Bookish Thoughts

The Penelopiad  is Margaret Atwood's exploration of Penelope, wife of Odysseus in The Odyssey . What was she up to while he was gone for twenty years? How did she raise her son and manage her household and fend off all those suitors? And what of the twelve maids who seemed to alternate between loyalty and betrayal and were ultimately hanged? Atwood alternates between prose sections from Penelope's point of view and a Greek Chorus of the hanged maids told in a variety of styles, most of them verse. They offer a counterpoint, sometimes directly contradicting what Penelope claims and allowing Atwood to maintain ambiguity about a story that cannot, ultimately, be known. This book was fine. Or at least it was short. I've been hankering to re-read The Odyssey , particularly the new translation by Emily Wilson, and I thought this might help get me in the mood. But perhaps I should have waited to read it afterwards, with the original material fresher in my mind. Ultimately I di...

In Alias Grace , Margaret Atwood tries her hand at historical fiction, speculating about what might have happened in the case of Grace Marks - a young maid who was convicted of killing her master and his mistress (Grace's boss) and sentenced to life in prison. The case is murky, with changing testimonies and contradictory evidence. Atwood did a lot of research to try and get to the bottom of it and tell a coherent story about what happened from Grace's point of view. The problem is that she doesn't ever seem to come to any conclusions. Grace is an enigma wrapped in lies wrapped in misdirection. Even though she told her own story in this book, I left it without any real sense that I understood who she was. Was she lying the whole time? Was she sick? Was she faking amnesia or not? Atwood chooses to leave this all up in the air, which left me frustrated. It didn't help that the book is incredibly slow. It took over a hundred pages to get to Grace's account and even...

The Robber Bride  is a horrific book full of people doing terrible things to each other. More than  Mr. Fox , it drove the horror of this tale home, and I felt genuine concern for what would happen to some of the characters, particularly Larry. But this book also has something that I didn't think existed in Margaret Atwood's work: a happy ending. This book tells the tale of four women who met in college, when three of them lived in a boarding house together. Over the years, Zenia has hurt the other three. She's a con artist and a compulsive liar and she seduces men away from Toby, Charis, and Roz. And while she is definitely a terrible person, she's also a bit of a scapegoat. None of the women are ever really comfortable with the imbalance in their relationships, so they just blame the dissolution of them on Zenia. By the end, it's clear that it's not nearly so black and white as they would like to believe. I really enjoyed this book, which takes turns telli...

I first attempted to read  The Blind Assassin  a few years ago. But then I hit an epic reading slump and abandoned it in the hopes that something lighter or faster would help me get back in the habit of reading. It took me over a month to actually finish a book and nearly two years to return to this one. But I finally did. And I had to laugh when I managed to read in a single day what it had previously taken me nearly a week to muddle through. Like the  MaddAddam  trilogy, this book alternates between past and present. Between two different stories and two seemingly different points of view that are ultimately revealed to be the same. I enjoy this structure, though I found myself preferring the book-within-a-book to Iris' reflections on her youth and life. But that's just the sci-fi fan in me. The Blind Assassin  is ultimately a tragedy. The story of a woman who has reached the end of her life to discover that she is deeply unhappy and is wondering where it ...

The final book in Margaret Atwood's  MaddAddam  trilogy is less of a conclusion than I expected it to be. Instead of moving significantly forward, the book mimics the format of the previous two, delving into Zeb's past and the founding of both the God's Gardeners and the MaddAddam movements. It does resolve the conflict with the painballers, but beyond that it raises almost as many questions as it answers. The final pages look towards the future with hope, but with as little resolution as the previous two books. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. The trilogy feels both like it could be complete and like there could be another three books, following the Crakers into the next generation and their new life. Seeing if they can maintain their truce with the pigoons and continue to repopulate the world. Zeb's story is interesting, and helps to make the world feel much bigger. His story moves from the east coast to LA and San Francisco. As far south as Rio and farth...

Remember when I said I wouldn't have time for much reading in January? Yeah, I'm laughing at past-me, too. I'd forgotten to factor in my complete lack of social life this month. I purposely don't make plans with anyone, as a way of recovering fully from the holidays. Add in the lack of alcohol (Kevin and I don't drink between New Year's Day and his birthday, also to recover from the holidays) and I end up spending many a weekend night reading into the wee hours. It also helps that Atwood's  The Year of the Flood , like  Oryx and Crake  before it, is a really quick read. There's a lot here, but something about the format makes this book just whiz by. It's broken up into small sections that alternate between characters and timelines. Each section is only a few pages long, so it's easy to squeeze in "just one more" throughout the day.  Oryx and Crake  followed a similar pattern, and I hope in continues through the finale. It will make it...

He doesn't know which is worse, a past he can't regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there's the future. Sheer vertigo. When news broke that HBO was developing an adaptation Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy, I began seeing it everywhere. And it being written by Margaret Atwood, I decided to pick up the first book, Oryx and Crake . Oryx and Crake is narrated by a man who calls himself Snowman. He is, for all he knows, the last human left alive. He acts as a prophet to strange, human-like beings called the Children of Crake, in between finding food, getting drunk on what little alcohol remains, and reminiscing about his former life, when he was known as Jimmy, he had a best friend named Crake, and he was in love with a woman named Oryx. The book alternates between the present and past. Though Jimmy is hardly in a state to think about things linearly, so it all occasionally gets mixed together. As the novel prog...

Having re-read The Handmaid's Tale somewhat recently, I really wanted to branch out into more of Margaret Atwood's work. Cat's Eye seemed like the obvious starting point. Mostly because it was the only other novel of hers that I'd actually heard of. Parts of this book were incredibly painful. It's about bullies, but the more insidious "mean girl" bullying that doesn't involve any physical violence. Just a prolonged attack on someone's self-esteem. Atwood's slightly detached voice adds a lot to this experience, I think. You can feel Elaine fading away at one point as her best friend Cordelia makes her feel like nothing. There's one scene that's particularly hard to read in which Elaine peels the skin off the soles of her feet. As soon as I read it, I remembered one of my friends from high school describing the scene to me. It was disturbing then without context, and it's even more disturbing in the book. Elaine herself...

The Handmaid's Tale , by Margaret Atwood, is another book that I read in high school but wanted to revisit. It takes place in a near-future version of America, called Gilead, where religious fundamentalists have taken over and basically obliterated women's rights. This story is narrated by Offred, a handmaid in the employ of a Commander named Fred. She lives in his house and is forced to copulate with him once a month. She also walks into town every day to buy food as part of her regimented exercise program. Her main purpose is to get pregnant. After she successfully has a child, she will be shipped off to another house at which point the process will start all over again. If she goes six years without getting pregnant, she will be declared an Unwoman and will be sent to a forced labor camp for the rest of her life. Offred alternates between describing her life as a handmaid and reminiscing about the time before when she had a husband, a daughter, a job, a ban...