October 7, 2005
How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez
A good story, with multiple perspectives and a good use of backward chronology so that you get more details as you read and stuff you learned about in the first couple of chapters makes more sense and takes on more meaning as you go. Plus I like anything about the Dominican Republic since I went there a couple of times in the nineties as a teen missionary. Should have been a quick read for me but took me almost a week as I apparently am no longer the reader I once was. Maybe it’s the pressure of recording everything I read?
October 11, 2005
The Outside World by Tova Mirvis
This is another well-characterized story about a family…the family (or families, actually) itself and the members thereof, if that makes sense. I only wish it’d been longer; I feel like the first half of the book was just warming up, really letting you see inside a closed world, understand some about the Orthodox culture, really see who the characters were…and then boom, the second half rushes towards the ending, which…which, what? What ending? The ending should have been the middle. It’s too neatly wrapped up when neatness is the last thing you expect from either of these families. That said, I really liked the mom who’d read all of Harriet Lerner’s books and who was always threatening to call a family meeting. That was very sneakily funny and cool. I would have liked to spend more time with her, and with everyone else I started learning about in this story.
October 13, 2005
Candyfreak by Steve Almond
I don’t eat chocolate very much anymore, and while I admit a taste, back in the day, for those dark Milky Way bars and a lasting fondness for Mounds Bars and a devotion to York Peppermint Patties that lasts to this day (I had one this afternoon), I have to say it was a little hard to relate to the “freak” aspect of this book. I mean, I know lots of people who are obsessed with random things. It’s a postmodern ironic hipster credo badge-of-honor. Maybe it’s just that I don’t have any one thing that I care about that much, not even Jane Austen or strippers or octopuses. Anyway, the history of confectionery in America was really fascinating to me and of course I clenched my fist in support of the small regional chocolate-makers in their ornately rundown factories, but I thought the connection Almond made between his apparently rather emotionally chilly childhood and his deep love for and obsession with candy was a little weak, in the sense of its being sort of obvious and yet somehow not fully fleshed out. But then I thought, who am I to judge this person’s childhood recollections? And then I thought that I wish I were a classic ectomorph too and that I could eat all the candy I wanted…although personally as far as sweets goes I am all about the pastries and not so much about the candy bars (although I do like peanut M&Ms). I’m rather partial to cake as well. And zabaglione. And chocolate covered cranberries. I’ve been dipping pretzels in chocolate lately too and those are pretty great. And Jaffa Cakes! I love those! And tiramisu, too, although only made with ladyfingers, not with spongecake. Not that I would say no to a nice genoise but I have to say I tend to prefer my cakes a little simpler and without so much ganache. I’m sure this has been said in every review of this book ever written, but, yes, I was very hungry and craving sweets while reading it.
October 14, 2005
The Dish on Eating Healthy and Being Fabulous by Carolyn O’Neil and Densie Webb
This is a chick-lit nutrition book, and as such is very pink and has a lot of “fabulous tips” like “Give yourself a spa day instead of eating cheesecake!” in the sidebars. I was looking for an accessible book on basic nutrition and came upon this somehow…it was a little embarrassing to pick it up at the library and I was very thankful for automated checkout because I didn’t want the librarians to think I was weird. Regardless of the demographic marketing though I did learn a lot about multivitamins, so no big loss there, all in all.
October 21, 2005
Sex In History by Reay Tannahill
I’m pretty sure this is a re-read for me because I know I remember the stuff about pederasty in the Greek chapters. Anyway, this brilliantly-named book is by the author of one of my favorite books ever, the similarly-brilliantly-named Food In History. It’s an interesting mix of exhaustive and brief: it gives you pages and pages and pages on the differences between the temple prostitutes of the Spartans and the Etruscans; richly detailed exegesis on the relationship between Taoism, Confucianism, and Chinese sex manuals; finely rendered speculation on the family construction and concomitant gender roles of pastoralists versus nomads in the fertile crescent, but by the time you get to the Victorians you’re zipping right along to “Woman Suffrage” and then all of a sudden the Pill is invented and that’s the end of the book. Also it was published in 1982 so most of the sources date from the seventies, and so there’s nothing about AIDS, which is just really weird to me for some reason. I’d love to see an updated edition of this book for the more recent stuff, but I still love its first two sections just because it’s sort of awesome to be reading about the vicissitudes of St. Augustine in the Christian era and then go smack bang to Tantric sex and the Kama Sutra, all while you’re on the bus as people raise their eyebrows at your reading material.
October 23, 2005
The Wind’s Twelve Quarters by Ursula K. LeGuin
Another re-read because my college roommate Airy sent it to me after having borrowed it last year when she came to visit. It’s a set of LeGuin’s earlier seventies’ stories, and as such are not as totally compelling for me as her later stuff. My favorites are the ones that build on the other worlds about which she writes in various books; I especially like “Winter’s King, ” even though, oddly, The Left Hand of Darkness isn’t one of my preferred books by her. Go figure. Anyway, good quick bed book, yay.
October 30, 2005
The Electric Michaelangelo by Sarah Hall
I wanted to like this book so much. I suggested it for book club this month and I am so ashamed that I did now, because it feels like it took forever to slog through, and I as I was slogging I kept trying to will myself to like it. It’s about tattooists, and seaside resorts in England and in New York, and about love and hate and all the rest. But the prose fell flat for me in a very ornately disappointing fashion. The characters never rounded out for me and I couldn’t figure out what the big deal about the woman the protagonist loves was. The plot…what there was of it…was murky and sort of arbitrary, but I couldn’t tell in service of what. I feel like Hall tells rather than shows, which is sort of an amateur criticism, I grant, but one that I kept thinking about as I read. I don’t need to “relate” to every character in every book I read, I’ve decided…otherwise, how could I really enjoy anything that wasn’t about someone in my exact circumstances, right? But I do need to be able to believe the characters and believe that their worlds exist for them the same way mine does for me, even if the worlds and the characters themselves are very different from my experience. Sigh. I wanted to like this so much and I just didn’t and now I’m embarrassed to go to book club this month. Sorry, book club. I have very good intentions with this one.