So! Second quarter has commenced.
For the past week, I’ve been celebrating the new year by (in chronological order):
-lazing about
-reading a little (see below)
-watching lots of Battlestar Galactica
-lazing about
-watching a half dozen movies
-skiing (only once, as the snow was so crappy, and the ankle I sprained in June decided to protest again)
-bopping around Bozeman, eating fabulous food and remembering how to drive on ice
-hanging with la familia (Mom, Dad, bro & cat)
-lazing about
-driving to Portland with my wonderful mom
-seeing my aunt and uncle and cooing over pictures of their grandbaby
-showing Mom Portland! (Mom, Portland. Portland, Mom. Pleased to make you mutual acquaintances.)
-eating fabulous food with Mom in Portland!
-playing games at my house with my fabulous roommates and Mom
-using Mom’s presence as an excuse to finally clean off every surface of my room and make it look thus:
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| ta-da! |
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| poetry books, cookbooks, and natural history books seem to belong together. |
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| a sunny, wintry, portlandy day |
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| after Mom left, I bought myself a pot of mini-narcissus buds as a reminder to take care of myself over the next quarter. I woke this morning to lovely blooms! |
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Over the 36 days of break, I read 10 books, which isn’t all that great, considering I read five of those over the first two days. Anyyow, here you go with mini-reviews for those 10 books, plus one that I read early in my first quarter, and one DNF.
®1. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao · · · · · · · · by Junot Díaz (10/8/2011).
This was the first and last book I read for fun during my first quarter in Portland. I loved this book, but to be completely honest, I can’t remember exactly why, because something called I DIDN’T THINK GRAD SCHOOL WOULD BE THIS HARD got in the way of my ever jotting down thoughts about this book. Fuzzy brain cells, regenerate, please! Let’s see… Fantastic narrator. Gripping storyline. Multigenerational epic (see #11 below for another gorgeous, similar book). Drama. Violence. Terror. Sex. Believable characters. Spanglish. Tons of obscure sci-fi references. Stir well, and add Dominican Republic scenery to taste. Díaz bakes all of these ingredients into a fantastic book, and if only I hadn’t waited three months to write this reviewlette, I could give you the specifics. As it is, I just remember it was delicious. 8 out of 10.
®2. A Wizard of Earthsea · · · · by Ursula K. Le Guin (12/7/2011).
Ursula Le Guin is from this part of the world (the Pacific NW), so it’s pretty much obligatory to read her. After an extremely stressful quarter in grad school, going on a sci-fi binge was the perfect way to chill out, and I dove into the Earthsea Quartet. A Wizard of Earthsea provides a quick blitz through a well-crafted storyline and setting (young wizarding adventures galore!), and made me feel like a Kid Who Reads Good because I finished in about 10 minutes. In college, I read one of Le Guin’s fabulous short stories that is very serious social-commentary sci-fi, and I was a little disappointed that A Wizard of Earthsea contains so little overt references to modern-day societal ills. However, it is a very nice romp through a fantasy world, as are the other books in the series (see #s 2, 3 & 4 below). 7 out of 10.
®3. The Tombs of Atuan · · · · by Ursula K. Le Guin (12/7/2011).
The second book in the Earthsea Quartet, this novel has a narrator who is a bad-ass priestess with absolute control over a very small piece of underground turf. She describes everything in black-and-white terms, because everything in her world is black and white. The underground darkness is her “kingdom,” and daylight aboveground is where everyone else leads unfathomable lives. As she starts to question her position and her worldviews, more light starts creeping into the absolute darkness of her underground realm, and her views of the world become more nuanced. 7 out of 10.
®4. The Farthest Shore · · · · by Ursula K. Le Guin (12/8/2011).
Next in the Earthsea novels, The Farthest Shore doesn’t disappoint. It features the repeat characters of a wise, riddle-loving old wizard and a young, impetuous prince—half of all fantasy novels contain this pairing when the protagonist is male; when it’s a girl, then the young girl is spunky, and the old woman is crotchety. This particular wizard and princeling meet all sorts, including dragons, evil undead wizards promising eternal life, and the like. Great fun. 7 out of 10.
®5. Tehanu · · · · by Ursula K. Le Guin (12/8/2011).
I finished up my first quarter of graduate school on Tuesday, 12/6, and I spent all evening bingeing on Dr. Who until I caught up with the grand over-the-top Season 4 Finale (ahhhh, how I miss David Tennant!). On Wednesday, I figured I’d better feed my brain with a bit of litterchur and since Ms. Le Guin was on my MUST READ list, I heaved the massive Earthsea Quartet off my roommate’s bookshelf and dove in. I sped-read through Wednesday night and Thursday morning (see #s 1, 2, & 3 above). As I got to Tehanu (the fourth novel in the series) I had a bit of Le Guin Fatigue. I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as the others, and felt it had even less to say about Life than the others, and even the big Aha! Moment at the end still felt shallow. Sorry, Tehanu, you fell victim to bad timing in reading on my part, and you just didn’t butter my bread. 5 out of 10.
®6. Rebecca · · · · · · · · · · · · by Daphne du Maurier (12/8/2011).
The Alfred Hitchcock version is thrilling (go Netflix it, immediately after finishing the book). Rebecca Le Book is also suspenseful, but in a much quieter way. The main character (Wife #2 of Maxim de Winter) is a romantic young woman straight from a Gothic novel who invents dialogues and conjures up sinister motives for everyone. The other characters seem to think her to be rather ridiculous—or perhaps she just imagines that they think she is ridiculous. The suspense lies in the fact that the readers are never quite sure what is the main character’s imagination and what is not—because the reader is limited by the narrator’s romantic blinders, du Maurier lets only the slightest suspicions that something else may be happening leak through. Was Rebecca (Wife #1 of M. de Winter) a gorgeous, benevolent intelligent woman? Or did she have a different character entirely? Du Maurier’s masterful tiny info-leaks build up, and by the end, the reader is on tenterhooks. 8 out of 10.
№7. Feet of Clay · · · · · · · · · · · · · by Terry Pratchett (12/9/2011)
Erm, I know Terry Pratchett is supposed to be a hilarious genius and all, but he just doesn’t quite toast my biscuit, if you know what I mean. I’d already read Good Omens and it was, well, genius in the sense that I could see how there was a little ba-bum-CHING! punchline at the end of almost every paragraph, but I just didn’t find the jokes funny. I felt like I had to give Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett another shot, so I asked my roommate to give me the best introduction-to-Terry-Pratchett Terry Pratchett book he had. He handed me Feet of Clay as if it were the Holy Bible. Nope, still not my thing. Sorry, Discworld-fans, you can start your hating now. I’m going to give Pratchett another go with Thud, but in the meantime, it’s time for me to head off to Mexico with books about travel, reading, and families. Did-not-finish (DNF) out of 10.
®8. The Art of Travel · · · · · · · · · · · · by Alain de Botton (12/18/2011).
Beautiful, poetic, quotable in its entirety, this book is well worth reading, especially while lying on a beach in Mexico. However, it very carefully outlines all of the selfish reasons why we travel (“On the Exotic,” “On Eye-Opening Art,” etc.) but completely ignores cross-cultural connections, or discoveries about modern-day societies, or humanitarian urges, or changes in our own lives prompted by reflections on others’, or any other real reason for travel. De Botton’s well-crafted essays speak to all of the personal journeys we can make, but he ignores all of the beautiful things that can happen between people when someone travels across cultures: travel can make us more tolerant of others, make us understand better how the world works, encourage us to make a difference in the world, help us see how the other half (or is it the other 99%?) lives and see elements of those lifestyles and cultures that we can incorporate into our own. De Botton, please keep on writing, because your ode to travel was magnificent and I agreed with every silver word that dripped from your brain to the page, but you stopped far too short of the ultimate goal. 8 out of 10.
®9. The Child that Books Built · · · · · · · · · · · · by Francis Spufford (12/21/2011).
Books about books are fabulous, except when they’re not. This particular effort chronicles the author’s coming-of-age through reading, which is a very intriguing idea, but memoirs always run the risk of making readers dislike the authors. An unlikable narrator can make wonderful literature, but when a peevish narrator is the author writing about himself, the author may want to write in a different genre or readers will scram. I wanted Spufford to write more of the bookish bits and less of the Spuffordish bits, because the bookish bits are great. He combines his love for certain books with developmental psychology (Where the Wild Things Are with Piaget) and with stories of growing up (The Hobbit with learning the magic of the alphabet). He also provides entirely quotable bits (on the Earthsea novels: “…their archipelago of bright islands like ideal Hebrides…”) and deeply analyzes certain books in a satisfying way. He mentions gazillions of books I’d love to pick up. In fact, when he started analyzing The Left Hand of Darkness, I skipped to the end of that chapter because it’s a book I want to read first on my own! All of that said, this book was…well, flat. It could serve as more of a reference book for titles I’ll add to my books-to-read-in-the-future list. As a memoir, though, it was fairly shallow and not all that insightful, and the author’s description of himself gave me a creepy-crawly feeling that makes me want to avoid all of his other work. 4 out of 10.
®10. The Lunatic Express · · · · · · · · · · · by Carl Hoffman (12/23/2011).
Another fairly shallow and pointless book. Its subtitle is “Discovering the World…via Its Most Dangerous Buses, Boats, Trains, and Planes,” which seems rife with possibilities. A commentary about privilege! An opportunity to experience life the way most of the world lives it! New people! New cultures! New insights on the planet’s interconnectedness! Unfortunately, this book skipped jauntily from one smelly bus to another, with little depth on any subject. The author evolves slightly throughout the book, starting off as a distant loner requiring adventure to be happy, to a man realizing how much relationships mean to him. Touching. But, his personal discovery of self-assed-ness would have been much more convincing as a side-story woven into a much richer commentary about globalization, or culture, or poverty, or anything else, instead of being the book’s sole nugget. I’m trying to think of something redeeming about this book… hmm. As a slapdash portrait of the various transportation systems that Americans ignore but that the rest of the world counts on, it is eye-opening. One memorable moment: the author hops on a ferry in Bangladesh, and spends most of his time “jammed with huddled masses on the floor” on the Bangladeshi part of the boat. However, he was invited to go into the first-class salon and which he describes well, if in a rambly, run-on way: “I felt guilty, but I went anyway, cutting through the massed humanity, the jumbles, opened a door, and passed into another world full of Western children playing Monopoly and men and women who looked just like me, playing guitars and munching on cheese and crackers under the veranda on the bow.” A powerful image. Any commentary? Nope, I had my hopes too high. Still, Hoffman painted a colorful picture in my mind, and for that I’ll at least give him a few points. 4 out of 10.
®11. A Yellow Raft on Blue Water · · · · · · · · · · by Michael Dorris (12/24/2011).
A gem. This was the perfect, most beautiful book to read on Christmas Eve as I flew from Baja to LA, and from LA to Seattle. I had one chapter left when we landed and so I dallied at the luggage carousel for 15 minutes, drinking the book down to the last drop. It’s deep and full of twists, turns, and heartaches. A Yellow Raft on Blue Water is told from the point of view of three women (daughter, mother, grandmother) who misread and misunderstand each other and who lead their lives without thinking of the hurt they cause each other. As each woman’s perspective is revealed, the picture Dorris paints becomes even more nuanced, and the reader’s heart goes out to each of the women in turn. Each narrator actively manipulates the reader into seeing her side of the story (which is usually against the other two’s perspectives) until you realize that this book, in a way, mimics the way we all see the world: seven billion perspectives against seven billion others, and each with their own story to tell. This book also poignantly recounts stories that make the reader question assumptions about cycles of poverty and race in America. One of the best books I’ve read in a long, long time. 9 out of 10.
®12. Eat, Pray, Love · · · · · · · · · · by Elizabeth Gilbert (1/4/2012).
I was fully prepared to hate this book. The movie was dumb. Lots of people I respect said it was dumb. However, lots of people I respect also said it was wonderful, that it was one of their favorite books of all time. (And hasn’t everybody else and their mother read it? so I thought I should, too.) Turns out, I didn’t hate it. Liz Gilbert sounds like one of the most annoying people on the planet, but she is an excellent writer. She chronicles her journey of self with clarity, wit, and (we readers assume) honesty. I felt a bit cruel to be happy to realize that the Liz Gilbert types out there—the gorgeous, chatty social butterflies—are not always perfectly happy in their flawless skin. Liz describes her search for happiness and inner peace through her months in Rome, Italy, an Ashram in India, and Bali, Indonesia exceptionally well, and I happily went with her for every step of her journey, thanking God I’m not in her shoes. A good book to start off the new year, and to say goodbye to a lovely, restorative month of holidays. 6 out of 10.
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