A Year in Books: 2009 in review.

I have "officially" read 86 books in 2009. I say "officially" because this number does not include textbooks, class materials, Sweet Valley, re-reads, and some truly, truly embarassing chick-lit which I am ashamed to tell you about (Comfort Food by Kate Jacobs, I am looking at YOU). All in all, it was a wonderful year in reading: books took me to Scotland just after World War II, 19th century China; placed me in wigwams in colonial America, and 21st century Wal-Marts. I met and made friends with a man who was a millionaire in Shanghai before the war, a black maid in the 1960s American South, Winston Churchill, and countless kings and queens.

(But of course for nearly every great book I read, there was one that was less than stellar. I've tried to summarize all of it for you, below.)

First book I read this year: Officially, by the blog, which I started in April, it was Tana French's The Likeness. Unofficially, the first book I read this year was Joyce Carol Oates's My Sister, My Love. (4 stars for The Likeness).

Last book I read this year: The Little Stranger, by Sarah Waters. (I'm in the middle of Wolf Hall now but even with my superior reading prowess I don't think I'll finish in the next 12 hours). A perfect, creepy, gothic note upon which to end the old year. (4 stars).

Best book published in 2009: The Help, by Kathryn Stockett, is a To Kill a Mockingbird for the 21st century. Spirit, humor, wit, sadness, and joy; and Stockett keeps her African-American characters from venturing into cliche territory. (5 stars).

Worst book published in 2009: South of Broad is all of the worst and most jumbled-up parts of Pat Conroy's other books recycled into one new and amazingly bad novel. (1 star).

Worst sequel of 2009: No Time to Wave Goodbye is so trite and far-fetched that it actually cheapens Jacquelyn Mitchard's far superior Deep End of the Ocean. (1 star).

Best sequel of 2009: The Girl with No Shadow by Joanne Harris takes up the story of Vianne and Anouk Rocher after the events of Chocolat, and I actually liked it better than Chocolat. How is that possible? (5 stars).

Best character: Miss Jean Brodie, of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark, was sharp, sour, stimulating and entirely pitiable, in the end. (5 stars). Runners up: The spirits in Eva Moves the Furniture by Margot Livesy. They are capable of great jealousy, great anger, and great love, and are refreshingly human for, you know...ghosts. (4.5 stars)

Worst character: I found Agnes Grey, the eponymous character of Anne Bronte's novel, to be ridiculously self-absorbed and judgmental and hypocritical, since she hated others for those same faults. (1 star).

Best villain: The racist Hilly Hollbrook gets exactly what she deserves in The Help. And what more can you ask of a villain?

Best nonfiction: It's almost counterintuitive to say a book that deals so vividly with the struggles of the poorest Americans is the best of anything, but Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed certainly made me want to use my powers for good, and made me grateful for what I've got. (4 stars).

Worst nonfiction: Skinny Chicks Don't Eat Salads. The only thing worse than being on a diet is reading about a diet--that can't work, because apparently "skinny chicks" don't eat much of anything. (2.5 stars).

Book that surprised me the most in a good way: Sinclair Lewis's Main Street is described as "joyless;" I found it to be a remarkable story of self-acceptance, and probably the best candidate for Great American Novel that's around (5 stars).

Book that surprised me the most in a bad way: For a book that involves the ghost of a dead flapper, Twenties Girl by Sophie Kinsella was surprisingly devoid of both Charlestoning and charm. (2.5 stars)

The genre I read most of in 2009 was: historical fiction (17 books), the best of which was either Fingersmith by Sarah Waters (5 stars); the worst of which was The White by Deborah Larsen (abandoned).

The author I read most of in 2009 was: Elizabeth Berg, with six books: Dream When You're Feeling Blue (3.5 stars); The Art of Mending (2 stars); Home Safe (3 stars); and We Are All Welcome Here (5 stars). I read but did not review Joy School and Say When.

I read a lot of books on this topic in 2009: World War II, which is no surprise (10 books). The best: Coventry, by Helen Humphreys (5 stars); the worst of which was Lisa See's Shanghai Girls (2 stars).

Funniest book: Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love, chronicling a larger-than-life British family in the 1920s, had me laughing literally out loud on every page. (5 stars).

Scariest book: Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger. I'm a fairly easy scare, but this story about a crumbling Warwickshire hall definitely gave me the "frit" in places. (4 stars)

Weepiest book: My copy of A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving, had me crying both tears of laughter--and true sadness (5 stars).

Most uplifting book: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Burrows. It has the end of a war, new friendships, a love story, and they even save somebody from the Holocaust. What can be more feel-good than that? (4.5 stars).

Most disturbing book: Goldengrove, by Francine Prose. (Runner up: Blue Angel, also by Francine Prose.) In Goldengrove, a thirteen year old girl takes on aspects of her dead sister's identity...including her dead sister's adult boyfriend. (4 stars).

Book I'm most likely to read again: I've already re-read Elizabeth Berg's Dream When You're Feeling Blue and I know it wasn't the last time.

Worst book I read this year: Between Here and April by Deborah Copaken Kogan is an ugly story about child murder and suicide with absolutely no redeeming qualities. (1 of 5 stars).

(And now, a drumroll please, because...)

The best book I read this year is The Distant Land of My Father, by Bo Caldwell, a perfectly realized story of love for family and love for country, and betrayal by both, set against vivid 1930s Shanghai and post-war California. Not only did I love the characters and story but I loved the setting and time period so much I sought out others books set in the same time and place. (Runners up: The Help, and Main Street).

Happy new year to all of you! Here's to great reading in 2010!

Query: best books of 2009

Well, another year is over and done with. It was a difficult year for me in many ways (school is kicking my butt, for example) but I always get a little sad when the old year wanes. Goodbye, 2009! I knew ye well!

What are the best and worst books you have read this year? What books were published in 2009 that you really enjoyed this year...or what books published in 2009 did you really not enjoy?

I'm going to post my best and worst list tomorrow, so please check back then! And if you've done a list of your own, will you please link to it in the comments?

The countdown begins! 5...4...3...2...!

Be careful what you wish for.

The Little Stranger
Sarah Waters

While I loved Waters's Fingersmith, I have to admit that I was not a huge fan of her other three novels. I tried Tipping the Velvet, but the time period was too similar to Fingersmith, and I couldn't get into it. Affinity was just weirdly bad, and Night Watch, though I usually LOVE novels about World War II, was too bleak to be borne. I picked up The Little Stranger only because I liked Fingersmith so much, and wanted to believe that it wasn't a fluke. And I wasn't disappointed.

Stranger is probably the best of Waters's works, and the best of the modern-day gothics that are going around. When he is a young boy, Faraday visits neighboring Hundreds Hall, where his mother used to be a servant, and steals an ornament from a beautiful wall freize. Thirty years later, he returns to the hall, as Dr. Faraday, to treat a servant girl suffering from nerves. Faraday befriends the Ayers family, which has fallen on hard times and lives in the crumbling Hall: the mother, Mrs. Ayers; the son, Roderick; the daughter, Caroline. When strange things start happening at the hall--mysterious smudges and marks appearing on the wall, fires breaking out, tapping sounds and eerie presences, Faraday is in a perfect position to observe how the residents of the Hall, his new friends, seem, one after the other, to be going mad.

But are they going mad--or is someone driving them to it? Is the ghost of Susan Ayers, Roderick and Caroline's older sister, haunting them? Are the malcontented subconsciousses of the Ayers manifesting as malevolent phantasms? Or is there someone more human behind the haunting--someone who wants to get his hands on Hundreds Hall, and the Ayers family out of it?

Waters is a really, really confident writer. She never, not even at the end, comes right out and answers that question. She just gives you all the facts, and there is one conclusion that you can draw that explains everything--but if you don't come up with it, if you miss something, this book will make no sense. It's a big risk, because a lot of people reading this will expect the author to pull aside the curtain and reveal all and when Waters doesn't, they'll be upset. (And I do have to admit that while I appreciate Waters trusting the reader, a more concrete explanation would have been, perhaps, more satisfying.)

I think this uncertainty is what Arthur Phillips was trying to do with his book, Angelica, but Waters has done it more successfully. Because it is so ambiguous, it seems all the more creepy, and I have to admit that for the first time in my life, the hair on the back of my neck actually stood straight up while reading it. That's always something you read about happening, but it never has happened to me. In Phillips's book, you see the phantasm and his horrible face, but in this book, you only hear the rappings and tappings and whisperings and that is SO. MUCH. MORE. HORRIFYING. It's the Jaws phenomenon: to see the whole shark would have been awful but to see just that fin slicing the water is fucking horrible.

The problem with a gothic novel is that it's hard to get to really love any of the characters. Because you know any one of them might be the villain, so you don't let yourself. And I appreciate that Waters makes her characters all distasteful in some way, but perhaps she goes too far at times. That's my only criticism of this book; otherwise, a perfectly Wilkie Collinsesque ghost story.

Rating: 4 of 5 stars.

I shall keep asking You.

A Prayer for Owen Meany
John Irving

Y'all...I have never cried so much in my life as I did when I was reading A Prayer for Owen Meany. This book is so tear-stained and water-logged that there's no chance the book resale people at McKay's will take it. I'm not a huge fan of John Irving--most of the time I find him weird and purposefully disturbing, but there was hardly anything about this book that I didn't like. I think this novel is the one that should define Irving's career; I know he gets a lot of praise for Cider House Rules and Garp but this, this is the one that he should be most proud of writing.

Owen Meany is extremely small in stature; at eleven, he stands barely past his best friend John Wheelwright's waist. His voice is shocking, frozen in a permanent scream. The other children in their small New Hampshire town have developed the habit of picking him up and tossing him around over their heads, of treating him like a baby. But despite all this, Owen Meany believes that he is touched by God--that he is God's instrument--and his faith is unshakeable. He believes that God has chosen him for an important mission, and he has no choice but to fulfill it.

Owen's story is inextricably twined with that of John Wheelwright's--the two are linked forever when, at a Little League game, Owen hits a foul ball that strikes John's mother in the head and kills her. As young boys, they play together, search for the identity of John's father, and indulge in Owen's stalking of the town Catholics. When John is left back a grade, Owen Meany, the best student in the class, stays back with him, so they won't be separated. Throughout their adolescences, John poses the same questions for himself, and the reader, over and over again: is Owen Meany some kind of prophet? Is he the Second Coming? Or is he just a small boy with a faith that can move mountains--and does it matter which of these is the right one?

Irving never takes the easy way out in this book. In fact, it seems like he sets up ridiculous situations for himself and then he's stuck with making these outlandish events seem poignant. After Owen kills John's mother, a stuffed armadillo is passed between them as a peace offering. It's just as affecting--more so--than if it had been a lock of the dead woman's hair. When Owen first meets John's out-of-town cousins, he pisses himself, and still they--and we--manage to like him. Owen Meany himself should be at least odd, at most monstrous, with his appearance and his terrifying voice. And yet: I loved him, loved him.

Owen and John have the bad fortune to be born at just the right moment so that they will come of age during the turbulent Vietnam war, and again, it would have been easy for Irving to ship the boys over to a rice paddy, or road trip them to Canada, but again, that would be too easy for Irving. At the climax of this book, you realize just what a genius Irving is: way back there, at the beginning of this story, he sets events into motion that are so small, but end up being so significant. You barely notice them as foreshadowing or exposition, but they're suddenly so important, and that's the way life is, isn't it? But the way everything comes together seems awfully important, when you consider Owen's claims of his own divine mission.

This book is heavy on religion, and as somebody whose own religious beliefs are tenuous, and constantly evolving, I wasn't sure I would like that. But in the end, this is a religious, faithful book--meant for unbelievers. John himself is an unbeliever, while Owen believes wholeheartedly. In the end, John believes in Owen, and we believe in him, too, and that, Irving seems to be saying, is as valid a religion as anything else: to believe in each other, to believe that someone you love can be a message for hope and instrument for good in a world where nothing is certain.

While I found this book to be incredibly satisfying, I'm pretty sure I'll never be able to read it again. It's too emotionally draining. I don't think I'll ever be able to have the same response to it again. That's my only criticism--and is it really a criticism? I don't know. I only know that for all of its unexpected moments, and despite its oddball protagonist, this book feels more like real life than any other I have ever read.

Rating: 5 of 5 stars.

And dance by the light of the moon.

Shanghai Girls
Lisa See

When I find new things I like, I tend to get a little obsessed with them, and for a while, that's all I want to talk about, watch, listen to, or read. For instance, when I discovered Josephine Baker, I:

• read four biographies about her one right after the other;
  
• Downloaded all the songs she'd ever sung, ever;
  
• Learned to dance the Charleston;
  
• Bought a bunch of vintage flapper dresses online;
  

And generally talked about her at great length with everyone I knew until people started crossing the street when they saw me coming. I can't help it. I'm an enthusiastic person, and she really is awesome.

Sometimes this fades rather quickly (During my third viewing of the Beatles Anthology I sort of woke up and ripped the tape from the VCR) and sometimes it never does (a love of the 1940s).

My latest obsession, after reading Distant Land of My Father by Bo Caldwell, has been to immerse myself in reading about China during WWII. It has all the hallmarks of a good obsession: it's something I know very little about, it's an extremely important time in that part of the world, it's foreign and compelling and unfamiliar. And in the past few years there has been a wide array of historical fiction published about this era. In the span of three weeks I've read Distant Land, The Piano Tuner, and now Lisa See's Shanghai Girls, all three of which deal with the same turbulent war years in Hong Kong and Shanghai.

Lisa See is the only one of the three to take up the war from the viewpoint of the native Chinese, as opposed to the American or British expat. Pearl and May Chin are "beautiful girls" in Shanghai in 1937; they supplement their family's wealth by posing as models for calendars. They are among China's most wealthy, privileged citizens, until in rapid succession, their father loses their money, forces them into arranged marriages, and abandons them. Then, to make matters a lot worse, the Japanese take over Shanghai. Suddenly May and Pearl are no different from their poorest neighbor, and set out on foot to try and find safety, a journey which eventually leads them to San Francisco, and then Los Angeles.

I expected I would like this book better than the others I've read, by Anglo authors, because I am a white liberal and whenever I read something another white person has written about a culture that isn't theirs, I automatically think of it as a sort of cultural appropriation. It's ridiculous to read about how white people suffered in Shanghai during the war, because the native Shanghaiese had it so much worse. That's what I thought. They lost their country, the only place in the world at that time where they belonged. I expected Shanghai Girls to be so much richer and more colorful than the other books I'd read on the subject; in the end, I was disappointed.

See begins the action of this story too soon after we meet all the characters; we don't get a chance to really get to know them before everything's in upheaval. And because things happen so quickly after that, there's never a quiet moment to feel you get to know these characters. The plot is driving the book, and you get the idea that these events could be happening to anyone. The Chin girls feel like stock characters, flat and insipid. And if you're going to have characters that are flat, that the reader doesn't really care about, then you better focus more on the things around them, instead of the things inside them. See doesn't, and gives us pages and pages of how Pearl feels about this or that, but since we don't know Pearl, it feels like that moment at a cocktail party, when you've just met someone and don't really know them and they are telling you the most personal details of their life and families.

This is a book about loss, and you understand while reading it that but you don't really feel it. In Bo Caldwell's book, she really makes that loss hit home by setting the first third of her book in Shanghai before the war. She shows you in great detail the beauty, harmony, and loveliness, the feeling of safety and security, that her characters stand to lose, and then she shows you how they lose it. We only get a few scenes of Pearl and May at home, and it doesn't seem very pleasant, and they aren't very happy, and so it doesn't make you feel bad for them, when they talk about what they've lost, after. There's just a little disconnect, there.

And Pearl Chin herself: this is more of a note for me, in my own writing, than a critique of this book, but don't you hate it when you notice that all characters in women's fiction are cut from the same cloth? They are pretty but not beautiful, kind, hardworking, underappreciated, and dutiful, with unswerving, unerring love for their sisters, mothers, and children. I know that publishers encourage this so a wide array of female readers will relate to the protagonist, but just once I would like to read a book written by a woman that features a woman character who is ugly, or complains, or doubts herself, at times. Just for variety's sake.

I loved Lisa See's Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, and I heard her Peony in Love was a great success and bestseller, too. And honestly, this is so different from her previous work that I hope it's just a misstep, and not a sign that she has the I'm-too-famous-for-my-shirt syndrome that eventually plagues most successful authors.

I did like some things: the hints of Chinese culture, food, and the Chinese Zodiac were the best and most interesting parts. But all in all, it was difficult to finish this book; in all honesty, I think the fact that it was the first I read on my new Kindle saw me through to the end. And I think this book effectively closed the door on my China-WWII obsession.

Rating: 2 of 5 stars.

Kindle Adventures, or "I am a genius"

Constance Reader has been Christmasfied and as of the 26th, is one year older.

I got some good book-related loot this Christmas: the two William Manchester biographies of Winston Churchill, lots of Amazon gift cards, and...a Kindle! It's been in my house for four days and already I can tell it's going to revolutionize my reading.

I love a lot about it: I can easily take it anywhere, because it's so small. It's especially good for reading long, heavy books. And since it can hold 1,500 books, I'm going to save a lot of space. Especially beautiful, though completely irrelevant for the reading process, are the lovely "pen and ink" screensaver sketches of famous authors that pop up when you turn the thing off.

Some things about it I could do without or would change if I could: the typos, for one. The first book I read was Lisa See's Shanghai Girls and it was riddled with misspellings and quotation marks just randomly placed where they don't belong. I'd be so happy if the screen lit up, and the cynic in me says that Amazon didn't want to give us that feature because right now we'll shell out to buy the Amazon clippy book light thing. Some books aren't available on the Kindle yet, mostly nonfiction, but also John Irving's Cider House Rules, which seems a pretty big omission.

But the thing that really, really bothered me about the Kindle was that I couldn't take it in the bathtub. As my darling friend L. said,
"Reading in the bath is the only reason to take a bath, as far as i'm concerned

otherwise it is BORING no matter how many cigarettes i smoke while soaking."

But I've always been told I'm pretty bright and while I sometimes have my doubts, I think I have come up with the perfect solution which will allow me to read my Kindle in the tub without such a great chance of ruining the precious thing:

Yeah, that's a Kindle inside a taped-up freezer bag.

So readers, let's dish! What fun bookish things did you get for the holiday? If you have a Kindle yourself, what are your favorite/least favorite aspects of Kindle ownership?

Mele Kalikimaka!

Query: favorite holiday songs?

I was inspired to do this by Elizabeth, over at Need More Shelves. She's posted two of her favorite Christmas carols today! My friend A. over at Pruned Down and Branched Out did something of the same thing!

Christmas is a special time for me, since my birthday is the 26th (and Mr. Reader's is the 28th). So I am offering you two of my absolute favorite Christmas songs, to brighten your day:





In the comments, post your favorite Christmas/Hannukah/winter/Festivus songs (with a link!) so we can all enjoy them!

Feliz Navidad, dear readers!

I'm sorry Miss Bronte. I am for real.

Agnes Grey
Anne Bronte

Anne Bronte was inspired to write Agnes Grey based on her own experiences as a governess. The story closely mirrors Anne's own: Agnes Grey is the daughter of a clergyman who makes a bad investment and loses the family's small nest egg. In order to bring in a little money, Agnes applies for a job as a governess with the wealthy Bloomfield family. The people there are rotten to her. She leaves, and applies for a job with the wealthy Murray family and misses her family lots and lots.

We are supposed to feel for Agnes, torn from her home, working among strangers, horribly ill-used and mistreated.

Howsomever. That only works if the character is, shall we say, sympathetic. By which I mean: likeable in any small way.

It's been a long time (Tropic of Cancer) since I met a character I disliked as much as Agnes, and I certainly have not met one more self-righteous or prissy or unself-aware. She bitches about literally everything, from the work she is required to do to the habits of the children she is to teach to the way they look at her. She, of course, assures us that this has nothing to do with her own bitchitude, because Agnes, like Mary Poppins, is practically perfect in every way. Except without the "practically." And except not really. She hates her pupils from the start, makes snap judgments about their intelligence, and generally shirks her duty whenever she can.

I really can't begin to describe to you how odious she is, so I will just offer you a passage from the book, in which Agnes's employer, Mrs. Murray, comes to ask her to keep a better eye on her daughters:

"Miss Grey," she began--"Dear! how can you sit inside drawing on a day like this...I wonder you don't put on your bonnet and go out with the young ladies."

"I think, ma'am, Miss Murray is reading and Miss Matilda is amusing herself with her dogs."

"If you would try to amuse Miss Matilda yourself a little more, I think she would not be driven to seek amusement in the companionship of dogs, horses, and grooms so much as she is; and if you would be a little more cheerful and companionable with Miss Murray, she would not so often go wandering in the fields with a book in her hand. However, I don't want to vex you," added she, seeing, I suppose, that my cheeks burned and my hand trembled with some unaimiable emotion.

I ask you: how would you like to have a governess whose cheeks burn and who feels unamiable emotion toward you, when you gently remind her of her duties that she isn't performing but is being paid to perform? I know it must really, really suck to have to work when you planned on a life of leisure, but seriously: there is no Mrs. Rochester in this book. There's not even a Mr. Rochester, who, while hot, was something of a jackanape. Everyone is just kind of...human. They gossip. They tease. They're frivolous. LIKE ALL OTHER PEOPLE--except smug little Agnes, who is always lecturing them on how, as good Christians, they should love one another. Smug bitch, proselytize thyself!

The thing that gets me, that really gets me? Is that a positive attitude would have improved things for Agnes, so much. I know this from experience. If you have to do something you don't want to do, you might as well do it with a smile on your face. It's taken me 27 years to learn that, but it's true. If she had reached out to her pupils, crass Matilda and greedy Rosalie, she might have found something in them that wasn't all bad. And then she could have encouraged them in their good qualities, and had some friends, and maybe not been as unhappy, herself.

I would have laid this book aside except that I wanted to see if Agnes would get the ending she so rightly deserved (death, dismemberment). She doesn't. She moans and whines and describes her position as "suffering" and "torment," and OMG somewhere out there Oliver Twist is begging for more gruel.

DO NOT WANT.

For all that, Bronte's prose is nice, and it reads like a very modern novel, considering AG was published in 1847. To put it in perspective, at the same time Nathaniel Hawthorne was writing The Scarlett Letter, the first line of which is like, three paragraphs long, Anne Bronte was writing this book. But for all of her skill at writing prose, this is (as Sherwood Anderson once said of Sinclair Lewis) some of the most joyless prose I've ever experienced. There's nothing to this book but dourness and self-pity and flat gray walls.

But hey! At least I can say I've now read something by each of the Bronte sisters! And I'm already planning a Jane Austen fanfiction crossover in my head; I'll let you read it when I'm done. It's called, "Agnes Grey Meets Lady Catherine de Bourgh: The Reckoning."

Rating: 1 of 5 stars.

Now you are 234.

Happy birthday, Jane Austen!

Dec. 16, 1775-July 18, 1817.


Dear Miss Austen, without you girls would have had to wait until the invention of movies and television to form unrealistic expectations about the nature of romantic love. Two hundred years of therapists and marriage counselors owe you big time!

All come free.

Home Safe
Elizabeth Berg

I used to love Elizabeth Berg's writing, but as the years wear on, I find that her books just aren't compelling like they were to me in the beginning. The stories are always so simple, so ephemeral, and it's hard to pin them down. There's not much meat to them. Contrasted with most of popular fiction they seem a little...tame.

Berg's latest is the story of Helen Ames, whose husband, Dan, dies quite suddenly. Helen is the very definition of co-dependent, and her life goes to pieces. She begins to rely on her twenty-seven year old daughter, Tessa, to fill the place in her life Dan left, but that's not really fair because Tessa has her own life to live. A year after Dan's death, Helen receives a call from her bank manager: her husband, before he died, drained their account. And then Helen receives a call from someone who knows what Dan did with the money: something that will change her life, forever.

If I don't find Berg's plotlines especially compelling I do have to say that I learn more from her books than I do from any other books. E.B. seems to live in a world that is populated with the most amazing, realistic, patient and kind people. It is so faith-inspiring; it makes me so happy. People in her books are always doing such small, beautiful things for each other, but it's these acts, Berg argues, that make all the difference. For instance, Helen teaches a writing class, and one of her students has an intellectual disability:

"Wait!" Ella says. "I have to tell you one single thing: I learned to speak French!" She rattles off a bunch of gibberish that might be some language somewhere, but most certainly is not French. The room is silent, but then Donnetta says, "You said that very well! You know, I always wanted to learn French." Helen watches as the two women, one young, one old, one black, one white, walk out together, chatting like girlfriends, and Helen sits still at her table, thinking. A friend of hers...once described such acts of kindness as the hold knots on life's climbing rope, and Helen thinks it's true.

Not long ago she was waiting at line in the post office, irritated at how long it was taking. Finally there was just one old man ahead of her, a gentleman with a walker. He made his laborious way to the clerk and held up a window envelope, a bill being paid. He said, "I've got a little problem here. As you can see, the paper inside the envelope has moved up and now you can't read the address where it's going." The clerk took the envelope from the man and examined it carefully and said, "Hmm. You know what might help?"

The old man stood watching intently.

The clerk tapped the envelope sharply on the desk and the paper fell into place.

"Oh," the old man said. "I see. Well, thank you."

"Good to see you, Charlie," the clerk said. And then, after he gave the old man plenty of time to get out of the way of the next customer, he called, "Next?"

It is, as Berg says, "a simple thing. But the world she stepped out into was so different from what it had been before." I love Elizabeth Berg because long after I've forgotten Helen and Tessa, and the tepid love stories of the novel, I'll be remembering that kindness costs nothing; is never the wrong thing.

Rating: 3 of 5 stars.

Papa don't preach. I'm in trouble deep.

The Emperor of Ocean Park
Stephen L. Carter

There's this phenomena that I've heard of, when you find out about something and then, suddenly everyone is talking about it? Does anybody know what I mean? That happened to me with this book. Somebody, I think Caitlin, mentioned Stephen L. Carter to me, and then all of a sudden, everyone was talking about him. He was mentioned three times in two of my (separate) law school classes. I saw somebody reading one of his books on the train. I went to the thrift store and his books were all over the place.

I guess if you know about the phenomena you can just chalk it up to science, but I am not a science-person and I am a lapsed Catholic (v. superstitious) and so when something like this happens to me, I always feel like I am Being Directed By God to read that book/watch that TV show/kill my overdraft by buying that J.Crew skirt with the ladybugs on it.

Anyway, because God Himself apparently wanted me to read this book, I had really, really high expectations for it. And they were not entirely disappointed. It's a good mystery, with a legal twist, but not so much of a legal twist that it felt like school for me to read it. Talcott Garland's father is Judge Oliver Garland, who was a nominee for the Supreme Court years ago before being Borked and having to withdraw his name from nomination. There was some scandal, or hint of illegality about what the Judge might have done, the kind of friends he hung out with. But the Judge himself always maintained that it was a conspiracy, because he was a successful black man, and people in power didn't want to see him rise. Years later, the Judge dies suddenly, and Talcott's sister Mariah thinks he might have been murdered, so Tal himself starts investigating his father's past--and uncovering things that probably should have been kept buried. Soon his family, and his life, is in danger.

It's an interesting book. Not only plot-wise, but sociologically. It's interesting, and enlightening, to read about the black upper class, as Carter presents them. You get the idea that it's lonely at the top, and there are all of these heavy expectations upon this small group of people. But mostly, the characters drive this book, and they are extremely well-written and realistic, but without being Olive-Kitteredge realistic, as in, "God, I know people like that, and I want to kill them all."

The writing is not too fabulous--you never forget that Carter himself was a lawyer, before he was a writer. And legal writing does not lend itself well to fiction writing, and vice versa. I was a writing major in college, and when I went to law school, I had a lot of trouble (and got my only C, like, ever) in Legal Writing, because it is so the opposite of good fiction writing. Carter does his best, but at times his prose is off. It reads a little bit like a really great translation from a foreign language--you almost don't notice it, but something just doesn't sit right. The issue is there. It was a tad bit distracting, but not enough to kill this book.

Because Stephen Carter might be the most intelligent, or at least, widely-read, writer I have ever written. He name-drops on every page--Alexei Alekhine, Guru Arjan, Werner Sombart--so many people, places, movements I'd never heard of that I had to start keeping a small notebook and checking Wikipedia every so often. Some people will hate this about Carter's writing, but I personally loved it, I love having my mind expanded. The only problem is that there's this big chess theme that, while interesting, is not really necessary, but again, I liked learning about it, so it was all right.

All this, but it's just--this book didn't totally work for me on plot. Carter sets the bar high for himself. I couldn't help thinking, dude, if you're so smart, why can't you think of a better way to do this? Just once, ONCE, I would like to read a mystery where

• Someone totally obvious Did It but you're still surprised
• The killer doesn't feel compelled to tell you how and why he did it before he kills you so you have time to think up a plan, outsmart him, and get away
  

Both are problems with this book, and and both feel like the easy way out. This book stretches on for a langorous six hundred pages but the ending is so rushed, and I felt exactly the same way I felt when I finally read the last Harry Potter book: that the author had spent all this time setting up the conflict, and did such a good job making the villain so evil that there really wasn't a good way to defeat him.

But all the same, I don't usually like mysteries, and I stayed up far too late on the night before an exam finishing this one, so that has to say something, right? At least, if you're interested in books about the African-American upper class in the US, read this. It's what I think Colson Whitehead was trying to do with his Sag Harbor, which ultimately failed. Carter is much more successful.

Rating: 3 of 5 stars.

I shall be free.

Taxation of Nonprofit Organizations: 2nd Edition
James J. Fishman and Stephen Schwarz

Oh, Taxation of Nonprofit Organizations--or "Taxie," as I've been referring to you for the past four months--oh, Taxie, what am I to do with you, now that finals are over?

You see, I would keep you. I have a penchant for leather-bound law casebooks. They look so impressive on my shelf! The colors! The gilt lettering! Seriously, if you want people to think you're intelligent, there is no better way than leaving your Law of the Sea casebook lying around. But Taxation of Nonprofit Organizations? That doesn't exactly send the right message. Admiralty law is jaunty, criminal law is sexy, even Secured Transactions makes people think that perhaps You Have Hidden Depths of knowledge and expertise that they heretofore did not know about.

Tax law sends the wrong message. To wit:


That is the first picture that came up when I typed "tax attorney" into Google images. And that guy is a douche. You can see it in the way that he is 1) gesticulating, 2) holding that book that way, 3) growing half-hearted facial hair. Also, the woman to whom he is speaking, if you look closely, is sort of recoiling from him in disgust and/or horror. And only an asshole would pick that color red for an office carpet. (Yes, perhaps that is not this fellow's fault. Still, I can't help blaming him.)

So, Taxie, I am not keeping you around. I do not want people to mistake me for this fellow. And honestly, Taxie, you were not very kind to me. I have not enjoyed my time with you. You weigh about 14 pounds and that is Just Too Much. You are also horrendously boring. I still cannot forgive you for breaking your promise that "there is very little math involved in tax law!" Within two chapters, I had to hunt my old TI-83 out of my decrepit LL Bean backpack, where it has been reposing since 11th-grade algebra class in 1998. Just FYI: if it involves a calculator IT IS MATH. DO NOT LIE TO ME.

You are riddled with typos. I will not reveal the exact amount of time I spent trying to decipher what a "excess benefit transaction night disqualify" was (a party? a fete for excess benefit transactions?) before realizing that the author meant might. They might disqualify. There are so many typos in this book that the authors had to issue a supplement to correct them. And that supplement is riddled with typos, so the wheel goes round and round and where will it end?

I live in a small condominium unit. This is Washington DC. Space is at a premium. I have made a place for as many law textbooks as I think I can. I have the ones I must use again for the bar and the ones I cannot bear to part with--Military Law, Business Associations (liberally peppered with Mrs. Constance [Business Associations Teacher's last name] in the margins--he had Henry Kissinger glasses!), Criminal Procedure, streaked with the tears I wept as I realized we Americans actually don't have any rights. I cannot part with any of them. I love them for sentimental reasons. But, Taxation of Nonprofits, I can bear to part with you. And I'll prove it:


That is my garbage can. And that, Taxie--is YOU IN IT.

Rating: One more semester...!

La-aa-a-a-ady in Red!

The King's Daughter
Sandra Worth

I was rather hard on poor Sandra Worth in my review of The Lady of the Roses. I see now that it really wasn't a horrible book. It was just a book that came to me at the wrong time. I know it was me, and not her, because I actually liked The King's Daughter, and I know the difference is because TKD had very little to do with the Wars of the Roses.

Elizabeth of York is Edward of York's daughter, an on-again, off-again princess as the Yorks and the Lancastrians vie for the throne of England. When the Lancastrians gain power, she is forced to marry Henry VII, to unite the two houses. She's nineteen, of course she's not too happy about that. But she promises to be the best queen that she can be, and to rule in the style of her gentle father, as opposed to her power-hungry and conniving mother, Elizabeth Woodville. This isn't too easy for our Elizabeth, as her husband really doesn't care for her, and his mother, Margaret Beaufort, is overbearing to the point of ridiculousness. But Elizabeth takes joy in her son, Arthur, even if she isn't too fond of her second son, who will grow up, we know, to be Henry VIII.

One thing that I really appreciate about reading so many different author's versions of this time period, is seeing what is the same about their works, and what is different. For instance, all four WoR books I have read have been strictly on the side of the Yorks. But everybody seems to have a different view of Elizabeth Woodville. Emma Darwin makes her sympathetic and sweet; Philippa Gregory makes her magical and aloof, a Nicole Kidman of Elizabeth Woodvilles. Sandra Worth, in both her books, makes her the devil incarnate. Worth, opposed to the others, makes Richard III a far more sympathetic character than any of the others--perhaps more sympathetic than he should be.

I swore I wouldn't read any more books about the Tudors, as I am sick of them as well, but in the end I'm really glad I read this one, if not to change my feelings about Worth, then to give me a glimpse into Henry VIII's early life, which explains a little why he was such a crucial dickhead. We see Elizabeth in this book turn to her son Arthur because he reminds her of her father, Edward of York. Henry resembles, in character and appearance, the husband she hates, and so she cannot bond with him, is even frightened of him. And nobody prepares Henry to be king and puts all of their efforts into getting Arthur ready to hold the crown. It follows that a boy ignored by his mother and not disciplined would one day decapitate two of his wives, doesn't it?

When all is said and done, I very much enjoyed this book. I still don't know why anybody in their right mind would have wanted to be King of England, and I don't understand why the entire British citizenry didn't band together and overthrow them after all the suffering and bullshit they caused, but I'm glad that Sandy and I are friends again (and in time for her new book, The Pale Rose of England, about Perkin Warbeck, the pretender to the British throne, to be released next year!)

Rating: 4 of 5 stars.

Can we not be old sames together?

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
Lisa See

I wrote, just a couple weeks ago, when reviewing Distant Land of My Father, that I don't tend to read much Asian (or Asian-American) fiction. I'm not exactly sure why this is. I think it's because I don't have a personal connection, that my liberal arts college tended to focus (as most do) on European, American, and African writers. And the cultural disconnect, which I mentioned before: I've been raised in the loud, obnoxious, American-Dream US, it's hard for me to understand cultures that deal in subtlety or fixed notions of class. I wrote my senior thesis on Hemingway. Hemingway. Bears, shark fishing, cold Michigan woods, bombs and manliness.

Snow Flower is the opposite of Nick Adams.

I will admit that there were times, during the first few chapters of this book, as See was detailing foot bindings, or the fact that people of certain castes could not do things of people of other castes, of the Catching Cool Breezes festival, that I felt a little like I was reading science-fiction, set on a planet in a galaxy far, far away. (I hope that doesn't sound as condescending as I think it does; I don't mean it to be. I just want to convey that this book was utterly foreign and strange, at first.)

But the more I read, the more I got used to it, and the more I fell in love with Snow Flower, and her friend, Lily.

Lily is a girl growing up in a small village in China in the mid-1800s. She is very beautiful, and the village matchmaker, seeing her at age seven, realizes that her beauty can catch her a rich husband in a wealthier nearby village. To prepare Lily for this life, the matchmaker finds a girl of the same age in a rich family to be Lily's laotong, or "old same." The girls will pledge lifelong loyalty and friendship to each other, and Lily will learn from this girl, Snow Flower, how to be a great lady. Lily's family agrees to the match, and Lily receives from Snow Flower a fan, on which is written, in the ancient, secret language of nu shu, a method for women to communicate outside of the world of men, a message: You and I are of the same year and the same day. Can we not be old sames together?

The story follows Lily and Snow Flower through their adolescence and into adulthood, to their marriages, at which point Lily and Snow Flower find their positions cruelly reversed. What follows is a close look at the many ways in which the people we love fail us, and we fail them. It is a powerful story, and redemptive, and I just just just couldn't get enough of it.

The only other Chinese fiction I'd ever read before this was Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club, and while I still maintain that it's a great book, I think Snow Flower goes even beyond it. In Joy Luck, we get a taste of war and diaspora, but Snow Flower gives you an idea of what ordinary life must have been like in China almost two hundred years ago. This book has been a runaway success, and I think See deserves all of it, because I don't think there's anything like it in popular fiction. This book isn't only a book, it's a feat.

Of course it's Oprahfied, as much as it can be, light on history and large on descriptions of things, and feelings, with a lesson to be learned, but there is a timelessness to this book. I think people will be reading it for a long time to come. See admits that she was fascinated, if not obsessed, by nu shu, and her enthusiasm and her energy shows. Now, I don't know anything about Chinese history, so I don't know if she got everything right. Maybe she didn't. The only thing I know is that by the time I'd finished Snow Flower I wanted to read Peony in Love, and Shanghai Girls, See's two subsequent books. And I think that one fact should tell you all that you need to know about the sum of See's writing: she took this foreign thing, that was so strange and almost off-putting to me at first, and made me want more and more.

Rating: 4.5 of 5 stars.

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day.

Tomorrow
Graham Swift

I...I don't know about this book. It looks like a real book. There are covers, over pages of text. The cover is actually quite beautiful. Nice picture. Nice typeface. On the back cover there is a blurb that uses phrases of highest praise. "An eloquent meditation on the mystery of happiness." There's an author photo. There are the words "Long-listed for the Booker Prize."

This book isn't just masquerading as a book, it's masquerading as a good book.

But it's not a good book. I'm not even sure it's actually a book, or at least, a novel. A whole new genre might have to be coined for Tomorrow: fictional essay? Because, and I'm going to tell you kids something, you can thank me later, unless it is written by Mr. William Faulkner or a new, exciting experimentation with narrative form, book requires dialogue. And there is no dialogue in this book.

I know if Mr. Swift (Swift? This book crawled) was here to argue with me, he would say that the form didn't lend itself to dialogue. The entire premise is that Paula Hook is sitting up on the night of her twin son and daughter's sixteenth birthday writing them the story of their birth, which has been kept secret, and will be revealed the next day. It's supposed to look like a letter to them, Swift would say, and letters don't usually contain dialogue.

To which I say, "Tosh."

Look, we're readers. We are willing to go to great lengths to suspend disbelief for the sake of a story. We will swallow a time-traveling man, a dead narrator telling his story from beyond the grave. We're already, in this particular book, swallowing the fact that Paula Hook manages to write three hundred pages to her kids in three hours. (Anyone who did Nanowrimo would love to learn that trick.) Peppering the telling with some showing, and some quotation marks, setting us in scene for a moment, would not have strained credulity and would have made this book far more interesting than it actually was, with all the "Let me tell you about the..."s and "Now I want to describe to you how my father looked when he found out..."s. Show me, you chucklehead. SHOW!

I guess by now you've realized that plotwise, something Large and Important is amiss in the circumstances of Paula's twins' births. Are you scintillated? Are you interested? You shouldn't be. I won't reveal to you the ending, but I will say that while I waited for the big reveal, I couldn't help guessing at the end myself. I thought that 1) They were probably kidnapped, 2) They didn't exist and were figments of Paula's imagination, or 3) They were not actually twins and one had died at birth or sometime shortly after and been replaced with a doppelganger. That would have been SRS BSNS, right? In reality, the truth is far, far lamer than any of those. So lame, in fact, and so nonearth-shaking that when I finally found out the truth, I wondered at Paula for making such a big deal about it, all the wailing and the gnashing of teeth, and the "things will never be the same! EVER!" Whatevs, this has happened to millions of other people and they survive.

I didn't like Paula because of that, but I also didn't like her because of the age old rule of parenting which is that Ye Shall Not Ever, Ever, EVER Talk about Sex to Thine Children, EVER, subclause (a) of which is "any sex at all," and the far more important subclause (b) of which is "especially not sex had by you, especially with my other parent." Paula breaks this rule willy-nilly by talking about all the graphic horizontal fun times she had with these kids' dad. In a letter. To those kids. About their dad.

I suddenly felt, I have to confess it (Ed: NO YOU DON'T) a great lust for your father, for your father's body--definitely not a new thing, as I must have made plain, but never before in a graveyard...I was really thinking: couldn't there be some magic timewarp in these proceedings so that, without anyone noticing, I could take Mikey off and satisfy my lust with him...at least by the time we got home to Herne Hill that evening the lust had become plainly mutual. Well, Mikey, let me be your South Downs."

Throughout the story Paula wonders, over and over, how will her children take the news that she and Mike are going to tell them tomorrow? What will they be thinking as they read this story. Will they be judging her, or angry? You don't get to see Kate and Nick's reaction to the news (cop-out) but I did get the lovely mental picture of these poor sixteen-year-olds covering their ears, blood-dripping out from between their fingers, going, please, Mumma, stop and barfing. And I guess that's just as good an ending as any for this whack book.

Rating: 2 of 5 stars.

And they all look just the same.

Main Street
Sinclair Lewis

In 1921, Main Street was awarded the Pulitzer Prize...only to have it later taken away and given to Edith Wharton for The Age of Innocence, instead. People have speculated why this might have happened, but I think it's pretty clear: in 1921, the United States was reeling from the First World War, from women finally getting the vote, from all that sex and loose morals, from things moving too far, too fast. Sinclair Lewis's novel not only opposes and makes ridiculous the war, but argues for a woman's increased role outside the home, criticizes small town attitudes toward sex, celebrates the Communist agenda, and lauds a female character for leaving her husband and shirking her motherly duty in an attempt to find herself.

Age of Innocence, on the other hand, rewards a woman who stands up for her marriage with unhappiness and death.

Main Street is not the best book I have ever read. It is not the best-written; it doesn't have the most perfectly-crafted characters; the story lags and draws on for so long (I say that, but I thinking back, I honestly don't know what parts I'd remove to make it shorter. They are all so necessary.) But it might be the most effective book I've ever read. Lewis sets forth to do three things: to honor his childhood in Sauk Centre, Minnesota; to give a satirical account of small town life; and to show the struggles of women in a changing world. And he does all of these things really, really well, and this might be my new favorite book.

The heroine of our story is city-girl Carol, who marries Dr. Will Kennicott and follows him to his hometown of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. Once acquainted with the town, and its smallness, both physically and intellectually, she sets out to reform it. She's going to single-handedly make this shitty, backwoods, small-minded, gossipy little pious town into a shining city on a hill. She's going to give these poor downtrodden hicks culture and elegance and music and poetry and dramatics.

She fails miserably in her attempts, again and again. And her quest becomes an obsession.

As the years go on, the novel becomes less and less about the question of whether Carrie will effectively reform Gopher Prairie, and more and more about whether Carrie will even be able to go on living there. Will she spend all her time being discontented, or will she embrace the town, and its people, and her husband? Or will she leave? This novel pretty much encapsulates the Serenity Prayer: Lord, give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

As I've just described it, this sounds like a pretty grim story, doesn't it? But it isn't. It's teeming with humor and wit and realism and romance. (On that last point, I think Carol and Kennicott have one of the most realistic and satisfying romances in all literature.) Sherwood Anderson described Lewis's prose as "joyless" but I found it quick and vital and heart-stirring. I laughed out loud at something literally every other page. While she is being lectured for her frivolity by her husband's relatives over Sunday dinner

Carol reflected the carving knife would make an excellent dagger with which to kill Uncle Whittier. It would slide in so easily. The headlines would be terrible.

I laughed again when Carol, after finding a kindred spirit in the town, exclaims to her husband,

"Everything has changed! I have two friends now, Fern and--But who's the other? That's queer. I thought there was--Oh, how absurd!"

I think Anderson was probably responding to Lewis's satirical wit. He doesn't really let you like any of his characters, he's too quick to point out their flaws, but it serves the story for him to do it, so I didn't mind it.

To illustrate: I don't know for sure if I liked Carol Kennicott, but I do know that I related to her, and that she is probably one of the most realistically drawn heroines of all literature. It's not even clear she is a heroine. In one breath Lewis makes you sympathize with her; in the next he points out her myriad flaws. He does the same thing with the town: you're glad you don't have to live there, and the next moment, you love its inhabitants and would fight fiercely against anyone who tried to bring them down. They are gorgeous, brave, wonderful people...until the next page, and you suddenly hate them, and Carol, again.

There is a great possibility that if you pick up this book, you won't finish it. I almost didn't. It's 500 pages long, and it's dense. You can't skim. And for all its humor, and for all of Carol's relatability, in some places you want to kill her, she's being such a brat. And in other places, you feel so badly for her that you can't go on seeing her so mistreated. But you should. This is probably the great American novel in a way that Gatsby, which is often cited, is not. It doesn't deal with a ritzy upper class, it reveals the hidden inner workings and longings of the ordinary mother, wife, country doctor, school librarian.

Try, and if you do try, I urge you to stick with it. I think if you do read this book, you'll find out something valuable about learning to live with those around you, and how to live with yourself, and to adjust your dreams to bring them within arm's reach. How to accept the things you cannot change. How to the find courage to change the things you can. And yes: the wisdom to know the difference between the two.

Rating: 5 of 5 stars.