What I read: Week of 2/19/12

Last week, I said that after plowing through nearly 2,000 pages of Herman Wouk's take on WWII and the Holocaust, I would need to focus on books in which people were not shot or gassed. I am pleased to say that nobody was gassed in the books I read this week. And while there was a shooting, it was not motivated by ideas of ethnic cleansing or eugenics, and therefore, I am calling this week a WIN.

I read:


-The Flight of Gemma Hardy by Margot Livesey (and reviewed it here).


-Into the Wildnerness by Sarah Donati

In my Books to Read if You Liked Outlander post, Zibilee and Laurie C. recommended the colonial-era Wilderness series. This is the story of Elizabeth Middleton, one mildly historically inaccurate female, newly arrived in the newly independent America. Elizabeth falls in love with Nathaniel Bonner, a white man raised by the Mahican Indians, and leaves her greedy father and goes to live with Nathaniel's family. There are land disputes, struggles over missing Tory gold, rumbles with the disapproving white folk, and tons and tons and TONS of bodice-ripping sex.

It is all, indeed, very Outlander-y. So Outlander-y, in fact, that Donati has made Diana Gabaldon's original characters, Clare and Jamie Fraser, into a sort-of tertiary (quaternary?) characters in her own work. There are also references to characters from Austen (Jane Bingley and Captain Frederick Wentworth make appearances in conversation), and I think the Viscount Durbeyfield, Elizabeth's childhood amour, is supposed to hearken back to Tess of the D'Urbervilles?

I understand liking a book a lot a LOT and wanting to pay homage to it in your own book, and it's a neat idea. But truthfully, I could have done without these little inside jokes and references, as every time I came across one, it jarred me from the narrative, but the story itself is gripping enough that I will probably continue on with book 2 anyway. (There's also the sex. That helps.)

And if I ever start an all girl band, I am going to make sure we are called The Historically Inaccurate Females.


-Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford

I finished Savage Beauty this week. It took me a while. I plowed through the first third in about an hour, then read the second third over the course of a week or so, but the final third took almost two months. It's not Milford's fault, as Savage Beauty is one of the best-written and most meticulously researched bios I've ever come across--the story of her struggles with Millay's sister Norma over the poet's personal letters and effects could have inspired a book all on its own.

The issue is more that I've realized that I have a problem with biographies; namely, that they I know what's coming at the end of one. The denouement in a biography is always the same: old age and/or sickness, then death. If I love the person I'm reading about--and I always do, because who reads a biography about someone they don't respect/love/esteem?--then their death hurts me as much as the death of somebody I know would hurt me, and troubles my thoughts for days afterward. I don't like seeing them sick, worn down, dying. In many cases, the death doesn't have much to do with the way the person I'm reading about lived their life, and only serves to bum me out at the end of the story and overshadow their stunning career/reign/achievements. Or maybe I'm just a fairweather biography friend, deserting my heroes at the time they need me most?


-The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta

-Today, after storytime, while I was waiting in the library parking lot for AAA to come jump my dead battery, I started The Leftovers. I had to wait a while, so I got a good way in, but I haven't finished it or come close to finishing it. I'm writing about it this week because I'm not sure I will finish it. Perrotta is a brilliant satirist, but the problem for me with satire is that sometimes you have to turn the characters into devices, and it can end up feeling kind of stupid and empty and mean. But the premise of the novel, of the people left behind after the Rapture, is amusing and interesting, so who knows? Maybe I will finish--check back next week.

Happy Friday, everybody! What are you reading this weekend?