Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann

Posted on March 17, 2010 by Thistle

imagesThe famous author Auschenbach travels to Venice on vacation. There, he sees a beautiful adolescent Polish boy named Tadzio. Auschenbach takes what he believes is an artistic interest in the boy, but his interest slowly devolves into a lustful obsession.

FYI: I read the Bantam Classics translation by David Luke.

I really wanted to like this book and I really thought I would. Unfortunately, that didn’t work out for me. It’s a short book, only about 70 pages, but it was so, so tedious. If I hadn’t skimmed three-quarters of the text – you’ll understand why in a minute – I never would have made it through. Most of it was big long blocks of text full of philosophy and references to mythology (I guess I should have saved this for the Once Upon a Time Challenge…). I liked the parts that actually focused on the characters, but unfortunately those parts were in the minority. Plus, the idea behind the book was creepy. Though Auschenbach never even speaks to Tadzio, he does go to lengths such as following him around Venice to keep watching him. The author…seems to be okay with this pedophilic obsession. And I’m not okay with that.

Honestly, I wonder if my translation was just bad. It’s supposed to be a good translation, but I feel like I’m missing something critical in reading it. I wish I could read this in the original German just to see if it would be better and less tedious that way. For instance, this is the first sentence of Chapter 2:

The author of the lucid and massive prose-epic about the life of Frederic of Prussia; the patient artist who with long toil had woven the great tapestry of the novel called Maya, so rich in characters, gathering so many human destinies together under the shadow of one idea; the creator of that powerful tale entitled A Study in Abjection, which earned the gratitude of a whole younger generation by pointing to the possibility of moral resolution even for those who have plumbed the depths of knowledge; the author (lastly but not least in this summary of enumeration of his maturer works) of that passionate treatise Intellect and Art which in its ordering energy and antithetical eloquence has led serious critics to place it immediately alongside Schiller’s disquisition On Naive and Reflective Literature: in a word, Gustave Aschenbach, was born in L . . . , an important city in the province of Silesia, as the son of a highly-placed legal official.

Yes. That is all one sentence. Oh. My. God. And the whole book reads the exact same way. Can you see why I wonder if this is a translation issue or an issue of the original text? I mean seriously, that sentence is 157 words long. 157. And it’s not the longest sentence in the book. Really, it would have been much easier to read had the very last couple lines been placed first. Originally on reading, I was thinking this was a list of different authors, not a list of things one particular person had created. I had to learn how to skim through all that to get the relevant information.

That’s not to say there was no point to this book. I’m glad I read it and I certainly wouldn’t recommend skipping it (just this translation perhaps). I had to read some lit analysis afterwards to really understand everything I missed in reading the text, but it’s an interesting little book. Creepy and longwinded, but interesting. I just feel like I missed something important in translation. Whatever Mann was trying to say, it didn’t come across to me.

Has anyone else read a better translation? I would love to get a better look at this book. It seems like it could have been so much more than I got from it, and that’s frustrating.

Posted in 2010, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Mornings in Jenin, by Susan Abulhawa

Posted on March 15, 2010 by Thistle

mornings-in-jenin-novel-susan-abulhawa-paperback-cover-artMornings in Jenin tells the history of Palestine through the eyes of four generations of Palestinians. It begins prior to the creation of Israel and the expulsion of Palestinians from their land, and goes through the siege on the refugee camp in Jenin in 2002. It’s a side of history not very often told, as most reports heard in the Western world are told from the Israeli point of view.

This story was a very personal one for me because my sister lives in Jenin, which is on the West Bank, and is married to a Palestinian refugee. Two years ago, I traveled there for her wedding and stayed with her a little over a week. In that time, I saw Tel Aviv, Jenin, Ramallah, Jerusalem, and Bethlehem. Before I went over, I knew very little about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. I read some nonfiction books before I went, trying to get a sense of the conflict. I knew my sister’s opinions, but I wanted to form my own based on my own knowledge and experiences.

Let me say up front that I am not anti-Jew, nor do I hold a grudge against the Jewish people in Israel. On the other hand, I despise the Israeli government and military and I think what they have done to the Palestinians over the last 60+ years is unforgivable. In America, we don’t get to hear the Palestinian side to the story. All we hear is that the Palestinians are terrorists preying on the poor, innocent Israelis. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In that part of the world, I saw the contrast between the super-rich, Westernized world of Israel and the third-world, sewage-ridden, completely downtrodden Palestine. When we crossed the checkpoint from one world to the next, there was instant change. Roads became potholed, packed-dirt lanes. Electricity worked some of the time, and only in some places. There were places with no sewage treatment or reliable running water. The refugee houses were concrete blocks with square holes for windows and a hole in the floor for a toilet. Men and women with gigantic guns set up checkpoints in random places to harass people trying to travel within the West Bank, supposedly to “catch terrorists” but more just because they can.

I heard stories of “administrative detention,” where Palestinians are grabbed at random and put in jail for six months with no charge or no trial. I heard about the way people are tortured, the way people I met had been tortured. Without reason. Just because. I saw the way the Israelis treated the Palestinians, and forming my opinion was not difficult: this is wrong. No, I don’t agree with the Palestinians who become suicide bombers or who shoot rockets into Israel. I don’t condone violence in any fashion. But compared to what the Israelis do to the Palestinians, stuff I can’t even talk about because it makes me violently ill, the Palestinian “terrorists” are petty criminals. The Israelis are the real terrorists.

Again, not all. I’m not saying every Israeli is like this. Of course not. But the government and the way they run their military is not at all humane. They have taken everything from the Palestinians, denied them every right, and squished them into little plots of land. While I don’t agree with the way the Palestinians have fought back, I can understand them fighting. If someone did to my family what they do to Palestinian families, I’d fight back as well. Mornings in Jenin goes into details about some of the things that families have to live with. Things that to sheltered Americans may sound like exaggerations, but aren’t. They aren’t. I’ve heard too many firsthand accounts of these exact things.

In 2008, I read a book written by the children of the Jenin refugee camp. My brother-in-law helped to translate the Arabic to English for this book. The children wrote essays, fiction, poetry, and photo journals for the book. Some of the kids were real young, 7 or 8 years old, and some were older in their teens. One of the things they wrote about was the siege on the refugee camp in 2002, which is discussed in detail in Mornings in Jenin. My brother-in-law’s neice wrote about how her family survived because their house was locked in the middle of others where bulldozers couldn’t get to it and no bombs happened to hit it, though one fell nearby and the explosion shattered her eardrum and caused her to go unconscious for some time. Another child wrote a tribute to one of her friends, a ten-year-old girl who had been playing with a doll near a window and who was shot and killed by an Israeli sniper. Death, war, and violence are a constant part of these children’s lives. Grief, loss, pain, and fear.

The world doesn’t listen to Palestine. Mornings in Jenin was written to tell their side of the story, and it does a magnificent job. It is not an anti-Jew propaganda. There are Jewish characters who are wonderful people. There are friendships between Muslims and Jews. And there is understanding for the position of the kids that serve their mandatory years in the Israeli military service. One of the Jewish characters, David, says:

I was twenty years old and they gave me total power over other human beings.

He also later says:

He did some evil things, but he was not evil. He was good to me.

Yes. These two statements are exactly right. People, Jewish or Palestinian, are not evil, even as they both do evil acts at times. I like the understanding that is inherent in that second statement. And in the first as well. Just like in any other situation, when you give people complete power over other human beings, the inevitable result is the inhumane treatment of those people. Even the Stanford Prison Experiment showed that. And total power is what these kids are given when they join the military in Israel. Complete power over the Palestinians, coupled with the prejudice they are raised with. It’s no wonder they hate the Palestinians and treat them the way they do, the way it’s no wonder Palestinians hate the Israelis and fight back. It’s a vicious cycle, and honestly I’m not smart enough to know how to get it to end.

Mornings in Jenin addresses so much. It not only tells the history of Palestine, but it talks about a culture we know very little about here and have definite misconceptions about. It talks about mother-daughter bonds and the value of family. It talks about discrimination against Muslims in the United States. In some ways, I think Abulhawa tackled almost too much in this book, but I’m glad she did. It was beautiful and moving.

The book is not without flaws, though. Content-wise, I think she’s spot-on, with one exception (more in a minute). While it may sound like an exaggeration to our naive ears, the things she says in here are based on fact. They are things everyone should know about. I wish everyone would read this book and learn what is hidden from our newspapers. Did anyone even hear about the massacre that took place in Jenin in 2002? I know I didn’t. I never even heard of the city until my sister moved there in 2007.

Structurally, though, the book suffers from a few problems. There is a fairly steady change in point of view at random intervals throughout the book. Sometimes it’s third person, sometimes it’s first person from Amal’s POV, sometimes first person from Yousef’s POV. Each time a new section started with a new POV, I was really disoriented for a minute. It’s a shame, because if the book had stuck to one viewpoint, it would have been far more powerful. Abulhawa does an excellent job of making the reader experience the world around the characters even in third person form. I know first person is used to be more powerful, but in this case it ends up detracting from the text.

**Originally here I pointed out one thing near the end that felt false to me, but having learned more about history since then, I realize why it had to be the way it happened, and it makes more sense now. (This was the exception mentioned above. I no longer have my original thoughts saved anywhere, just this blurb.)**

I know this is a huge review, and I left so much out, too! The Palestinian/Israeli conflict is very personal to me because I have family there, but I do want to say that it’s my personal experiences, not my bias based on family, that formed my opinions on the situation. I’ll repeat that I am not anti-Jew. I don’t care one bit if someone’s Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, atheist, whatever. I don’t care about a person’s ethnicity or their religion. The only thing I care about is the way people treat others, and in my experience, the way the Israeli government and military treat Palestinians is criminally wrong. I’m glad to have come across a book that shows exactly why I feel the way I feel.

Posted in 2010, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Newes From the Dead, by Mary Hooper

Posted on March 9, 2010 by Thistle

newesNewes From the Dead is based on a case from 1650 England. A servant named Anne Green was hung only to wake up on the operating table just as physicians were about to cut into her for medical research. This book tells the story from two points of view – from Anne’s as she lays paralyzed, almost dead, and remembers her past and what led up to the hanging; and from a medical student named Robert who is in the room as they prepare to cut Anne open. The chapters alternate, first person narrative for Anne, third person for Robert. In the back of the book there is a copy of the 1651 pamphlet about the case, called “Newes From the Dead.”

The story behind this book was fascinating. I loved learning about the laws that existed at the time, and the different ways they were enforced. Women and men were treated differently; the poor and the rich were again treated differently. Anne Green from all accounts is obviously innocent and her rich employer definitely had his hand in the rushed trial and guilty verdict. Doctors considered it a deliverance from God that Anne came back to life – they called it a proof of her innocence. She received a full pardon, and her employer died three days after her resurrection. These aren’t spoilers, I promise! This is actually just case history. Like I said, I found the story fascinating. The historical case itself.

The book, on the other hand, was merely a vehicle for me. I didn’t like the writing at all! Especially the first person sections from Anne. It felt so faked and forced, like the author was trying to use old speech but didn’t pull it off very well. Now I’m not a big fan of historical fiction in general, and language is one of those things that has to be done very, very well for me to buy it. Like The Witch of Blackbird Pond – I barely noticed the different ways they spoke because it felt so natural and accurate. This felt far from natural or accurate, both in language and in thought patterns. I can’t see a devoted Christian girl used by the gentry remembering the events as him running his hands all over her “private parts.” I’d think she’d be more ashamed, would try to hide that even from herself, definitely would not use modern thinking for it.

The sections with the doctors were a little better. They didn’t feel forced, though they still felt a little fake. I don’t want to say unresearched, because I know the author did a lot of research into the case! But still, some things were just wholly unbelievable in Robert’s character and his progression through to the end.

Because I was interested in the historical case, and because this is for a book club this month, I kept reading. It was an easy book to swallow in full-page gulps, passing over individual words that killed me when I focused on them, and just getting the basic plot as I went by. I read the book in about an hour, and I doubt I’ll have much recollection of it in a month. But if I’d tried to read like normal, I wouldn’t have made it twenty pages in. The writing rubbed me that badly. It’s a weird contrast in reviewing the book – fascinating case, not so great fiction… On the bright side, it makes me want to go read some nonfiction about Anne Green, who I’d never heard of before this book!

ETA: Because a couple people are not sure what I mean about the mediocre/false language, let me give you a paragraph example:

A month later I was still at Dun’s Tew Manor, lacing myself into my bodice and stomacher each morning and pulling them a little tighter betimes. I’d not left the Reades’ household, for a lethargy seemed to have come over me so that I had neither the energy to leave, nor the courage to go home and face my father. I knew I should have told Ma of my situation, or at least got a message to her, for it was probable that she thought the cunning woman’s cordial had been effective, but I did not wish to cause her any more distress. As well as this, I could not have faced the walk back to my village, for my legs ached mightily and I was constantly weary.

Posted in 2010, Prose, Young Adult | Tagged | Leave a comment

Baby Be-Bop, by Francesca Lia Block

Posted on March 6, 2010 by Thistle

71331This is a book about a boy coming to terms with his sexuality in a world that doesn’t want him around. It’s about love, it’s about hate, and it’s about understanding who you are. The message is a beautiful one: Any love that is love is right.

I first heard about this book last summer before I went to the ALA conference. Up in West Bend, Wisconsin, a certain library system is dealing with a ridiculous lawsuit. Four guys calling themselves the “Christian Civil Liberties Union” wants this book pulled from library shelves. Not that unusual, really, but what makes this case particularly unique is that they are also asking for legal permission to publicly burn all the library’s copies of the book as a way to tell authors not to write this sort of “filth.”

Honestly, I wanted to read this book during Banned Books Week last fall, but then I discovered that 1) it was part of a series and there were four other books that came before it, and 2) it was a hardcore science fiction novel. Now I have no idea where I got that second impression – more on that in a minute – but Debi let me know that this could easily be read as a standalone book. I now finally got around to reading it, with Debi’s encouragement.

It’s a short book, more of a novella really, barely over 100 pages. The writing is very simple, almost kid-lit in tone though not in subject. I did go into this thinking it was going to be a sci-fi book, and I’m generally not a big fan of sci-fi, so I was leery. When the main character, Dirk, falls in love with another boy, Pup, I was convinced that Pup was really an elf or something because his slightly pointed ears were mentioned more than once. When I heard about Dirk’s grandmother’s house, I thought the whole thing was literally gingerbread-cottage-y. Yeah.

Just in case anyone else got the idea that this was sci-fi or fantasy: it’s not. It’s actually more like historical fiction, in a good way. You guys know I rarely like historical fiction, but as I said in a recent Sunday Salon post, I like it when the historical setting is merely the background on which a plot is laid. This story takes place about 30 years ago, with flashbacks to older times than that. Other than cultural references, it could have taken place in any time. That’s the sort of historical fiction I like!

This book gave me barely a glimpse into the world of its characters. They passed in and out of my mind like a dream. They told their story, almost fairy-tale-like, and slipped off into their own world again. The good, the bad, the indifferent – it was all immutable. It was hard for me to know what to make of it, but after a few days and a second read-through, I think I really liked it. It feels like something I cannot quite capture, cannot quite wrap up into my arms and pin down. Pup with his pointed ears may not have been an elf, but the whole book has a fairy-like feel to it, similar in tone to what I imagine A Midsummer Night’s Dream is meant to feel like (yes, I admit it, I haven’t read that one, sorry!).

Once again, the people who want to ban (or burn) this book have created something desperately out of proportion. Are there hard words in this book? Yes, but not as bad as some. Do bad things happen? Yes, but again, not as bad as some. Is homosexuality discussed? Yes, though in terms of love, not sex. I was expecting something much, much stronger to have garnered that specific reaction up in Wisconsin. I should have known better…

I think I need to get the whole Dangerous Angels collection now.

Posted in 2010, Prose, Young Adult | Tagged , | 1 Comment

M, by Jon Muth

Posted on March 5, 2010 by Thistle

9780810995222I’ve been sick the last two days and no matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to read. In a last ditch effort to do something other than watch TV and movies, I pulled out M by Jon Muth. M is a graphic novel adaptation of the classic German Expressionist movie M, by Fritz Lang and Thea Von Harbou. I love M, as well as Fritz Lang and Thea Von Harbou in general. I saw this book back in late Dec/early Jan. Originally it was released in four volumes in 1990, but was recently put together in a single hardbound volume. The artwork is much like Shaun Tan – not in style, but in structure – which lets the picture tell the story more than any words on the page. In fact, the pages with words (done in cheesy, early-computer-style bubble format) actually detracts from the story in my opinion.

M is the story of a pedophile and child murderer in early 1900s Germany. Kids disappear in seemingly random places throughout this town, only to be found murdered later. No one knows who the murderer is. The police are worn out but determined, citizens are panicking, and the underground network of criminals are irritated that this murderer is giving them a worse name than they already have. Everyone is out looking for this man in their own way.

I can hardly talk about the graphic adaptation without talking about the movie as well. While it’s not my favorite of Lang’s movies – that honor belongs to Metropolis – I was very impressed the first time I saw it. Peter Lorre plays the child murderer, and unlike all his English-speaking roles, he isn’t just a goofball with funny eyes and a weird voice. My favorite part of the movie is a long monologue he gives towards the end (I won’t tell you what about or the circumstances surrounding it). It’s brilliant, and it’s what really stood out for me in this movie.

The pacing is very different than modern day crime/psychological thrillers. I know this wouldn’t be a movie everyone would like. It lacks a score, so that sometimes long scenes are shot without any sound at all. M was Lang’s first non-silent film, in the era where talk films were just beginning to be produced.

The graphic novel was a tribute of sorts to the movie. Muth used people he knew to shoot photographs in similar scenes to the movie, and then he painted the panels of this adaptation from those photographs with an elaborate set of tools. The entire process is described at the end of the book. Most of the pictures are in black and white with subtle sepia hints, there are a few places where he adds color to highlight specific points of the panel. While I don’t think the adaptation captures the same emotional flow of the movie (though that could be because I was really, really sick when I read it), the artwork is gorgeous. Some of the most beautiful paintings I’ve ever seen. This is definitely a book I want to keep and read over again.

I watched the movie again this morning. Jason got it for me for my birthday, and it was nice to sit down and see it for the second time. It was especially nice to watch it right after reading the graphic adaptation. I would definitely encourage people to watch the movie and if they enjoy it, to read the adaptation as well.

And now it’s time to go take a nap…

Posted in 2010, Adult, Visual | Tagged | 1 Comment

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, by JK Rowling

Posted on March 3, 2010 by Thistle

Prisoner_of_Azkaban_coverThe Prisoner of Azkaban is one of my two favorite HP books, along with the Half-Blood Prince. I never get tired of it, no matter how many times I read it. This is Rowling at her best, in writing, in characterization, and in plot. I won’t summarize. Most people have read it anyway, and if they haven’t, either they don’t want to or they might one day. For those in the latter category, I wouldn’t want to ruin it.

I read the hardback version of the book, as I’ve always read the paperback version before. Again, still looking for discrepancies between the two texts. I want to say first that I must have been a copyeditor in a former life because in combing the text, I found three places with copyediting mistakes, all pertaining to endquotes. Either the endquote wasn’t there when it should have been (once), or there was a misplaced endquote (twice). These mistakes were NOT caught between hardback and paperback versions, though, and they are the same in both books.

There WAS one text discrepancy between the two, though. I wasn’t sure which volume the discrepancies would start to show themselves in, but apparently it’s in Prisoner of Azkaban. Page 65, Mr. and Mrs. Weasley are arguing about whether or not they should tell Harry about Sirius. Mr. Weasley says:

You know what Harry and Ron are like, wandering off by themselves–they’ve ended up in the Forbidden Forest twice!

Of course, that’s not true. Harry has been in the Forbidden Forest twice by this time, but Ron has only gone once. The statement is corrected in the paperback edition:

You know what Harry and Ron are like, wandering off by themselves–they’ve even ended up in the Forbidden Forest!

This is the only difference between the two texts that I found.

So that’s it for month three of this little Harry Potter comparison! See you guys next month with my least favorite book of the series, The Goblet of Fire.

Note: Review date is only an approximate of when this book was read/reviewed in 2010.

Note: Originally read in 2005 and many times since.

***
– November 2014 throwback review

Posted in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2012, 2014, Children's, Prose | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Big Over Easy, by Jasper Fforde

Posted on March 1, 2010 by Thistle

6628Humpty Dumpty falls off a wall to his death, but was it murder or suicide or accident? That’s up to Officers Jack Spratt and Mary Mary of Reading’s Nursery Crime Division to determine, if fellow officer and top story detective of Amazing Crimes, Friedland Chymes, doesn’t steal the case from them first.

Rumpelstiltskin and illegal straw-to-gold operations. A neurotic mad scientist psychologist who grafts kitten heads on haddock bodies. A religious/political man similar to the Pope called the Jellyman. A verruca the size of a small child. A womanizing 4.5 ft tall egg-man. Suicide by cookie dough mix. This is just a small spattering of what you’ll find in The Big Over Easy.

Jasper Fforde = genius. Seriously. Who else can throw together coherent plotlines that weave everything from a giant beanstalk to an immortal Titan to Dr. Caligari to the infamous crime boss Giorgio Porgia into a single story? Not to mention the dig at himself as actress Lola Vavoom retired from her movie career after her appearance in the disastrous movie, The Eyre Affair.

It’s almost impossible to think how to review this book! There’s just so much in it, both plot-wise and otherwise. I admit, at first I wasn’t sure about this book. I prefer the literary references from the Thursday Next books to the nursery rhymes and fairy tales of this world. By about halfway through the book, though, I was sold. I slowed down – I’d tried to read it too fast – and then I started laughing. Fforde is a master of irony and humor.

But even in all the comedy, there are lots of little issues touched on, the same as in the Thursday Next books. The detectives in Reading not only have to solve their crimes, but have to solve them in a way that’ll make good stories for readers. All sorts of weird laws have been enacted, such as dog-walkers can be fined for finding bodies because that’s too cliché and overused. Chymes – who is very much like Captain Hammer – is very good at solving crimes in intricate, ridiculously-complex ways, which makes good stories, even if they are embellished a bit. Jack Spratt, on the other hand, gets no respect because he has no flare for intricate solutions and instead just solves crimes. I find this emphasis on publicity-comes-first crime-solving very reminiscent of some of the awful techniques of modern media – anything to get a story (Dateline immediately comes to mind).

There are other things touched on here, but many of them would involve spoilers so I’m going to keep my mouth shut on them. Point is – the book is more than it seems to be, although one could read it for the mystery and humor alone. It reads like an old detective novel more than a modern murder mystery, which I loved. As with other Fforde novels I’ve read, I’m sure I missed 3/4ths of the references, but I loved the ones I did catch.

All in all, this was a fun book once I slowed down and let myself read it at a more leisurely pace. I love Fforde’s wit, humor, and the amazing way he manages to bring SO MANY THINGS into a plot and yet make them all completely coherent/relevant.

Quick question for the Fforde fans out there: In the last chapter, the first two sentences have a bunch of spoonerisms in them (“hother’s mouse” “mull foon” etc). They seem to have nothing to do with the book itself, just randomly thrown in. I seem to remember seeing something like that in one of his other books, equally random and unrelated to the plot, but I could be remembering wrong. Is this normal for Fforde? Or is there something about this book that I missed, that would make said spoonerisms relevant?

Posted in 2010, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

The Picture of Dorian Gray (graphic novel), by Oscar Wilde

Posted on March 1, 2010 by Thistle

dorianThis is the graphic novel adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. It’s adapted by I.N.J. Culbard (illustrator) and Ian Edginton (text). It follows the exact same plot as the original book, so my summary is for Dorian Gray in general.

Dorian Gray is a beautiful and naive young man who has caught the eye of a famous painter. The painter, Basil, paints a portrait of Dorian that captures his beauty, innocence, and youth. By the time Dorian sees it, however, he’s already had his head filled with ideas by one Lord Henry, a cynical man who speaks his mind on whims and never means anything he says despite what the people around him assume. In a moment of madness, terrified that he’ll lose his youth, Dorian wishes that the portrait will grow old and ugly while he himself remains young and beautiful. He sells his soul this way, and indeed as Dorian sins and becomes corrupt, his innocent exterior stays the same. This painting, locked away, hides his secret.

I love this book. I’ve read it multiple times now and each time I love it a little bit more. It’s a slim volume and very easy to read, with only one tedious section where Dorian’s collections are all listed out individually. I understand why that section is there but it’s still hard to get through. Anyway, I wanted to read the GN adaptation because the book is one of my favorites. I was a little worried after Rebecca reviewed it as horrible a little while back, so I decided to try it in-store before buying it. Especially after my experience with the modernized adaptation of Crime & Punishment. Yuck.

To my happiness, I loved it! The graphic novel held the essence of the original and enhanced it. I wasn’t fond of the art style, but it certainly got the point across. Reading it was like reading an old friend, even though it was my first time for this particular adaptation.

I do have to say it would be better to read the book before reading this GN, because the adaptation does remove a certain element of Lord Henry’s character that I feel is really important to the book. In the GN, he sounds corrupt and base. He’s a woman-hater that believes in all the opinions he gives. In the book, however, it’s obvious from the beginning that Lord Henry is really more of a devil’s advocate. He doesn’t believe a word he says – he doesn’t even remember what he’s said if you leave him alone for any amount of time. He talks. He likes to talk, and what he says is just the way he works out his thoughts. But people take what he says as his absolute opinion. I love Lord Henry – he’s a lot like me in that way. He’s my favorite character in the book and the GN doesn’t do him justice. There isn’t enough subtlety in his character.

But, having read the novel enough to know Lord Henry’s personality, it was fun reading him in this format. I could hear the tone in which he says everything. Like I said before, this GN is a compliment to the novel rather than a way to get out of reading it. It enhances the book. It’s a definite keeper and I’m glad I gave it a chance despite my worries.

Posted in 2010, Adult, Visual | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Galapagos, by Kurt Vonnegut

Posted on February 28, 2010 by Thistle

galapagosGalápagos is a sort of dystopian-science-fiction treatise on evolution. The world has sunk into depression, unknown bacteria are making women infertile, and WWIII is about to break out. Ten people – one male and nine females – end up on a cruise ship and are stranded on the Galápagos island of Santa Rosalia. Their offspring eventually become the only people left on earth, and evolve over the next 1 million years until they are far more animal-like than human. The story is told in little chunks zigzagging through time by a narrator whose story is not known until near the end.

The first book I read by Vonnegut was Slaughterhouse 5, sometime back in high school. I was too young at that point, it think, and I just didn’t get it. I mean, I understood the plot, but the meaning went way over my head. I decided it was time to give Vonnegut another try and I’m glad I did. I really enjoyed Galápagos. I loved the way the story was woven together in little chunks. While I didn’t enjoy the frame story (narrator’s story) as much, I appreciate why it’s there and how that allows us to see the evolution of humans over a million years. The book felt like an appropriate tribute to Darwin, and ironically I think I learned more about the theory of evolution from this book than I ever learned from school.

One thing I hadn’t expected when I started reading Galápagos was a side-theme of intimacy between two women. Two of the passengers on the ill-fated cruise, a pregnant Japanese woman and a blind woman, pair off once they arrive on the island to raise the Japanese woman’s baby together. After their daughter grows up and leaves to live in her own place, the two women – who have never been separated in more than 20 years – commit suicide together by drowning. They hold hands and walk into the water together. While there is no implication of a sexual relationship between the two, there is this wonderful portrayal of love between them. It was so unexpected and yet beautiful.

Posted in 2010, Adult, Prose | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Liar, by Justine Larbalestier

Posted on February 24, 2010 by Thistle

NewLiarThere will be absolutely no spoilers, not even a hint of them, in this review.

Micah is a liar. Nothing she says can be trusted. And yet she swears that she didn’t kill her boyfriend Zach. She had nothing to do with his death. Do you believe her?

Whatever you think this book is about – it’s not. I had heard that this book was full of twists. I had heard it blindsides you and leaves you reeling. I avoided all reviews and refused to listen to anything that might give away the twists. And still…I wasn’t prepared.

Last night, I read through the Part 1 of the book. The whole time I kept thinking, “Okay, where are the twists? This seems all pretty straightforward to me.” Part 1 ended on a bit of a stretched note, so I thought, okay, maybe that was the twist. No. The news wasn’t on yet, so I thought I’d read just a bit more. Page 1 of Part 2, I got smacked in the face. I didn’t see it coming. Despite all the hints, I never even got close to suspecting.

Funny thing is, awhile back I actually got THIS EXACT SAME IDEA for a novel I wanted to write. Not the lying part, but the stuff introduced in Part 2. I started mapping out the idea, fleshing it out, but realized I didn’t know enough about the subject/genre to write it, and I put it aside. I’m glad I did. I’m glad I didn’t invest any real time into it, because I might have been quite upset now. As it is, I’m crossing the idea off my list and grinning wholeheartedly because what Larbalestier did was brilliant. BRILLIANT. It was so much better than anything I could have done with the idea. She took everything I wanted to do and made it into something amazing. I can already tell this book has a strong possibility of becoming one of my favorites of the year.

I want to talk to someone about the book! Someone who’s read it so I don’t have to worry about spoilers. I told Jason last night, after reading the beginning of Part 2, that I needed him to read it. Normally if there’s something I want to tell him about a book he’s not interested in reading, I’ll just describe it, but that’s the funny thing about Liar: If I just described it, it would come off incredibly cheesy and dumb. But the way it’s written, it’s anything by cheesy. It rides the line so well! And by the end, you really don’t know what to think. It’s hard to even know how to classify the book!

Liar has been sitting on my shelf since I got the ARC at ALA last July (yes, I have the crappy cover with the white girl on it, which makes ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE Bloomsbury, even less sense now that I’ve read the book). I don’t know why it took me so long to get to it – perhaps the 300 other unread books on my shelf have something to do with it – but I am so glad I finally sat down and gobbled it up. I’m also glad I decided to give Larbalestier a second chance. How to Ditch Your Fairy was not my favorite book. It was okay, but it was a bit young for me and I wasn’t real impressed over all. Liar, on the other hand, is amazing. It’s a definite WIN for the 2nds Challenge, with my personal goal to read 2nds books only by authors that didn’t impress me the first time around.

Posted in 2010, Prose, Young Adult | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment