Jun

25

Verbosity

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Yesterday I finished reading Breakable You by Brian Morton, the same guy who wrote Starting Out in the Evening, which I read last month.  I saw the movie of Starting early this year and really loved it.  The book was excellent, too.  In fact, I’m rather torn in deciding which one to recommend.  The book was lovely, but the movie had very admirable acting and you so rarely see that these days.  I finished Breakable right before I was going to teach a class, which was rough.  Mostly because I was trying very hard not to be all teary-eyed.  I have decided that Morton is excellent.  He should write lots of books.  It’s not that he’s a fabulous plotter.  There’s nothing wrong with his plots, they are very fluid and natural and believable.  It’s that he writes people so well.  In both books, different characters were followed in different chapters, always from a third-person point of view.  And every one of them came alive completely even within a couple of pages.  I have always had a weakness for books with strong characters, which is funny because I end up reading so many mysteries these days.  Mysteries generally suck at character development, and most of them repeat the same stereotypical characters.  They’re heavy on plot, though, and I’m usually a sucker for plot.  But Morton has reminded me that it doesn’t matter what the plot is if you really get into the people themselves.

I got this same reminder from another source.  I’m listening to an audiobook right now of Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith, a new book doing fairly well on the bestseller list for a debut novel.  (Allegedly, one of my all-time favorites, Richard Price, is writing the screenplay.)  This is a very densely plotted book.  And a long one.  I didn’t realize until this morning that something I heard two days ago was actually tied in to an earlier point in the book.  There’s just so much going on that the reveal wasn’t obvious enough.  All in all, I enjoy the book quite a lot.  I really feel like I’m getting a glimpse of Stalinist Russia and how it would have felt to live there.  But as I’m nearing the end, I’m getting a bit wearied.  How many escapes will there be?  How many cleverly orchestrated tricks to hide from the government?  Just how will they pull it off this time?  As the plot twists get trickier, I get less interested.  My favorite part of the book was near the beginning when the main character, who works for a secret-police-esque group of the government, was trying to figure out if he should renounce his wife to save his own life.  A lot of very crazy moral dilemmas came early on.  Now, I’m just getting a bit tired.  Still, I definitely recommend it as a summer read.  Very interesting, not something that’s written about a lot, and I do like it overall.  Even if it’s starting to bend credulity.

I still haven’t watched the last episode of The Sopranos.  Lately I’ve been trying out The West Wing, which I never saw a single episode of when it was on the air.  At the time I was a nice little young Republican, but also someone who knew virtually nothing about politics.  It’s obvious why it didn’t appeal to me.  Now as a rather over-informed democrat who has a tendency to read political blogs when she’s bored, it’s much more interesting to me.  I’ve actually never watched an Aaron Sorkin show before, so now I get all the references to his talkiness.  Yes, his characters talk a lot.  But it works.  The thing that drives me nuts about the show is how they go all reverential all the time.  I get it, it’s all very solemn and presidential, but I could do without the preachiness and excessive explanations.  Sometimes I want to yell at the television, “I am informed, you don’t need to explain the Constitution to me!”  There’s one bigger flaw, though.  The soundtrack.  I forgot how bad tv music was in the 90’s, with all the synthesized orchestrations.  Yikes.  TWW is quite the offender.  I used to read this website, Television Without Pity, that makes snide recaps for television shows.  And in the late 90’s, there were common references to “an oboe of regret” or “a clarinet of misgiving” or something playing in a scene.  I have never understood it more than I do with TWW.  I’ll just be sitting there watching someone say something relatively unimportant, but then a little oboe of foreboding will creep in and I’ll just shake my head.  Is there a way to remove that particular track from the sound?  I would pay someone to do it.  Because in large part I like the show.  I am talky by nature, so I don’t mind their verbosity.  And I like that they’re all smart.  And I think Allison Janney rocks.  I’m not surprised she won 4 Emmy’s.  She’s so winning on the show, and it’s so nice to have an intelligent woman.  Granted, many of the women on the show are secretaries, which irks me, but I will let it go.  Maybe their casting will get better as we move through the administration, eh?  Plus it’s fun to see actors I know well now back before I knew them.  Like Elisabeth Moss, who is my favorite as Peggy on Mad Men, playing the president’s daughter.  And Lisa Edelstein, who plays Dr. Cuddy on House, playing a high class call girl.

Speaking of Mad Men, it’s about to come back on!  If you have not seen Season 1, you are so missing out.  It is simply the awesomest show ever.  I watched the whole season in less than a week and adored it.  And not just because of all the smoking, drinking, and cute dresses.  Season 1 DVD comes out next week, I highly suggest getting your hands on it.

Jun

20

Lighten Up, or Not

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Helpline has been slow this week and so I pass the time by watching episodes of Pushing Daisies.  I can’t really go anywhere or do anything since I may have to take a call at any time, so mindless tv is ideal.  And while I find Pushing Daisies occasionally charming and occasionally witty and quick, it is so often… twee.  (I love the word “twee” thought I don’t particularly care for things that are defined as twee.)  I wish there was a whimsy meter so that I could tone it down every now and then.

Even the occasional musical numbers–something I normally adore–just never seem to go quite right.  (Birdhouse in Your Soul?  Seriously??)  And they have Kristen Chenoweth, but when they give her songs they are random and not good.  (The songs, not her.)  I fear she’s being pigeonholed ever since Wicked and I wish she’d do something to really show people her stuff.  (If you do not know her stuff, I recommend you go immediately here to watch her nail an awesome and hilarious aria.)

Speaking of Candide, (if you’re confused, you didn’t click the previous link) I noticed in my reading of the letters of John and Abigail Adams lately that John warned his wife to keep his kids away from Voltaire.  I think this is a shame, though it was when Adams was getting slightly more on the stuffy side.  I love Voltaire.  And I like him even better when set to music.  Maybe if Adams had a better sense of humor we wouldn’t have had the Alien and Sedition Acts.  I’m mostly through with the book and I expect to be done tomorrow when I have to proctor a test for 3 hours.  This is a great excuse to read.  I’m also planning to bring along either The Unconsoled or The Rainbow or both.  I’m undecided.  The Unconsoled is less of a slog than I remembered after I picked it up last night and read through several chapters.  It is still disorienting, but that’s the intention, I’m sure.  But I’m much more confident I’ll finish it.  So maybe I should make The Rainbow my in-class reading material.  We’ll see.  It’d at least give me a good jump on Lawrence for the summer.

In fluff-book news, I’m waiting on a bunch of things from the library but none have come in so I’m a little lacking in the reading material department.  I may have to start stealing Eric’s kindle, which has an ample supply of things I’d like to be reading.  We’ll see.  There will be no refuge in the movie theaters this week as there is zero of interest out.  Too much crap this year.  Though it’s the same as most years, I guess.  At least there are a few bright spots on the horizon, albeit the distant horizon.

Jun

17

Caving

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Right after I finished my last post I immediately felt guilty for not including Lush Life as an obvious candidate for my Best Books list.  So I have to make up for that.

Meanwhile, I’ve been reading a good deal.  I’m realizing I may exceed my goal of 100 books this year by a lot.  It’s looking like I’ll hit 150.  And if you consider that I was working the first few months this year and reading less, well, it may get higher.  This means that my biggest problem is keeping up a list of things to read.  So far I’ve been doing okay.  I’ve added a couple book blogs to my rounds, though, since the NYTBR is sadly lacking in fiction these days.  And they have one reviewer that I just don’t pay attention to at all.

At the used book store the other day, Eric brought in a few boxes and I got to walk away with The Rainbow and Women in Love for free.  I’d been holding out on The Rainbow because I got a copy at a used book store a couple years ago, but I haven’t been able to find it.  I have finally caved, though, with my goal to read more serious literature.  Lawrence is a good place to start.  I shouldn’t really have been as surprised as I was when I read Sons and Lovers and just about fell over.  I’d always heard it was that good, but for some reason I held Lawrence at bay for a long time.  I have a tendency to do this with many things I end up loving dearly.  (Like my Anne of Green Gables books which sat dormant in my teenage room for a good five or six years until I finally read them and kicked myself for taking so long.)

The thing that struck me most about Lawrence was the way he managed to write about women.  More and more lately I’ve been annoyed at the way men write about women or from their point of view.  They so rarely seem to get it at all.  (A recent example, Night Train by Martin Amis was horrifically off.  I’d think the man had never met a woman, only heard about them in books.  She was also supposed to be American but had no grasp of American-isms at all.  I think Mr. Amis should stick to what he knows.)  I’m looking forward to the two I have, though I don’t know how long it will take me to read them.  I read Sons and Lovers on my lunch breaks for a week or so.  (I should say I devoured it.)  I remember how much I looked forward to shutting my door and propping my feet up with that book.

I also read the quite short Daughters of the North by Sarah Hall, which was interesting and dystopian.  I’m a fan of dystopic novels, but they often seem to miss the point.  I think Hall may have had a bit more going on than I had the strength to really delve into, but I enjoyed the book nonetheless.  Today I had another quick one with Curse of the Spellmans by Lisa Lutz, which I found on the new book shelf at the library.  It’s a sequel to The Spellman Files, which I read earlier this year and liked.  She’s so peppy and funny, most authors attempting to be snide and funny don’t really nail it, but she does.  Word is there’s a movie, and I just hope they let her do the screenplay.

I am still trudging through the Sopranos.  Or at least attempting.  Technically I have less than two episodes left.  But it feels like so much work just getting through a single episode anymore.  I expect it to take quite a while.

As for the movies, we’ve been going quite a lot.  A nice extravagance since things are a little less tight money-wise these days.  And both Eric and I enjoy the actual act of going to the theater.  I’ve been letting Eric make our picks, as you can tell from my Movie List link.  (He did NOT accompany me to see Miss Pettigrew.  That was girls only.)  The summer is a rough time for the arthouse patron.  Not much good stuff comes out since they have to squeeze into the multiplexes and are usually shoved out.  So far, none of it has been too terrible, though most of it hasn’t quite been good.  To be fair, Eric was going to see Redbelt with me, the new Mamet film, but we didn’t get a chance to.  Today we wanted a little night out but didn’t want to see any of the big films.  Instead, we went to The Fall, which I’d heard was good but didn’t look much like my thing.  I thought Eric would like it, though, since it looked very visual.  We both liked it more than expected.  I’m usually not much for big visual grandeur movies, I get bored.  But this one managed to get me.  Largely on the strength of the two main characters.  (The little girl got me so bad that now I want all my children to have cute little Russian accents and speak in pidgin English.)  I knew the man’s name right away, I’d looked him up on IMDb for something else and it bugged me the whole movie.  Now I know that it was the guy from Miss Pettigrew, who I found quite charming, and that he was also in Infamous, my preferred Truman Capote movie.  Goodness.  And he’s also the main guy in Pushing Daisies, which everyone has been trying to get me to watch and which I’ve held off on because I’m not much for whimsy, but now I think I’ll have to do it.  He’s quite good.  (His name’s Lee Pace, btw.)

Now I must get back to trudging my way through The Unconsoled, an Ishiguro I’ve meant to read for ages but that’s turning out to be a bit of a slog.

Jun

11

A Milestone

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I finally finished Ada !  One thing I noticed as soon as I started reading it was that I started seeing it referenced all the time, and generally in a negative way.  And yeah, I kind of have to agree.  I could tell Nabokov imagined this whole world, that in his head it was something massive.  But on the page it feels like you keep missing the rest of the story.  Like the whole thing is connected to some other book that you never read, or like Nabokov is in on some joke that the rest of us don’t know.  It, more than any other book of his I’ve read so far, definitely betrayed his style: to plan his books on hundreds and hundreds of index cards.

It’s a sign of how things have gone so far this year that Ada will not make my Top Books of 2008 list.  But one that will is one I just finished, Popco by Scarlett Thomas.  The recommendation came from Bookslut, a book blog I frequent. Sometimes their taste is a bit too obscure for me (the one that comes to mind is The Thin Place, which I read on their recommendation a couple years ago and didn’t like much) but this one was a joy.  It’s like someone sat down and thought of a book that would make me turn my head and go, “Oo, that sounds interesting.”  They had no other purpose, just to make me very involved.  Me, no one else.  Popco is about a woman who works for one of these new-age toy companies and it involves, among other things, codes and ciphers, secret treasure, neat ideas for toys that I would have loved, crazy marketing campaigns, intrigue and secrets galore, and also manages to look really thoroughly about the strangeness of what it’s like to grow up as a girl.  While I think the ending tied things up a bit succinctly, I do have to admire that there’s a bibliography with a bunch of other books to read about codes and such.  I am kind of thinking I may start leaving Eric coded messages now that I know bunches of different ways how, some of which involve rather complicated math.  So far, it is one of the few guaranteed to make my end of year list.  (The only other sure-things are In the Woods and Howard’s End.  Also with a good shot is A Clockwork Orange, which I just read for the first time.  Turned out to be very easy in audio form, I’d never been able to get through the slang otherwise.  But having a reader made it much easier to understand.)

I’m not quite sure which big challenging book I will tackle next.  There are so many to consider.  I may also wait until my next class starts.  Reading Ada in small chunks was helpful.

I am still trudging towards the end of The Sopranos.  I am so looking forward to it being over.  I have 3 episodes left, so I feel like I’m too close to quit now.  But still.  Last episode there was a car accident.  These people have more car accidents than anyone ever.  Whenever things get boring, there’s a car accident.  And then, wait for it, let’s have Tony tripping on peyote for 15 minutes.  What are these people thinking?

I’m about to watch the third Prime Suspect, which I like quite a lot.  I went in search of other Brit tv only to find that 99% of it is mysteries.  There were too many and I eventually quit looking.  Overwhelmed.

I waited for the end of the season to start Gossip Girl, so I could get through it quickly.  Blah.  It has so much potential, but they really blow it.  I expected it to be much more scandalous, but instead it plays out like a teen drama from the suburbs half the time.  So boring.  And then they take plot lines with great potential and drop them flat.  (Hello?  You gave us the reason Nate’s trust fund was drained way too quickly and easily.  Don’t you people know how to really work this stuff?  Goodness.)  I want way more nastiness.  And less adults.  Unless you make them slightly more dimensional.  (Exception was the episode with Blair’s dad and his gay lover.  That one I liked.)  Very disappointed, especially with all the talk I’d heard.

Should be more movies soon.  I’ve got bunches of good ones waiting.

Jun

4

The Male Animal

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I wrote a few weeks ago about Boy Toy by Barry Lyga, a YA book about a teenage boy who’d been seduced-slash-molested by a female teacher.  I just finished Lyga’s first book, The Astonishing Adventures of Fan Boy and Goth Girl.  What really impresses me about Lyga is something I’d never really thought about: the sexual preoccupations of the teenage boy.

See, I was a teenage GIRL.  This is an important difference.  I was also just about as prudish as a teenage girl can get.  I went through high school without even a decent kiss.  And teenage girl oriented fiction follows much of the same.  Even when there’s sex involved, it’s all really about love and romance and mushiness.  And the whole male-oriented YA book thing seems like something of a new phenomenon.  (There used to be such books, but I think they were mostly sci-fi.  Am I wrong?)

It’s all kind of funny to me because I’ve never gone back and taken my later education and imposed it on my teenage years.  I’m sure things were happening all around me, but I never concerned myself much with it.  It’s even funnier because I’m married to someone who apparently went through a number of girls.  (This also confuses me.  At my school, it was simply not possible to be a really smart, very skinny valedictorian guy and also date a bunch of girls and have a reputation as a bit of a player.)  I often ask him questions about his relationships with these high school girls and shake my head at his responses.  Poor girls.

Fan Boy had that whole thing back in my head.  Mostly because I was really impressed at how I finally got it.  The book finally explained it to me.  Now I can equate the teenage boys I interacted with to what I’ve learned to be true about men.  The main character doesn’t really understand any of it, but he’s honest and everything just kind of falls into place.  This is a pretty big deal.  It’s kind of the teenage equivalent of High Fidelity by Nick Hornby, the book that helped me understand guys and why they are often huge jerks.  They simply can’t help it.

I’m one of those types who tends to get all concerned about the way men portray women and all that stuff.  Women are certainly better at writing about women most of the time.  But sometimes I get mad at them for what they choose to write about or how they oversimplify or overdramatize things.  Men have many more problems, so many that I generally don’t start.  But I haven’t really thought much about how men portray men.  And I guess it’s surprising that rarely have I been able to pull any insight about males from books about and by males.  Huh.

And while I’m thinking about it, I’d like to link to something.  I am relatively critical of women writers, but mostly because I expect us to actually pull ourselves out of this stupid little niche we seem to have put ourselves in.  But I was really struck by this article on Salon about how everyone needs to just give it a rest.

We have to remember: There is nothing wrong with women writing about themselves, their youth, their indiscretions, their habits and values and personal development. Men have been writing about this stuff for thousands of years; they call it the canon.

And like their male contemporaries, a lot of this writing disappoints. When it does, there is nothing wrong with criticizing it. The thing that is wrong — really wrong — is when we forget that these kinds of stories are not the only ones that women have to tell.

I think she’s exactly right.  (By the way, the article is a response specifically to the Emily Gould blog-centric NYTimes Magazine article from a couple weeks ago.)  Here is a link to the whole thing.