as a dark David Copperfield. His mentally ill mother, Dorothy, along with his father’s mistress, the fragile and promiscuous Lippsie, together make a kind of Dora Copperfield, an idealized notion of maternal love that is taken from Magnus too soon. Magnus’ father, Rick Pym, is a picaresque con-man who resembles a sociopathic Mr. Micawber. Rick is only one of Magnus’ “fathers”; Jack Brotherhood, along with Magnus’ friend and mentor, Axel, also influence him. In David Copperfield, David tells the story of how he is able to reconcile his conflicting identities, and in the end becomes an author. Magnus, too, becomes an author, but the same qualities that make him a perfect spy make it impossible for him to pinpoint any one identity as his real self.

Couched in the trappings of a spy thriller, A Perfect Spy depicts a man asking the same kinds of questions David Copperfield asks in what is perhaps Charles Dickens’ best novel: Who can I trust? How do I tell right from wrong? How do I know who I love? What kind of person do I want to be? In other spy novels I’ve read, the chase, the action, the intrigue, are all the point of the novel. We read thrillers to be titillated and diverted, and I certainly love to be so diverted by a book whenever I can. But A Perfect Spy uses the media of the spy novel to transcend its genre in a way that made me feel I was discovering something, even as I knew that thousands of readers before me had already made the same discovery.

A Great and Monstrous Thing: London in the Eighteenth Century, by Jerry White

          In his history of eighteenth century London, Professor Jerry White writes, “It has often been summarized as the Age of Politeness… but a proper balance needs to be struck. For this was a city (and an Age) of starving poverty as well as shining polish, a city of civility and a city of truculence, a city of sentiment and a city of cruelty.” He goes on to characterize London as a “city of extremes,” and paints such a portrait of its filth, noise, violence, culture, wealth, and burgeoning democracy as to leave us in no doubt that it was.

The most immediately striking aspect of A Great and Monstrous Thing is the sheer amount of information White manages to compile. To help the reader manage this onslaught of detail, the book is divided into five sections: City, People, Work, Culture, and Power. Each of these in turn starts with the story of a personage whom White deploys as a prism to illuminate related aspects of London life. This device works well, as these introductory stories are often interesting in themselves and serve as microcosms of the societal sector to be described. Ignatius Sancho, a black man who rose from slavery to servitude to literate, middle-class independence, is used to illustrate the ways in which ethnically and religiously diverse populations were and were not integrated into London society.  Like many of the personalities used to open the chapters, Sancho is well-chosen because of his vibrancy and charisma, which create a character the reader can interest herself in. From there, White goes on to describe the place of Europeans, Indians, Jews, Catholics, Scots, and Irishmen in the workings of London society, a society which could be violently bigoted at the same time that it was dispassionately pragmatic: no matter one’s descent, a person could keep himself in London and even attain a degree of status if he could make himself useful in one way or another.

This kind of “truculent egalitarianism,” as White terms it, in many ways characterized London across class lines as well as ethnic ones. This is not to mitigate the profound division between rich and poor in terms of quality of life, but to say that White describes a city in which the very rich and very poor, because of their physical proximity, were compelled to intermingle more than one might expect. On the crowded and often filthy London streets, walking was a competitive sporting event for every pedestrian. The theaters were a cultural event available to all but the very poorest, with seats in the upper galleries costing a mere shilling. This level of detail does more than simply give the reader factual information: we get a real sense of how the city felt, which is likely to stay with the reader long after specifics have dimmed from memory. This quality is of especial importance to the casual intellectual, who may read A Great and Monstrous Thing purely for information and not research.

Adding to its appeal is the humor inherent to many of White’s anecdotes. White’s love of his chosen city shines through in his evident amusement by such stories as John Wilkes’. Wilkes was a rake and a social opportunist who rallied the spirits of a disenfranchised lower class through anti-government writings. His good friend, Lord Sandwich, betrayed him by exposing him as the author of a libel against a member of the House of Lords, and read the bawdy poetry piece in front of the House: “Amid great disorder there were cries that Sandwich should stop, others that he go on. He went on.” It’s clear that Wilkes takes great delight in imagining a room full of English Lords in uproar over dirty poems while simultaneously yelling for more.  Eighteenth century Londoners! They’re just like us.

Despite its appeal to the merely interested reader, White’s book’s real value is what an invaluable resource it will no doubt prove to be to future academics. This work is as close to pure history as a book can be: its facts are not the fabric of any deeper interpretation than that London was a place of rampant growth and seeming contradiction. Though its lack of implication limits it in some respects, it also releases the book from any obligation to substantiate its objectivity. In his acknowledgements, White says he spent six years writing the book, but no book of this magnitude is anything less than a point of culmination in many more than six years of  scholarship. Indeed, it is the third in a series of histories of London by White. Fortunately, A Great and Monstrous Thing will likely serve its audience for at least a lifetime to come.

14, by Peter Clines

If you get to the end of this review and want to read 14, don’t read any other reviews! As psyched as I got by the reviews on Amazon, a few of them inadvertently contain spoilers for avid science fiction and fantasy readers.* If you are one of those avid readers, you are going to want to read 14, and you will not what to know what direction the plot will take. Unless you’re one of those people who kind of likes to know what direction the plot will take, in which case, see my footnotes. As accurate as my predictions were about the various plot twists, even I didn’t foresee how Peter Clines would take it There, and then keep going.

But there’s no harm in giving you the set-up.

Nate works a crap temp job that doesn’t pay well. Ergo, he is looking for a cheap apartment. And he finds one. But not too long after he really starts to thinking about why the rent is so cheap, he notices a few weird things about the other apartments. Like the fact that they’re all different sizes and layouts. Like the fact that the super really doesn’t like people poking around or asking questions. And the fact that the door to apartment 14 is padlocked shut and painted over.

The other tenants are, to varying degrees, also intrigued by the building’s oddities, and they band together to form a little investigation team behind the super’s back. I was surprised to find, halfway through the book, that I felt that I knew a handful of these people, and that I cared whether they lived or died. Their investigation gets progressively more mysterious and more creepy the more you read. The mystery is so appealing that it’s a shame Clines wastes so much time on irrelevant details that do not advance the plot or the characterizations. After all, we only need one or two scenes at Nate’s temp job to get the point that it’s a dead-end and that he’s looking for something more meaningful. Other times, Clines does an excellent job of spinning out time in a long, taut, thread, keeping a plot point dangling just beyond our reach while filling the interim with action sequences that are interesting in their own right; the scene in which Nate and a few of his cohorts explore the building’s basement is one such sequence. We follow the characters through its tunnels, dying to know what they will find, but enjoying the process of  just being there with them.

In many ways, the book reads as if Clines did not really find his footing with it until about midway through, and then was unable to curtail his own meanderings in the revision process. The book is so great in its last half that it would be easy for a casual reader to forget and forgive some of the chaff thrown our way in the early stages, but a careful assessment of the book would not be complete without an acknowledgement of the few elements that keep 14 from being a truly well-oiled machine.**

Sometimes, when an author has a really good idea, all he has to do is stand back and not get in its way. As Mama Ru always says, “…and don’t fuck it up.” Here’s a gratuitous picture of Ru, because I love her and she makes everything more fun, even reviews of books that have nothing to do with her.Anyway, my point is that Peter Cline did not fuck it up. Far from it. 14 is not richly layered or multi-dimensional.*** It is not written in cuttingly intelligent prose. But it is terribly clever and fun, and sometimes that’s all a book has to be.

STOP READING HERE TO AVOID SPOILERISH FOOTNOTES.

Or, keep going, whatever.

Beautiful Creatures, by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl

The most obvious comparison to make to Beautiful Creatures is to Twilight. They both feature normal teens who fall in love with supernatural beings. Stephenie Meyer, the author of Twilight, says that the characters came to her in a dream. Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl, in their interview with Amazon.com, describe the origins of Beautiful Creatures as follows:

Kami: We actually wrote Beautiful Creatures on a dare from some of the teen readers in our lives.

Margie: Not so much readers as bosses.

Kami: Looking back, we wrote it sort of like the serialized fiction of Charles Dickens, turning in pages to our teen readers every week.

Margie: And by week she means day.

Kami: When we were getting texts in the middle of the night from teens demanding more pages, we knew we had to finish.

Margie: As it says in our acknowledgements, their asking what happened next changed what happened next.

While I have no intention of making a case for the quality of the Twilight franchise,* I think the above quotes illustrate a key difference between the two series. Beautiful Creatures does not read as if it had been inspired by a singularly vivid dream. Instead, it seems to string together serviceable plot elements of Twilight and other major teen fantasy series, only without sufficient atmosphere or characterization to substantiate this lack of originality.

This sounds more harsh than I intend it to be. I have no problem with literary recycling as such. I was cool with Beautiful Creatures. BC is written in a moderately intelligent prose style. It is well-paced. For lovers of  fantasy, the supernatural, and YA, like myself, it is a fun book that goes quickly, especially in the last quarter of the book. But it seems like it’s reaching for something it never quite touches.

The book is set in a small South Carolina town, Gatlin,  where the townspeople perform yearly Civil War reenactments.  Sixteen-year-old  Ethan Wate laments the smallness and small-mindedness of his hometown, and finds relief for his boredom in the new girl, Lena Duchannes. Lena, it turns out, is a Caster. This means that she has magical powers and will be Claimed for either the light side or the dark side on her 16th birthday. Her relationship with Ethan and the dramatic events  leading up to her birthday make up the story, which is told through Ethan’s perspective.  This is a major drawback, as Ethan is just not that interesting a character. He starts out as a bored, smarter-than-average guy, and is drawn to Lena immediately upon her arrival. By the end of the book, he’s certainly no longer bored, but any further development that may occur in the book’s sequels is only hinted at in this first volume.

The authors attempt a Southern Gothic atmosphere by populating Ethan’s town with a handful of stereotypes: the small-minded Southerners, the bitchy cheerleaders, the oblivious jocks. Several characters, such as Amma, Ethan’s surrogate grandmother, and Marian, his late mother’s best friend, have real possibilities, but are kept mostly to the sidelines. Lena’s enigmatic uncle Macon is an interesting fellow, but the Dark Caster Sarafine, the book’s major antagonist, doesn’t make a real appearance until right before the book ends, when things are just getting good. There is good material in the book, but the authors don’t spend enough time with it. Instead, they distract us with at least two too many high school set-pieces to demonstrate how Lena is ostracized by the aforementioned bitchy cheerleaders and small-minded Southerners.

A few plot-holes are similarly distracting. Ethan encounters Serafine in disguise mid-way through the book. She is clearly evil, but he never thinks to investigate. On Lena’s birthday, he falls for what is clearly a diversion and leaves her alone and open to attack on the most vulnerable night of her life.

I read the book because I saw a trailer for the movie, which stars Jeremy Irons and Emma Thompson. I can see why Beautiful Creatures got picked up for film: it has great possibilities. In the book, unfortunately, they aren’t fully realized. I hope Irons and Thompson were given a great script to work with and ham it to the max. I’ll be in the theater, enjoying a box of peanut M&Ms and cackling every time Jeremy Irons doesn’t even try to put on a Southern accent.

*I’ve read all four Twilight books twice each. I have no defense. I’m an intelligent person who reads dumb YA vampire books. DEAL WITH MY CONTRADICTORY NATURE!

2012 Books in Review

I’ve been keeping lists of all the books I read for the past three years, and whenever I enter a book on my list, I also note whether it is a favorite. I always know instantly upon finishing a book if it’s a favorite, and sometimes even before. 2010 (a red-letter reading year for me) and 2011 each had 6 favorites. 2012 has only four. In the order in which I read them, they are:

The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes

I read that Barnes was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times before writing this book, which finally won. Though I hope to eventually read more of his work, it’s hard to imagine something else being more deserving than The Sense of an Ending. This is the kind of book I imagine a writer building up to for his entire life. I’m not sure anyone much younger than Barnes, who is 66, could have written this book. It is so full of the kind of humility that age brings that it wounded me as I saw myself in its descriptions of the narrator’s self-perceived shortcomings. Fortunately, any intelligent reader north of oh, say, 13, can appreciate its beauty. It is also technically masterful, with a twist that lends the book poignant irony without being sensational. I couldn’t speak for a full forty minutes after finishing.

Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson

I told a friend this is “the most suspenseful book in which not much happens that I’ve ever read.” The first line, “My name is Ruth,” is more than an introduction to the narrator; it is the first of many ties to Moby Dick and an entire philosophy that Robinson single-mindedly sustains over the course of the book without ever being preachy or heavy-handed. The prose is masterfully, unselfconsciously beautiful. One could stop to unpack nearly every line, but it is never obfuscating or overwrought. I later read Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead, which is also perfect, but Housekeeping is the one that I feel closer to and expect I will read again and again in years to come.

Wool, by Hugh Howey

The most fun I had reading all year. Dystopian science fiction with a truly badass main character who just happens to be female, some truly suspenseful action sequences, and a verrry reasonable e-book price.

The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, by Andrew Solomon

An open message to Andrew Solomon:

Really, if you’ve ever experienced depression or know anyone who has, I can’t imagine a better book to make you understand what it feels like, or make you gasp with recognition. It’s also quite funny, because depression, honestly, sometimes is.

Total Books Read:64

Re-reads: 8 (56 new books)

Worst Book of the Year: I guess Tyra Banks’ Modelland was pretty lame, but I have a high tolerance for lame, so…

Most Popular Genre: Literary Fiction, 17 titles. I’m proud of boosting my Non-Fiction reading up to 10 titles this year, and sad that I only made it to 7 YA books.

Longest Book: The Executioner’s Song, by Norman Mailer.

Unfinished Books: Some Kind of Fairy Tale, by Graham Joyce. I’ll definitely read it this year; it just didn’t grab me at the right time.

I am already reading for 2013, namely The Desert Spear, second in the Demon Cycle by Peter V. Brett, and Marilynne Robinson’s Home, a sequel to Gilead. I will be reading and reviewing A Great and Monstrous Thing, a great and monstrous (really, just enormous) history of London in the 18th century. I’m eager to see what books will make my Favorites list this year.

2010 Books in Review

I wrote this as a Facebook note before I had a blog, and it gave me the idea to keep one in the first place. Anyway, I’m posting it here for reference, since it is, after all, the first in a series.

I had the idea at the beginning of the year to keep track of all the books I read. I’m pretty sure that doing so resulted in my having read more books than usual this year, especially since my job this year offered a lot of free time, between my 1.5 hour commute each way, and Fridays off.  I’m currently in the middle of reading Don DeLillo’s Libra and since it’s not the kind of book I can read very quickly, it doesn’t look like I’ll be finishing before the end of the year, so I figured I would just go ahead and post my stats now.

 

Total Books Read: 63

Re-reads: 4 (fewer than I thought!)

Charlotte’s Web

Villette

Anna Karenina

The Perilous Gard

New Reads: 59

Most Popular Genre: Young Adult (11 books)

Hardly shocking, since YA books are such quick reads, and The Hunger Games series packed three books in right there. Second most popular genre? Romance. Thank you, Sookie Stackhouse. Other genres read were just plain old fiction, classics, thrillers, sociology, autobiography, sci-fi, fantasy, horror, historical fiction (yay, me; HF is a tough category for me to maintain interest in), mystery, psychology, and one children’s book, in my re-read of Charlotte’s Web.

Longest Book: Kristin Lavransdatter, Sigrid Undset, 1124 pages

But just barely. Under the Dome was 1074. A much easier to read 1074. I’m fairly certain Kristin Lavransdatter was also the book it actually took me longest to read.

Biggest Chore to Finish: The Red and the Black, Stendahl

Dear. God. Every once in a while there’d be a sexy part, and then the author would pull this bait-and-switch, like, “Turned on, eh? Well, they’re going to be unlacing that corset for a while, so let’s leave them in the boudoir and talk about the Bourbon Restoration!”

Worst Book of the Year: Confessions of Summer, Philip Lopate

I learned about this book through a reading comprehension section on one of my practice SATs. The section described really perfectly what it felt like to come from a lower-class background and the strange sense of hypocrisy and in-betweenness that having friends in the middle and upper-middle classes initially gives one. The rest of the book just plain sucked.

Favorites of the Year: Drood, Dan Simmons; The Book of Lost Things, John Connolly; The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins; Daniel Deronda, George Eliot; Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro; Portrait of a Lady, Henry James.

You know me. So you know I couldn’t choose just one, right? Except for Book of Lost Things, I have commentary on each of these novels at my goodreads.com page. I didn’t write much about that one because I finished it on the ten hour, overnight flight home from Hawaii, during which I was so uncomfortable I only slept two hours. I woke up, started reading this, and finished it before arriving home. It’s a little Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, a little David Copperfield, a little Neverending Story, and a little “Into the Woods”.  Obviously, I loved it. It’s a book so simple in concept it could easily have been ruined by another writer, but instead it has that transporting quality so rare and so essential in all the works it draws from. Whenever I read fantasy, it’s because I’m trying to get into a book like this one, and I always think I’ll never feel that way again, but then I do.

Drood is a book I originally gave an ambivalent review, but it stayed with me, vividly, in a way I could not have predicted, and I look forward to reading it again.

The only problem now is that I’m going to feel the need to do this every year… for the rest of my life.