One Girl's Books

What's Going On?

No real excuse for not updating more frequently.

I haven't been reading as much as I used to - work getting in the way I guess.

But here are a few items....

Rather than lugging around Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth on a recent trip to Ireland, I downloaded the audiobook. I am not big on historical fiction, but I absolutely loved this book. Part of me thinks I wouldn't have enjoyed the book as much if I had "read" it as opposed to listening to the novel.

The book takes place in the 12th century and concerns the epic task of building the fictional Kingsbridge Cathedral. There are tons of characters, lots of different story lines and a surprising amount of sex!

The unabridged audiobook is about 40 hours long. I listened on the train cutting across Ireland and in Christ Church Cathedral  in Dublin which was built in the 13th century. I listened while trapped in the airport during a 5-hour layover and when I returned home. It's an epic tale in the best sense.

 

I am currently listening to the sort-of sequel, World Without End.  It takes place a couple hundred years later, in the same fictional town of Kingsbridge. I'm only a few hours in to the audiobook, but it seems to be holding up well against Pillars. The same reader is used for both books and he is perfect.

The Road - not taken

Just finished The Road by Cormac McCarthy - Oprah's and the Pulitzer committee's much-loved post-apocalyptic novel. I didn't love it. At all.

I really wanted to be moved by the story of an unnamed father and son making their way through the bleak nuclear winter of America after "the end of the world." They stop. They shiver. They eat tinned peaches. Repeat. They hide from cannibals. They push a cart. They investigate long-deserted houses. Repeat.

Some of McCarthy's language just annoyed me. He only uses contractions for certain words. Conversations have no quotations. Certain words are repeated endlessly like laved for washed, for example.

Worth reading, but not enough back story. Not enough character development. Here.

Annoyed.

About Time

I am a sucker for time-travel stories.

I've been intrigued by the concept since I was a kid. Backwards in time; forwards; whatever. The following provides a small sampling of some of my favorite time-travel tales.

The Time-Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger  - This is the class of the group. An extremely well-written and beautiful book. It took the first 50 pages to get used to the time shifting, but after that the story of Clare and Henry really moved me. Henry suffers from Chrono-Displacement Disorder which  causes him to move involuntarily through time.  It is during one of those time shifts that he meets a young Clare who years later becomes his wife. Don't hold it against the book that book clubs all over the country have this on their reading list. Here.

Time and Again by Jack Finney - I think this was the first time travel novel I ever read. Si goes back to 1880s New York with the help of a mysterious government agency. Finney wrote a couple sequels because people loved the book so much. It's a classic. Here.

To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis - Maybe it's just me, but a story involving Victorian manners, the bombing of Coventry during WWII, time travel and Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat can't miss.  I read this in 2001 for the first time and have picked it up three or four times since.  It's a comedy science fiction mystery. One of my favorites. Here.

Also....

Shortcut in Time - This is a very low-key novel. An alleyway provides the "gateway" for time travel. But the travel is only 15 minutes back. I enjoyed the concept. Here.

The Diana Gabaldon Outlander series is very popular too. Not a lot of time travel, but good romance. The first one is probably the best. Here.

Smart families are all the same?

I've been meaning to post something about a favorite small sub-genre of mine - "the eccentric family novel."

The ultimate expression of this genre is J.D. Salinger's Glass family who make appearances in several of his books, most notably Franny and Zooey. If you've only read Catcher in the Rye, you are missing out. Read Franny and Zooey first, but  just read them. Here.

Another excellent example of this genre is I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. The Mortmain family lives in a crumbling English castle and younger daughter Cassandra chronicles the family's ups and downs in a series of journals. One of my all-time favorites. How can you not like a book that begins, "I write this sitting in the kitchen sink...."? Here.

A screenplay suggestion - Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums owes a huge debt to Salinger. If you've seen the movie, try the screenplay. Hilarious. Here.

When the genre is done poorly, it really, really fails. So, don't read A Taxonomy of Barnacles by Galt Niederhoffer. The Barnacle family is not eccentric; they are boring. The Barnacle family is not quirky; they are annoying.

King Dork

Thanks to all for suggestions. Short post here:

Even though I'm having a slight existential book crisis, I have it together enough to recommend the hilarious King Dork by Frank Portman.

Portman is the founder of the Bay Area punk band The Mr. T Experience and King Dork is his first novel.

The main character, nicknamed Chi-Mo (short for child molester due to an unfortunate career aptitude test) is a teen dork who hides from reality by writing songs and coming up with band names - The Stoned Marmadukes, for example.

You will laugh. I promise.

Here.

Mergers & Acquisitions

The idea of Dana Vachon's novel about a young man of good breeding working as an analyst at a high-powered I Bank in New York was extremely appealing to me. Stories about wealth and the upper class in New York have always intrigued me. I think I might be a snob.

The execution, unfortunately, was too broadly comic for me to fully recommend. It seemed to me as if every character eventually became a just a frame to hang jokes onto. I was particularly disappointed by the monogram jokes Vachon hammered on repeatedly - the characters Manuel Oliveire Rodrigo Orjuela de Navarro (Moron, get it) and Carlos Ungaro Nunez de Talarico (see what I mean?) and others all wear their initials on their sleeves. Ha Ha.

There are some really nice sections, but Vachon takes the easy way out of pretty much every situation. Here.

Best book lists

I used to have a top 10 list of favorite books. It kept changing as new and amazing books came into my life. The list became unwieldy so I gave up the list, but enjoy looking at lists that others have compiled.

Modern Library, the wonderful  publishing house,  came out with some interesting Best 100 lists. The reader's poll leaves more than a little to be desired - Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard as the top three ! Read the lists here.

Time Magazine has a list, too - check that list out here. That list seems a lot more down to earth - with a good sprinkling of sci-fi writers.

The Guardian has a list here.

And here the 100 best opening lines!

David Copperfield

Please read David Copperfield. If you read it in high school, please read it again.

I first read it the week after I took the California Bar and I think it changed my life. Granted, at that time anything that wasn't legalese was a welcome relief after 67 straight days of 14-hour marathon study sessions, but I later read it again and loved it even more.

It is funny, sad, exciting, romantic, silly and well-deserving of its status as a classic. I'm a sucker for the bildungsroman (coming of age) genre, although apparently, Copperfield is a Kunstleroman (development of an artist) novel.

Some of my favorite characters are in this book, including Mr Micawber who says my favorite line:

'Gentlemen,' returned Mr. Micawber, 'do with me as you will! I am a straw upon the surface of the deep, and am tossed in all directions by the elephants-I beg your pardon; I should have said the elements.'

Neal Stephenson Angries (Angrys?) Me Up in the Blood

So back in maybe 1988 in college while wasting time at Northtown Books in Acta, I  found a copy of The Big U. by Neal Stephenson. It was on the bargain table and was marked down to like $1.50. The cover had a cartooney picture of a cheerleader type in a college dorm room reading a book that had a picture of a cheerleader type in a college dorm room reading a book and so on. I found a terribly muddy version and posted it here.  I vividly recall reading the description on the back and being totally sucked in. It starts, "One flew over the animal house..." It's a big, silly book about life on a giant college campus.

I read it right away and it became one of my favorites. I passed it along to many friends (including some that tried to kidnap it after finding out that it was out of print).

  I tracked down Zodiac soon after and loved that too. Then came  the highly influential Snow Crash (love, love, love) and The Diamond Age (somewhat conflicted love, love, love).  The Big U was whispered about on fan sites, Stephenson completely degrades the book and doesn't even include it on the list of books he has written on his website. Copies were selling on ebay for hundreds! He finally agreed to reprint in in 2001, with a new, lamer cover.

In 1999 Stephenson published Cryptonomicon, another brilliant book, featuring  And then, something terrible happened. He started sucking! I bought Quicksilver the day it came out. Still can't finish it. I have tried and tried.

What do you do when one of your favorite authors fails you?

Not even done yet, but

I'm not even done reading Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall and I feel the need to comment on it.

When I find a writer I love, I tend to zoom through all their works as fast as possible, greedily devouring them all and then feeling depressed that I ate 'em all up - this is especially horrible if the writer is dead.

Somehow with Waugh though  I wound up taking something like a 10-year break in between Brideshead Revisited and A Handful of Dust. Well, after last week's reading of Dust, I am on to Decline and Fall. It's fantastic! Funny, bitingly sarcastic and a bit sad too. He has the most brilliant names for characters - Lady Circumference! Don't get mad about the racial epithets, he was a product of his times.

I just feel lucky that I have lots more of Waugh's works to read!

A beautiful site devoted to Waugh is found here.