I’m not sick anymore and I’m not traveling anymore so it’s back to updating for me.  My list of X-Files episodes is ready to go and I’ll post it in the next couple days.

As for me, being sick didn’t really help my reading much.  Usually I watch a lot of television when I’m sick and this was no different.  I went from being stuck halfway in Season 4 of The West Wing to now having finished the entire show.  I had a lot of time on my hands.  I also watched the BBC adaptation of Tipping the Velvet, which was not as good as Fingersmith, I had some definite directorial criticisms.  But I was surprised at their willingness to go all-out even with some of the racier material.  Currently I have at home the third and final Sarah Waters adaptation, Affinity, my least favorite of her books.   The film so far is acceptable, though I feel the same sense of disengagement as I had when I read the book.  Perhaps I would’ve found the whole thing more interesting if I wasn’t already very familiar with the whole medium scene from other books.  (If I recall correctly, it played a decent sized role in a book I love, The Prestige, but also had a lot of information in one of Mary Roach’s non-fiction books.)  Kind of took away the feeling of mystery which is somewhat essential for its very Victorian Gothic thing to work.

I did finish reading Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates while I was sick.  I started this one after hearing about the film version, which is this year’s big Oscar bait come winter.  It was allegedly a staple so I figured I should read it since it sounds like the kind of movie I would see.  However, it didn’t sound like the kind of book I would read.  I’m sorry but I’ve never been big on the suburban malaise genre.  But I’m glad I made the effort.

In the times I’ve discussed this book since reading it I’ve found a comparison that works pretty well.  Similar to suburban malaise, I hate novels about 60’s radicals.  It’s not that I find the subject matter inherently uninteresting.  It’s that so many novels have been written and they pretty much all say the same thing.  I have found only two such novels that I actually love (American Woman by Susan Choi and American Pastoral by Philip Roth) and the two of them take such interesting and nuanced looks at the issue that I see no reason to read any of the other drivel.  I now feel similarly about Revolutionary Road and its place in the suburban malaise oeuvre.  I’ve never been a big fan of Updike, who is generally presented as one of the big names in mid-century American fiction.  And now I no longer feel guilty about it.  Yates is just so good at what he does that I just want to find everything he’s ever written.

It’s hard to really put down succinctly what Revolutionary Road is.  It has a look at the suburbs as they began, in the 50’s and 60’s (being a crazy Mad Men fan I was already comfortable in the time period), and what moving to the suburbs stands for.  Its main characters, Frank and April Wheeler, are the kind of people most middle-class people are: the ones who think that they’re really better than the life they’re leading.  I love how Yates presents them without an agenda.  Never are their ideas inherently endorsed or ridiculed.  In fact, I’m not sure there was any happy way for this story to work out.  I got the sense that by the time the novel began any hope had already been lost.  But I love a writer who lets me make those judgments myself.  Mostly I love how Yates really gets in the heads of his characters, you are very much with them, you understand their decisions.  In fact, my main concern for the movie is that without those inner moments their actions may seem strange and unexplained.

It’s rare that I read a book and already know it will be on my favorite books of the year list.  This one has the potential to get on my favorite books ever list.  And it’s a crime that it’s been overlooked for so long.  I see no reason why it shouldn’t be on the list of 100 Best American 20th Century novels.  To me, it should be around the top 20, and most definitely in the top 50.  And why haven’t I heard of it before?  I’m a pretty literate girl, so now I’m making my own push.  Hopefully the movie will help.  But if you’re looking for something solid and interesting, the kind of book you can talk about and think about but that isn’t a real chore to read, this is it.  And after reading it, I’m thinking about giving a closer look to some authors I may have overlooked before.  I had a similar eye-opening moment a couple years ago with William Styron.  How many others are there out there that I haven’t found yet?

I almost hate to crowd just one entry with two such big things.  The second is my re-read of The Night Watch by Sarah Waters.  You probably already know I’ve been on a Waters kick since July when I finally read her first novel, Tipping the Velvet.  I read them in reverse order and I thought I should revisit TNW since it’s been a year or two since I read it and I had no idea what it was or who Waters was at the time.  It’s also the most different of her books, which are often told in a very intimate first-person style with lots of twists and turns.  TNW is something vastly superior to her other writing, which was hugely entertaining.  TNW is a bigger and more ambitious book.  It’s less tied to the lesbian concerns and themes of her other book, although homosexuality still plays a large role.  It’s still recognizably Waters, especially with her chosen storytelling device: working backwards.

It’s the kind of decision that could feel gimmicky, but what’s so astounding is the suspense it manages to give to the novel.  It should be the other way around.  If you start at the end, especially the end of WWII, and you already know who’s alive and who’s dead, who’s together and who’s broken up, you’d think there wouldn’t be much interest in what came before.  But Waters manages to use that foreknowledge to add a lot of pathos to your reading.  My favorite character in the book, Kay, begins the novel (at the end) as very lonely and wandering.  And it makes her earlier happier scenes that much more interesting and heartbreaking when you know where she ends up.

The book, which starts in 1947, moves to 1944, and ends in 1941, follows the lives of four intertwined characters.  They are gay and straight, women and men, rich and poor.  And it’s the diversity of their experiences that is part of what’s so interesting in the novel.  Waters’s previous books have looked at particular time periods and particular groups who lived outside of society.  Here, the characters lack that uniting factor, the only thing they have in common is the war.  War novels are another of those very common, almost overdone genres, but I hadn’t seen this version of London in the war before and I really enjoyed it.  The book looks most specifically at the nightly bombings, their immediate effects and their lasting effects.  One of my favorite scenes follows two characters as they walk, late at night, through a bombed out part of the city that’s practically deserted.

Looking at it through the lens of Waters’s big issues, it’s interesting to finally get to see lesbian characters allowed to walk about in men’s clothing without fear.  And yet there’s still a real feeling of secrecy, perhaps even more than in the previous books where the characters all managed to find shelter for their lifestyle somehow.

Mostly, though, the book hits me on an emotional level unlike most of what I’ve read this year.  I think I liked it more the second time.  I was bringing it to class to read, but had to stop.  There was no way I was reading the most heartwrenching scenes in front of a bunch of people and having to stand up a few minutes later and teach.  It deserved to be taken on its own time.

One of the most enjoyable reads I’ve had.  I’m only sad it won’t make my best-of-the-year list since I read it a few years ago.  (It was on my best-of list the year I read it.)  But it was a joy to read again.

I noted on the other blog last week that I was sick.  I am still sick.  We’re on Day 8 (9 if you count that I started feeling bad last Monday night).  I am on antibiotics now and it looks like I’m on the mend but it’s been long and incredibly boring.  It was a very bad week for netflix to have shipping problems.  Very bad.  I have watched an entire season of The West Wing.  Last week I couldn’t read much and was stuck with just tv.

Fortunately I got my netflix movies on Friday.  I promptly watched Fingersmith all the way through.  I love that the BBC is so risque.  I doubt you’d see something like that on PBS in the US.  It’s been about a year since I read the book, which was just long enough that I forgot about the big huge twist until about 30 seconds before it happened.  Man, that’s a twist.  It’s one among many in one of the twistier books I’ve ever read.  Still it was an excellent adaptation.  I loved the actress who played Maud (her IMDB says she was in the new Room with a View, which I skipped since I just saw the old one, I’ll have to throw it in my netflix if it’s available)  she had just the right mix of crazy and lovely.  Plus it’s always fun to see a real serious actor chewing it up, like Imelda Staunton does here.

I also watched The Getaway the other day, the last movie in Filmspotting’s heist marathon.  The movie was decent.  Ali McGraw is a terrible actress.  I spent more of the movie thinking about The Kid Stays In the Picture than McGraw’s character.  But the highlight was the early scenes.  The whole movie is filmed on location throughout Texas.  The early prison interior shots looked a lot like The Walls unit, where I used to go regularly for work.  I was positive once I saw the gold bars, definitely the Walls.  Although the exterior shots were another place.  It’s possible they did it at Byrd, another unit not far away that I recall being more isolated.  I’ve scoured the internet and can’t seem to find out which one.  For shame, internet, this is supposed to be what you’re good for.

A bunch of fluff is moving to the top of my netflix queue.  This is probably a good thing, since there are multiple serious foreign films that I never feel like watching here at home.

Reading hasn’t been too easy, as I said.  I lack the concentration.  But this week now that I’m on meds I’m feeling better and hopefully I can read a little.  I went to the library today and picked up two books I had on hold.  One is The Likeness by Tana French, which I am crazy to read.  The second is Revolutionary Road, a classic of suburban malaise from the 50’s that I’ve been meaning to read.  I actually bought a copy but have lost it and can’t track it down.  I finally caved and got it from the library.  I read the first couple chapters tonight and it’s already incredibly good.  I’m excited to read it. I’m excited to read anything right now.  I’m so sick of being sick.

I did finally finish Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72, which has been a bit of a slog.  I can’t blame the book, really.  But I do know who wins the election.  And it’s depressing.  And it only makes me worry about having another depressing election.  And it left me rather sad about the state of things.  Not just politics.  I mean, isn’t it kind of great that the traveling press with McGovern all got high on the press plane?  I doubt you’d see that now.  As much as I’m addicted to news, I also hate the 24-hour cycle.  I will be happy when we get into real actual election news instead of the drivel we have now.  But I’ll be happier when it’s over.  I do like Thompson’s writing style, but I admit that I particularly liked the chapters where something went wrong and he was all messed up and couldn’t write and would just dictate to an editor.  Those chapters were my favorites.

I also read a book called The Senator’s Wife by Sue Miller which I got at the library for no real reason.  Didn’t like it much.  It was a book without a point.  And you kind of need a point.  And it’s hard to have a book about these two women in strange marriages that seems to be more about the marriages than the women without ever telling us hardly anything about the men.  It was strange.  I don’t see where she intended to go.

I have to travel for work next week.  I may have to stock up on books.  Or steal Eric’s kindle.  I will be seriously bored.  Maybe I’ll go see movies I haven’t seen or something, who knows.  But I’ll have at least two big days of nothing to fill up.  Bleh.

I couldn’t wait to write about The Age of Shiva by Manil Suri until l was all done, but I’ll go into more detail now that I’ve finished it.  But it’s the kind of book that had me very wrapped up in it all the time, whether I was reading it or not.  It got me thinking a lot about women and control and going with or against society.

The book follows Meera from her days as a teenager well into adulthood.  She stumbles into her first love affair, going after the boy mostly because she wants to steal him away from her older sister, a girl who tends to get her own way all the time.  She is successful, but not in the kind of way you would hope for.  A series of events leaves Meera married to this boy, Dev, before she has any idea of the consequences of her actions.

This is only the first in a long series of events that seem to show Meera working directly against her own best interests.  This kind of self-sabotage can be hard to understand in a book, but Suri taps right into her motivations.  Meera is raised by a very modern father, who tries to get his daughters to be self-sufficient women.  He urges them to put an end to the chauvinistic and antiquated traditions of their ancestors.  One example is that he forbids them from a formal show of respect where you bow down and touch the feet of the elder.  It is a general tradition, but also one specific to women and their husbands.  This tradition in particular plays an important part in the plot.

If Meera’s father wants her to be self-sufficient, his actions don’t really seem to say so.  He believes in a modernized society, but still seems to be caught up in a male-dominated system.  He tries to manipulate Meera into making decisions which he feels will be for her own good.  The pressure often makes Meera go in exactly the opposite direction, even when she should have long been a woman in her own right.  But it’s not only Meera’s father who pushes her.  Her husband’s family is very caught up in the old rites and traditions.  And Dev only follows along with the manipulations of Meera’s father, trying to get himself ahead using the man’s connections.

Pushing back against them rarely helps Meera.  She often finds herself in problems mostly of her own making or loses the chance to take advantage of an opportunity.  It is a frustrating situation, but one you can’t help but understand.  The book’s real impetus is what happens after Meera has a child.  Finally there is a male in her life who looks to her with love and without expectation.  Still, as most women would anticipate, this doesn’t lead to the kind of complete fulfillment she expects.

This was one of those books where I was impressed at how a man made a female character come to life.  Her narration always feels very honest, but allows you to objectively evaluate her decisions at the same time.  Near the end things feel rushed, years go by in a few pages, but it’s a minor complaint.

It’s also one of those books that gives you the chance to learn a lot about India.  There is a lot about politics, Indian independence, Nehru and Indira Gandhi.  If you haven’t read any Indian fiction before, it takes a while to get used to all the new words, especially names.  Biji and Paji for mother and father, bahu for wife.  There are many ceremonies in the book that I was unfamiliar with, but they are relatively well explained.  My favorite was Holi, a festival where you celebrate by throwing colored powder at people.  There are also many stories of hindu gods, especially Shiva, Vishnu and Parvati.  If you’re new to Indian fiction, it would probably be a good place to start.

I also got through my new Karin Fossum mystery pretty quickly, Black Seconds.  I have to say that it seems like Fossum’s mysteries are getting smaller.  This one is short, certainly, but it and The Indian Bride, the last one I read, both happen on a much smaller scale.  There are less witnesses, less characters, only a few families that are involved.  It is clear in this book who is likely to have been involved in the crime, the only issue is what exactly happened.  I must say, I preferred The Indian Bride, which really took me by surprise at the end.  Often her books don’t have any big reveals, instead letting you work things out along the way with Inspectors Sejer and Skarre.  Still, I can’t not recommend her books.  I do like them quite a lot.  (Also, having married into a Norwegian last name, I now search them to see if there are any nice Norwegian names I would consider giving our children.  So far, the answer is definitely no.)

Thinking of Karin Fossum, for some reason, makes me remember Natsuo Kirino.  She’s a very popular Japanese crime writer who just put out her second book in the U.S. and I can’t get it at the library.  Searching on Amazon, I found a third which I hadn’t even heard of.  Crazy.  I really liked her first book, Out, it had a real-ness to it that is usually lacking in crime fiction.  But I say that with a grain of salt.  Part of the story was completely insane, but I liked the balance of it.  I don’t think she’s for everyone, definitely an extreme to Fossum who’s very reader-friendly.  I think Kirino may turn a lot of people away, but I’m definitely going to make more of an effort to seek out her other novels.

I have at home one of my big-goal books, Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford, author of one of my favorite novels, The Good Soldier.  It is here and it is possible I will read it, but I wouldn’t hold out hope.

I am also continuing to make progress on The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence.  I am over my previous annoyance.  I’m back loving him again.

Just got back from a rather disappointing trip to the movies.  Eric and I go a lot.  More than most people.  And sadly, it just doesn’t pay back in dividends.  I could pick out probably 5 of the movies we’ve seen this year that were good.  Maybe.  Pineapple Express wasn’t one of them.  Take note: Seth Rogen is not a straight man.  Also, maybe a few funny parts would have been good.  Or, in the alternative, lots and lots more Red (played by Danny McBride).  But as it was it didn’t seem to settle happily into campiness, but the more serious parts manage to fall flat.  One of those cases where the preview was funnier than the movie.  I hate when that happens.  (A shocking turn of events: Eric is so disillusioned that he has now decided to skip Tropic Thunder to avoid what he is sure will be epic disappointment.  Wow.)  Now, David Gordon Green, can you go back to making movies I like?

Sometimes there’s a book I really want to read that manages to get lost in the shuffle when I get it at the same time as lots of other books.  Sometimes I never even get around to it.  Fortunately, I did finally crack open The Age of Shiva by Manil Suri.  I’d read his previous book, The Death of Vishnu, back when I was on a pretty heavy Indian/Bangladeshi lit kick.  It was one of my favorites of all the ones I read, even though I remember feeling so turned off by the description.  The book looks back and forth between the struggles of different families living in an apartment building in Bombay, focusing on them through one man who is slowly dying in the stairwell.  Sounds awesome, right?  But actually I really loved it.  And reading Shiva reminded me why.  He’s just such a good writer.  He brings you right into his characters so immediately.

TAOS is the story of a woman who seems to constantly find her life moving in unexpected directions.  She never makes decisions for herself, but always seems to be reacting to others.  Specifically, she prefers to do exactly what the men in her life don’t want her to do.  It’s a really interesting look at the history of India, but also shows you just how difficult it can be to be a fully-realized woman in a culture that won’t allow you to be one.  Meera, the main character, is raised by her father to be intelligent and literate and a woman in her own right.  But having that forced on her tends to get her caught up in the highly conservative family of her eventual husband and their archaic traditions.

But the story is really just gravy because Suri is just that good.  Reading his books is a joy.  I am still very curious to see where Meera is going to end up.  And I also feel like I always understand why she makes the decisions she does, that self-destructiveness of youth that tends to creep in to even the most important choices.  I’m very glad I didn’t take it back to the library.

When I stopped by said library today, I finally got my new Karin Fossum mystery.  I love my Inspector Sejer, and I’m hoping this one lives up to her normal level.  I’ve been too busy lately to get lots of reading done, but hopefully I’ll find a bit more time.

Btw, if you’re not watching Mad Men Season 2, are you high?  It is great so far.  The second episode was pretty killer.  It makes up for the seriously lackluster season of Project Runway currently on the airwaves.  I am not much for the Olympic-watching, so I’ll just stick to my favorites.  (The Olympic death knell for me came back in 2000, with my college roommates, when Bob Costas wouldn’t stop talking.  Since then, I haven’t been much for the Olympics.  And I hate Bob Costas.  Oh, and did you know that technically the word “Olympic” is like uber-trademarked?  I read about it back in law school.  You can’t name your restaurant The Olympic Cafe because they will sue your butt.  Which just makes me less likely to watch.)

I really loved In the Woods by Tana French, a book I read a few months ago.  It also happened to win this year’s Edgar Award for debut novel.  I mentioned a few times on the blog just how much I loved it but didn’t really go into detail.  That’s because I was planning to do a podcast on it. This is my second, I mentioned my first back here in April.  They’re part of Books You Should Read, a show made up of listener contributions.  I finally got around to making my podcast this weekend.  I hope I got across just how much I like the book instead of just saying I liked it over and over again.  You can go here to download my new one.  (Click the button to download the latest episode.)

Last night I finally finished City of Thieves by David Benioff.  I hadn’t planned to read it last night, I usually read it in bed and I was already pretty tired.  But Eric was taking up most of the bed and I couldn’t get comfortable so I figured I might as well read.  I definitely like the book, but pretty much everything I wrote in the last entry holds.  You reach a certain point where you’ve been shocked and horrified so many times that it loses its effect.  This may actually be the intent, since the same thing happens to the narrator, but it’s not my favorite kind of reading experience.  I like Benioff, and it couldn’t have been an easy book to write, but it left me a little unsatisfied.  It’s always hard when you follow an author’s career.  At some point, they leave behind what you like and try something else and it’s a struggle.  (Like when Zadie Smith wrote The Autograph Man, which was simply awful.)  All I can do now is wait to see what he does after this.

Went to the library today and was mad that they’d taken my reserved books off the shelf.  Apparently you only get a hold for a week.  I thought I was within my week, but apparently the books came in before the notice went out.  (This shouldn’t have surprised me.  I’ve come in before after getting notice of one book in and found three.)  Granted, I have plenty to deal with already, but I could’ve had the new Karin Fossum book today and that has me a little bummed.

I have library books due that can’t be renewed.  I really need to finish them, but I’m having trouble.

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 by Hunter S. Thompson is certainly interesting, especially given our current political climate.  But I got hung up for a few days while I tried to figure out what the heck actually happened at the democratic convention.  It involved a vote and women in South Carolina and confusing everyone, but they were so good at being confusing that I was lost.  Since a lot of the book was published in Rolling Stone throughout the year, it tends to assume that I know what’s going on.  I usually don’t.  The internet was unusually unhelpful.  It took a lot of searches before I finally found a link that explained it to me, and I’m not even sure I could find it again.  It all left me a little exhausted, plus I already know Nixon wins, so that doesn’t give me a whole lot of incentive to watch it happen.  And I haven’t read enough Thompson before to know if he’s really serious when he says certain people were stoned on acid during the convention.

The other book I need to get in is City of Thieves by David Benioff, he of the incredibly awesome novel The 25th Hour of a few years ago .  Since then he’s written a book of short stories (that was good) and a few movies (which, for the most part, were not so good).  It’s only his second novel and he goes totally outside the box.  It’s set in WWII Russia, when the Germans were invading during that incredibly cold winter.  And it may be the most depressing novel ever.  It reminds me of when we studied the holocaust in school.  When you keep getting horror after horror thrown at you, it’s exhausting.  By the fourth chapter or so we’d already run into cannibalism.  And it gets worse from there.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good book, he’s a great writer, but there’s only so much I can take at a time.  Whereas 25th Hour is the kind of book I like to swallow in one sitting.  It’s good enough that I’m forgiving him for what started as a trend and has now turned into a full cliche: the novel that stars someone who has the author’s name and may or may not actually be him.  The story of the novel comes from someone named David Benioff asking his grandfather about his experiences in Russia.  I’m overlooking that.  But I do really love that the great quest the hero and his companion undergo is the search for chickens.  Seriously, the cover has two guys trudging through snow after a chicken.  (The chicken is very tiny, but it’s definitely a chicken.)  It’s not really funny, starvation never is, but there is a good deal of levity in the book.  Just not enough to make all the starvation and merciless killing go away.  I just worry that too much of these horrors takes away the kind of psychological depth I want from Benioff’s writing.  That was the beauty of25th Hour, the way you got into these characters heads, the way you felt really pulled into them.  I don’t feel like he can really get into much character discovery here.  How much can you really discover about yourself in these situations?  Surviving is the number one goal, there’s not a whole lot else.  But he’s trying and I’ll see if he’s successful.  Let’s just say I’m glad it’s a short book and that I’m nearing the end.

In the meantime, some of my other library books sit untouched.  And two more are waiting for me on request, assuming they still have them Monday.  (I keep forgetting to go to the library this week.)  I am making decent progress through Women in Love, though I admit I’m getting a bit fatigued with D.H. Lawrence.  That’s all I’m reading right now, which is a relatively low number given the summer so far.  I’m not watching much either.  We’ll see if my numbers start going down as I get busier for the next month.

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