The Likeness by Tana French

I believe I've actually mentioned this book before. Oh, yeah, here it is. I didn't really review it there, so I feel justified in revisiting it, if only because I, fresh off my awesome experience rereading In the Woods, had to reread The Likeness IMMEDIATELY, which should tell you how addictive French's writing and characters are to me. I'm working really hard to get an advanced copy of her new one, Faithful Place, which should be easy considering my circumstances but is in actuality insanely difficult, it turns out. Le sigh.

The Likeness picks up a few months after In the Woods leaves off (actually, they have slightly overlapping timelines, but whatever). Detective Cassie Maddox has left the Murder squad and moved to Domestic Violence in the hopes of escaping the trauma of her experiences in In the Woods (I'm trying to go for NO SPOILERS here, so lots of this is going to be intentionally vague). But she can't entirely leave them behind, of course; like all good tortured characters, they follow her around like her own shadow, making her jumpy and nervous and haunting her in her sleep. She's in a relationship with a Murder detective (I'm going to call him Detective X, because he's a character in In the Woods and I don't want to tell you whom, just in case you end up reading the first book), who one day calls her to a crime scene. When she gets there, she realizes why he's acting so weird: he thought the victim was her.

You see, years ago, before Operation Vestal (the In the Woods case), before Cassie was even on Murder, she was an undercover cop going by the name Lexie Madison. She attended Trinity College Dublin in order to infiltrate an extensive drug operation and got pretty close to one of the main dealers before he stabbed her in a frenzy of meth and paranoia. Cassie got sewn up and was offered her assignment of choice, which she took: Murder. Now her alternate identity has returned, full flesh and bone, and has been found--stabbed--in a tiny run down cottage in Glenskehy, a ghost town outside of Dublin. The girl is wearing Cassie's face, an almost virtual double, and using the Lexie Madison name. After much understandable hemming and hawing, Cassie agrees to infiltrate this other Lexie's life in a joint investigation run by Detective X and her old boss, Frank Mackey (Faithful Place follows him post-Operation Mirror, the name of the The Likeness case).

Since Lexie Madison is an invented person, it stands to reason that this Lexie is a fabrication as well. They know nothing real about her, only that she came on the scene a few years ago, became friends with an extremely codependent and closed-off group of post-docs who all live together in a crumbling old mansion on the Glenskehy outskirts called Whitethorn House, and for some reason pissed someone off so much that they stabbed her. Cassie is completely drawn into the little world that Lexie had built with her friends. Daniel, Abby, Rafe and Justin are a tight-knit band of weirdos, but they're seductive, interesting weirdos nonetheless, and the more time Cassie spends with them, the farther she sinks into their private, enchanted world than is good for her or for her investigation.

French's ability to show the way in which Cassie is slowly drawn deep into their world is one of her greatest achievements here. Detective X, who is overprotective of Cassie as truly in love boyfriends tend to be, doesn't understand why Cassie is so obsessed with Lexie, just because they have the same face, but to Cassie it's more important than that--this nameless girl took over her old identity, so to Cassie it's as if someone she created out of thin air has come to very real life. She's shaken by this, but also, after what she's been through, seduced by the possibility of sloughing off her old, battered life and slipping into a beautiful new one, free of baggage and bad memories. She envies Lexie, who has by all accounts gone by many names in many countries and never let anyone hold her long enough to trap her.

It's extremely rare that a writer can follow up a brilliant debut novel with one that is equally as impressive, mostly because it's so difficult to capture what was unique about your first work and imbibe the next book with something similar--but not exactly the same. Instead, French didn't try; she took a brilliantly realized character and fleshed her out even more, gave her her own trauma and story and let it unfold from there. It's a stunning achievement, really, if you think about it, and I have very high hopes for her next book.

In the Woods by Tana French

I'm a pretty faithful re-reader. There's a list of books I tend to revisit every year/eighteen months or so: Hey Nostradamus by Douglas Coupland, The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford, Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman, Atonement by Ian McEwan. When I crack open a book I've read several times before and still get excited to read again, it's like when I visit old friends from middle school that I see only rarely--that same homey, nostalgic sensation that warms the heart.

There's a risk to re-reading, though. Sometimes you might find that a book that you had the hots for three years ago (I'm what Fadiman calls a "carnal" reader) leaves you cold now, or that once the ephemeral shimmer of not knowing what happens fades you're pretty bored by the whole endeavor. Which actually sucks, because reading an entire book takes an enormous amount of time, energy and dedication, and there's nothing worse than going to the house of a girl who braided your hair at sleepovers in the fourth grade only to find out you're in completely different life places and have nothing to talk about anymore.

I've probably mentioned the new book club I'm in. Well, since I'm the best read chickadee (obvi we're all girls, boys don't read) in the group, I tend to be the one throwing out suggestions for upcoming meetings, which is why two out of the three books we've read so far have been re-reads for me. I thought I'd written a review of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, but maybe it's in draft. Whatever, that was a fine re-read for me, but it didn't need to happen. On the other hand, my revisiting of In the Woods was inevitable, but in the course of reading it over I found it a changed book, or (and this is infinitely more likely) I have changed in the interim.

In the Woods, a literary murder mystery set in modern day Dublin, Ireland, is narrated by one Rob Ryan, a detective assigned to the (non-existent) Murder squad. But Rob wasn't always his name; until he was twelve, his name was Adam Ryan, and he was an only child growing up in suburban Knocknaree. One day, near the end of summer, Adam and his two friends, Peter and Jamie, ran into the thick, wild woods behind Knocknaree, and only Adam came out again, near-catatonic with fear and trauma, his shoes filled with someone else's blood. In addition to changing his name, Rob has done his damnedest to distance himself from the Knocknaree tragedy; he's adopted a new accent, a new personality, and a new attitude towards everything. At the beginning of the book, Rob cautions us--he lies. It's part of his job, he says, but it's also a learned part of his entire life--keep the past at bay by denying it, obfuscating it, deleting it from your memory.

Rob and his partner, Cassie Maddox (one of my favorite women in all of literature, a real woman, brave and strong and dignified and also capable of staggering vulnerability), have a singular relationship, a combination of siblings, best friends, and a married couple (sans sex). Cassie is the only person outside of Rob's parents and himself who know the truth about who he really is, at least as far as his childhood tragedy is concerned. So when Rob and Cassie are called out to Knocknaree to investigate the murder of a twelve-year-old girl, they conspire to cover up his connection to the old case and set to solve the crime themselves--with near-disastrous consequences.

When I first read In the Woods, I emerged from it pretty much in love with Rob Ryan, at least as in love with a fictional character as you can be. He's an exquisitely drawn man as far as I can tell (not being a man, you see, it's hard for me to know for sure), and he's just so tortured that I could hardly stand it. Don't roll your eyeballs at me, boys! Chicks dig that shit. But now, being a few years older and hopefully at least a little bit wiser, I found my relationship with Rob to be a little more complicated. Most of the time I was just totally pissed off at him. Basically, kitty has changed. I'm taking this as a good sign, for myself personally, but it made reading In the Woods a different experience this time around.

Back then I took everything in the book at face value, but this time I found myself sort of enraged at how irresponsible it is for him and Cassie (and she's at fault here, too, which she definitely understands by the end of the novel) to be investigating a case that has anything at all to do with Knocknaree, and how ridiculous it is that he's never been in therapy for what happened. I'm mad at him for constantly believing that he's right even when he most clearly IS NOT, mad at how he treats Cassie, mad at how totally delusional he is about his entire life, how selfish he is, how cruel he can be. BUT--these are not bad things, as far as the story is concerned. These are the cogs that make the story work. The book wouldn't exist if Rob was a totally well-adjusted awesome cop, and the reread actually made the novel more intense, because not only do you have the mystery, you also have the tension between what Rob believes is going on and what is actually going on, which you can't see if you don't know the solution to the mystery. Sigh. Books are so cool.

Unsurprisingly, Tana French's writing is an absolute joy to read. You're just not going to find a debut author with as much style, emotion and raw talent than she has. The way she builds Rob and Cassie, word by word, flaw by flaw, piece by telling piece, is deft and artful, perhaps the product of her acting background. It's the sort of book that can make another writer feel insignificant in comparison, but for the right kind of writer it can be an inspiration, and for the right kind of reader it can be a revelation.

Going Bovine by Libba Bray

When Libba Bray's fourth novel, Going Bovine, won the Michael L. Printz Award in January, most people didn't really know what to think. I'm not sure I saw it on a single mocked up honors list. Of course, the Printz has a reputation that way--of going against expectation and choosing a book nobody expected to win. And the Printz may not have the name recognition of the Pulitzer, the Booker, or the National Book Award, but it's a much coveted medal in the young adult literature community, as important to the children's book business as the Newbery or the Caldecott (both of which went to the favorites this year, in another interesting twist), so when a book is awarded the Printz it means something to a lot of people.

Going Bovine is a weird book, no questions asked. It was from the beginning. Libba Bray, a New York Times bestselling author, became famous for her first three books, referred to as the Gemma Doyle trilogy, about a wealthy teenage girl living in the Victorian era who discovers that she has the power of a second sight and crosses over into other, more spiritual realms like people who live on Long Island day trip into the city. I've only read the first one, but I didn't enjoy it at all and I quickly wrote Bray off as a Writer Of Things I Have No Interest In Reading, since I'm not a paranormal fan to begin with.

Going Bovine, however, is an entirely different animal, if you'll pardon the pun. Even though I knew it was way different from the Gemma books, I wasn't planning to ever read it, because of the aforementioned designation I gave to Bray after A Great and Terrible Beauty. But if you have anything to do with YA, you can't ignore a Printz winner, and here we are.

The protagonist of Going Bovine is Cameron Smith, a smart, friendless slacker/pothead who spends most of his time behaving like a little shit. Then he starts having strange physical attacks and seeing things that aren't there, and when his parents take him to the doctor they discover that he has Creutzfeldt-Jakob's disease, a neurodegenerative disease that causes spongy degeneration in the brain and spinal cord. I was introduced to Creutzfeldt-Jakob's disease via an episode of The X-Files in which a town full of weirdos cannibalize outsiders and, eventually, each other. But most people know it by its more popular name--mad cow.

Yes, the kid has mad cow disease, hence the title. In the hospital, he speaks for the first time to a girl who's been following him around for weeks, a pink-haired, fishnet-tights-and-combat-boots wearing angel named Dulcie. Yes, an angel, wings and all. She gives him a Disney World E-ticket bracelet and tells him to find a mysterious Dr. X who will cure his disease. The only catch is that Dr. X found this cure during his travels through space and time, and because of all of this dimension hopping has opened a wormhole that brought dark energy in the form of giants made of fire and the metal-helmeted Wizard of Reckoning, who are going to destroy the world. Just your typical road trip, basically.

Maybe that synopsis turns you on. Frankly, it seemed way to far-fetched to work for me. But actually, what hurt the book more than the ridiculousness of its plot--because ridiculous always gets less ridiculous the more you get used to it--was the tone in which it was written. It's clear from the writing that Bray thinks she's funny and clever, which is a huge pet peeve of mine. Anything that smacks of authorial self-satisfaction makes me want to throw down the book in disgust. But I persisted, and happily the book becomes too busy being funny and clever to tell you how funny and clever it is, like Bray got swept along in the action right along with her characters. As a result, Cameron becomes, in trickles, a person worth caring about, and the reader is taken on a crazy ride that reminded me of The Phantom Tollbooth, but with more erections.

So for the most part I thought Going Bovine was great, but it was way too long. It could've had probably seventy-five less pages and I don't think anything would've lost--the detour in Daytona wore very thin on me. But eventually, the book arrives at its final destination with a kind of smart thoughtfulness and quiet joy that I found at once sad and comforting.

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

Well here it is, my last book review of 2009. Did you know I've been reviewing books for the Blogulator for over a year now? Spooky. You know what else is spooky? This book. Great transition, high five, me!

Sarah Waters is a literary writer who built her reputation on a trilogy of Victorian novels (Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, and Fingersmith), lauded for their historical accuracy and period authenticity--two very different things, in my opinion. But I didn't know that when I started The Little Stranger; I confess, the only Sarah Waters book I'd even heard of was Fingersmith, and I've never read it, or considered reading it. I first came across The Little Stranger in the New York Times Notable Books of 2009 list, and it sounded so incredibly good, like The Turn of the Screw meets Atonement, that I immediately ordered it online without a second thought and brought it with me to read over Christmas.

Besides being something of a thick book (463 pgs, not really long, per se, but long-ish), The Little Stranger is a slow-moving thing. That's not a criticism, either; reading it is like eating a many coursed rich meal. You need to take the opportunity to savor everything, and it will take a considerable amount of time. With this novel, Waters has recreated post-WWII England; the voice and detail is pitch-perfect, as far as I would ever know, to the period. The descriptions are so lush, the depth of narration so profound, that it really takes some effort to absorb and appreciate it all.

The Little Stranger is about a family, more specifically about their house. Hundreds Hall is one of those English country estates that for centuries was formidable, whose residents commanded respect as landed gentry. But since the death of the squire and with the ravages of war, Hundreds has fallen into disrepair and its owners, the Ayers family, into debt and despondence. The narrator of the story, Dr. Faraday, whose mother used to serve in the house long ago when it was still buoyed by the Ayers' fortune and pre-war lifestyle, comes to know the Ayerses by simple chance--something that would not, of course, ever have happened in the old days. He becomes a friend of the family, and a witness to their sudden misfortunes.

Roderick, the youngest Ayers but, as the only son, Hundreds' master, is twenty-three and returned from the war with an injured leg and a scarred face. He comes to confide in Dr. Faraday his suspicions that something dark and disturbing is living in Hundreds Hall, torturing him and threatening his family. Faraday, a doctor of course, believes that Roderick is cracking under the strain of running a quickly disintegrating estate coupled with post-traumatic stress disorder, and eventually helps the Ayerses move him to an asylum. When Mrs. Ayers and her daughter, Caroline, with whom Faraday has fallen in love and hopes to marry, begin to believe his ravings and experience ghostly occurrences in the house as well, Faraday continues on with his practical GP sensibility and, I believe, is instrumental in bringing the whole family to its knees.

I always wonder, when reading these types of stories, how I would react to a friend of mine telling me that their house is haunted. I firmly believe that if Faraday had listened to and taken seriously the things that the Ayerses said they were experiencing at Hundreds, had removed them from the house and installed them somewhere safe, everything would've turned out differently. But the house works its magic on Faraday as well; when Caroline attempts to leave, he is appalled that she would abandon Hundreds, and she is disgusted with his obsession with it. Reading The Little Stranger, I grew infuriated with Faraday, going so far as to say out loud, "Oh my God, will you just believe her, you asshole?" But then again, who would believe such a thing? Faraday's not wrong to suspect that the whole family has gone mad, but he turns away from the evidence for too long, which is his downfall. If I were Caroline, I would've strangled him the first time he pronounced me "tired" and "anxious" as a way of avoiding the things I obviously meant and believed in. Douche.

Otherwise, I, like the Ayers family, was very fond of Faraday. I felt sorry for him, even; the single-minded pursuit of his education, he believes, hastened his parents' death, and he has yet to make a real contribution to the medical field. He has few real friends and no family; the Ayerses become that for him, and Hundreds becomes his home--I can't imagine how hard it would be to give all of that up, especially if you're as insecure and afraid as he is. His fears of irrelevance plug in so nicely to the Ayerses actual irrelevance that he begins to feel as though he's one of them, despite the fact that he demonstrably is not. After everything that happens, Hundreds won't even haunt Faraday. It leaves him alone. He's not part of it, though he longs to be. The end of the novel finds Faraday wandering the dark, empty corridors of the house, pathetically begging whatever it is that terrorized the family to show itself, and receiving no reply.

The Little Stranger is a masterful novel. Full of suspense and palpable darkness, everything is so beautifully and horrifically rendered, from the house to the narrator to the time period to the Ayers family themselves, who are almost as charming and lovable as the Redesdale clan (from the Nancy Mitford novels). You'd be hard pressed to find a richer, more entertaining novel this year.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

I always liked the idea of book clubs, but for some reason, whenever I wanted to start one, the attempt was stymied by the inertia of my, let's say less dedicated, friends. The book club I started at my old job lasted just one book--Microserfs by Douglas Coupland, a really good gender neutral read I highly recommend. The Internet book club my high school friends organized while we were in college hundreds of miles away from each other also only lasted one book--A Thousand Secret Senses by Amy Tan, which was okay, although after you read The Joy Luck Club, her stuff starts blending together a little.

So I'm not totally 100% sure that this new book club, imported by one of my best friends when she moved to the metro area a few months ago, will take a real hold, but she's dogged and we all like to read. The first book she picked was The Road by Cormac McCarthy and, like the dutiful club member I have always been, I read it.

I wasn't excited about The Road--not before I read it, not while I was reading it, and not afterwards. I found it difficult to get into--a sentiment shared by all of the club members who decided to show up (we had two beg off sick, not an auspicious beginning). I am of the somewhat unpopular opinion (at least in the literary community--not so, necessarily, among actual readers) that a book without a plot is not worth my time. A book can be full of beautiful, singing prose, finely crafted metaphors and transcendent imagery and have a plot. I firmly believe that.

The Road is thin on plot. What it's got in spades is a series of heartbreaking and stomach churning vignettes that form a gruesome portrait of humanity (such as it is) after the end of the world. It's never stated just what caused this apocalypse--whether it was an act of God or an act of man isn't entirely clear, although from the way the people in this book behave, it must've been some manmade disaster. Nuclear fallout? Perhaps. The sun has been blotted out by a thick layer of atmospheric ash that covers everything and makes it necessary for our protagonists, a man and his son, to wear masks.

They have no names. They're moving south because another winter would kill them. It's the man's sole purpose in life to get his son to the coast, where he hopes that "the good people"--those who do not rape, pillage, destroy and cannibalize their fellow survivors--YES I SAID CANNIBALIZE. One of the things we talked about in book club was the sheer horror of the state of humanity presented in the book. We're largely desensitized to murder from watching television and movies, but cannibalism is the last frontier, an uncrossable line that makes these scenes particularly terrifying. I almost put the book down once when the man and his son found the charred remains of an infant resting in an ersatz barbecue pit, and was doubly disgusted when my friends reminded me of a scene I seemed to have repressed--that in which the man and his son find cannibalized humans, ALIVE and IN PAIN, in the cellar of a house and leave them there.

The man and his boy represent the dual options facing people with nothing left--faith and despair. While the man believes that the world is doomed, the boy believes in God and has an enormous amount of empathy and compassion for other suffering people. The father refuses to help other people in need, believing that their options are to think only of themselves and possibly live, or stop to give aid and certainly perish. But still the boy insists, and while he has no faith the father doggedly tries to preserve his son's, although for what purpose it is unclear. The boy is afraid, but not of death, and the father is desperate to keep him cynical enough not to give in to the death urge but hopeful enough to keep moving down the terrifying road that they are traveling.

We were all disappointed with the ending, unsure that its message fits with the real possibilities presented by the novel, but one interesting theory did come up. My friend said that while she was reading it she expected, in the end, to discover that the man and the boy were one in the same person, that the man invented the boy in his head to give himself a reason to live. McCarthy certainly doesn't state that that's the case, but it makes a lot of sense and would have been the BEST TWIST OF ALL TIME.

By the end of book club, I'd changed my opinion of the book. One of my friends said at the start of our discussion that she's glad that she read the book, although she would never read it again and would be unlikely to recommend it to anyone. I feel similarly. I resented the lack of plot and the quasi-poeticism of the language, but I admire the ideas that it tries to grapple with and the way it struggles with issues of faith and morality. I feel better for having read it.

A Better Angel by Chris Adrian

I have now written and deleted this review three times, which makes me a little nervous, as I start again, about my ability to adequately talk about this book. This sometimes happens when I read a book that affects me so deeply--I become incapable of expressing how I feel about it, how it made me feel and what it gave me. But maybe this time it will happen.

It has been a few years now since I've read The Children's Hospital, Adrian's 2006 novel about an apocalyptic flood that buries most of the earth under seven miles of water, sparing only a newly built hospital full of sick children, their parents, and a handful of doctors. The hospital is attended by four angels--the recording angel (who is creating scripture for a new world), the preserving angel (who keeps the hospital afloat, provides for its inhabitants, and comforts them--or tries to, although she is frequently rebuffed for being too annoying), the accusing angel (who serves up guilt like Thanksgiving turkey), and the destroying angel (who does its job).

As I read A Better Angel, I kept noticing small elements of The Children's Hospital, which utterly blew me away when I read it, although I'm much too dumb to appreciate it fully in all its dimensions. Characters quietly recurred, familiar themes began to emerge. In one previous iteration of this review, I tried to catalog all of these things as best I could (you're welcome for sparing you that, by the way--it was for my benefit rather than anyone else's), and setting them all down like that made me wonder how many things I was missing. I've started reading The Children's Hospital again, so it's possible I'll soon know.

Adrian, a pediatrician and former Harvard Divinity School student, is preoccupied by death and suffering, and his fiction often represents the collision of the physical and spiritual worlds. In real life, we all know people who turn away from metaphysical questions, choosing to proclaim themselves "not religious"--perhaps you are a person like that, dear reader--but in Adrian's work, no one escapes the eye of God or the influence of angels. Angels in The Children's Hospital and A Better Angel are often terrifying, capable of truly awful things, beings who have witness and absorbed the world's darkness. But they're not false angels or demons--they are simply fearsome because they are so ancient, representations of a particular wisdom that we struggle as hard as possible to forget: that we are capable of miracles, great leaps of positive creativity, but that most of us just give in to the incessant whirlpool of entropy or, perhaps, destruction.

Which is worse? Entropy, of course. To deny one's true nature--I say that instead of "destiny", which gives the impression that we are "meant" to do something rather than built to do something, which is entirely different--is to deny God. In the title story, a pediatrician named Carl watches his father die, while his personal angel, who has been visible to him since childhood, tries to nag, cajole, even scare him into saving the old man. Carl is a miserable man; he cheated and bribed his way through medical school and uses a steady stream of morphine, Ativan, and anything else he can get his hands on to get himself through the day. The story is superb and heartbreaking. Instead of raising a hand to save his father, Carl opts to broker both of their comforts with painkillers, and goes to the trouble of mocking up a thunderstorm when his father mentions wishing to experience one again before dying. In the end, Carl's father breathes his last, and though Carl knows he has failed the angel, she does not leave him.

"A Better Angel" is the greatest story in the collection, but it is not the only very good one. In "The Sum of Our Parts", a woman who attempted suicide by jumping off a seven story parking garage lies in a coma, awaiting organ transplant, while her noncorporeal self wanders around the hospital, spying on the lives and minds of phlebotomists and lab technicians while she roots for her body's demise. When it finally occurs, when her heart is harvested from her chest, she leaps into the arms of death with pure ecstasy, crying out "Finished!" as she disappears "in search of a place without loneliness and desire; without misery and rage, without disappointment; without crushing, impenetrable sadness."

In "The Changeling", one of three separate stories that offer up perspectives on 9/11, a nine-year-old boy (also named Carl) is possessed by the spirits of those who died in the Twin Towers, spirits who cry out for revenge, blood sacrifice, justice. Carl's despairing father, terrified for his son and desperate to restore him, self-inflicts injury upon injury to appease "the entity." The story is rife with sorrow, the agony of a man who punishes himself to resurrect his psychologically buried son. The father is tender and loving and willing to do anything, which he proves at the end of the story--although whether or not it brings Carl back permanently is left up in the air.

What's refreshing about Adrian is that he doesn't moralize. His work is like exploratory surgery, opening up the body and soul at once and poking around, staring unflinchingly at corruption and horror. But it's not all fun and games. Some stories bring a message of guarded hopefulness--Beatrice's joy at finally being able to move on to a higher plane, the faithfulness of Carl's angel despite disappointment and loss--and some a strange foreboding. The future Adrian envisions for us is a mixed bag of good and evil, of destruction and recreation, not unlike the end of The Children's Hospital. But certainty is for zealots; most of us move through our lives in a constant state of metaphysical flux, one moment believing in the goodness of people, in a benevolent universe, the next despairing at the state of our broken world. In his books, Adrian asks that we look it all in the face and make of it what we will.

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

I wasn't really sure what to expect from Into Thin Air, although in retrospect I should've known what I was going to get. It wasn't the first Krakauer book I'd read--I'd read Under the Banner of Heaven and Into the Wild, and each one was sadder and more terrifying than the last. Krakauer's books, I've figured out, have recurring themes--fanaticism and death, the ties that bind. Krakauer seems fascinated by radical faith, whether it's in a man who said he'd discovered ancient golden tables in rural New York state, in a country, in an ideal, or in a mountain. Into Thin Air, although it was the first (discounting his book of essays about mountain climbing, titled Eiger Dreams) book he wrote, is the most heartbreaking of all of these accounts, because it is the most personal.

Krakauer always loved climbing, and lived much of his youth the way Chris McCandless, the young man from Into the Wild, endeavored to live his--as an itinerant adventure-seeker, of the mountain climbing variety. It was a dangerous sport to be sure, and he was winding down after it was beginning to destroy his marriage, until an editor at Outside magazine proposed an essay about the commercialization of Mt. Everest. Recently, there had been a proliferation of agencies that would provide guided ascents to the mountain's summit, for a price. Krakauer agreed to write the story, if the magazine would pay to send him all the way up the mountain, instead of just to Base Camp. After a year of preparation, Krakauer set off to climb the South Face of mountain with a group of other climbers being taken up by Everest legend Rob Hall and his team of guides and Sherpas.

It was clear to Krakauer that not all of his fellow clients should have been there. Even he knew that he didn't have the high-altitude climbing experience that would have made summitting the mountain possible on his own. For two months, the group, along with several others, most notably one led by another respected guide, Scott Fischer, prepared for their final ascent, which began early in the morning on May 10, 1996. In twenty-four hours, eight people, including Fischer and Hall, would be dead or dying, and another would have risen from the dead.



I kept thinking how much different the book would be if Krakauer had written it a few years after the experience, rather than six months after. The guilt he felt for his perceived complicity in the deaths of a few of the clients, especially his friend Andy Harris, is palpable in these pages; his rage over all of the deaths is unshakable. Underneath it all there is a clear, unsettling question--why not Krakauer? Why did he live when others died? He was not a better climber than some of these people. His descent from the summit was neither elegant nor safe; delusional from the lack of oxygen and exhausted from the ascent, Krakauer narrowly escaped the blizzard that bore down soon after he arrived at camp. If he had let time pass before telling the story, would he have reached some sort of peace with the whole thing, the way some of his fellow survivors had? Probably not. The thing about extreme faith is that, when it is shattered, it haunts you.

The book hits hardest at the end. After one of the surviving guides from the disaster, Anatoli Boukreev, told his own story in The Climb, cowritten by a man named G. Weston DeWalt, Krakauer was encouraged to write an author's note defending himself against allegations that he intentionally slandered Boukreev in Into Thin Air. Krakauer, although recognizing Boukreev's skills as a climber and heroic efforts to save some of the stranded clients, which prevented more deaths, believed that Boukreev's decision to descend from the summit before all of his clients put many people in danger and, indeed, might have caused some deaths. He also disagreed with Boukreev's decision not to use supplemental oxygen while guiding. The accusations flew fast between Krakauer and Boukreev, culminating at a conference where the men shouted at each other across a crowded room, even though DeWalt, who was not on the mountain and indeed had never climbed Everest or any other high-altitude peak, was the main antagonist.

Krakauer's sucker punch comes at the very end, when he tells of a conversation he had with Boukreev after the conference. The men apologized to each other for what had happened, and hoped that they could soon put their feud to rest. Not long after, Boukreev was killed in an avalanche on Annapurna--they never resolved their dispute, and Krakauer is left carrying the guilt of another lost comrade on his shoulders.

I have never felt the call of Mt. Everest, or indeed the call of the wild in any capacity. I like my warm bed, my cheesy television shows, my books. I don't understand what makes people climb Mt. Everest or, having nearly died doing so, do it again. Sometimes I wish I was a little more adventurous, but in the end I'm happier knowing that I'm safe. I think that's why I'm pulled towards books like this, the ones that shred you from the inside out. I don't know what to do with Into Thin Air, which means it's a book I'll keep coming back to until I'm capable of understanding a little bit of what it's here to teach me.

When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead

I try pretty hard to only review adult books on the Blogulator, because I feel relatively certain that that is what people expect to read about here, but truthfully I read a lot more young adult books. Like, A LOT more. But I tend not to read middle grade, which is book industry speak for books written for an audience of about 8-12. Still, lately I've been hearing great buzz about When You Reach Me; it's considered the front runner for the Newbury Prize, which is very prestigious, so I picked it up yesterday and stayed up late finishing it. It was very, very good.

The protagonist of When You Reach Me is twelve-year-old Miranda, a bookish latchkey kid living on New York's Upper West Side in the late 1970s. Her life is pretty ordinary, and populated by only a few important people--her mom, her mom's boyfriend Richard, her best friend Sal and his mother. Then, all of a sudden, a few things happen that change her life. A homeless guy Miranda takes to calling "the laughing man" starts spending time on her corner, where even though he seems harmless he still scares Miranda. Sal gets punched by another boy for seemingly no reason and stop speaking to Miranda, also for no reason. And Miranda begins receiving mysterious notes from an unnamed person, who predicts upcoming events in Miranda's life.

The touchstone of When You Reach Me is one of my all-time favorite novels, Madeleine L'Engle's classic A Wrinkle in Time. Like A Wrinkle In Time, When You Reach Me is a sophisticated novel that unfolds in a seemingly effortless way. The big debate amongst the people I know who've read it right now is, "Will kids like it?" because it is so sophisticated. And not to say that kids can't be sophisticated readers, because they can--after all, A Wrinkle In Time is a favorite of lots of kids, and it's sophisticated and complex and beautifully written. But nowadays, what with the Spongebob Squarepants generation maturing into The Clique novels, it's sometimes hard to imagine where smart books fit in to the entertainment landscape of today's middle grader. Which is really too bad.

While When You Reach Me seems effortless, it's quite obviously not when you take a look at the stitching. It takes a ton of work to create a novel that's this restrained and focused. There is not a single scene out of place here, nothing that, in the end, you don't believe was necessary or belonged. The words are chosen carefully, and the language is very precise, tailored to the voice of the character. There's no insincere kid talk mucking things up, but it sounds age appropriate.

There's also the fact that, though When You Reach Me takes place in 1978/1979, aside from a few tip-offs (The $20,000 Pyramid, for example, which plays a not insignificant part in the story) there is no reason not to believe it could take place right now. This isn't because it fails to conjure up the '70s, but rather that the author's attempt to make the story cross-generational and timeless actually works. But perhaps the book's greatest accomplishment is that it takes a fairly melodramatic premise (When You Reach Me is probably the only book I know of where to tell you the premise would be a giant SPOILER) and allows it to come to fruition without seeming too hysterical, and without letting it overwhelm what truly makes the book special--its characters.

Miranda is a perfectly wrought twelve-year-old, as are most of her peers in the novel (only Marcus--and maybe Julia--veers into the realm of quasi-unbelievable, but Stead makes it clear from almost his first appearance that there is something more about him that Miranda finds unusual just as the reader does), and she matures steadily and gracefully over the course of the story--which is actually not that much time, but is perfectly acceptable in context.

This novel, like many, is about discovery--mostly, making your own discoveries about people you look at every day but don't really see. Stead pushes Miranda past the veil that obfuscates the world--its triumphs and its tragedies, its hope and its horror--and asks her the $65,000 question: "What are you going to do now?"

A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True by Brigid Pasulka

When I found out that this book existed, I was ecstatic. Like, over the moon excited about it. So excited that even though it doesn't come out until August, as soon as I noticed Amazon had it in stock and was shipping (publishing fun fact: only big, big books like the Harry Potter series and Twilight and shit have hard-and-fast, don't-you-dare-sell-this-one-second-before-midnight-or-you'll-never-have-lunch-in-this-town-again release dates; whether or a not a book gets stocked on, before, or after its scheduled release date is entirely at the discretion of the retailer, and Amazon tends to ship as soon as the books are printed and in stock at the wholesaler--usually 1 to 2 months before the publisher's date) I purchased a copy. I'm an Amazon Prime member, so it took about two seconds for the book to reach me, and I started reading it immediately.

As it turns out, I could've waited.

A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True has two central plotlines told in alternating chapters. The first story is concerns the relationship between a beautiful (aren't they all?) young woman named Anielica Hetmańska and her true love, Czesław (pronounced Cheh-swav), also known as the Pigeon, before, during, and after World War II. Anielica, the Pigeon, and their families are górale, highlanders indigenous to the Tatras Mountains in southern Poland--hillbillies, basically. Because of this, Pasulka's treatment of their narrative resembles something closer to a fable than historical fiction. Told in third person, very far removed from the internal lives of the characters, the górale story retains an air of folksiness that defies even the author's attempt to darken it with the horrors of war.

And can I tell you something? I hate that. I really do. It's the reason that no matter how many times I've tried, I cannot get through Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated, which A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True seems to be emulating. I've never been the sort of reader who wants a story for the story's sake--I want people. That's what I care about. And the górale portion of this novel gives cardboard cut-outs, a morality play whose lessons are as trite as "true love conquers all" and "don't be anti-Semitic" and "we all sort of suffer, kinda" which, whatever.

Anielica and the Pigeon were terribly boring (this, by the way, is why I'm anonymous) because I didn't know them at all, I just watched them do and experience stuff. The moments that could be hard-hitting are glossed over or vaguely described (Anielica and her sister-in-law Marysia's rape by German soldiers during Nazi occupation is shown as a chaotic tableau from the Pigeon's point of view as he walks in on it in progress--not as an actual event that is being experienced and felt by anyone) or briefly mentioned in passing. I just did not care.

The second story, that of Anielica and the Pigeon's granddaughter Beata (you don't learn her name till the end of the novel, which makes no sense and is annoying), is slightly more interesting. Raised by Anielica after the early death of her mother from cancer and her drunken father's abandonment, Beata has recently moved to Krakow to live with her first cousin once removed (or whatever--geneology isn't my strong suit) Irena and Irena's daughter Magda, who is supposed to be studying to be a lawyer but mostly just fighting with her mother a lot and dating wildly inappropriate men.

Beata misses her now-deceased grandmother, and feels uncomfortable in "the New Poland"--post-communist, pre-EU (I think; it's not entirely clear), and almost completely foreign to her górale sensibilities. Everyone calls her Baba Yaga, which is the name of an ugly witch-like character from Slavic folklore--but don't worry, she's used to it. Beata is a housekeeper/cook/companion for Pani Bożena*, the aging widow of a former official in the Communist government, a bar girl, and a film enthusiast. She doesn't know who she is or what she wants to be doing, and she sort of wanders around Krakow in an uneasy daze most of the time. Somewhere along the line Beata's boyfriend gives her a video camera, which is both something of a deus ex machina, vocationally speaking, and also representative of Beata's function in the story: she's an observer. She's far less judgmental than she probably should be, and she's not exactly interested in the deeper meaning or significance of most of what she witnesses. Shrug.

The problem with having a book with two such disparate narratives, even if they're connected however tenuously (and the connection here is pretty tenuous), is that each story only gets half of the author's--and the reader's--attention, which weakens them. Just Beata's story, with her grandmother's stories throughout, would have been a thin but strong tale, but Beata doesn't seem very connected to her family's history or very invested in her future. So...what does one do with all of this?

This is not to say that A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True was not a valuable book to me, but the reasons I liked parts of it are mostly personal in nature--not in a private way, but in a singular way. I'm lucky I'm Polish, because otherwise the surfeit of unexplained aspects of Polish culture and language would have infuriated me. As it is, I probably only recognized about 20% of the Polish words and phrases in the novel, and figured out 50% more in context. I know the story of Baba Yaga and what górale, dupa (ass--as in butt), and Żywiec (a brand of Polish beer) mean. Other references certainly went over my head, which is annoying, but I also felt sort of accomplished, and intend to brag to my grandmother about how the Polish lessons she gave me the summer I lived with her after graduate school really helped me understand parts of this book that would be otherwise inaccessible to me.

I wanted more from Pasulka's novel, and I was ultimately disappointed by it. On the other hand, I'm certain my mother will like it, and plan to send it to her. Not only that, but I appreciate the attempt to tell a story about what Polish people suffered during World War II, even if this one wasn't as balls-to-the-wall as I would've liked (really, the atrocities delivered upon the Poles during WWII were vast and largely unspoken in deference to other, more traditional Holocaust narratives, also horrific). But I liked the glimpse I got of New Poland, and when Pasulka writes another book I will absolutely pick it up. I feel a great fondness for her and her subject, and I look forward to hearing more from her in the future.

*"Pan" and "Pani" are honorific titles for a man and a woman in Poland. So instead of Mr. Smith, it'd be Pan Smith, and Pani Smith for his wife. This, like most Polish customs, colloquialisms and vocabulary, is not explained in the novel.

Shakespeare Wrote For Money by Nick Hornby

A couple of weeks ago, one of my favorite Tumblr-ers, Laura from 52 Books, made an exciting announcement on her site: McSweeney’s, an incorrigibly eccentric and intelligent independent publishing house founded by Dave Eggers, was having a garage sale. They were selling off their old books, in a range of conditions, for a fraction of their original cost. Being a lover and hoarder of books, I immediately clicked on the link and purchased four: The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers, and all three volumes of Nick Hornby’s collected Believer columns, “Stuff I’ve Been Reading.”

I can’t recall exactly when I read The Polysyllabic Spree and Housekeeping vs. the Dirt, the first two installments, but I can figure it out with reasonable accuracy. I must have taken the books out of the library because I know nobody else who has read them and I don’t own them (well, didn’t, until I bought them the other day), but I’m a woeful library patron, preferring owning books over borrowing them (which is an addiction and I’m not afraid to admit I have a problem; I have the USPS box full of acquisitions taken from my recently abdicated job to prove it to me), and the only time in the last five years I used the library with anything approaching regularity was when I was living with my grandmother after graduate school and working downtown at a literary agency, a block away from the main branch of the Chicago Public Library. That would put it in the summer of 2007.

Such is the power of memory.

Anyway, back then I had never read any of Hornby’s novels, not even About a Boy or High Fidelity (although I’ve seen both of the movies). And guess what? I still haven’t read any of his novels, not even Slam, his YA attempt of two years ago. But now, as then, I’ve read all of his Believer columns available in paperback, and boy is he hilarious.

I know I first picked up Spree after reading about it on the now sadly defunct 50 Books blog, and Housekeeping followed quite naturally in its wake. They’re slim little volumes, and though they purport to be about reading Hornby shows no compunction in veering off in other directions when the truth of the matter is that he’s been reading a lot less than he’s been doing other stuff, namely watching soccer. He is British, after all. As he mentions in one or another of the first two books, he got some pushback for that from the magazine*, who preferred that he stay focused, but when you run a column with the vague and noncommittal title “Stuff I’ve Been Reading,” you’ve got to take what you can get. Eventually, the smartie pantses** at McSweeney’s wisened up and left the poor man alone to ramble about whatever topic he so chose.

Usually, though, he talks about books.

I’m coming to the realization that reviewing Shakespeare Wrote For Money, the last volume in the collection, while brilliant in theory because the books are fun and interesting and deserve being praised on a blog devoted to pop culture because, like, what is Nick Hornby if not a tireless advocate of pop culture’s literary relevance, was kind of a stupid idea. Because, aside from saying that the books are fun and interesting and deserve to be praised, it’s hard to come up with a solid, useful takeaway message. There’s no plot to be dissected or themes to tease out, and to be totally honest, you have to be both a huge reader and an unrepentant literary voyeur (that is, you have a GoodReads account and 56+ lit blogs in your Google Reader, a moi) to really appreciate these books.

Take, for instance, this wry observation about Ali Smith’s The Accidental:

I should own up here and tell you that The Accidental is a literary novel; there’s no point trying to hide this fact. But it’s literary not because the author is attempting to be boring in the hope of getting on to the shortlist of a literary prize (and here in the UK, Smith’s been on just about every shortlist there is) but because she can’t figure out a different way of getting this particular job done, and the novel’s experiments, its shifting points of view, and its playfulness with language seem absolutely necessary.

Now, to really appreciate that statement, you have to not only have the particular love-hate relationship with so-called “literary novels” and literary prizes that comes mainly from taking too many fucking creative writing classes with people who call their “style” “Raymond Carver-esque”, but you have to A.) know who Ali Smith is and ideally B.) have read something the woman has written. Because she is such a strange writer, and by strange I do mean incredibly brilliant and incredibly confusing. My favorite short story of hers involves the passionate, unrequited love a person of indeterminate gender has for a tree. A TREE, people. Best short story ever.***

Basically, these little collections of Hornby’s are book porn. If you love books—or, more accurately, if you love the act of reading, although I can’t for a minute imagine that one could exist without the other—you must read them. Otherwise, just pick up one of Hornby’s novels. I can’t recommend one personally, but I hear How to Be Good is nice.

*It's important to note, though, that this was probably a joke.
** Is “smarty pants” like moose or sheep—same plural as singular—or what? I stand by my rather awkward pluralization, but if anyone has the wherewithal to look it up, I’d be happy to print a correction.
*** “Spring”, to be found in the collection The Other Story and Other Stories because, you know, wordplay.

I Love You, Beth Cooper by Larry Doyle

I never wanted to read this book. When I first found out about it, I was like: Major high school geek declares his love for the head cheerleader in his valedictorian speech and then spends the rest of grad night running away from her meathead boyfriend whilst trying to get in her panties? Yawn. Then I read this rave on Pajiba and I really didn't want to read it. A retread of John Hughes comedies, but in novel form twenty years later without the nostalgia factor and also with 500% more bodily fluids? NO THANKS.

Then my cousin called me a couple of days ago and informed me that the movie (by all accounts not good, even for those who liked the book)--and, thus, the book--was set at the high school she just graduated from, in the town I grew up in (I went to a different high school, one that is mentioned several times over the course of the narrative). I'm all about that; I have established myself as quite the fan of you-are-kinda-there reading. So I booked it to my local B&N and after many misdirected attempts to locate it in the YA section, where it belongs, I found it in a non-movie poster paperback form. Perfect.

The book is, indeed, set in Buffalo Grove, at Buffalo Grove High School, which ensured I got all the regional jokes. Fabulous. I Love You, Beth Cooper follows the trajectory of one long night in the life of Denis "The Penis" Cooverman--graduation night, in fact. It's the best night of Denis' life. As he says to Beth Cooper late in the book, "All of my high school memories are from tonight."

Poor bastard. Seriously, Denis' graduation night is just short of a massacre--he emerges from it broken, bloody, bruised, mosquito-bitten, and waterlogged, with healthy amounts of humiliation and patent ridiculousness thrown in for good measure. Just in case you can't visualize it properly, the helpful folks at Ecco threw in chapter illustrations charting the decimation of Denis' unremarkable face for good measure.

The facts are these: Denis Cooverman, BGHS valedictorian, virgin, and all-around geek, takes the opportunity in his valedictory address to give his fellow classmates a hearty "fuck you" by accusing them of latent homosexuality (and this to his best friend, Richard "Rich" "You Know He Has Another Nickname" Munsch, which, puerile, yes, to be sure), vapidity, idiocy, having been sexually abused as a child, and disordered eating, among other things.

Oh, and he also tells Beth Cooper he loves her. Who is Beth Cooper, you ask? Why, she's the head cheerleader! OF COURSE. Because no other girl is worth lusting after. Denis sat behind Beth in class all through high school, and though she has nearly no idea who he is, and they've never really spoken, he's in love with her. Naturally.

Beth Cooper is an interesting conundrum. She's definitely a bitch, but there's a good-heartedness to her that would be way more apparent if it wasn't so often eclipsed by her insipid selfishness. Her most admirable trait is both her awareness of and willingness to acknowledge the fact that her glory days are behind her, that not being very smart or driven she basically has no future. Of course, like all things, not having a future is a choice, which she doesn't seem to get and probably never will. Too bad for her. Denis, for his part, is going to Northwestern.



In a moment of insanity, Denis invites Beth to his house for a "party"--basically, he and Rich sitting in the basement staring at a bottle of champagne. But they actually come! On a lark, of course, but Denis, who actually does lack total self-awareness, doesn't get that until later. By then, he's been beaten to a pulp many, many times (an unbelievable amount of times) by Beth's jacked, coked-up Army boyfriend Kevin and his goons and broken about 10 laws. Whoops. Here's to the nights, you guys--here is to the nights.

Anyway, I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, it's funny, especially at the beginning and at the end. The author is a writer for The Simpsons and he is genuinely amusing, at times EL OH EL hilarious. On the other hand, there is absolutely no emotional hook for me here. This book is for boys who spent all of their high school years "being in love" with someone they didn't even know or, to be honest, want to know. There are a lot of those stories out there, and I just don't find them very interesting.

I think that's what bothered me the most about I Love You, Beth Cooper--Denis is absolutely stunned to find out that Beth is an actual human being apart from his perfect fantasies of her, but he doesn't even see that for what it really is. Instead, he's too busy being stunned by this exotic creature who smokes cigarettes (OMG!!!11!) and drives like a bat out of hell and wears panties that say "Hello!" on them. Uh, that does not a woman (or even a girl) make, Denis. Beth's flaws are forced and contrived, while Denis' redeeming qualities are basically nonexistant. He's a boring pedant who can't wrap his brain around reality; he's a coward and a narcissist, and he blew his one moment of courage on his high school valedictory speech. Blerg.

I don't know, you guys. The incessant beatings Denis (and, thus, the reader) is forced to endure are really boring and worthless, and the events of the novel grow increasingly unrealistic as time goes on--there is a very over-the-top Simpsons-esque quality to the humor, which feels out of place in the setting, which I acknowledge might be the I-actually-grew-up-in-that-town thing kicking in but I doubt it. But I feel uncomfortable outright panning it, because there were some moments in which I truly enjoyed I Love You, Beth Cooper. The most effective scene for me was the one where Denis realizes that Beth and her friends showed up at his miserable excuse for a party as a goof. Duh, right? But for Denis, that is the worst, and I genuinely felt for the guy.

Nevertheless, at the end of the book I just kind of looked like my friend Hayden here:



Mostly bewildered.

If you do decide to pick this one up, get the paperback--the supplemental materials at the end of it are the funniest part of the whole book. Also, if you're a fan of audio books, I have an audio version of I Love You, Beth Cooper that I will never, ever use, not being much of an audio book fan myself--email me at ohdreads [at] gmail [dot] com and it's yours. First come, first served; US residents only, sorry.

Shelf Discovery by Lizzie Skurnick

Now, I don't want to alienate the (considerable) male readership of The Blogulator, but I need to say something to all the ladies in the crowd, and it is this: If you are not reading Lizzie Skurnick's book columns on super ladyblog Jezebel (most importantly Fine Lines, but also Shelf Pleasuring, if you know what's good for you, which I'm sure you do if you ever pilfered your parents' copy of Jean Auel's Clan of the Cave Bear and read it with a flashlight in your closet like, um, some people), you are doing yourself an extreme disservice.

Boys, you should totally read them, too, religiously in fact, but I know my audience.

Lizzie Skurnick is, as her bio page so helpfully describes her, a critic, poet, essayist, blogger and author (not to mention National Book Critics Circle member, which is, in a word, awesome). Basically, she's a literary Jack of all trades. I first encountered Lizzie in November 2007, when she started up Fine Lines, a column devoted to the experience of rereading "the children's and YA books we loved in our youth"--and here by "our" they pretty much mean women in their twenties and thirties who grew up reading books for teens released in the '70s and '80s, painted covers and all.

About a year ago, someone at HarperCollins decided that Fine Lines was a great blog-to-book idea, and, quite unusually for this type of thing, they were right! Why hadn't anyone written this book already? So Lizzie pounded out what looks like a frillion more essays, organized them by loosely bound categories, and whamo, the best reading memoir I've ever had the pleasure of devouring whole. An ARC of the book landed in my lap about a week ago, and I've been in hog heaven ever since, because my absolutely wretched memory has given privileged space to only a scant few of these classics, many of which I read over and over again as a child (NOT a teenager--one of the nice things about YA today is that it actually appeals to teenagers, not eight-year-olds who WISH they were teenagers).

But the best part of Shelf Discovery is not revisiting old favorites (although that has been delightful; I could read about The Girl With the Silver Eyes, Island of the Blue Dolphins, From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, and A Wrinkle In Time--ESPECIALLY A Wrinkle In Time--all day, every day), or rediscovering them (now I remember! I read Ghosts I Have Been by Richard Peck probably half a dozen times in middle school, a fact which had totally slipped my sieve-like mind)--it's hearing about books I never read (like Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret., which, I know, sacrilige, but it's true! In fact, my entire Judy Blume experience revolves exclusively around the Fudge books, which is woeful AT BEST*) or, ridiculously enough, never even heard of (like The Grounding of Group Six and Don't Hurt Laurie!).

I'm starting to see that I moved on from children's literature far too soon, which is bound to happen when you start reading at age three and add in being ahead a grade and also the undeniable fact that kids read up, anyway. I also spent far too much time and energy reading Sweet Valley books at all levels (Kids, Twins and High, but not University, although several of those covers have pictures of the university I attended on them), and read a lot more Lois Duncan books than I would have thought--although, she wrote so many, and they're mostly the same (i.e. paranormal, terrifying), so it makes sense that they blended together a bit.

But wait, can we go back to A Wrinkle In Time for a second? This is probably one of my favorite books, like, ever. (That cover to the left is the one on the copy I grew up reading, by the way.) I remember laying on the floor in my bedroom--it was a dark and stormy night (for reals! I'm not even making this up because that's the first line of the book! Which it totally is, if I remember correctly)--with my headphones on, listening to Natalie Imbruglia's first CD, Left of the Middle, which I'd gotten for Christmas from my cousin Michelle (and TO THIS DAY listening to any song off that CD makes me think of this book, they are so intricately woven together in my mind), reading A Wrinkle In Time for probably the seventieth time or something and marking pages because I was planning to write a screenplay of it! (???) That never happened, but the book lives on inside of me, as any and all good books do. They become part of your DNA even if, unlike Anne Fadiman's son Henry, you refrain from actually eating them.**

So anyway, A Wrinkle In Time, right? There is no better story. All the most wonderful possible aspects of a book are there--the brutally lonely but fiercely brave heroine (one Meg Murry, daughter of brilliant scientists and best big sister ever), the infinitely precocious but lovable boy child (Charles Wallace, who I imagine growing up into some marginally better socialized version of Bones's Zach Addy, minus the *spoiler* tendency to align himself with murderous canibalistic psychopaths because his "arguments are logical", whatever Zach *end spoiler*), the wise teacher who imparts the secrets of the universe (in this case, there are three: Mrs. Who, Mrs. Which and Mrs. Whatsit who are, for lack of a better word, aliens), the terrible crisis (beloved father imprisoned by evil interdimensional monster on a faraway planet--way less cheesy than it sounds!), and, OF COURSE and necessarily, the love interest, although that seems like an unfairly bland term for Calvin O'Keefe, better to call him Meg's perfect soulmate. But not in a goopy, cheesy, unbelievable way!

I'm heartened that Lizzie shares my passion for A Wrinkle in Time and has brought so much attention back to the treasure trove of children's literature that I grew up with. Reading Shelf Discovery--and, before it, Fine Lines--has been a true pleasure, and it is a necessary addition to the personal library of anyone who, like me, has a gustatory relish for books.

One question, though: Did we really need two essays about Clan of the Cave Bear? I mean, I loved that dirty, inexplicably fascinating series as a kid, too (totes inapprop, btw, if anyone out there in Bloguland hasn't read Clan and its sequels), but man.

*Oh wait, no, lies: I read Summer Sisters.
**See Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman

Julie & Julia by Julie Powell

There's something powerful about confession. Maybe it's because of the latent Catholicism of the European enterprise, but a common cultural meme in this country, in this century, has been to pour out your deepest secrets on the Internet in the hopes of absolution, of normalizing behavior and in search of like-minded--or at least sympathetic--souls. Or maybe blogs are just the natural next step in the evolution of American exhibitionism, and any sincere confessing, or absolution, is accidental.

Whatever the reason, we all blog now. Well, not all, but so many of us expose ourselves on the Internet in one way or another. Blogs, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter...even my mom's on LinkedIn, a professional networking website. The thing about blogs is that nobody knows quite what their potential is; the Internet and its news aggregators certainly appear to be killing print, but is website advertising ever going to be worth what print ads used to be? Hell if I know. What I do know is that the people who stand to lose from the swiftly dominating bulk and brute of the Internet volley back and forth between denial of its importance and desperation to control it, all of which, of course, stems from fear.

Thus was born the blog-to-book deal. It seems as if every week there's another announcement in the trades about a blogger who is walking out of the virtual jungle, slinging their words on a page and entering the respectable world of paid writing gigs. Sometimes, these books fail, miserably. Sometimes, they thrive. Some of my favorite writers launched their careers with blogs: Pamela Ribon and Jen Lancaster are two such examples. Lancaster, whose fourth hilarious memoir, Pretty In Plaid, just took her on a multi-city book tour (people don't do those much anymore, unless they're worth it). And Julie Powell, one of the first blog-to-bookers, author of Julie & Julia, is about to see herself played on the silver screen by Hollywood darling, and pretty damn good actress, Amy Adams.

Julie Powell used to want to be an actress. It's what she studied at Amherst College. It's what she came to New York to do. But Julie Powell is one of those people. They claim to want to do something, they talk about it a lot and when people ask them at family gatherings "What is it you want to do?", they say it with sincere gusto, but they don't want to work at it. They want all of the success with none of the work. After several years living in New York, Julie Powell had failed to go on one audition, and so she became a temp.

That kind of life, however, has enormous pitfalls, mostly of the existential variety. At twenty-nine, Julie was married but childless, stuck in a worthless, dead-end job that meant nothing to her and wasn't even lucrative. She was miserable and frightened, prone to hysterical meltdowns for no damn good reason, and people were getting tired of it. So Julie decided to do something about it. While at home in Texas trying to get a hold of herself, she stole her mother's old copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, and The Project was born. The Julie/Julia Project, in which Julie Powell, secretary, attempted to prepare all 524 recipes in the landmark book by Julia Child, legend, in a tiny Long Island City kitchen, nearly ruined her marriage, but it saved her sanity, banished her ennui, and jump-started what has evolved into a very cool career.

I love books about cooking. It took me only six hours to race through Kathleen Finn's The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry, about her experience at Le Cordon Bleu, and I thought Ruth Reichl's Garlic and Sapphires, about her time as a food critic for the New York Times, was completely fascinating. Julie Powell's book stands up grandly with the memoirs of other gourmandes, even though it's a little less, erm, sophisticated. Powell's fondness for the f-bomb gets a lot of laughs out of me, and her frequent diversions to talk about the love lives of various friends who figure prominently in the story are interesting, but they earned her no love from her namesake--Julia Child apparently considered Powell "unserious" and disrespectful.

Disrespectful? Maybe a little, although I disagree. Unserious? This woman pried the marrow from beef bones, ate more aspic than anyone else would be able to keep down, gained twenty pounds of butter weight, and killed more than one lobster alive--and not all by boiling. Powell worked hard at this project, and she deserves the kudos for that. She also writes about it in a humorous, engaging, entertaining way, which is no small feat, either. She was brave enough to reveal herself, first on the Internet and then in a book and now in a feature film, as not always so nice, not always such a great friend or wife, sort of a grump, and a bit of a basket case. As someone who endeavors at all times to put her best face forward on the Internet, knowing it's going to be around for time eternal and I'd better not leave anything up I'd die to read 50 years from now, that's courage.

It's especially weird because Julia Child herself was pretty unserious at Julie Powell's age. The paperback edition of Julie & Julia* has a list of books Julie recommends, and of course she includes Julia Child's memoir My Life In France. As well she should--it's a hoot! Published in 2006, after Child's death in 2004 at nearly ninety-two (b. August 15, d. August 13), it's a recollection of the time Child spent with her husband, Paul Child, a high ranking member of the US Foreign Service. France was Child's spiritual home. She learned to cook there, at the famous Cordon Bleu (which, at least to hear Child tell it, was not nearly as glamorous as it seemed), she began to give lessons, and she entered into a long-term partnership with Simone Beck, with whom she co-wrote Mastering the Art of French Cooking, volume I of which saved Julie Powell's sanity.

I confess, I didn't know very much about Julia Child when I started Julie & Julia (in fact, I only picked the book up in the first place because I want to see the movie, and I try very hard not to see movies based on books before reading the book, it's a steadfast, almost stalwart, policy of mine). I remembered hearing that she was a spy back in World War II (not technically true, although she did work for the OSS--Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the CIA--"registering, cataloguing and channeling a great volume of highly classified communications" in Asia). I knew she was a famous chef, that she had a TV show. What I wasn't aware of was what a personality Julia Child really was.

My Life In France is stuffed with personality, especially given that Child had a ghostwriter. Well, maybe that's the wrong terminology for someone like Alex Prud'homme, who is a journalist and also happens to be Julia Child's grand-nephew through her husband, Paul.** It's hard to tell what his fingerprints on the book are, because it seems like pure Julia, through and through.



The memoir is full of exclamations and pronouncements on the beauty of la belle France, as she loves to call it. It reconstructs many important meals Child ate while living in Paris and the progress of her cooking skills. It tells of her frustrations with Le Cordon Bleu, leading to the formation of L'Ecole des trois gourmandes--les autres being, of course, her Mastering coauthors Louise Bertholle and Simone Beck. It comments wryly on the vagaries of the publishing industry (and it's only gotten worse since then), during the times when she and her cowriters were trying to get "The Book"--Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which suffered through many revisions--published.

It's possible that Julia Child turned into a humorless old crank in her later years (after all, she was in her nineties when she made her crack at poor adoring Julie Powell, who sobbed when she got word of what Child said about her), but I doubt it. My Life In France is just too sweet and funny for me to believe that. But Child never seemed to suffer fools gladly, and at the end of the day I really don't think she would've liked the wobbly, melodramatic Powell much at all--she was way too put-together. But none of that matters to me, because I like them both. Love them, in fact. They're two of the most entertaining women to ever write about cooking, and to someone like me, who doesn't really cook but loves to read about it, that makes them worth their butter weight in gold.

Bon appetit!



*Side note: Julie Powell's full first name is Julia, and Julia Child's husband and friends called her Julie. What I mean is, Julie Powell and Julia Child have the same name. FREAKAY!
**To answer a question my dad asked me, which I answered incorrectly because, like my dad, when I don't know the answer to a question I decide what a reasonably correct answer might be and then give it as confidently as if I actually knew such a fact, Alex Prud'homme is, as far as I can tell, NOT related to Paul Prud'homme, who is also a chef, like Julia Child, whose husband, Paul Child, is Alex Prud'homme's great-uncle. Got it?

Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson

I try not to stray too far into the realm of YA* on The Blogulator (Twilight aside), because I'm not quite sure that's what you guys want to read, but this week there was an interesting Internet conversation surrounding a YA book I recently read, and I thought I would bless the world with my thoughts, insofar as they contribute to the discussion.

Laurie Halse Anderson is considered one of the most formidable talents in children's literature. Popular with teens, teachers, librarians, and booksellers (and, one would imagine, her publisher), Anderson debuted with Speak, a grim, sad, but redemptive novel about a young woman who is slowly coming to terms with having been raped. Speak won the Michael L. Printz award, a coveted YA prize, and was a New York Times bestseller (speaking of Twilight, Kristen Stewart starred in the 2004 indie film based on the novel). Naturally Speak garnered negative attention as well, from potentially well-meaning but ultimately misguided folks who, confusing "protecting the children" with "censorship", tried to have the book removed from public libraries, especially those in schools.

I don't know a single author who can abide censorship. Anderson herself wrote, "[C]ensoring books that deal with difficult, adolescent issues does not protect anybody. Quite the opposite. It leaves kids in the darkness and makes them vulnerable. Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance. Our children cannot afford to have the truth of the world withheld from them." Holla, LHA. Holla.

Anderson, of course, as all good, controversial authors do, went on to write more brilliant novels that address, without condescension, the trials and tribulations of adolescence, but it wasn't until this year--only a few months ago, in fact--that one of her books came under the same damned scrutiny from the moral majority. It's called Wintergirls, and it's about anorexia.

Actually, that's not true. It's about a girl who is anorexic--Lia, a ninety-pound waif whose eating disorder has been a huge problem for years. Lia's family situation is rough--at the beginning of the book she lives with her father, his new wife (the woman he left Lia's mother for), and his stepdaughter, who worships Lia. Lia's father is well-meaning but useless--Lia has been hospitalized for her disease before, her best friend (bulimic) has just died, and she's still very sick, but he blinds himself to it as a coping mechanism. Lia's mother, a cardiologist, is the only person who really recognizes Lia's situation for what it is--a death wish--but the cold, clinical woman, though she loves her daughter, handles the situation in exactly the wrong way, by trying to force Lia to get well instead of understanding and healing her. Jennifer, Lia's stepmother, is probably the adult who tries hardest with Lia in the best way, although she, too, allows herself to be fooled by Lia's tricks--sewing quarters into the hem of her robe to create the illusion of higher weight on the scale, for instance--and eventually expels Lia from her house out of fear for her influence on Lia's stepsister.

Lia is consumed by both her obsession with her weight and the death of her estranged best friend, Cassie, who died alone and helpless in a motel room as a result of her bulimia (Lia's mother's grisly explanation of the eighteen-year-old's death is particularly haunting). Making matters worse, Cassie attempted to call Lia for help at the last minute but was ignored because the two had been fighting. The rest of the novel details Lia's extremely convincing death spiral and the fall-out of her psychological damage, as voiced by frequent hallucination of Cassie, who tugs Lia towards death with encouragements to eat less and become nothing.

In her New York Times review of Wintergirls, Barbara Feinberg asks, "Can a novel convey, however inadvertently, an allure to anorexic behavior?" The question is addressed, as is the way of the interwebs, by almost 100 loud-mouthed commenters on the NYT's Well Blog, and again by the women of Jezebel. The answer? We're not quite sure.

My thoughts are these: Yes, there will probably be some girls out there who get pro-ana tips from this book. Wintergirls confronts in a very direct way the realities of anorexia, and by doing so opens a Pandora's box of details that could look more like solutions than symptoms to an already sick girl. But will it make healthy young women anorexic? No. Will it help some anorexic girls find a little peace with their bodies now that they know that someone understands them, someone who recovered, and maybe seek recovery for themselves? Probably. Will it fix anorexia? No. It's a really, really, really good book, but, then again, it's just a book.

But as my friend Mary says, whether or not it will give girls anorexia isn't the issue. The real issue is whether or not the book should be banned from school and local libraries because of the chance that it will encourage eating disorders. That is, of course, completely debatable, but I always come down on the side of the book. Always. It's in my DNA. I believe that libraries should be democratic insofar as they serve their main purpose, which is to provide access to books and to educate.

Should a high school library contain copies of Ron Jeremy's personal memoir? Probably not. Not because it shouldn't be read (although no one who's ever read David Foster Wallace's essay on the porn industry, "Big Red Son," would ever want to read it), but because it doesn't really service the main purpose of a high school library and isn't relevant to the community. Not so with YA literature--which, remember, is written for teens. Anderson has been very clear that she wrote Wintergirls in the service of young women, inspired by letters she's been receiving for years from girls struggling with ED. With knowledge comes choice, as the Bible teaches us, but should ignorance be the price we pay for the potential of choosing wrong? I emphatically do not think so.

I'd especially love to hear from some of the teachers in the crowd about this.

*For those still unfamiliar with the term, YA is publishing speak for "Young Adult", i.e. books written for a 12- to 18-year-old readership, more or less.

Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell

Hey Blogulators! Sorry I've been absent for such a long time; I'm sure you've missed my book reviews so much you cry yourself asleep at night, and I appreciate that sort of devotion, so I'm bringing it back with the cabbage patch this week just for you.

My reading patterns have been a bit out of whack for the last month or so. I've been really busy and my reading time has been cut short, plus the books I've been reading just haven't been worth reviewing (see: Naturally Thin by Bethenny Frankel, of Real Housewives of New York fame--I know, I know, but I love Bethenny, I was trapped on a plan for five hours, and I just couldn't resist). That changed this week, though, with Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation, a book I both have something to say about and also think the Blogulator audience would really enjoy.

For those of you unfamiliar with Vowell, she is a writer, radio commentator, and, most unusually, voiceover actor--she provided the pipes for Violet in The Incredibles. She's also a neurotic New Yorker with a shit-ton of phobias; she won't drive or swim, and she's afraid of heights. I mention this only because her writing, as I've gathered from reading Assassination Vacation, is personal even when non-fictional; she doesn't seem to have any interest in writing an objective account of anything, as the subjects of her books rise from her own personal obsessions (in this case, presidential assassinations) and are blanketed by her own experience.

In Assassination Vacation, Vowell enlists the help of friends and family members in visiting almost all historical landmarks associated with the murder of three presidents--Lincoln (Vowell's fave), Garfield, and McKinley. These travels take her everywhere in the continental US, from Alaska to the Dry Tortugas, where the federal prison that housed a supposed Lincoln assassination conspirator still stands (Vowell got terribly seasick on the boat trip over).

Vowell's book is interesting for several reasons. One is the author's true passion for the subject, which is sometimes juicy and full of interesting trivial tidbits (consider this: Robert Todd Lincoln, son of the first murdered president, was present at both Garfield's and McKinley's assassinations, in what Vowell calls his "second career as the presidential angel of death"; not only that, but he was rescued after having fallen on the train tracks in Jersey City by none other than Edwin T. Booth, famous actor and brother to John Wilkes Booth, his own father's killer), but is often not the kind of information one would seek out for oneself voluntarily.

I mean, when asked to name the presidents you know, who besides a dedicated student of history (or fascination with assassinated politicians) would named Garfield or McKinley at all? Well, all right, maybe you'd remember McKinley--after all, he does have a mountain named after him, a very tall one at that--but Garfield? Not a chance. Along with Chester A. Arthur, who succeeded him in office after his death, Rutherford B. Hayes and William Henry Harrison, he's one of the four forgotten presidents, and for good reason--he was only in office for six weeks before he was shot and spent the rest of his short term convalescing from the gunshot wound that would never heal.

Still, Vowell's fondness for most of her subjects (and her vast interest in all of them), as well as her ability to pull fascinating facts (did you know that the Oneida Company, now a manufacturer of dishes, was once a polyamorous sex colony in upstate New York that harbored Charles Guiteau, Garfield's assassin, for many years?) out of incidents and people that seem pretty dry at surface level, makes Assassination Vacation a must-read for history buffs.

Another reason Vowell's book is interesting (and a little annoying at times, let's be honest) is its fixation on connecting the events of the past to the events of the present (first published in 2005, Assassination Vacation was written during George W. Bush's first term, and Vowell, an ardent liberal, makes her anger and disappointment with that administration amply clear). This would've been way cooler had I read the book while W was still in the Oval Office; I could've nodded along furiously at her comparison between the current Iraq War and the Spanish-American War of 1898. Not that the Iraq War is over, but having Obama in the White House now is a bit anticlimactic in terms of feeling, as you get the sense that Vowell was overjoyed by the outcome of 2008's election and, had she written the book now, it would've been considerably less indignant. And, after all, her indignation is the subcurrent of the entire thing.

There is one thing that confuses me about Assassination Vacation, though: it completely disregards, but for a few mentions, JFK's assassination in 1963. Vowell doesn't mention why she chose to ignore what is arguably the most famous presidential assassination in the United States' short history in favor of the considerably less interesting Garfield assassination, for instance.

I've come up with a few theories to explain the omission, none of which are wholly satisfactory. The first is that she was so taken with the idea of Robert Todd Lincoln's unluckiness when it came to presidential assassinations that she chose only to focus on the three he either witnessed or was connected with. That seems a little capricious, though. Another possible explanation is that Vowell's own historical interests are concentrated more on earlier events, from colonial America through the Victorian era, and all three of her subjects, along with their contemporaries, served in the Civil War (Lincoln as Commander in Chief, obvs, and both Garfield and McKinley as officers).

A third reason--maybe the most likely--is that the difference between the three presidents discussed in Assassination Vacation and JFK is that we know beyond the shadow of a doubt who killed Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley, and the book is as much about the men who died as the men who shot them. Sure, she could do a bunch of research about Lee Harvey Oswald, and probably has, but with all the doubt surrounding his guilt it might not be as illuminating as she would like, or would devolve into a book-fattening investigation of the mystery surrounding JFK's murder. Best to leave that for another time, perhaps.

In any event, Assassination Vacation is informative and interesting. Vowell peppers the book with enough personal narrative to balance out the history (some of my favorite parts of the book concern the author's nephew, Owen, a comically morbid three-year-old whose idea of good fun is traipsing around graveyards with his aunt and his mother, Vowell's twin sister Amy), and as a lover of tangents and digressions I really appreciated it when Vowell wandered off on her own. My roommate recently told me that, unlike most people, who tell stories chronologically, I tell them based on the things that interest me most, which is exactly what Vowell does, creating a multi-vectored historical exploration that appealed to me. There's also the fact that Vowell is kind of a hoot, especially if your sense of humor leans towards dry, sarcastic wit--in that case, you don't even need to have a special interest in history or assassination to enjoy this book; the kick you get out of Vowell's snappy one-liners may be enough.