Bookish Thoughts

This was a lovely little story about love and identity with just a hint of magic sprinkled over the top for flavoring. The bulk of it takes place in San Francisco in the 1940s, where several women are living and making art on the fringes of society. When two of them fall in love, it's almost too good to be true. And when their relationship is inevitably threatened, the two have to find a way to stay together. There were so many elements of this story that I loved - the history, the art, the love story. Klages clearly did a lot of research and her setting comes to life on the page. She examines both the queer experience and the immigrant experience at this particular place and time and the incredible specificity is a great illustration of what this was like in general. I wish there had been a hint more magic, but what was there was a nice bit of seasoning for what was, at it's core, historical fiction. I was just expecting something that leaned a bit more heavily towards fan...

I discovered Isabel Allende about a year ago, and I've really liked her books so far. I was prepared to fall head over heels in love with this one, which is the one everyone always references when they talk about her. Unfortunately that didn't quite happen. But I think it had more to do with mismatched expectations than the book itself. This is Allende's first novel, and I had to remind myself of that while I was reading it. It's not quite as polished as some of her later works. I particularly had trouble with the shifting narrators. The book shifts between two first person narratives. But the identity of the second narrator is revealed so late in the book (and looking back, refers to herself in the third person more often than not) that there might as well have been three narrators. Except that the epilogue makes it pretty clear there were only two. When I wasn't struggling with who was telling the story, I mostly enjoyed it. It's an epic family saga, set a...

I'd been saving this book to read while I was in Mexico over New Year's. Then it was so short and so good that I ended up finishing it almost before we arrived. Like Water for Chocolate  is part cookbook, part romance, part family epic. It centers on Tita. As the youngest daughter, she's destined to remain single and care for her mother for her entire life. When she falls in love, her mother does everything in her power to prevent the two from getting together, leading to much strife and drama. But Tita is the family cook, and her emotions come spilling out in her food, like The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake  in reverse. Everything in this book was heightened, from the emotion to the conflicts. It was no surprise that this all occasionally erupted in magical displays. But it also all stayed grounded through the traditional recipes that Tita prepared for her family. Those recipes are woven in in a way that makes you think you just might be able to replicate them. But ...

At it's core, this is a story about a family curse. The book alternates between two timelines. The past timeline details the events that led to the family being cursed and its immediate repercussions. In the present, the latest descendant discovers this curse on his family and takes steps to break it. But breaking the curse might break him. Woven around this skeleton are any number of fantastical elements: a travelling circus, mermaids, and tarot cards. Tying it all together is a book, handed down through generations, lost and found, until it shows up right where it needs to be. This book was slow and atmospheric. There isn't a lot of action, it's more about relationships that are built up and tested, strained and repaired and sometimes broken entirely. It's about the ways your family and history can trap you. The things you need to do to break free and live your own life. I really loved this book. The family saga is epic, and the magic is woven in so subtly you c...

Years ago I read a short story by Aimee Bender ("The Color Master") and fell deeply in love with her writing. I don't usually become quite so attached to an author based on such a small sampling of work. But that story was just that good. It made me miss my metro stop, which has only happened to me two other times in my life (Patrick Rothfuss and Brandon Sanderson. So that's the kind of company she's in in my mind). I wanted to read more of her work, but I was also scared. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake  was always there on the shelf at the bookstore, taunting me. It couldn't possibly be as good as that short story I read. Maybe that short story wasn't even as good as I remembered. But I re-read The Color Master, and I still loved it, so when I saw her novel at the library sale, it finally felt like time to pick it up. I shouldn't be surprised that I loved this book, which is about family and sorrow and expectations. It went in a very differe...

Well I'm officially in love with Isabel Allende. She writes beautiful, lyrical, romantic historic fiction with incredibly real characters. It brings the history alive, and her tendency to branch out and explore the lives of secondary characters allows for a lot of sympathy as well as multiple reactions to the events she writes about. Island Beneath the Sea follows Zarité (aka Tété), a woman born into slavery on Saint-Domngue. She lives through the Haitian Revolution before moving with her master to New Orleans, where she eventually achieves freedom for herself and her children. Tété is a wonderful character, strong and fierce and intelligent. She makes incredible sacrifices for the sake of her children, doing everything in her power to keep her family together. Her resilience is astounding, as is the naivete of her master, who is sure that the two of them have a bond that goes deeper than owner and property (mostly because he's the owner and has the luxury of delusion). ...

I came to write this review and I'm suddenly realizing that I barely remember this book. Which is weird. It hasn't been that long since I read it. I expected it to stick with me longer than this. Oyeyemi's work generally does (I'm still haunted by certain sentences in Mr. Fox ). And I guess that ought to inform this review. There were a few stories in here that stuck with me, for good or ill. The first one, Books and Roses , was amazing and deserves a re-read to untangle all the different layers. Is Your Blood as Red as This? is also lodged in my memory, but more because it's weird than because I enjoyed it. And other stories have escaped my memory completely. I know that I enjoyed reading this book. And maybe it was just that I was too tired, or trying to fit it around caring for Gavin in a way that didn't work. The stories weren't really long enough to sink into completely, but they were too long for me to read any of them in a single sitting. Except ...

Everyone was talking about this book when it came out. I knew that it was about rich teenagers. I was vaguely aware that there was a twist ending, mostly because no seemed to want to talk about it. There were just a bunch of pleas, everywhere, to read this book because it was so good. Having read it, I get it. It's hard to talk about this book without talking about the ending. The ending re-contextualizes the whole story, making you go back and question everything you read. What I wasn't expecting, and was presently surprised by, was the element of magical realism in this book. Cady describes her emotional reactions as physical manifestations, which both convey how unwieldy both she and her mother find those emotions. Her mother's constant pleas that she just pull herself together and act normal seem almost justified when Cady is talking about melting into a puddle on the floor or her brains spilling out of her ears. Her imagery is so specific and blends so seamlessly...

I still want to live in this book. I suppose I'll just have to settle for re-visiting it once a year or so. The Night Circus is a fantastic, romantic story with just enough magic to intrigue and just enough description to let the reader's imagination run wild. It's a comfortable book, and it's perfect to take on vacation. I liked it even better the second time through. I knew what was going to happen, so I was able to meander through the book a little more. I took my time and stretched out, and I caught a bunch of things I skipped right by on the first time when I just wanted to know how it all ended up. I still read it in essentially one sitting, but that's just because I happened to be at an airport and on a plane without much else to do. The story felt richer this time around, as I picked up on some thematic background that I'd missed the first time through. Most notably the fear of ending up along that gets threaded through the story and ultimately pu...

Dandelion Wine is a book steeped in nostalgia. On the surface it's about being twelve years old in the summer time. But it's also about remembering being twelve years old in the summer time. It's about growing up and growing old, remembering your past and letting it go. This book is more a series of connected short stories. They all take place in the same town, and they're all observed and commented on by Douglas and his brother, Tom. They're the main players in a few of the stories, but in others they're just on the fringes. As will happen in a short story collection, even an informal one like this, I liked some stories better than others. I really liked the commentary of the two boys as they struggled to make sense of an adult world. And I liked the overall feel of the book. Bradbury's language is very poetic, well-suited to describing childhood summers. There were some elements of science-fiction (a happiness machine) and magic (the cure for a feve...

I'm about halfway through the final Wheel of Time book, but I found myself needing a break. That book is essentially an 1100 page battle, which can be wearing. I'm someone who tends to completely skip over battle scenes in books, so a book, so I've been having a hard-time focusing. I decided I needed a break, and Neil Gaiman's most recent short story collection was exactly the palate cleanser I wanted. I've been a fan of Gaiman since I got American Gods  for my 18th birthday, and a fan of his short stories since college, when I could never find the time to devote to anything longer. So I was excited when he released a new collection. Then I was surprised to discover how many of these stories I'd already read. Not because they're in previous collections (only one appeared in a collection I already owned), but because I follow Gaiman's online presence, and a lot of these have popped up on the web at one point or another. I heard Gaiman perform (is that...

I picked this book up in the airport in Istanbul when we were there in October. I'd been meaning to read Elif Shafak's work for a while, and since she's one of Turkey's most popular authors, it seemed like a good souvenir. I wasn't really sure what it was about, except that my mother-in-law really enjoyed it as an Armenian American. And boy, does this book dive into the Armenian-Turkish conflict. I'm glad I married in to an Armenian family and had some context for this book going into it. Granted, that's all from the Armenian side of things. But it was still good background to have. The book follows two families. One is Armenian-American, living in San Francisco after the grandmother was forced out during the genocide. The other lives in Turkey. The Armenians are focused on the past. Everything they do and believe is shaped by the genocide, even for young Armanoush who is threee generations removed from it. The Turkish family is more focused on the pr...

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven was a book club pick that I was particularly excited for. I've been meaning to read Sherman Alexie's work for years, so it was nice to finally have a firm excuse to put him at the top of my reading list. This collection of short stories packs a punch. Many of the stories are short, but they're dense. I had trouble reading more than two or three at a time, meaning that it took me a week to read the book. Which is saying something, since I frequently read books of similar length in a single day. But these stories took a lot of digesting. There's a lot of pain and anger that can't be funneled into anything except writing, so the reader experiences the full force of it. I was frequently caught off guard by single sentences that exploded into my brain and refused to let me go on. There are a lot of repeated themes: poverty, alcoholism, basketball, stories. This is another reason it helped to slow down with t...

I felt a little bad when I abandoned  Middlemarch  after 120 pages. I don't often abandon books, and there's always some residual guilt that comes along with it. But then I picked up Junot Diaz's  The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao , and I fell head over heels in love on practically the first page. This is why I let myself abandon books - so I have more time to spend with the ones I enjoy. The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao  is not just about Oscar Wao. It's about his entire family, going back to the time of his grandfather, who was cursed. The entire family struggles with the curse, coming back again and again to play out the same tragedies, unable to break free. But it's also about the Dominican Republic, the immigrant experience in America and diaspora. About not really being able to go home, but not quite fitting in in your new home either. It's about the toxicity of machismo culture, which Oscar struggles to live up to his entire life and Lola may o...

Signal to Noise  is probably the closest I'm ever going to get to a musical in book form. (Well, until ebook technology and creativity mesh in exciting new ways that have to happen sooner or later). The story is about Meche, who is obsessed with music and, thanks to her DJ father, has a deep knowledge of a number of genres. She plays music constantly, flipping around to find a song that matches her mood. I knew most of the songs she referenced well enough to hear them in my head. More than once, I put the book down long enough to pull up the appropriate song on youtube so it could be the background for the scene I was reading. It made the whole experience much richer. The story is split into two timelines. In 1988, Meche is a high schooler in Mexico City, hanging out with her fellow misfit friends and discovering the magic of music. And I mean literal magic. When they find the right record, they can make things happen, punishing their enemies, healing their friends, and coming ac...

Every now and then you come across a book that seems like it was written just for you. Helen Oyeyemi's  Mr. Fox  is, as I mentioned, a retelling of the English folktale, Mr. Fox. It's more than that, though, bringing in elements of Bluebeard and Fitcher's Bird. Reynardine makes a significant enough appearance that I went to look him up. There are probably other, similar folktales woven through that I didn't recognize. Oyeyemi is amazingly well-researched. And her ability to weave together all these tales, to find the common threads, is amazing. Although the structure of the book certainly lends itself to a multitude of related tales. Mr. Fox  centers on a famous author, St. John Fox, who has a habit of of killing the women in his stories. He has a wife named Daphne, who appears passive at first ("I fixed her early", Mr. Fox claims. "I told her in heartfelt tones that one of the reasons I love her is because she never complains. So now of course she ...

It's always disappointing to dive into a classic, beloved book and discover that it is just not meant for you. I really wanted to like this book. I enjoy magical realism as a genre, and I remember liking what I read of Marquez in AP Spanish in high school. But this book was such a slog that I gave up after about 150 pages. There were a couple of cool things. At one point the entire town is struck by insomnia and slowly begins losing their memories. I enjoyed reading about that, but I wish it had gone on longer. Because the book covers seven generations (100 years), no one episode gets more than a few pages. Anything that was interesting was quickly over and I was left with characters that I didn't care much about. The characters were the biggest problem I had with this book. They were constantly getting in their own way. Creating misery for themselves like they were all suffering from the same stupid martyr complex. One woman falls deeply in love with a man. He eventually f...

Bless Me, Ultima  is a book I missed back in high school. My sophomore year was American Literature. The school decided to start a new class that combined American Lit with American History into a single 3-hour class. But because I was science track, I opted for the regular, easier english and history classes that year. And I ended up with a different reading list because of it. So while all my friends read and fell in love with  Bless Me Ultima , I was keeping busy with  The Great Gatsby  and  Catcher in the Rye . (My friends probably read those, too. I think the advanced class had an expanded reading list, not a different one.) Recently I saw this book on a best-of list, then encountered it at a used book store for $1. Which meant that I basically had to read it. I think I may have enjoyed this book more had I read it in a classroom setting. It reads like a lot of the other books I read for school, heavy on the metaphor. And each chapter works fairly well ...

I came at this book from an interesting angle. At my mother-in-law's suggestion I watched the movie before reading the book so that I could experience the various layers of the text.  I can't really judge, having never experienced this story any other way, but I'm gonna go ahead and say she was right. Knowing the ending made certain scenes much more horrific. And it made it easier to follow what was going on. The story in the movie is far more linear than the one presented in the book. It makes sense for the book. For the bulk of the story, time has no real meaning or relevance. And presenting the action as a series of disjointed events which may have happened in any order fits with the frame of Pi remembering this journey. That said, it bugged me that Richard Parker was named, but not revealed to be a tiger, until well after he arrived on the life boat. Though that's probably just because I knew he was a tiger and was waiting impatiently for that reveal....

The eighth volume in Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, Worlds' End , is easily my favorite. It's another collection of short stories, but these are connected with a Chaucer-like framework. Several beings, finding themselves caught in various storms, make their way to the Worlds' End Inn. While the storm rages outside, the pass the time telling stories to each other. The stories are a lot of fun. One concerns the dreams of a city. Another is a fairly standard tale of a girl dressing as a boy so she can live as a sailor. My favorite takes place in an idealized America where a young president is able to unlock the potential of what our country can be. Between stories we return to the Inn, to see the conversations the characters are having there. And to finally discover the reason for the storm that has driven all of them there. In some ways, this volume represents the end of the series, with the next two volumes delving in to what happened and why and what w...