Sarahlynn's Writing Blog

Gentleman's Agreement by Laura Zametkin Hobson

2012-03-07T14:04:00.001-08:00

Have you read Gentleman's Agreement by Laura Zametkin Hobson No? Well, you should read it! Everyone should read it! Once upon a time, lots of people did - it spent five months at #1 on the New York Times Bestseller List after it published in 1947 - but it has since fallen out of favor. I'd never heard of it until a friend picked it for our book club's February selection, spurring probably the best discussion we've ever had.

The novel's current lack of visibility might be due in part to its Amazon blurb: The plot of GENTLEMAN'S AGREEMENT concerns the experiences of a young Gentile writer who poses as a Jew in order to secure material on anti-Semitism for a series of magazine articles. A thesis novel concerning the social and economic aspects of anti-Semitism in American life.

No, really, it's good! I wrote all over my copy of the book, and then typed up my notes. And, yet, it was fun.

It's a quick read, easy, but not shallow (except a little right at the end). And it's non-threatening, too, for a book with such a point. The main character is an ally (not prone to some of the major prejudices of his day) which casts the reader into the same role and allows us to hear hard truths and appreciate them while thinking ourselves exempt or hidden.

This is one of those books that has stuck with me and I find myself using some of its figures of speech in my everyday life weeks after completing the read. Flick, tap.

The novel is about a California-based widower and writer who gets a job with a major weekly magazine in New York City and relocates his family. The first people he meets are his new editor - who gives him the assignment of writing a series on antisemitism - and the editor's niece - who inspired the idea for the assignment and becomes the love interest/second main character. The writer gets the idea that in order to write convincingly and interestingly about antisemitism, he must experience it first-hand. So he introduces himself to everyone he meets as a Jew and undergoes a rapid transformation.

The novel deals not only with antisemitism but also with other forms of prejudice, including racism and sexism. I especially enjoyed some of the nascent feminism, as the author gently drew us along with contemporary lines like, "I'm having people over tonight. A couple of girls and people." How great is that? The role of women's work in the running of a household provides an interesting background, as do the the characters' remarks about "womanish softness" of thought and "a vague resentment that it's a man's world."

But the parts that really stuck with me were about antisemitism and are equally relevant today, with our own various -isms. Prejudice comes in little "flicks" and "taps." “Rarely was the circumstance so arranged that you could fight back.” "They gave you at once the wound and the burden of proper behavior toward it.” There's a lot of discussion about “the complacence of essentially decent people about prejudice” and the question of whether it's gauche or required to make a scene and speak out against prejudice whenever you encounter it (even if it's at a formal dinner party with an important client).

All this unfolds as part of a love story between the writer and his editor's niece. She inspired the assignment and is passionately antisemitic . . . but perhaps she
has a different understanding of what antisemitism is and means and how best to respond. What brought the couple together eventually drives a wedge between them.

If you read - or have read - this one, please let me know; I'd love to discuss it with you! And if it doesn't sound like something you're willing to read, the novel inspired a movie by the same name, starring Gregory Peck.

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Beowulf on the Beach: What to Love and What to Skip in Literature's 50 Greatest Hits by Jack Murnighan

2012-01-03T22:20:00.001-08:00

It took me more than two years to read this book, but don't let that scare you away. I think you should read it, too!

I loved this book. I didn't agree with the author about everything, but I did agree with him about a lot of things and I loved his passion for literature alongside his irreverent take towards it. This month, for Barrie Summy's Book Review Club, I'm discussing Beowulf on the Beach: What to Love and What to Skip in Literature's 50 Greatest Hits by Jack Murnighan.

Murnighan "has a Ph.D. in medieval and renaissance literature from Duke University. He is the author of The Naughty Bits and Classic Nasty and has written for Esquire, Glamour, and Nerve. He lives in New York City and teaches creative nonfiction at the University of the Arts."

I don't hold all that against him, though. He writes like a hip professor who really really wants to pass along not the IMPORTANT SYMBOLISM or CRITICAL HISTORICAL CONTEXT of classic literature but rather a love of reading great books along with an understanding of how to read "tough" books and why the effort is worthwhile.

The publisher's blurb:

Did anyone tell you that Anna Karenina is a beach read, that Dickens is hilarious, that the Iliad’s battle scenes rival Hollywood’s for gore, or that Joyce is at his best when he’s talking about booze, sex, or organ meats?

Writer and professor Jack Murnighan says it’s time to give literature another look, but this time you’ll enjoy yourself. With a little help, you’ll see just how great the great books are: how they can make you laugh, moisten your eyes, turn you on, and leave you awestruck and deeply moved. Beowulf on the Beach is your field guide–erudite, witty, and fun-loving–for helping you read and relish fifty of the biggest (and most skipped) classics of all time. For each book, Murnighan reveals how to get the most out of your reading and provides a crib sheet that includes the Buzz, the Best Line, What’s Sexy, and What to Skip.

I found that if I tried to read the book straight through, the chapters and various classics began to bleed together. So I used it as my palate cleanser, reading a chapter or two between other books as I finished them.

And now I intend to start all over, using Beowulf on the Beach as a to-do list to fill in the gaps in my reading of the classics. I'm especially loving the "what to skip" bits, some of which confirm that a book that's supposed to be "great" but I have no interest in might not actually be so wonderful after all. (Murnighan has a theory that people like sets of three and sometimes an author or books is tossed in with two other, far greater works to make a complete set.)

My favorite part of the book is that Murnighan is so completely un-snobby about literature. He tells you everything you need to know about each book in order not to embarrass yourself at a literary cocktail party. And he also tells you what questions to ask to poke holes in the blowhard who quotes famous lines from books he probably hasn't read.

(Fourth Monday Book Club, this book is why we're reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude this month. I hear it's "the greatest novel of our era." And who can resist that?)

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Ghost Story by Jim Butcher

2011-12-06T23:15:00.001-08:00

Hey! This here's Barrie Summy's monthly book review club.

For next month my book club is reading One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. And that was my choice. But there's another reader inside me, too. And that reader likes to read fun books that are quick and consumable and exciting and pulpy and fun. Also, did I mention, fun?

That reader discovered Harry Dresden a few years ago. What's not to love? In Jim Butcher's contemporary urban fantasy series, Chicago looks much as it does today. Except that, in the Yellow Pages, there's a single listing for a "Professional Wizard." That's Harry Dresden, and he's an old-school private investigator who solves problems with little help from modern technology (electronics don't do so well around magic).

The novels might start like classic noir detective stories but soon the missing artifact or other de rigueur case turns out to have an occult twist. To sum up the awesomeness here, so far we have:
1) Funny series novels set in Chicago
2) Classic mystery set-up
3) Magic.

What's not to love? That's harder to put my finger on. But I found that I don't want to read two Dresden novels back-to-back. Butcher's voice grates on me after that and little . . . flaws? stylistic choices? character idiosyncrasies? . . . in the writing begin to call attention to themselves and draw me out of the story.

So I read the books one-at-a-time, with space between, because I really like to enjoy each one. These stories have it all: wizards, magical politics, faeries, goblins, trolls, zombies, vampires, werewolves, angels, priests, fighting, battles, war, romance, you name it and it's probably somewhere in this world. As an added bonus, the main characters are geeks.

Another benefit to the slow-read approach is that I didn't catch up to the author for a long time.

But when I finished Ghost Story (Book 13, naturally) last week, I was stuck. The next novel isn't due until next summer! And only one per year after that! Alas.

If the above description captures your interest, let me underscore that/reassure you in two ways: Butcher's writing improves as the series progresses, and the novels are better than the short-lived Sci Fi Channel series loosely based on the books.

If you've tried just one or two of the novels but haven't gotten hooked, I'd recommend perseverance. I was shocked - shocked! - at what happened in Changes (Book 12). It sent me scrambling for Side Jobs, an anthology of short stories and a novelette set between various novels in the series, as well as a novella set immediately after Changes. Then I rushed right into Ghost Story, which left me hanging deliciously.

I'm looking forward to book 14 - and it's worth noting that the author does have a planned story arc for the entire series, including an ending - but I think the first 11 novels, fun as they were, were worth reading as prelude alone for all the changes in books 12 and 13.

Recommended light holiday reading.

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Simple Gifts

2011-06-13T22:12:00.001-07:00

I used to have this idea about writing a novel called Simple Gifts about a child with special needs. I can't imagine writing that book, now or ever. Because the more I learn, the more it becomes apparent to me that there's nothing at all "simple" about a child with special needs.

Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell

2011-05-31T22:44:00.001-07:00

Every time I hear or see Sarah Vowell - as a contributor on NPR's This American Life or as a guest on The Daily Show - I want to read one of her books. But picking up a nonfiction book about American history is not my first inclination when I'm looking for a fun read.

This month I took the plunge into Vowell's Assassination Vacation. What better book for the beginning of vacation season? The book follows Vowell's road trips to sites associated with the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley.

Despite my reluctance to read history, I fully expected to love this book.

And I did enjoy it quite a bit.

The two reasons I didn't love the book as much as I expected to: in the prologue Vowell (quoting a friend) used the word "retarded" twice as a pejorative having nothing to do with people with intellectual disabilities. Yes, I'm hypersensitive about this issue. But it jarred me out of the (otherwise hilarious) narrative and got us off on the wrong foot.

A deeper "problem" with the book is Vowell's disjointed, stream-of-consciousness style. I love it and my brain often works the same way. But I found the plot (such as it is) hard to follow sometimes. Tangent split off from tangent and I dutifully followed Vowell's breadcrumb trail but in my sleep deprived state - I have a newborn baby! - I had a hard time finding my way back to the main narrative. (Are you picturing the birds of sleeplessness devouring bread crumbs? Because I am.)

Not being intimately familiar with all the characters (the assassins, their families, people near the Presidents at the time of the attacks, etc.) I occasionally had to stop and reorient myself. Wait. Who are we talking about again? And how does this relate?

But I am so so glad I read the book. I learned a ton - painlessly - and I took away something even more valuable. As an ignorant American (alas) I have little sense of historical time. I know that our nation's history is relatively short but thinking, "The Civil War was 150 years ago," didn't really mean much to me. That is, until I saw it this way:

Robert Todd Lincoln - the President's son - was an adult with an established career when his father was murdered. He was still practicing law when my grandparents were born. In fact he didn't die until they were adults. Wow, these are all current events when I think about it that way. And I didn't realize how recently we held public hangings in this country.

To sum up: Sarah Vowell is hilarious and it's worth the time to read or listen to her work whereever you find it. This is a good, interesting, and educational read. Vowell is passionate about American History - she considers it her religion - and she shares her excitement in a way that's quite infectious.

One additional caveat. Vowell wrote this book during the Iraq War and President G.W. Bush's second term. Assassination Vacation is very much a product of its own place in history; Vowell ties in current events and politics with the historical narratives, and she is very much a liberal.

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Not Writing, Still Busy

2011-04-27T23:01:00.000-07:00

Writing every day is important to me and it's not something I'm doing at present. The urge is still there. I abandon my bed, driven from potential (and much-needed!) sleep by the need to write. Ideas buzz around in my head, eager to be let out.

Then I sit at my computer and hear: the baby waking, an older child requesting assistance (or attention), the pug needing to go outside, my email inbox pinging and pinging and pinging, or just my carpets crying for merciful attention from the vacuum cleaner.

I jot down my thoughts in outline form, hoping to get back to "flesh them out" later. This process satisfies the urge to write but rarely (never) produces anything worth sharing.

Indeed, this is less than half the post it was intended to be. But Ada needs water for her paintbrush and lunch isn't putting itself on the table.

Looking back over our Picasa site for the last month, it appears that I haven't just been on a "babymoon." I did have a baby a month ago and he's rather the center of everything right now. (And rightly so!)

But I've also written a bunch of thank you notes, read several books, gone to book club twice, toured a local Frank Lloyd Wright house, assisted in homework-related projects, hosted lots of company, gone to church and related meetings (several), attended a reunion event, put together a Seder and Easter, taken the dog and child to the vet and pediatrician, respectively, and coordinated the first annual Paul invitational marathon and supported my husband's running in general. Not too shabby.

From Ellie's nonfiction writing project "How To Make Cornbread for Chili:"

Permission to Change (Seasons)

2011-04-08T22:58:00.000-07:00

My apologies for the erratic weather we've had so far this year. I recently realized that it's all my fault.

See, in December a friend gave me a novel called Snow by Turkish author Orhan Pamuk. As I read it in fits and starts, it took me a really really long time to finish. But I'm finally done! And so now the snow can stop and spring can commence in earnest.

You're welcome.

As for why it took me so long to finish this book, well, that's all me I suppose. I kept flipping back to the front cover to verify that the seal on the front proclaiming, "Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature!" was still there and not just something I dreamed.

Later, I'd turn the book over and peruse the blurbs again. "One of the best books of the year" according to just about everyone from The New York Times Book Review to The Economist. Rave reviews from truly impressive people.

Repeatedly I read the jacket copy. "Slyly comic." Also, "humor," "wicked grin," etc.

I was excited to read this fabulous book, which came so highly recommended and is set in Turkey. (My in-laws lived in Turkey for years and my husband was actually born there; they returned to the states when his sister was ready for elementary school.)

But I just didn't get it. I didn't engage with the story, I didn't connect with the characters, and I felt frustrated by the pace. (The first day seemed to me like it must have been at least 48 hours long. Is Ka really in his late 30's as it appears? If so, how come the 17+ year age difference between close sisters Ipek and Kadife is never discussed?) I utterly missed the humor.

Obviously, this is all on me since apparently everyone else who's read Snow loved it. But I spent the first 200 pages trying to figure out why the author gave most of the unrelated main characters the same last name (Bey). Then I figured it must be a subtle comment on the provincial nature of Turkish society (the cerebral humor I'd been missing?). By page 300 I'd realized that "Bey" must be a sort of honorific (and it is). Some of my confusion might indeed have been cultural. I certainly feel like an uncultured ignoramus for my utter failure to appreciate this highly acclaimed novel.

But I finished it, and now it's spring!

Rope 'Em! by Stacy Nyikos

2011-04-05T21:22:00.001-07:00

I love participating in Barrie Summy's Book Review Club, and I get especially excited when she asks for a volunteer to review a children's picture book. The last one I reviewed was An Apple Pie for Dinner, which is still a favorite of both my girls. So when Barrie asked if anyone was interested in reviewing a picture book by another member of the Book Review Club, Stacy Nyikos, I jumped at the chance. And I am very, very glad the author sent me a copy!

At first I was concerned. Amazon.com suggests the book for 9-12 year-olds, which seemed a bit old for a picture book. Would my 7- and 4-year olds enjoy the story or would it be too much for them?

As I started reading, I remained concerned. A lot of the book - which is hilarious, incidentally - is an extended pun I doubt my 4-year-old understood. It's a Western. Set underwater. At the "OK Coral." On every page I felt like there were at least two jokes I needed to explain in order for my children to "get" the story.

But I held off and just read the story, instead. And then I read it again. And again. And, later, again. When my Ada's preschool class started a unit on the ocean I allowed her to take the book with her to school to share with her friends. (Ada has a thing for the ocean and another current favorite picture book of both of my girls is a western: Susan Middleton Elya's Cowboy Jose.)

I'm probably underestimating my kids. I bet they do get the humor in a bull shark chasing cowfish. And what's not to love about a sea horse who's a champion herder?

I'm still not sure exactly what my girls like about this book. They can't quite articulate why it's so great, but they certainly ask for it at bedtime again and again. They love to hate the shark. They sympathize with the heros. And my preschooler is a big fan of the TEAMWORK message that ends the story and dovetails nicely with a concept emphasized at her school.

The writing is clever, and with all the puns there's plenty for 9-12 year-olds (and adults) to enjoy. But the story also works on a simpler level for younger children. There's not too much text on the page, and Bret Conover's illustrations are worth the journey through the book all by themselves.

I can tell you what I like about the book, but for a children's picture book I think the highest praise is when a child requests the book over and over. And that's certainly happening at our house. Cowboy José had to go back to the library yesterday, but we still have Rope 'Em and I know we'll read it again tomorrow!

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Anouncing. . .

2011-03-25T23:10:00.000-07:00

Theodore James
Born 3/25/11
Weight: 7 pounds, 13 ounces
Length: 22 inches

Mom and baby are doing great.

Where I Work

2011-03-16T23:04:00.000-07:00

I have a corner office, but this isn't as glamorous as it sounds. For one thing, it's in a corner of my living room. For another, it's a bit drafty there near all the windows. And, possibly related to the draftiness, when it pours rain occasionally my to-be-filed pile gets completely soaked.

But the view and the light are lovely. Plus, I get to work in my pajamas and the commute can't be beat.

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

2011-02-01T23:42:00.001-08:00

This month for Barrie Summy's Book Review Club I'm discussing The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. My sister gave this novel to my husband a few years ago, insisting that he had to read it. He didn't. Eventually, I did. Now he has, too, and my book club was supposed to discuss it tonight. We didn't. In fact, we didn't even meet because of the thick sheet of ice dusted with new-fallen snow blanketing our corner of the Midwest.

So rather than discussing The Sparrow with friends over food and wine at my house (visual enjoyment only, in my case with the wine) instead I'm sitting in my pajamas - which I've been in for 24 hours straight - on my couch in my warm, clean house, writing about the book.

Some of the women in my book club don't read a lot of science fiction, so I tried to sell them on the idea of this book. "I'd like to suggest something speculative, if you're up for a bit of a journey. The genre for this one I'd call literary sci fi, though it's fairly near future and not too far out there." If we amend "literary sci fi" to "literary Jesuit sci fi," does that pique your interest?

The idea is this: when new lands and people are discovered, one of the first groups to get there, every time, have been the Jesuits. Why should space be any different?

I also linked to a reading group guide and this review:

"In clean, effortless prose and with captivating flashes of wit, Russell creates memorable characters who navigate a world of exciting ideas and disturbing moral issues without ever losing their humanity or humor. Both heartbreaking and triumphant, and rich in literary pleasures great and small, The Sparrow is a powerful and haunting book. It is a magical novel, as literate as The Name of the Rose, as farsighted as The Handmaid's Tale and as readable as The Thorn Birds."

to prove that the book is absolutely appropriate for a serious book club read.

Not that we only take on serious reads. After all, this group has read Twilight and Just Do It: How One Couple Turned Off the TV and Turned On Their Sex Lives for 101 Days (No Excuses!). But mostly we do read upmarket fiction, the kinds of new novels that come with discussion questions printed on the last pages and require long waits at the library.

Back to The Sparrow. It's a smart book, meaning that it's a book about smart people who don't try to pretend not to be smart. I like that. The characters aren't pretentious, they're just interested in learning stuff. And it's a book that pulls off that amazing storytelling trick of describing something horrific and then making it understandable and a lot harder to judge than you'd assume.

I'm generally not a fan of books that jump around in time, but this book is told in alternating chapters from the "present" (near future) and the future (slightly further near future). This structure works well for the novel because both time lines proceed chronologically and eventually meet. Needing to know how we could possibly get there from here drives the story.

I don't want to give too much away, especially since I went on to read the sequel (Children of God) which picks up where The Sparrow leaves off and almost feels like Part II of the same book. So I will close with this: The characters from Russell's novel felt real to me, and I wish that I knew some of them. The situations felt perfectly plausible - no mean feat in speculative fiction. The moral questions felt absolutely current and relevant and important. I love talking about this book with people (which is why I twisted arms to get my husband and one of my book clubs to read it).

Have you read it? What did you think?

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Mom Jeans

2011-01-24T23:06:00.000-08:00

I'm thinking of a new book idea along the lines of "You Might Be a Redneck." Mine would be You Might Be a Mom and would have sections like, "You Know You're an At-Home Mom When..." "You Know You're a Work-at-Home Mom When..." and "You Know You're a Mom of Multiples When..."

Today's entry:

You know you're a stay-at-home mom when you save getting "dressed up" in blue jeans for special occasions like going out for coffee with girlfriends.

The leggings I wore all day today (before shimmying into sexy maternity jeans) are very comfortable and would have been just fine . . . if they weren't simultaneously too baggy everywhere and yet too short to meet up with my socks. Alas. None of those features (the fact that they're leggings and I no longer have "long" shirts, the fact that they're too big, the fact that they're too short) disqualifies them from being part of my regular pants rotation.

In fact, I put them right back on when I returned home from book club.

Cinema

2011-01-09T23:07:00.000-08:00

Since television has been on hiatus since before Thanksgiving, and since I'm dealing with a case of post-holiday malaise (or at least ennui) I've been watching movies.

In the first three nights of 2011 Paul and I watched:

Spellbound (documentary about the National Spelling Bee)
Outsourced (indie comedy about a guy sent to India to train his replacement)
Twilight (yes, that Twilight).

Here's how I sold it to Paul.

Look, there were some things about the book that weren't so great. But I bet they don't plague the movie nearly as much. Here's the premise: it's set on the Olympic peninsula (which we love) in and near towns we've visited. There are lots of scenes hiking in the woods, up the mountains, and on the beach. (I've already piqued his interest.)

There's a "family" of vampires living there, and since they choose to hunt animals rather than people they can stick around in one place for longer without attracting uncomfortable notice. The "father" is a doctor and the five "kids" are in high school. When it becomes obvious that they're not aging normally, they'll move somewhere else where it's cloudy most of the year and start over as high school students again.

There's also an Indian reservation nearby and according to tribal legend they're descended from wolves and are ancient enemies with the vampires so there's some territorialism going on in addition to the rest of the vampires trying to pass as humans stuff. (It turns out that it wasn't the details here that caught Paul's attention, but rather the simple fact that there is any back story at all, something other than a flaky teen love story about romanticized vampires.)

Three big criticisms of the book are: vampires, teens, and bad writing/flat characters. The first two aren't really problems for us. (Hello, Buffy!) and the third was probably addressed by the screenwriter. Simply by virtue of having faces, the characters will be more real than in the book. We'll know what Edward looks like, not just that he's "perfect." Bella will most likely have some personality and actually interact with the world around her. And, best of all, there will be far less repetition than in the novel.

(He was actually interested in watching the movie at this point and voluntarily sat down on the couch without his laptop.)

Paul's comments: it wasn't bad. There was a lot of teen angst, not very much happened, and it needed a lot more editing. Some of the scenes really dragged and I didn't like the decision to have a narrator. But the premise was pretty good and interesting. If it hadn't been All About Bella, it could have been a good fantasy series.

My thoughts: Yeah, that pretty much sums it up. Also, the movie was structured better than the book. Almost from the very beginning we're aware of a foreign threat in town, killing people. In the novel, we meet the main antagonists, what, 2/3 or 3/4 of the way through? They fixed that plotting problem for the movie. The book was much more stream of consciousness/flow of the school year/life experienced along with the main character. The movie had a narrative arc and seemed, well, plotted.

As a writer it was fun to look at the differences between the book (to which I listened on iPod during a road trip) and the movie, to try to pick out what worked, what didn't, and why.

I can't say that I'm now a Twilight fan. For a good teen love story, show me Juno any time! But I did add New Moon and Eclipse to my Netflix queue.

Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog

2011-01-04T22:34:00.001-08:00

My parents have been married for over 40 years and they're still very happy together. But my mother once confessed to me that she fears she married my father under false pretenses. It started like this. When she was a sophomore in college my mother took a train to visit her older brother at seminary in Chicago. Her brother didn't have a car, so he asked his buddy to take him to go pick up his sister at Union Station.

From there my parents' relationship progressed mainly through letters. My father, a graduate student in his mid-twenties, enjoyed chess and philosophical debates. My mother, still at that time a teenager, wanted to impress him. So she worked hard on her letters and studied up on her philosophy. But considering the nature of things - Do universals exist, or only singular things? - is not a true interest of my mother's.

Fast forward, then, to last year when a woman in my book club began reading Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog. She enjoyed the novel very much and felt inspired to tackle several classics she'd missed along the way, including Anna Karenina. This caught my interest, because I was - and still am - reading Jack Murnighan's Beowulf at the Beach: What to love and What to Skip in Literature's 50 Greatest Hits. I too have been inspired to go back and pick up a few classics for fun.

But I needed a bit more motivation before launching into Tolstoy, to I eagerly borrowed The Elegance of the Hedgehog. (Some of the characters in the novel are big fans of 19th century Russian literature.) Unfortunately, I got to Murnighan's chapter on Flaubert's Madame Bovary at the same time I was beginning Hedgehog. I've read Madame Bovary at least twice, and I detest it. I'd rather shove toothpicks under my fingernails than read it again; the sensation is much the same. And this is how Murnighan starts his chapter on Flaubert:

"If you were to read them in quick succession, paying attention mostly to the plot (and nodding off now and then mid-sentence), you might not be able to tell Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina apart."

Enthusiasm for tackling Tolstoy: dashed.

But the premise of The Elegance of the Hedgehog grabbed me from the beginning so I persisted. A middle-aged French concierge pretends to be much less intelligent and cultured than she is to avoid notice from the tenants in her building. One of those tenants, an extremely bright and precocious 12-year-old girl, has decided that she doesn't ever want to be like the stupid grown-ups around her and is considering suicide. The story progresses through their journal entries. And I can't tell you how it ends, because I still have 50 pages left to read. (No spoilers, please!)

This is a very good novel, and an enjoyable read. Especially if you enjoy philosophy. I'm hesitant to talk too much about the language and writing, because I'm reading an English translation (the original is in French). And, frankly, I'm more like my mother in this way than I am like my father: lengthy philosophical debates are not my thing. I realize I've been sort of skimming for a few paragraphs, waiting for the plot to pick up again. Then I force myself to go back, reread slowly, and pay attention.

"Oh, you're reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog," my mother observed. "I did not enjoy that book. Too much philosophical pondering for me."

"I enjoyed it," my father replied mildly. "For pretty much the exact reasons your mother did not."

Barbery does not talk down to children, and she really gets that kids can understand a lot more than we give them credit for. I found 12-year-old Paloma pretty believable. In Beowulf at the Beach, on the other hand, Murnighan repeatedly insists that we ruin literature for people by forcing it onto high school kids who can't possibly understand it. Au contraire. In high school I read a lot of philosophy (and classical novels, too: Dickens, Austen, the Brontes, and so forth) and I loved it all, even when I hated it. I did understand Kant and Machiavelli and Marx and Descartes and Plato. In fact, I read and understood and pondered and cared so much more then than I do now, when my mind is full of more pressing concerns like remembering to change the ceiling fans from their summer to winter settings. I'm no longer willing to work so hard to pull meaning from the text.

So. Can't talk about the ending, can't talk about the writing, can't talk about the philosophy, and yet I've written a terribly long review anyway. I'll conclude with this:

The Elegance of the Hedgehog is a novel about people who like discussing literature and philosophy. But even if you haven't read Tolstoy and don't enjoy pondering the existence of universality, it's still a good story. And it's a book about smart people hiding their intelligence to avoid notice but eventually recognizing each other and making connections despite the barriers imposed by class, station, age, and race. And that is the story I loved to read.

This review is part of the January meeting of Barrie Summy's Book Review Club. More reviews here:

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Burning Kansas by Sara Paretsky

2010-12-01T07:12:00.001-08:00

This month for Barrie Summy's Book Review Club I'm writing about Sara Paretsky's Bleeding Kansas.

I have a bit of a thing for V.I. Warshawski, and to tell the truth I have a bit of a thing for her creator, Sara Paretsky, too. I'm a member of Sisters in Crime, a group Paretsky founded, and I've heard her speak in person. All of this increased my admiration for Paretsky and her work.

So when I heard that she had written a new novel - not a mystery and not starring Warshawski - I was intrigued. Especially because it's set in Kansas. Hey, I lived in Kansas for 11 years. Now she really had my attention. (Paretsky grew up in Kansas, too.)

So I bought the book for my dad (also a Paretsky/Warshawski fan) as a thank you gift for driving to Inconvenient, Illinois to pick up my girls' new bike and saving us $150 in shipping costs.

Naturally, I read the book before gifting it. What, you don't do that? Oh. Well, I do. Just as naturally, he already owned the book and had really enjoyed it.

Which is good, because I was sort of "meh" about it. Paretsky is a wonderful writer. I just had trouble connecting with any of the characters in this novel, by which I mean that I didn't really like anybody. Perhaps I was in a crabby mood that week. But by page 200 I was caught up enough in the story that I barely minded that I didn't care very much about the characters. Parts of the novel read a bit heavy, like a massive information dump. Fortunately, the history was pretty interesting and I enjoyed it. (Reading Gilead: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson prepped me by giving me background on the anti-slavery politics of Civil War-era Kansas.)

So, to conclude: if you like history, you might check this out. If you're interested in pioneers and settlers and the history of slavery in our country, you might find this interesting. If you'd like a picture of non-cookie-cutter politics in America's heartland today, you might check this out. But if you're a Paretsky/Warshawski fan looking for the sort of hard-boiled Chicago P.I. page turner we're both used to, well, you won't really find that here.

(Note: this novel was new in 2008. I'm a little behind. And the Amazon reviews are humorously mixed.)

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Wheel of Time

2010-11-30T07:13:00.000-08:00

If I were going to review Towers of Midnight - which I'm not - this is what I'd say:

Sanderson continues to do a very good job with the imposing task he was given.
It's a good book, a compelling read, a solid installment in the series.
It's nice to see the characters finally maturing, accomplishing things, working together, and getting along.
However, there's perhaps a bit too much of that. I like it, but it seems a bit too pat to me. Jordan didn't write characters standing around camp fires singing Lean On Me very often. His characters were frequently unreasonable. And these are still his characters . . . still, we had to work toward the ending eventually and this is satisfying.
Sanderson is working very quickly and effectively, keeping up with his own projects while making deadlines on The Wheel of Time stuff too. But . . . his prose lacks a little something that Jordan's had. I like the way Sanderson brings pieces together, ties up loose ends, and gets things done. I don't mind an occasional typo. But the split infinitives and clunky grammar wore on me in this book, especially when an educated person was speaking in an otherwise rather highbrow fashion. Minor complaint but not insignificant, to me.
Finally, I'd rather laugh with Mat than at him, wish the author had dialed that back a bit.

But all that's if I were going to review the book. And I'm not going to do that.

Writers Write

2010-11-10T07:15:00.000-08:00

Here is the sentence I worked on - in my head - for an hour last night while awake with a sick child.

"As it turned out, Tuesday morning’s breakfast buffet at the Sugar Maple B&B was far more deadly than usual, though it took quite a while for anyone to notice."

I'm still waffling about the first bit and keep taking it out then putting it back in. They're unnecessary words. So they should go. But I like the tone and voice they suggest.

Obviously I tend toward verbosity.

Reading and Cooking

2010-09-02T07:16:00.000-07:00

Over the past week or two I've read:

Like mother, like daughter!

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
March by by Geraldine Brooks
The Heretic's Daughter by by Kathleen Kent
Sanctuary of Outcasts by by Neil White
Proven Guilty by Jim Butcher
probably a couple more I've forgotten,
like Case Histories by Kate Atkinson,
and gotten ahead on my Newsweeks.

This one, too.

One of Ellie's all time favorite dishes is pearled couscous and she's always thrilled to help prepare it. Also served with this meal: Greek salad, spanakopita, and roasted chicken and potatoes seasoned with basil and rosemary. (I didn't make the spanakopita from scratch; that would have cut too far into my reading time!)

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

2010-08-31T22:48:00.001-07:00

This week for Barrie Summy's Book Review Club I've chosen The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows.

"Sarahlynn - See what you think? Carol"

Perhaps every other book club in America has read this novel sometime in the past two years, but neither of mine did. I'd never heard the title until my mother-in-law passed the paperback to me. We're both avid readers, but our tastes don't always overlap (hooray Diana Gabaldon!) so I wasn't sure what to expect. And I waited about a year before picking it up.

Then I really really enjoyed it.

As a fledgling writer who never seems to get quite as much writing accomplished as I set out to do, I was touched by the author's story. Mary Ann Shaffer wrote for years and years and years, probably her whole life. She belonged to writer's groups and researched and wrote diligently. But she never finished a book to her satisfaction until this one, which she sold when she was 74 years old. She died before the final requested rewrite, and her niece - also an author - finished the project. Both of their names appear on the cover.

But I read all that later, after I'd finished the book and needed to know more about who wrote it. The book itself - the story, the writing, the characters, the style - grabbed me and made me not want to finish.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is a novel told in letters between an immediately post-World-War-II English author and her friends. Right off the bat, this is not a subject that causes my breath to quicken (except, perhaps, in hasty retreat).

But the main character, Juliet Ashton, has a voice I simply adored. I want to be her friend. I want her to be alive and real today so that I can be her pen pal. I'll even learn to respond to letters, I promise!

The novel tells the story of the German occupation of the British Channel Islands (between England and France) during the Second World War. No, but really. The history just provides fascinating snippets scattered along the way of the real stories, all of which were far more personal. Individual growth, relationship building, priority setting, and even a mystery.

I have no idea how Shaffer and Barrows managed to write about such sad, indescribably painful, terrible things without making light of them but while still keeping a bright, funny tone to the novel. That feat alone was masterful. While some of the letters were extremely hard to read, I always ended up laughing somewhere along the way. And since there are no chapters, just a series of letters, naturally I read straight through to the end. It's a quick read.

Carol, I enjoyed this one very much; thank you for encouraging me to read it!

--Sarahlynn

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Fun Site

2010-07-15T21:27:00.001-07:00

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

2010-07-07T00:00:00.000-07:00

This month for Barrie Summy's Book Review Club I'm discussing Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout.

I first learned about this novel in book club. We were listing our all time favorite novels and one reader mentioned this one, then chose it for our next read. Because of my impressions of the woman who selected the book and the context in which we were discussing it, I assumed Olive Kitteridge was an older novel, perhaps something she'd read in college. I thought it would have a prominent religious message. I thought it would be quiet and probably a little conservative or at least conventional.

None of those assumptions proved accurate.

Olive Kitteridge is a novel, though it doesn't seem like one. It's actually a volume of short stories, many of which are completely unrelated to each other. Quite a few of the characters show up only in one story and then are gone from the book forever. This breaks all the rules of good story-telling. But it works for this narrative, and the one consistent thread is Olive herself.

She appears in every story, either as a main character - as when her husband is the narrator - or merely as someone who walks through the room in which someone else's story unfolds.

This works in large part because of the author's skill, but also because of Olive herself, who is complicated, fascinating, and nothing at all like I expected her to be. (The series of stories ends up telling one larger story about Olive's life, which makes it feel like a novel, in the end.)

Are you intrigued yet? I hope you are. Because I loved this book and want you to go read it too so we can talk about it.

(And after that, perhaps you can point me to a good grammar tutorial on using an awkward word like "assumptions.")

P.S. "Elizabeth Strout’s most recent work, Olive Kitteridge, a novel in stories, won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was a New York Times Bestseller. She is the author of two previous novels, Abide With Me, a national bestseller, and Amy and Isabelle, also a New York Times Bestseller."

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Gotham Writers' Workshop

2010-06-08T23:38:00.000-07:00

I'm just finishing up a fabulous workshop on freelance writing at Gotham. Online courses work great with my current schedule. This is what I used for my class bio:

I'm a writer living in St. Louis, Missouri with my husband, our two young daughters, and a snoring pug. When I'm not writing I'm usually reading (everything from Elizabeth Strout to Richard K. Morgan, which is to say: everything), engaging in terribly wholesome family activities, eating, or running.

For ten years I worked in medical publishing but now I stay home and play Uno. For fun I write fiction and narrative nonfiction. (I've published a few short stories and essays and have written four practice novels that no one will ever see.)

For money I do freelance work - both marketing and editorial - for my former employer. But I'd like to do more freelance writing in addition to freelance editorial work.

I recently finished reading WRITER MAMA by Christina Katz, which energized me to start the career transition. I'm looking forward to this class!

A Sudden Country by Karen Fisher

2010-06-02T01:01:00.001-07:00

This month for Barrie Summy's Book Review Club I'm discussing A SUDDEN COUNTRY: A Novel by Karen Fisher.

First let me just say that A SUDDEN COUNTRY is the author's first novel and was a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist. Seriously.

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I was reading this book and it was making me crabby. Now I've finished. In fact, I finished the novel quite quickly, as I raced to the end to see how the two main story lines would resolve. (More on those in a moment.)

First a bit on why the book annoyed me so much as I read it. I called it "Madame Bovary on the Oregon Trail" and it's helpful to note that I didn't have a blast reading Flaubert's masterpiece, either. I spent the first half of A Sudden Country talking aloud to the female main character, Lucy. "Don't do it, don't do it, don't do it. You idiot. You'll ruin everything. Seriously, don't do it. Fine, do it. Die if you want; lose your children, whatever. See if I care."

The characters in the novel are nuanced and flawed. I mean, really flawed. And that's good and all, but it's hard to like any of them. Hard life, hard people, occasionally making stupid choices possibly to just because they can. So rarely do they have significant choices to make. Anyway.

Sentence fragments. I was annoyed by them throughout. But my least favorite thing about the writing was my friend Jeanne's favorite part, so it's obviously a matter of taste. Jeanne loved the way the story unfolded slowly, with a sense of mystery. It drove me crazy. I thought the vague, dreamlike, and occasionally misleading language drew attention to itself and took me out of the story. I spent the first few chapters doing math, trying to figure out how Lucy and Israel had all these kids when they'd only been married 4 years, then guessing which kids came from which previous marriages.

Reviewers on Amazon were split between loving the writing style (sentence fragments, partial explanations, imagery-rich details short on clarity) and hating having to read certain sections more than once to figure out what was going on. I found myself somewhere in the middle. Sometimes the style worked for me, sometimes it annoyed me. The author's comment on this issue: "this novel took over ten years, and most of it was written very late at night, by a tired person. So if you find it dreamlike and hypnotic, that’s probably why. I advise reading it under the same circumstances."

I get that! Enough with the criticism already.

One of the greatest strengths of the novel is the amount of historical detail the author includes "effortlessly." I'm not usually a huge fan of reading history and require massive doses of personal narrative to make the lessons go down. (To this day, almost everything I know about ancient Egypt came from a children's novel my mom brought to distract me when I was home sick.) But at times in A Sudden Country I found the historical anecdotes (daily life on the Oregon Trail) more compelling than story. The author did a really really good job with her research and with writing it into the story in such a way that it was enjoyable rather than pedantic or distracting.

And then there's the story arc itself. I love the ending, though I know many people hated it. I think Lucy's story arc ended just perfectly. Everything was not wrapped up in a neat little bow, but her life never really was particularly tidy (unlike her home or her campsite). The other main point of view character and story arc . . . dropped. Something was building, building, building, I was excited to see how it came out, and then - poof! Done, over, kaput without ever reaching a conclusion. Without ever reaching a confrontation, a destination, anything. It just failed. This frustrated me. Doesn't it break all the rules to cut off the story like that without any sort of resolution? But the more distance I have from the book, the happier I am with the author's choice to handle the story the way she did.

I read a book club version of the novel, and it included an interview with the author as well as a reader's guide bound into the paperback. You know how sometimes there's one tiny thing someone says or does that jumps out at you and bothers you so much it colors everything else you know about them and their work? (Tom Cruise's religion, Orson Scott Card's politics, David Hasselhoff's habit of wearing his shirts unbuttoned) There were two of these such moments in the author interview, and they nearly spoiled the whole reading experience for me. Now that I've done a bit more research, I suspect that either the author's tone didn't come across perfectly in the interview, or it was edited unsympathetically. (Note this interview is much more humble and likable, IMO.)

"The road to publication was as rough, believe me, as the journey I was writing about." I would have laughed at that line at a writer's workshop, but not so much immediately after finishing an engrossing and emotional read. Really?! Your search for an agent endangered the lives of your children every day? You had to leave behind every thing you held most dear? Sheesh. I know it's hard to get published, but that's a little Rumpelstiltskin.

This review is far too critical. I'm so glad I read this book. I think you should read it too. It's very good. And educational. Wait! Stop! I mean that in a good way.

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What I Want to Write

2010-05-16T23:28:00.001-07:00

I haven't been writing much about writing lately. And that's because . . . I haven't been writing much lately. I've been freelancing more lately. Like, for money. That's important, and it takes up a lot of the time I used to spend writing creatively. (And blogging.)

It's really really hard to keep up with: raising kids, running a household, menu planning (and shopping and preparing healthy food), keeping active, freelancing during "free" time, AND creative writing.

It can be done, of course. In fact, I've done it! (Although when I'm writing busily I often let exercise and eating-in slide a little bit.) So the real reason I haven't been writing as much lately must be something else.

I believe it's because I'm still trying to figure out what to write. Write what you read! goes the standard advice. Well, I like to read lots of stuff. I've tried to write what I read, and even some stuff I don't read as much of for variety.

And after much effort I've determined that it's a real struggle for me to write
children's lit
humor
romance
sci fi and fantasy
and . . . mysteries. I've worked the longest at writing mysteries! I've studied really hard! I've practiced! I've loved reading these all my life! I'm an active member of Sisters in Crime! And maybe one day I'll write a mystery that I think is good enough to share with others.

But in the meantime, where the writing feels most real and most natural and most fun and most exiting is when I'm writing something a lot like . . .

Literary fiction or maybe book club fiction ("commercial fiction," I suppose, though I don't really tend to see the two as such distinctly different genres as some do). So: commercial literary fiction. I think I have drool on my chin. Upmarket fiction.

But the derision!
The pretension!
What unpublished writer could claim to be writing a book like that?!

Those books, the ones that might have stamps from prestigious awards on their covers, the ones with thought-provoking readers' guides, the ones that "use too many words" (as determined by a writer friend of mine who's all about pace and urgency and cutting out all "unnecessary" description) those are the books that really touch me, that really get me excited, that make me think:

I want to do that!

And so. I live. I experience. I feel. I read. I think. I practice. I write.

And someday, hopefully, I'll have a novel I'm proud to show others.

(Image from AllPosters.com.)

Nothing to Read Here

2010-05-04T22:40:00.001-07:00

I read a book intending to review it for the May meeting of Barrie Summy's Book Review Club. I decided against writing the review, though.

You know what everyone's mother says about if you can't say anything nice . . . ?

Well, that's not the case here. It's more like I'd be damning the book with faint praise.

And since I didn't have a really strong reaction to the book either way I'm simply not going to review it.

So I could dust off an old review, like this one of Percival the Plain Little Caterpillar.

Or I could review another book I've read recently, like Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls or Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Stout.

Or I could just take a month off. I've chosen to do the latter. I'll also include a list of the books one of my book clubs has discussed:

2006
The Tender Land by Kathleen Finneran (memoir)
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel (graphic memoir)
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber
Plainsong by Kent Haruf

2007
Night by Elie Wiesel (memoir)
Kindred by Octavia Butler
Birds of America: Stories by Lorrie Moore (short stories)
House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah (memoir)
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Dangerous Life of Altar Boys by Chris Fuhrman
The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
Bearing Witness by Michael A. Kahn
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

2008
Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan
Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott
Lamb by Christopher Moore
August: Osage County by Tracy Letts (play)
Blue Shoe by Anne Lamott
Him Her Him Again the End of Him by Patricia Marx
Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris (memoir/essays)
Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld
The Women by Clare Luce Booth (play)

2009
The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers
Innocent Traitor: A Novel of Lady Jane Grey by Alison Weir
Lipstick Jungle by Candace Bushnell
The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
Life of Pi by Yann Martel

2010
Going Away Shoes by Jill McCorkle (short stories)
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
The Day the Falls Stood Still by Cathy Marie Buchanan
A Sudden Country by Karen Fisher

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