Monthly Reading
Novels
American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld
Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
The Fiction Class by Susan Breen
The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor
The Truth About Forever by Sarah Dessen
The Face on the Milk Carton by Caroline B. Cooney
Only novels this month. I am sadly behind in my New Yorker reading and my aversion to anything related to America’s Next Top President ‘08 means that my usual sources of nonfiction are somewhat limited. Raves this month include Bel Canto and Prep.
Some Fun: Answers
How about some answers to last week’s quiz?
- 1801 – I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
- Sybil Davidson has a genius I.Q. and has been laid by at least six different guys. Forever – Judy Blume
- Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it “and what use is a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?” Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
- She hurries from the house, wearing a coat too heavy for the weather. The Hours – Michael Cunningham
- Noon. London: my flat. Ugh. Bridget Jones’ Diary – Helen Fielding
- This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it. The Princess Bride – William Goldman
- You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
- The sun sets in the west (just about everyone knows that), but Sunset Towers faced east. The Westing Game – Ellen Raskin
- When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee
- Parsifal is dead. That is the end of the story. The Magician’s Assistant – Ann Patchett
- (Bonus) When he says, “Skins or blankets?” it will take you a moment to realize that he’s asking which you want to sleep under. “How To Talk To a Hunter” by Pam Houston, from the collection Cowboys Are My Weakness
Some Fun: A Reading Meme
Welcome to my procrastination. I feel like I’ve seen this meme somewhere before, as I’m definitely not original enough to make it up. Below are the first lines of 10 of my favorite books. See if you can figure out who wrote them and where they came from. Leave your answers in the comments.
- 1801 – I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.
- Sybil Davidson has a genius I.Q. and has been laid by at least six different guys.
- Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it “and what use is a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”
- She hurries from the house, wearing a coat too heavy for the weather.
- Noon. London: my flat. Ugh.
- This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.
- You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.
- The sun sets in the west (just about everyone knows that), but Sunset Towers faced east.
- When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.
- Parsifal is dead. That is the end of the story.
- (Bonus) When he says, “Skins or blankets?” it will take you a moment to realize that he’s asking which you want to sleep under.
I’ll post the answers later this week. Enjoy!
Distractions
If I get nothing done this week, it’s all Curtis Sittenfeld’s fault. I started American Wife last night and I’m already 200 pages in. (It helped that I stayed up until 2 a.m. reading.) If you’re a fan of Prep and Man of My Dreams, then be assured that this one is great, too.
I’ve had a run of great luck with books lately. Yesterday I finished Bel Canto. I’ve loved Ann Patchett based on The Magician’s Assistant and The Patron Saint of Liars, but for some reason I skipped Bel Canto. I read it over the weekend for an upcoming book group fell and in love with Patchett’s writing all over again.
I have to say, though, that sometimes when I read a bunch of great books I think, why do I even bother? Why isn’t it enough for me just to read great books, why do I feel I have to try to write them?
Sigh…
August Reading
Is it September already?
Novels
Galatea 2.2 by Richard Power
Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist by Rachel Cohen and David Levithan
After Dark by Haruki Murakami
That Summer by Sarah Dessen
Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging by Louise Rennison
Bullyville by Francine Prose
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
When Zachary Beaver Came to Town by Kimberly Willis Holt
Cures for Heartbreak by Margo Rabb
Short Stories
Glory Goes and Gets Some by Emily Carter
Nonfiction
The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson
I had no idea I read that much this month. Obviously, the theme was YA lit. Some raves include: Cures for Heartbreak, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, and Galatea 2.2. I also started, but can’t seem to finish The Savage Detectives. Oh well.
Linkage: On Chick Lit
(As in the genre, not the username.)
I tend to get a little prickly when people dismiss books as being chick lit. For example, “Oh I’m not reading anything special, just some chick lit” or (from a guy) “I’m not going to read that, it’s chick lit.” It annoys me but I’ve never been able to articulate why it annoys me. When I’ve tried, it has turned into a thousand word rant on literary elitism and that damn MFA program. These sorts of outbursts are better left off the blog.
However, one of my favorite authors briefly tackled the subject on her blog and I think she summed it up very nicely:
. . . I did an interview the other day where I was asked what I thought of the label “chick lit” and how it’s applied to my books. It’s an interesting question. The truth is, I feel like the label “chick lit” is kind of lazy. It’s a way of grouping any book about a woman which has NOT been classified by the Powers That Be as Literary into one incredibly vast category. Personally, I love books about women, Literary and not, and I’ve read enough to them to know that one word cannot possibly define everything that is out there. Is Jennifer Weiner the same as Meg Cabot who is the same as Suzanne Finnamore who is the same as Jennifer Belle? No, no, no and no. It’s like saying that all YA books are the same because they are about teenagers. I think, personally, that it’s up to you as a reader to define what a book is to you. It’s different for everyone. Which is a great thing, and really what reading is all about, anyway.
Via Sarah Dessen.
What Went Wrong with Breaking Dawn?
Warning: This post may contain spoilers for Twilight/Breaking Dawn, Harry Potter, and The Dark Materials. Read at your own risk.
Forgive me, friends, because I am a terrible person. I have a morbid fascination with the fallout over Breaking Dawn, the fourth and final book in the Twilight series. I’ve been watching the Amazon ratings and reading the fan discussions on the interwebs. My, there are a lot of angry fans out there.
Here’s the lowdown for those who haven’t been obsessively tracking the Twilight phenomenon. Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series consists of four books dealing with (best I can tell) a love triangle between a teenage girl, the sparkley vamp she loves, and a werewolf. The much awaited finale had a midnight release this weekend to the tune of 1.3 million in book sales. Early Saturday morning Amazon reviews suggested some dissatisfaction with the book. (Two and a half star rating? Oh my!) Shortly after, threads suggesting readers return their copies or even burn them began appearing. Currently, the fandom appears divided between “Breaking Dawn is the BEST BOOK EVER” and “OMG did I just waste my Saturday morning reading that?”
Having read only the first 200 pages of Twilight, I am not at liberty to review the last book. I’m probably not qualified to even write this blog post. Still… In reading the reviews and discussions, one of the things that upsets me most are the people that answer any criticisms of the book with some variant of “it’s just fiction, don’t think too hard about it.” (For the record, there are a number of plot criticisms in which this comes up, but the primary discussion to which I’m referring to deals with vampire sperm. You see why this is fascinating to me.)
The Breaking Dawn problem seems to stem from the fact that Meyer broke the rules of a world that she created. Anytime you write fiction, you get to establish a new world. It can be a world just like ours, or it can be a completely other world. Rowling created a underground magic school and an entire society of wizarding folk. Pullman assigned people daemons that were tethered to them. Both of these world were completely plausible, despite the fact that they were completely unlike the world we live in.
But, just like our world operates on rules (the laws of physics, as just one example) so do fictional worlds. In Pullman’s world bad things happen when daemons are severed from their humans. It’s a rule. It would take a hell of a lot of skill to break it.
So Meyer built three books that established the world of Twilight and among the established rules is one that says vampires can’t have babies. Sorry, vamps, just the way it goes. And then in the last book, the rule is utterly, spectacularly broken, and revamped (sorry, I really couldn’t help myself) with some vamps can’t have babies, but others can. Hmm… remember that part about it taking a lot of skill to break an established rule? I’m gathering from the Breaking Dawn fallout that this book didn’t pull it off. People are pointing out that the whole vampire siring a child thing is completely implausible in the Twilight world. And it’s a valid criticism, one that has the other half of the fandom answering it with “it’s just fiction.”
To answer that criticism, or any criticism with that remark suggests that fiction doesn’t have to honor the world it creates when, in fact, it very much does. The best stories are the ones that I get completely lost in and I never question their plausibility, but that’s because they establish their rules and they don’t break them without some serious skill. Just because “it’s just fiction” does not give the work a bye when it isn’t plausible or breaks the rules that it has created.
Sorry if this post seems extremely harsh toward the book or toward Ms. Meyer. I actually feel a lot of sympathy for the Twilight fans that are feeling ripped off by the latest book. It really sucks to get very much invested in a book or a series only to want to end up burning it when it’s over. I hope your next reading adventure is much more enjoyable.
July Reading
Novels
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
On a Night Like This by Ellen Sussman
A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines
Freshman Lies by Linda A. Cooney
Freshman Guys by Linda A. Cooney
Someone Like You by Sarah Dessen
Alternatives to Sex by Stephen McCauley
Short Stories
Notable Nonfiction
Billy the Kid: The Endless Ride by Michael Wallis
The Writer’s Desk by Jill Krementz
“The Lion and the Mouse” by Jill Lepore
Hibernating
Twilight by Stephanie Meyer
I have a couple of great novels to recommend this month. I really enjoyed On a Night Like This and Someone Like You. The latter is a YA book that made me wish that someone was writing YA like this when I was a teen. I think I would have read more.
On the other side of that coin, I tried Twilight and I simply could not finish it. It didn’t help that I kept playing Buffy DVDs as I was reading it. I really wanted to like it because I’ve been getting more into YA lately (more on that later) and I’m usually up for a good vampire tale, but this book lacked the character development that I need to really pull me into a story. And so, permanently hibernating it is.
Linkage: What Makes Bad Fiction
Ward Six writer J. Robert Lennon recently posted a list of what makes fiction bad (in his opinion) and invited others to share their complaints. I tried coming up with my own list of complaints, but could only think of one:
Fiction that puts artiface or style over the story. There’s a book I started reading recently that had an unusual narrator. That part didn’t bother me, but this narrator was frequently interrupted by vague poetic observations that were usually written in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. These observations were so intrusive, they kept pulling me out of the world of the story and reminding me that the author was trying something very clever. I hate that. I like to be lost in a story. I like to forget that a novel even has an author, so if the story is mainly a conduit for the style (instead of vice versa) it’s going to leave me cold.
Anyway, I encourage both readers and writers to check out the original list and the discussion that follows. I think we can all benefit from being able to talk about why we don’t like a novel or story instead of simply saying that we didn’t like it.
…Wherein It’s Wednesday
(With many apologies to hujhax).
Here’s what I’ve been up to this week:
1) Writing a $#@! novel. This week I finally sat down and wrote the first three pages of a story that has been dancing around in my head for years. I’ve never considered myself capable of a novel. I’m still not sure I consider myself capable, but short stories aren’t quite doing it for me right now, so might as well try something else. We’ll see how that goes.
2) Moving my butt. Hubs and I signed up for a gym last week and I’m proud to announce I’ve gone three times so far. I think this will be good for my writing. Exercise stimulates my creativity. Or so I’d like to think. During my first 2 1/2 years in the MFA program I ran two or three miles daily. When the exercise sloughed off, so did the writing. Call me superstitious, but it’s worth a shot. Also, routine = good.
3) Reading The Bell Jar. I think I missed the age window for really loving this book. I imagine in my teens or twenties I would have thought it awesome, but the old, cynical me is less impressed. This makes the second book that I’ve inadvertently screwed up for myself by reading it later than I should have. A couple of years ago I finally got around to reading The Catcher in the Rye and discovered that Holden Caulfield is a whiner. I have a similar feeling about Esther. When I sit down to read it, much eye-rolling ensues. However, it’s short and a quick read, I’ve less than 75 pages left, and I’m committed to getting it over with. After that, I’ll take my teen angst with a side of cheese in the form of Freshman Dorm thankyouverymuch.
4) Going to photography class. I have serious doubts about how well I’ll learn my camera in a classroom setting, but I’m trying anyway.
5) Playing Singstar. Hubs edged out my top score for “Material Girl.” Vengeance is mine.
