One Sunday Morning, by Amy Ephron (2005)
When I'm reading a book I'm unsure about, I try to give it a 50-page chance. Because this book's pages are so text-lite, I gave it 84. Here's the part that made me give up for good: "She was tiny, bird-like, rail-thin, seventy-eight, if she was a day, and she loved to kick up her heels, which she did, to reveal a pale blue garter which she, also, showed to Mary Nell when they were in the Ladies' together and told her it was from 'Paree.' That was how she pronounced it."
Did no one edit this book? I count four unnecessary commas in that sentence; it's like tripping down the stairs. And what about the absolutely unnecessary "That was how she pronounced it"? Duh.
Or check this out: "There was no division between the two families, as there was at some weddings, with the bride's family on one side of the room and the groom's on the other, in fact, it was downright clannish and hard to tell the Holmes and the Harts apart, the women were all big-boned, with heavy ankles and prominent facial features, as if they had always been related or were cut from the same blue-blood cloth." Run-on sentence, a comma instead of a semicolon, a comma instead of a period, two extra commas. More: "...Two people were about to be joined together for, at least, some part of their life." Comma-happy. I'm not saying my punctuation is pure as the driven snow, but then I don't get paid, or, have, an, editor, I can be a little, foot-loose, about it.
Here is how it seemed to me, reading this book: That half the sentences were filler. It is only 213 pages long even after cutting the text per page down to the size of an index card, space-and-a-half-ing the lines, and giving it good wide margins. Any English teacher's eyebrows would be raised suspiciously, but then add in all the times when something was said more than once and what we have here is a paper done the night before.
And it's all so awkwardly written! This paragraph: "'It was.' Mary smiled. 'Although I stayed too long.' Mary hesitated." Aaaauuuuuggghhh!
Sentences are short: "She'd never cared what anyone thought. She'd learned not to care from the time when she was a little girl. She'd learned not to pay attention to what people said. She could hear them whispering across the lobby." It's like riding with someone who keeps slamming on the brakes.
The dialogue is so unnatural and dull, I felt like screaming. Internal monologues go in circles, boring boring circles.
The author has to spell things out to make herself understood. I know I'm always saying authors shouldn't have characters look in mirrors in order to tell us about their appearance, but I didn't mean we need to see the framing of the walls, either: "And then, he turned and said to Mary, in a moment that said more about his character than anything else..."
This book is a misery. It jerks along, sputtering and coughing, spitting out commas left and right, dragging us along for a ride that is simultaneously rough and dull. I was bored out of my skull AND irritated.
Midwives, by Chris Bohjalian (1997)
It is distracting when an author writes as a member of the opposite sex. Every time he wrote about how he was "still a little girl," I felt weird about it. Nor was he successful: when I began the book I believed the narrator was male, and continued to think so until the first time we're told otherwise, at which point I was confused and had to go back and re-read. If it had been essential to the plot, fine, but instead it seemed as if the author was saying, "Look at me stretch!" He even seemed to be drawing our attention to his trick deliberately by BEGINNING the book with a photo of himself: "Look, I'm male!"
If you can get past this, it's a good book. A midwife performs an emergency c-section on a woman who has died in childbirth. Later, there is doubt: was the woman in fact dead, or did the midwife kill her? The case goes to trial. Good characters, good plot, good dialogue. And quality details: a bird that "probably weighed about as much as a Snickers bar."
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer (2005)
It turns out it is still too soon for me to read fiction about the World Trade Center disaster. I started reading the book, and I liked what I read, but I found that when I put it down I was resistant to the idea of picking it up again. I didn't want to revisit that time.
A Long Way Down, by Nick Hornby (2005)
Four people separately climb up on a roof to kill themselves. None of them go through with it. They form an unusual alliance: one former TV star, one former band member, one irrational teenager, one middle-aged woman.
The story is told from alternating points of view. The four voices didn't vary much, however; sometimes I had to go back to the beginning of a section to remind myself who was talking.
I liked the book, and I was repeatedly amused. I liked its self-awareness, which was present without going too far and being irritating. I liked the way Jess, after telling us about her sister who disappeared, says, "Don't sit around hoping for her to pop up later on to rescue me. She doesn't come back, OK? And we don't find out she's dead, either. Nothing happens, so forget about it. Well, don't forget about her, because she's important. But forget that sort of ending. It's not that sort of story."
I liked how everyone kept swearing, and how they kept apologizing to Maureen (the middle-aged woman, who called sex "intercourse") for it. I liked when JJ said, "How do people, like, not curse? ...I'll tell you who the most admirable people in the world are: newscasters. If that was me, I'd be like, 'And the motherf_____s flew the f___ing plane right into the Twin Towers.' "
I liked this: "People go on about Starbucks being unpersonal and all that, but what if that's what you want? ...I like to know that there are big places without windows where no one gives a sh_t. You need confidence to go into small places with regular customers--small bookshops and small music shops and small restaurants and cafes."
And I liked this: "My dad wonders why I choose to be like this, but the truth is, you have no choice... Telling me I can do anything I want is like pulling the plug out of the bath and then telling the water is can go anywhere it wants."
And I liked this: "There was something else in the article I read: an interview with a man who'd survived after jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. He said that two seconds after jumping, he realized that there was nothing in his life he couldn't deal with, no problem he couldn't solve--apart from the problem he'd just given himself by jumping off the bridge."
Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, by Mary Roach (2005)
I was not expecting a science-y book to be so FUNNY. "When you're as brainy as Gerry Nahum is, you lose sight of just how ignorant the rest of us are. Earlier on in our talk, he prefaced the line 'Quite a few people look at microtubules as what can be considered almost like an abacus for molecular calculation at a subcellular level' with the phrase 'As I'm sure you're aware.'"
It's funny, but it's not a humor book, it's a serious scientific research project. The topic: If religion--which has so many conflicting theories most of them must be wrong no matter how fervently the beliefs are held--can shut up for a sec, we'd like to know what SCIENCE has found out about life after death. Basic answer: very, very little, maybe nothing. Probably we're worm d'oeuvres. But....you can believe if you want to, because there are a few things that could be marks of SOMETHING.
Mary Roach looked into studies about whether a human being loses weight (the soul, presumably) at the instant of death, and whether mediums have any luck contacting actual dead people. She even goes to "medium school" herself, and she takes a forensic expert with her to the scene of an incident that caused a court of law to rule in favor of a ghost story.
It's an interesting, funny book. I recommend it.
Mother of the Bride: The Dream, the Reality, the Search for a Perfect Dress, by Ilene Beckerman (2000)
Every time I read an Ilene Beckerman book, I am astonished by the way she communicates so much in so few words. "My mother-of-the-bride story begins with the conception of my daughter, which took about five seconds; briefly covers my pregnancy, which took the usual nine months; and ends with the planning of my daughter's wedding, which took a year." All that in 159 barely-texted pages full of illustrations. It's a picture book for grown-ups: easily and quickly read, highly entertaining, funny and also touching. I loved it. Loved it, loved it.
The Edge of Marriage, by Hester Kaplan (1999)
I know that as I read these short stories (about, as you might expect, marriage), I was thinking about how much I was enjoying them. So why is it that now, writing the review, all I can think of is how frustrating it is when a writer uses a word like "cuckle," a word that does not appear in my dictionary? I hate not being sure of what's going on.
The Other Boleyn Girl, by Phillipa Gregory (2001)
I dislike the idea of historical fiction. So much of it is dorky and over-romantic: all bodices and fancy costumes and m'lady, very little greasy hair and body lice. Plus, I used to have to drink two cups of coffee just to stay awake for the FIRST HALF of history class.
Imagine my surprise when this book came home with me from the library. There is a bodice actually ON THE COVER, a FANCY bodice. I almost took it back without reading it. Once I'd read a dozen pages, it was too late.
I greatly enjoyed the book, much to my shame. It was sensational, soap-opera-ish. Phillipa Gregory is a talented storyteller; I can hardly believe how interesting she made everything. I was thinking that maybe I liked history after all; maybe I just hadn't found the right absorbable format.
Then I looked a few things up online. I found that this book is actually cited by reference sites as a source of classic misinformation. Shoot, now I've absorbed all this fake history. Good book, though, the kind that makes your heart pound. But FICTION, remember; FICTION.
Magical Thinking, by Augusten Burroughs (2004)
My thought early on in the book: He's like David Sedaris, but raunchier and more psychologically damaged. My thought as I finished it: I must have more, MORE, give me MORE!!! I am smitten.
Obviously the man is brilliant. Consider this: "I believe in the baby Jesus. And I believe he is handsome and lives in the sky with his pet cow. I believe that it is essential the cow like you. And if you pet the cow with your mind, it will lick your hand and give you cash." And later: "I tell people my theory, and they think I am either kidding or insane. But think this as they may, I have cow saliva on my hands, and many of them do not." Brilliant.
Or what about this: "I was raised by a mother similar to Martha Stewart in that she was self-consumed and incredibly successful and famous. Except my mother was only incredibly sucessful and famous in her brain, which was diseased."
The combination of humor and truth SLAYS me. Combined with a matter-of-fact attitude about past traumas and current shortcomings, it is lethal. I must go out tonight, prowling the town for copies of other Augusten Burroughs books.