Readathon: Lolly Willowes, by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Posted on April 9, 2011 by Thistle

willowes03Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner is about a spinster aunt who goes to live alone and becomes a witch after making a pact with the devil. I thought it sounded fascinating, but the book ended up being very badly structured. The first 100 pages or so just talk about this woman’s family history. The next hundred pages transitions her from living with family to living alone. The last 50 pages are when the plot finally happens, and the whole witch/devil thing was really cheesy. The only part of this book I liked was about 10 pages right before the witch part where Lolly is upset because her nephew wants to come live with her and she’s losing her new-found independence. That part actually felt like the book was going somewhere. But then it changed into deals with the devil and witchcraft and Sabbath dances. I don’t know. It just didn’t work for me and I really thought it would. Ah well.

Posted in 2011, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

The Original of Laura, by Vladimir Nabokov

Posted on April 8, 2011 by Thistle

the_original_of_lauraThis was an interesting book to read. Since it’s Nabokov’s last novel, very incomplete and written only in notes on index cards, it comes across as nothing more than fragments. I’ve been conflicted about reading this one since it came out, as I know Nabokov wanted it destroyed. However, I’m very interested in Nabokov’s writing and thought processes so this was fascinating to look over. The book is laid out with his index cards on the top of each page, and a printed “translation” of sorts on the bottom to make it easier to read. I honestly spent more time looking over the structure of the notes than reading for any actual story, which was probably a good thing because the second half of the notes become even more scattered and incoherent. They definitely don’t make up an actual plot, and I loved that. I loved all of the things Nabokov brought together to look at and eventually integrate. Possibly. The index cards are full of potential, rather than polished genius.

Posted in 2011, Adult, Prose | Tagged | Leave a comment

The White Devil, by Justin Evans

Posted on April 7, 2011 by Thistle

The-White-DevilAndrew Taylor is an American student sent to spend his senior year at a British boarding school, Harrow, because of some drug trouble he had at his last school at home. While he’s still adjusting to a new way of life – new culture, new slang, new food, etc – he unexpectedly discovers the dead body of a fellow student. Soon he is mixed up in Harrow’s history – legends from Lord Byron’s time there, and a ghost that supposedly still haunts the school.

British boarding schools, Lord Byron, and the ghost of a dead gay lover – can it really get any better than this? I rarely take review copies anymore, but as soon as I read the blurb on this one, I knew I had to read it. I’ve been obsessed with Lord Byron in recent weeks and this book was perfect to read not long after I finished Don Juan.

I was very impressed by the way Evans put this book together. He obviously did a lot of research not just on Byron, but on a whole range of subjects from British boarding school customs to certain medical conditions. I was particularly impressed by him pulling in a 1612 John Webster play (also called “The White Devil”). You often see books that reference popular classics (Jane Eyre, Pride & Prejudice, Sherlock Holmes…) but rarely ones that will pull out more obscure references like that.

The White Devil had a perfect gothic ghost story feel, set on a modern background. There were scenes that, I admit, were difficult for me to read (kind of gross) but over all I was entranced by the story. I love good gothic horror stories, especially when they have that old-fashioned kind of feel. Of course there were places that stretched credibility (it was a ghost story) but they fit well with the story itself. I loved the Byron elements, and I felt like Evans respected the poet while at the same time not glossing over his faults. Too often I see books that just treat Byron as an inhuman monster and that turns me off completely. Thankfully, The White Devil was not one of them. The GLBT elements were also well done, ranging from forbidden affairs in the early 1800s to the rampant anti-homosexuality that exists in the present-day all-boys’ school. Once again, I felt like Evans respected homosexuality while not glossing over the way some people view and/or treat it in real life.

The story was perfectly paced, building up to a fantastic, suspenseful climax and an ending that blew me out of the water. I’m obviously not going to talk about what happened, but I was surprised by the nontraditional path Evans took. It was a very bold move and satisfying to me, though I imagine it might be exactly the opposite to other readers, particularly readers who prefer modern over classic fiction. And that’s all I’m going to say about that.

I really enjoyed this book and highly recommend it to people who like this sort of gothic, ghost story book (Rebecca, Phantom of the Opera, The Monk). It’s the best of its type that I’ve read in modern fiction in quite a long time, plus it would make a wonderful RIP book when the season approaches!

Posted in 2011, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

The Believers, by Zoë Heller (audio)

Posted on April 6, 2011 by Thistle

believersThe Litvinoff family is a dysfunctional bunch of socialist atheist political activists. Joel and Audrey play-act at a good marriage. Their daughter Rosa has given up the family values and is investigating Orthodox Judaism. Their daughter Karla is unhappy in her marriage and begins to fall in love with a coworker. Their adopted son Lenny is a drug addict constantly falling off the wagon. When Joel has a stroke, the family is thrown into even more discord than usual, which grows worse when a secret about Joel’s past comes to light.

I want to say first off that Zoë Heller knows how to write people. Wow. There are very few people in this book that I’d ever want to meet in real life. Most of the characters are disgusting, horrible, stuck-up, narrow-minded people, the epitome of things-Amanda-dislikes, and I know I’m not the only person who would say that. And yet…I never wanted to stop reading this book. Heller has the most beautiful prose, and she finds ways to make reading about these people interesting and almost sympathetic. She weaves in all their stories so that just when you don’t know if you can take any more, a soft moment comes to smooth things out.

The one exception to the awful character cast, for me, was Karla. I really loved Karla. She’s the daughter who never could quite get her parents’ attention, and she therefore spent her whole life trying to please. She’s the sort of person who looks trampled on when you meet her, the person who looks like she’s constantly cringing away from being hit by some invisible force. She gives in to everyone and has major self-esteem issues exacerbated by her mother’s constant nagging, particularly about her weight. No one has ever bothered to look at her and see who she really is. She admits some really profound and honest things in the course of this book, even as they are unflattering:

It was often assumed that Karla, being a fat person, had more forgiving aesthetic standards than other, slimmer people, but this was untrue. Years of attending to her own physical failings had made her, if anything, more closely attuned to the nuances of bodily imperfections than most. Her girlfriends, many of whom took guilty reassurance from the fact that they were Not-as-Fat-as-Karla, would have been shocked to discover how unsparing she was in her assessments of their figures.

or

Depression, in Karla’s experience, was a dull, inert thing – a toad that squatted wetly on your head until it finally gathered the energy to slither off. The unhappiness she had been living with for the last ten days was quite a different creature. It was frantic and aggressive. It had fists and fangs and hobnailed boots. It didn’t sit, it assailed. It hurt her.

or

She thought about the glowing goodwill she had felt toward her patients, toward strangers on the subway – toward even Mike – during the six weeks that she had been with Khaled. Never had she been filled with so much reckless magnanimity. It was one of the discomfiting paradoxes of her adultery: sin had made her a better person.

All the time I read Karla’s story, I just wanted to reach out and hug her, or shake her. I was just hoping and hoping her story would go in a certain direction, more towards finally breaking away from her chains rather than sacrificing herself for what’s supposedly right. I won’t say which direction it went, of course, but the journey was beautifully and realistically done. Her story is what really made the book for me.

I can’t say that I liked this book as much as Notes on a Scandal, but I can say that it was just as brilliantly written. Thank you again, Lena, for giving this one to me.

Performance: I listened to the first 235 pages of this one on audio, read by Andrea Martin. I honestly really disliked the performance. I didn’t like Martin’s interpretations of the characters, who seemed far more brash and disgusting in the audio. She stressed every swear word as if she didn’t think they’d be believable if she didn’t, even though the filthy language of some of the characters just seemed like part of their regular vocab and imo should have been read as such. There were also all the accents she did, which felt more stereotypical than real, and in some cases (Khaled for instance) downright incorrect. I’m not sure why I kept going as long as I did, but I finally gave it up and read the last 100 pages in print instead.

Posted in 2011, Adult, Prose | Tagged | 1 Comment

The Six Rules of Maybe, by Deb Caletti

Posted on April 3, 2011 by Thistle

The Six Rules of MaybeThis is the fourth book I’ve read by Deb Caletti and I enjoyed it, though not as much as The Nature of Jade or Wild Roses (my two favorites). As usual for Caletti, this book is wrapped up in family issues and neighborhood issues, rather than school issues (which seems to be the norm for many realistic YA books). Interestingly, having just read I Capture the Castle, I recognized a lot of the same elements in these two stories, except that The Six Rules of Maybe was more mature and less quirky-charming (ie more realistic). Of course, since I’m a fan of mature and not so much of quirky-charm, this one definitely worked better for me and actually made me see I Capture the Castle in a different (and sadly less flattering) light. Those who prefer the lighter and more charming books might not enjoy this one as much. It’s heavy and the characters are much more real than fun. I really enjoy the way Caletti handles characters. All of her characters are so lifelike, and I really appreciate that. Both her writing and characterization have remained consistent through all four books that I’ve read. She strikes a great balance between YA and adult fiction.

Posted in 2011, Prose, Young Adult | Leave a comment

Don Juan, by Lord Byron

Posted on April 1, 2011 by Thistle

don-juan-lord-byronThis epic poem is a retelling of the legend of Don Juan. Don Juan is normally seen as a scoundrel and womanizer, but in Byron’s retelling, he is instead just a beautiful young man easily seduced by women. The poem tells of all of Juan’s various adventures in love, war, and travel, while at the same time attacking everything from social and class customs to other poets in Byron’s time.

For some reason I can’t explain, I’ve grown rather obsessed with Lord Byron recently. I’m not sure how I became interested in him, but I’ve been reading what I can find about his life and work, and he fascinates me! I really ought to find a good biography. I knew that I needed to read some of his poetry, and when I found out he’d written Don Juan, I knew that this was the one.

The poem starts off with a humorous tone, ribald and eye-waggling. It almost feels as if Byron is winking or making bedroom eyes at you the whole time you read. The rhyme scheme (ab ab ab cc) is silly to the point of ridiculousness, and the content ranges from hush-hush erotica to cannibalism. Byron frequently talks to the reader, discussing his own poem’s fate out in the world or spearing his contemporaries’ work. To give you some examples of what the poetry is like:

He woke and gazed and would have slept again,
But the fair face which met his eyes forbade
Those eyes to close, though weariness and pain
Had further sleep a further pleasure made;
For woman’s face was never formed in vain
For Juan, so that even when he prayed
He turned from grisly saints and martyrs hairy
To the sweet portraits of the Virgin Mary.

or, one of my personal favorites:

When people say, ‘I’ve told you fifty times,’
They mean to scold and very often do.
When poets say, ‘I’ve written fifty rhymes,’
They make you dread that they’ll recite them too.

The poem continues on this tone for about six of the seventeen cantos, with Juan getting up to all sorts of crazy stuff, including dressing as a member of a harem at one point. After the six cantos, though, the poem takes a sudden shift. The end of a scene is simply not given and we jump through time, and suddenly the poem becomes focused on war and adventure. Now, Byron wrote these cantos over five years, in sporadic bursts, and I imagine his mood, age, and experience played heavily on the content and tone of the poem. Unfortunately, while I know the rest of the poem is exquisitely written and a masterpiece of style, after the shift it never quite regained the flow of the beginning and, I admit, I got bored really fast. I was very happy to reach the end of the war cantos, but still, I never really got back into the poem even after that. I never felt that eye-waggling quality that was so fun in the beginning. Instead, things grew sharper, more bitter and cynical.

Byron died before getting too far into the seventeenth canto. He said he had no real plan for the poem, but just thought up each new adventure before writing it, so that the poem could have gone on for much longer, or ended at any time. There was no over-arching plot, but instead more of a series of episodes. I do wonder where the poem might have gone if Byron hadn’t died.

I admit, while the latter part of the poem didn’t do much for me, I am still fascinated by Byron himself and want to read more about him, as well as more of his poetry. I probably won’t try another epic like this again for a while – it took me nearly three weeks to read Don Juan – but I’ve heard some of his individual poems are supposed to be quite beautiful.

Posted in 2011, Adult, Poetry | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Complete Stories, by William Somerset Maugham

Posted on March 22, 2011 by Thistle

maugham storiesI love Maugham and wanted to read his short stories as part of my short story project this year. I’ve since decided to give up the project and just finished reading the stories. There are quite a bit of them – 91 in all – and they come in a two-volume set that totals 1636 pages. The first volume, at 955 pages, are the first 30 of those stories, with an average page length of 32. It’s called East and West and primarily focuses on stories set in Asia. I got to travel all over the place, from Samoa to Brunei to Korea to Malaysia. The second volume is The World Over and takes the reader through South America, back to Asia, and then through Europe. It’s only 681 pages for 61 stories, averaging 11 pages each. Quite a difference between the two!

Interestingly, the two volumes are completely different in tone and quality as well. It’s almost as if The World Over contains the “b-side” stories. I adored East and West, savouring each story, but I skimmed and skipped most of the second volume. There were exceptions, of course, in both volumes. I hated the Ashenden spy stories in East and West, which were the only stories to take place in Europe instead of Asia, and I loved the Asian stories in The World Over. All the stories that took place in Asia just felt more real. Maugham seems to have really loved the people and culture there, despite being saddled with some traditional British colonialist ideas. I also think the stories set in Asia were better because they were generally much longer than the others. Maugham seems to write better when he has more room to develop his stories. The very short ones felt clipped and clichéd, moralistic and flat.

I’ve had this collection on my shelf for years and have been intimidated by its size. I’m glad I’ve now finally read Maugham’s stories, even if there were some I didn’t like.

Posted in 2011, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

The Lost City of Z, by David Grann (audio)

Posted on March 21, 2011 by Thistle

The-Lost-City-of-Z-279869Before I begin this review, I have to admit something a little embarrassing. For a very long time, I thought this book was a zombie novel. I mean, “The Lost City of Z” just sounds like a zombie novel, right? I think I was getting it mixed up with all those World War Z sorts of books. Then, a couple months ago, Jason mentioned it to me as a nonfiction book about South America and the Amazon. I was floored. I had no idea! It sounded fascinating, so I got the audiobook from the library and decided to listen to it.

The book is sort of a mixed biography, history lesson, and travelogue all in one. The primary focus is on an explorer from the late 19th/early 20th century, a man named Percy Fawcett. Fawcett was apparently pretty famous in his time and his explorations were the inspiration for a whole host of things, including books by many writers of the time (such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World). I, being really ignorant when it comes to history, had never heard of the guy and had a great time getting to know all about him and Amazon exploration.

David Grann sets this book up perfectly, alternating history lessons, biographical information on Fawcett and other explorers, and information from his own journey into the Amazon. He tells us how he did all his research, and instead of just presenting the research, he tells it as if it’s a story. To me, this is the best kind of history, and the kind I retain most easily. It’s focused on cultural and human aspects, rather than political or governmental. That’s not to say that politics and government played no part in the history or the book. They did. But they were integrated into the story of these people, rather than the reverse.

I learned so much from this book that I didn’t know before. South America fascinates me, though I’m not sure I would personally want to go into the Amazon, especially after hearing all the (really gross) tales of insects and parasites. Still, from a distance, all this fascinates me. I really felt immersed in the area and a time period in a way I rarely feel. I think it helped that I listened to the audio version, rather than just reading. Hearing it spoken added a whole new dimension for me, and I think I’ve decided that, whenever possible, I want to listen to my nonfiction in the future. Mark Deakins read the audiobook, and he was the perfect narrator, clear and precise. I highly recommend both the book and the audio production.

Posted in 2011, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

City of Veils, by Zoë Ferraris

Posted on March 19, 2011 by Thistle

city-of-veils-zoe-ferrarisWhen the body of a dead woman – beaten, burned, and bloated – turns up on the beach in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, an investigation begins into her death.

I don’t normally read thrillers, but this one sounded interesting to me, particularly as it takes place in a part of the world I haven’t read much about. City of Veils really goes deep into Saudi culture. It doesn’t gloss over the difficulties, particularly for women, of living there, but also doesn’t judge the whole nation based on their culture and religion. It’s very careful to keep the actions of politicians and religious extremists separate from the religion and culture itself. It also differentiates between cultural and religious interpretations of Islam. This careful balance is one I can appreciate and that I respect.

The mystery and crime parts of this were equally well-done. They were engaging, and the characters didn’t feel like generic cutouts as they have in other thrillers I’ve read. I’m not saying all thrillers are like that – I just seem to run into bad ones each time I try to read one! I liked how well developed everyone was in this book. City of Veils is a second book in a loose series, but is standalone and I read it without having read the first book (Finding Nouf). I imagine there will be more books to follow. There was no cliffhanger, but there was enough room in the lives of the characters for development and growth that I imagine more books would work well.

Posted in 2011, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Harry Potter et la Coupe de Feu, by JK Rowling

Posted on March 18, 2011 by Thistle

HP4As I stated last year, this is my least favorite of the Harry Potter books. Thankfully, some of the things that really irritate me, like the repetition of phrases, aren’t anywhere near as noticeable to me when translated into French! But still, this book dragged a lot and as usual made me a little tired of the series. I’ll be taking a few weeks off reading it before I resume with the fifth book.

This is the first book in the series that needed to make huge changes in the text in order to carry out the same ideas as the original. There are so many things that rely on wordplay in here that needed to be changed. For instance, when Harry hears the riddle from the Sphinx and the clues are supposed to add up to “spider,” the riddle had to be changed completely in order to spell out “araignée” instead. It was fascinating to see how the translator dealt with all this and I was actually very impressed. He’s gotten far better at this since those first two books that were missing tons of stuff!

There didn’t seem to be anything missing from this book, though interestingly, there was a lot of text added. There are several places where additions were necessary or useful. In particular, the translator had to get the idea across that though the book is translated into French, the characters are still speaking English, and the students from Beauxbatons have a hard time understanding them (and vice versa). When Madame Maxime arrives, she speaks in a very strange accent that changes the spelling of many of her French words, and she and Dumbledore have a couple of miscommunications that aren’t in the original. For instance, when Madame Maxime asks about her horses (chevaux), her accent comes across as “hair” (“cheveux”), and Dumbledore tells her that her hair is beautifully styled. She laughs and tells him he’s such a joker. There are several interchanges like that, and the same later when Fleur comes over to ask Ron for the bouillabaisse. When he can’t pronounce it, she chides him for not being good at or kind about foreign languages. By doing this, and by adding lots and lots of Rs to all the Bulgarian’s words (“prrrofesseurrr” instead of just “professeur” etc), it comes across that the three schools are speaking three different languages.

Another addition came when Harry is stuck in the staircase and Moody accios the Marauder’s Map. It’s one of those places where you wonder why Harry didn’t think of that, instead of reaching out and trying to wipe the map clean instead. The English text doesn’t address the issue at all, but the French text adds a paragraph where Harry internally smacks himself for being stupid and giving way to panic. It makes the whole section not look like a plot hole and I love it! I wish something like that had been incorporated into the English version as well.

That’s all for this month. I didn’t really improve my French any because, I admit, I did a certain amount of skimming. Of course, it’s kind of cool that I can skim even when the text is in French, but I certainly don’t think it’s terribly helpful for me over time. Thankfully this is the only book in the series that I ever skim!

Posted in 2011, Children's, Prose | Tagged , , | Leave a comment