Books Read: August 2011

August 3: A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin

Somewhere in the middle of this book, I began to feel like I needed to start back at the beginning of A Game of Thrones and make myself a comprehensive flow chart of characters, locations and situations as I read. While I understand the complaints of the fans who waited for years for this book to come out, I have to say that starting the series just this year means that I haven't had the time to re-read and obsess, making the ever-expanding cast of characters much harder to grasp in anything even approaching a comprehensive fashion. There ends up being a lot of "Oh, this is like that guy with the thing..." For most of the points of view, this doesn't make too terribly much of a difference in appreciating Martin's depiction of a world being subsumed by darkness (and wondering how on earth they'll translate some of the stories to the screen if Game of Thrones gets this far). It's certainly a lot of information to process, though. A few years until The Winds of Winter doesn't sound bad at all to me.

August 28: A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle

I ended up re-watching Sherlock as I moved things around my apartment in preparation for the hurricane, then decided to download this on to my Kindle for some weekend reading. Which then came in handy after my power went out. I don't really think I understood how much of the adaptation for the show is really about capturing an ethos rather than telling the exact same story until I read A Study in Scarlet. It's sort of intangible and difficult to describe, but there's just something tonal that the writers behind the show seem to get about Holmes, Watson and the structures of the mysteries that were missing in the recent Guy Ritchie film. Not gravity, necessarily...I'm not sure exactly what word I'm looking for.

I also read "A Scandal in Bohemia" - it seemed like an appropriate companion piece to the weekend to read the story of perhaps literature's most well-known Irene - and I'm really curious to see how it translates in the show's second series. The basic setup of the story - a prominent man tries to retrieve a potentially reputation-damaging photograph - seems very well-suited to Sherlock's style of updating. And after seeing the way he's framed characters like River Song and Madame de Pompadour in "The Girl in the Fireplace" in Doctor Who, I'm really intrigued to see how Steven Moffat writes a 21st-century Irene Adler as a foil for Holmes.

Books Read: Catching Up

These monthly posts totally got out of hand for me. I'd keep thinking that I wanted to write something more concrete about this book or that one, but never actually following through on doing so, until the backlog just became untenable. The Song of Ice and Fire books will probably come up again in future discussions of Game of Thrones, and I'd like to revisit A Discovery of Witches, Sisterhood Everlasting and The Night of the Gun when I have the time and focus to do so. Until then, I suppose this will have to suffice.

April 3: Sweet Valley Confidential by Francine Pascal

April 8: Bossypants by Tina Fey

April 9: A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin

April 10: A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

BTW, I'm totally adopting Deborah Harkness as a new role model. I mean, academic historian/fiction writer/wine blogger? Sounds pretty awesome to me.

May 1: Bumped by Megan McCafferty

May 21: Kissing Between the Lines by Diane Farr

May 31: Cinderella Ate My Daughter by Peggy Orenstein

June 1: A Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man by Bill Clegg; Spoiled by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan

June 14: A Feast for Crows by George R.R. Martin

June 20: Sisterhood Everlasting by Ann Brashares

June 27: To End All Wars by Adam Hochschild

July 4: The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich

July 6: Abandon by Meg Cabot

July 25: The Night of the Gun by David Carr

Books Read: January, February and March 2011

January 1: The Long Song by Andrea Levy

January 16: Starter for Ten by David Nicholls

January 21: A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin

February 2: A Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin

February 19: I Think I Love You by Allison Pearson

March 8: Mildred Pierce by James M. Cain

Books Read: December 2010

Better late than never, right?

December 22: Original Story By by Arthur Laurents

There's actually a very specific reason why I picked up this memoir - for a while now, I've been sort of fascinated by the character Anybodys in West Side Story. Like various of the Jets, she doesn't have a clear antecedent in Romeo and Juliet, but is rendered with an intriguing degree of specificity as a) a supporting character and b) someone who vocally refuses to conform to gender norms in the early 1960s. I wondered if she was a creation of Laurents, who wrote the book for West Side Story, and accordingly decided to pick up Original Story By to see if he discussed it at all. While that question wasn't addressed in any way, shape or form, the book was a delightful read. Laurents isn't afraid to indulge in some good, old-fashioned name-dropping - he seems to have interacted with an unbelievable array of Old Hollywood figures, and is wonderfully willing to talk about who he doesn't like and why and to dissect how his own work translated from page to screen.

December 26: Dash and Lily's Book of Dares by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan

Good, but probably my least favorite of Cohn and Levithan's three collaborations. I liked the different scope of New York locales they utilized for this book, and the way they used the Christmas season to revel in touristy kitsch, but Dash and Lily as protagonists come off a bit abrasive in their high opinions of their own points of view.

December 26: Fannie's Last Supper by Chris Kimball

Reading more Cooks Illustrated and watching more of the America's Test Kitchen shows in the past year have really made me a fan of Kimball. (I love this Slate piece, where he declares that suggested cooking times are "bullshit.") The enthusiasm that drives his presence in the shows is evident in this take on the Fannie Farmer cookbook of 1896. The academic in me would've liked a bit more examination of how class shaped kitchen work and who performed it, but the budding foodie reader loved the detail Kimball devoted to dissecting every element of the late-nineteenth-century multi-course dinner party.

December 27: Matched by Allie Condie

A solid introduction to what is clearly intended to be a series, but also a bit dry. Once you've read more than one young-adult take on a dystopian universe, the whole structure of the "heroine being part of the system/heroine questioning the system/heroine rejecting the system and working for the revolution" can feel pretty rote if it isn't executed with a significant measure of unique framing and writing infused with emotion. I think the ideas shaping the world of Matched have potential for a great second book, but I felt the introduction was just good.

December 27: The Help by Kathryn Stockett

December 28: Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

Both books where I'm intrigued to see how they've been adapted for the screen later this year - they could be affecting if done well, and melodramatic camp-fests if not. (Maybe fabulously so? I mean, one thing that really stuck with me when I read Water for Elephants was that, trusting that they stick to the story, Cristoph Waltz getting *spoiler alert!* clubbed to death with a circus tent pole by the elephant he once abused could make for the kind of clip that out-of-context viral fame is made of.)

Books Read: August 2010

August 6: One Day by David Nicholls

August 10: Dear John by Nicholas Sparks

August 13: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling

In the past, before each new Harry Potter volume came out I would re-read all the preceding books. It became sort of a soothing summer ritual; it also means that I've read the first four books (Goblet of Fire became the division point because it's my favorite) many more times than the final three. I missed that old ritual, and the film of Half-Blood Prince has entered that endless loop of HBO play, so I decided to pick the book up again. It'll be interesting to see whether the Deathly Hallows movies pick up on any of the dropped themes or plot points from the book; I understand why they condensed the Pensieve memories, but the book places a bit more emphasis on the similarities between Harry and young Tom Riddle, which in turn could have lent more emotional heft to the film.

August 13: The Romantics by Galt Niederhoffer

I read Niederhoffer's previous novel, A Taxonomy of Barnacles, a few years ago, and when I saw in the trailer below that this novel had inspired the film, I decided to pick it up. Reading descriptions of the book made me wonder if it was set in the present day; indeed, though it is, it has what felt to me like a very retro take on white ethnicity, setting up conflict between Jewish Laura, Catholic Tom and WASP Lila. The characters' strong sense of social divisions generated from these backgrounds felt at times like a relic from Erich Segal's heyday.

I still feel like I'm not sure whether I liked this book or not. I'm genuinely unsure about whether Niederhoffer intended for her characters to come across as such horrible people. "Friends" usually connotes even a minimal degree of mutual affection, but I never believed that any of the characters ever liked each other. More like the kind of enmity-disguised-as-friendship that prompts normal people to abandon the relationships once they've left whatever school/employment that temporarily forces them into close proximity. As I'm sure is obvious from the television shows I like to watch, I like stories about unsavory people of all sorts as long as they're made with clarity, skill, and self-awareness. I just never felt like I could get a firm handle on assessing those qualities (particularly the last) in the book.

Can I rant for a minute? My personal rule of thumb in fictional depictions of Yalies is: if the author mentions secret societies more than residential colleges, it's a no-go. Normally I hate to be a nitpicker, but the inaccuracies made it difficult to tell whether Niederhoffer was intentionally making her characters seem like idiots. (I'll just cite one example: Laura remembers meeting Tom for the first time as a freshman on the Old Campus, where he asks her how to get to Linsly Chittenden. Now, if this is a serious question, he's an idiot. For 5/6 of the school's freshmen, this would indicate that one has walked out of the front door of the building in which they live and immediately misplaced a building that is more or less directly in front of them. There are buildings on the campus that are difficult to locate; LC is simply not one of them. If it's not a serious question, then she's an idiot for finding such a lame ploy charming. And I'm going to stop now, because I sound like an insufferable elitist just like this book's characters.) Wikipedia indicates that Niederhoffer went to Harvard - I don't understand why she didn't just utilize the environment with which she was already familiar. I'm pretty sure the characters would still be snobs either way.

August 14: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling

August 28: Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

Mockingjay is a slow starter, with too much time devoted to the specifics of life in District 13, but once it gets going it provides a haunting conclusion to the Hunger Games trilogy. Collins deserves a lot of credit for being unwilling to pull punches - Mockingjay often depicts a brutal, violent world and never shies away from the consequences of the war at its center - the post-traumatic stress that lingers over each of the Games' "victors" throughout Mockingjay gives the book an emotional heft that wasn't quite present in the previous two books. The end isn't so much "and they lived happily ever after" as "and they lived, for whatever that's worth."

Word is that the film rights have (unsurprisingly) been picked up - it'll need a director and screenwriter with a sensitive touch and a flair for nuance to really pull it off. Hollywood seems to like these things a bit more cut-and-dry than what Collins offers - it's not good vs. evil so much as evil vs. lesser evil, and is there really such a thing as a "lesser evil" anyway? - and the relative mishandling of The Golden Compass doesn't necessarily portend great things for another trilogy rooted in ambiguity and the kinds of questions about life that many don't think need to be asked in works that are ostensibly "for children." With a sense of gravity and a good cast, a film could well capture the world of the books, but without it risks replicating the exploitation that the book critiques. We'll see.

Books Read: July 2010

July 4: How Did You Get This Number by Sloane Crosley

July 5: I Know I Am, But What Are You? by Samantha Bee

July 8: For You, For You I am Trilling These Songs by Kathleen Rooney

A trio of good essay/memoir works. Rooney was more serious than I anticipated, and came across as very much the former English professor (for better or for worse), though I will likely make copies of her excellent professor's lament on plagiarism, "I Will Catch You" for my student-teaching friends. Crosley was somewhat less funny in this work than her first, but also more thoughtful. Bee's candor, perspective and humor regarding her past made her book a standout.

July 11: Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

July 24: Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour by Bryan Lee O'Malley

I may revisit this one after I see the movie, if only because I'm curious to know how the disparate endings compare. I like the closure that O'Malley gives to Knives and Kim, and the return of Envy, but the Gideon/Ramona arc gets too muddled to me in the path from Volume 5 to Volume 6. Gideon comes across as flat when compared with many of the preceding exes, and I'm not sure that Ramona is any less enigmatic upon the story's conclusion.

July 24: The Baby-Sitters Club: The Summer Before by Ann M. Martin

A lovely little bit of nostalgia. Martin's new prequel recaptures the characters of the initial four babysitters in all their tween glory. It reminded me of youthful summers and hours whiled away absorbed in the world of Stoneybrook. If I'd been home when I read it, I'd probably have gone rummaging through the attic looking for the old books for a lost weekend of reminiscing.

Books Read: June 2010

June 5: The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner by Stephenie Meyer

Not revolutionary by any stretch of the imagination, but a solid companion to the rest of the Twilight series. Certainly, given her tendency to pull her punches in confrontational situations it was good to see Meyer communicate a degree of authorly affection for Bree Tanner's characters, considering that the vast majority are dead upon the story's conclusion. She also didn't shy away from the newborn army's capacity for out-and-out carnage, coming perhaps the closest she's ever gotten to more traditional vampire fiction.

Books Read: May 2010

May 15: Dead in the Family by Charlaine Harris

The latest in the series from which True Blood derives its inspiration. The series tends to divide into books where momentous things happen, and books where characters are largely reacting to previous momentous events. This book seems to fall into the latter category, but was still solid. I think the continuing storyline of the impact of Katrina on Louisiana's vampire hierarchy was a shot in the arm for the series that continues to deliver for Harris. (It seems like their runs will only overlap for a couple of weeks, but I'm really intrigued to see how True Blood and Treme play back-to-back. At the very least, it will be accent-tastic.) I also like that Harris revisited the concept of having a famous dead person appear as a vampire (this time with a less litigious estate than that of "Bubba").

May 18: Heart of the Matter by Emily Giffin

Her work may be branded with the condescending "chick-lit" label, but I really enjoy Giffin's work. Her characters always feel like adults, whereas other books lumped together under that umbrella can often come across as adults acting like teenagers. Heart of the Matter was heavier and darker than Giffin's previous books, but it never shied away from the resultant complexity. I feel like I'm going to be musing on this one for a while.

May 19: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Someday I'll have to tally all the books I end up reading either in anticipation of seeing a film adaptation or after seeing a film adaptation. This falls in the former category - I'm interested to see how the book's very interior narrative will translate to the screen, particularly in the way that its guiding concept informs the story's progression.

May 20: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

No matter how deeply I recognize, at least on an intellectual level, the pull of a popular young-adult book, somehow I still seem to find myself in circumstances where I'm totally drawn into a book and find myself finishing it at some ungodly hour of the morning. Collins takes a fascinating concept - an authoritarian government demands tribute from its citizens in the form of teenagers who fight to the death in a televised competition - and milks it brilliantly for all its tension and drama. Believe the hype.

May 24: What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller

Another film-inspired choice...about which I apparently don't have much to say.

May 25: Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

Again, another late night. What can I say, they're addictive. A solid middle book to a trilogy - it made me look forward to the last installment coming out later this summer, and drew upon the world Collins established in The Hunger Games without being too repetitive.

May 28: When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead

The most recent Newbery winner (sometime I'll devote a full post to how I was Newbery-obsessed as a kid) and a very good one, at that. I liked the way that Stead drew upon A Wrinkle in Time not only to frame the narrative of When You Reach Me, but also to evoke a sense of the way a particular book can impact you when you're young. A worthy addition to the pantheon.

Books Read: April 2010

April 23 - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

I read this one for a class. It's interesting to see how frequently the Pulitzer committee has chosen these sort of multi-layered histories for their fiction prize in recent years. They may feature different protagonists and narrators, themes and tones, but there's still a lot in common between Oscar Wao and, say, Kavalier and Clay, Middlesex and The Known World. I dug Diaz's take on Oscar's epic nerdiness - it kind of makes me want to create an "Oscar Wao Sci-Fi/Fantasy Reference" tumblr.

April 30 - North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

The first book I've read using the Kindle for Mac application. I tend to not be a huge fan of reading on the computer, but it wasn't too bad. I think my biggest problem was the progress bar at the bottom of the window, which allowed me to rationalize spending time reading when I should have been doing other things. (75% read? I could probably finish in a few hours!) I was prompted to start reading North and South after I watched the BBC miniseries adaptation from 2004. I don't do too much nineteenth-century reading outside of Austen and the Brontes - Gaskell's take on labor conflict, as well as the relative agency she bestows upon her heroine, was truly unlike anything else I've read from the era.

Books Read: January 2010

Let's try this again!

January 2: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

I can't believe it's taken me this long to read Jane Eyre - it's been sitting on the bookshelf taunting me for years and this winter break afforded me the time and inclination to give it a go. However many years ago it was that the movie Becoming Jane came out, a New York Times article observed that Austen fans and Bronte fans are different, because Austen situations that could plausibly happen to you with minor time period adjustments and Bronte situations are so off-the-wall insane that they would never happen to anyone. This is all true, and while it won't replace Pride and Prejudice in my estimation, I still enjoyed Jane Eyre's drama. After reading the Twilight series, I had forgotten what it was like to enjoy a narrator's presence.

January 14: Julie and Julia by Julie Powell

I first picked this book up after seeing its movie adaptation over the summer, but lapsed in reading when the school year began. I was compelled to return to the book after reading some of the press surrounding Powell's second book, Cleaving, particularly Powell's own posts on the DoubleX blog. (Slate being one of the few things I feel legit about reading while I'm at work.) I was intrigued in particular by Powell addressing a statement Amy Adams made regarding Cleaving's account of infidelity; namely that Adams had reacted by saying that "her" Julie Powell wouldn't have cheated on her husband. The differences between books and film adaptations are always interesting to parse; in this case, Powell's personality was dramatically flattened in the transition from "real life" to the screen. Film Julie seems to have a lot more in common with the other wide-eyed characters Adams has played in the years since Junebug that she does with the endearingly sarcastic woman who comes through in the written Julie and Julia. As someone who's recently tried to embrace cooking and baking with a small kitchen and a middling electric stove of wavering temperature, I couldn't help but identify with the ups and downs of Powell's quest. I can understand why Nora Ephron focused more on the vibrant personality and well-known persona of Julia Child in the film, but it would have been nice to see more of, say, Powell's love of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or her hilariously expressed crush on David Strathairn.

Books Read: January 2009

Reading Nick Hornby's essays about reading inspired me to try to keep a record of what I'm reading. Sometimes (i.e., when I'm not on break) it will skew more academic, sometimes more recreational, although the hope is always that the academic will also be compelling and interesting, and of course, that I will really read those books and not just pretend to. I'll just keep adding to the list until it's February's turn.

Housekeeping vs. The Dirt and Shakespeare Wrote for Money by Nick Hornby

Books of the aforementioned essays from the magazine The Believer. Reading About a Boy as part of my Chris Weitz mini-primer reminded me of how much I enjoyed High Fidelity and drove me to pursue more Hornby. The next time I have a stretch of time to read recreationally, I'll probably tackle some more of his fiction, but these essays were positively delightful. Above all, I really latched onto Hornby's basic philosophy, which paraphrased is basically "Read what you like, because life's too short to read something that makes you miserable." His anti-literary-snobbery stance is refreshing, and made me feel better about some of my literary choices of the past year, namely quitting on Blood Meridian after about ten pages, neglecting to read Housekeeping for class (his writing on the book convinced me that I couldn't have possibly given the book the attention it merits in the time given to read it for class, and made me eager to pick it up when I do have that time) and not feeling the least bit guilty or ashamed for enjoying the Twilight series.

The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman

Another exercise that grew out of Weitz assessment. I first read The Golden Compass back when it originally came out, when I was in elementary school, and didn't return to it until last month, when I prepared to watch the movie. Back in the day, I didn't move on to The Subtle Knife because a friend told me that I should wait until the third book came out because of the frustration involved in waiting for the conclusion. Knowing little of the joyous tension that can come from anticipating the release of a book (or movie, or album, or new TV season), I heeded her advice, and hence was no longer interested when The Amber Spyglass was released. It has thus taken the better part of a decade for me to get around to it. I liked the series, and I'm glad that I finally took the plunge and just finished it already. Lyra is a delightful, ballsy heroine, and the worlds that Pullman imagines around her are vividly imagined. It's not supplanting Harry Potter in my personal esteem, but it was a satisfying way to spend a few days.

The Final Solution by Michael Chabon

A short mystery by another author who's becoming one of my favorites. Chabon has what many of my favorite authors have, which is an innate sense of history. By which I mean that the manner in which they write fictional histories weaves stories in an epic sense that evokes documented factual history (that is, history by academically trained historians). Though The Final Solution is brief, one gets the sense that among the silences and unfilled gaps in the mystery, is a deeply involved story that Chabon ultimately knows from beginning to end.

Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood by Koren Zailckas

Maybe it's weird to say so, but I find stories about substance abuse, fictional and otherwise, unbelievably fascinating. They frequently show life at it's most dramatic and melodramatic, small moments exacerbated or writ large due to the influence of alcohol or drugs. However, even if Zailckas' memoir wasn't about substance abuse, it would still be interesting due to her startlingly clear-eyed observations about what it means to be a young woman in America today. She looks at herself and her peers and draws their misadventures with alcohol out to make points about expected behavior of women as young people, as drinkers, as friends, as protectors that are sad but revelatory when plainly stated.