The Discomfort Zone, by Jonathan Franzen (2006)
I tried to read The Corrections when there was so much fuss about it a number of years ago, but I couldn't manage it, and I can't now remember why. I think I will have to try it again, now that I have read this book.
I would not have expected that I would be interested in someone telling the story of how he got involved in bird-watching, but I was. I would not have expected I would be interested in reading someone's lengthy accounts of their church youth group experiences, and yet I was. This is due to the author, who is charming and interesting. Also, the cover is awesome.
Incidentally, I would like to add that I successfully finished my NaNoWriMo novel last month. I haven't even read it, because I don't want to.
The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank, by David Plotz (2005)
I was completely riveted by the idea of a "genius" sperm bank the minute I heard there ever was such a thing, so I was an easy sell for this book. What a letdown.
The author is eager to assure us of his own intellectual credentials. Whatever. Being smart doesn't mean you can write, or understand scientific concepts, or present ideas in a way that doesn't make you look foolishly biased.
Let's start with the cover. It shows a blond, blue-eyed baby, eyes so blue they practically glow. Get the Aryan/Nazi reference? Oh, yes. It runs throughout the book. Many, many times we are treated to discussions of how people looking to make any improvement in the human race at all are basically the same as Hitler. Dull point, and repetitively forced, and point not proven. Vaccines and antibiotics are Hitlerish, too, by the author's standards.
Let's go on to the writing in general, which is sloppy and hyperbolic. Relatively routine and early-level fertility treatments are described as "a nightmare." Oh, really? Do you really want to compare getting a daily shot in the butt to a NIGHTMARE? Incendiary language is used when the author wants to make it clear what the reader should think of something: "dragged them down to the asylum," "forced under the knife," "bloody-minded eugenic ideas." A regular, non-Nazi sperm bank is described as reminding the author of "the scene in the science fiction movie when the hero accidentally discovers the warehouse where the 'friendly' aliens are freezing the millions of humans they have secretly kidnapped for their terrible experiments." Nice cool objective reporting there, sport.
He doesn't even try to back up what he asserts. He's describing how eugenicists were keen on the idea of sterilization to improve overall human wellness, and that what they wanted to do was sterilize everyone with a known disease or flaw; the problem was that they were calling things "genetic" when they weren't--so sterilization wouldn't have helped. The author then says, "And even if they had been genetic...it would have taken literally thousands of generations of mass sterilization to significantly reduce the incidence of genetic disease." Really. Thousands of generations. Literally thousands. Is that really a statement he should be following with "But eugenicists didn't stop to do the math"? Nor does he bother to explain his assertion or back it up with any actual information at all, he just moves right along. This happens time and time again throughout the book: wild assertion, no back-up for it. An example of anything happening once is used to make sweeping implications that it must have happened that way every time. If he doesn't find any research to support something he wants to say, he makes it up. The first use of a sperm donor the author has ever heard of is labeled "probably the first use of a sperm donor, period." Back it UP, buttercup.
I dog-eared dozens and dozens of pages in this book, meaning to comment negatively on every one of them, but I'm too crabby to go on. I hated this book, not only because it was sloppily written and sloppily biased, but because it was such a disappointment. I was interested in the subject and I wanted to know more, but I came away feeling as if all I knew was what David Plotz wanted me to believe.
The Man of My Dreams, by Curtis Sittenfeld (2006)
This is exactly the sort of book I like: frank and introspective, simple and real, true and straightforward. I like it when I can wonder periodically if the book is actually autobiographical.
I feel I must point out that the author is female. The reason I must point it out is that in general I dislike female narrators written by men, and so I almost didn't check this book out: it passed the "reading the front flap" test, but then when I saw that the author's first name was Curtis, I don't know what kept me from putting it back on the shelf.
The book is about Hannah, and her experiences with men from age 14 until age 28. I liked the characters and how they were described, especially Hannah's cousin Fig.
I was not crazy about the title, which I think makes the book look like the bad kind of "chick lit," the kind that embarrasses most women with its shoe obsessions and brand-dropping. I was not crazy about the "information given in the form of a letter written to someone else" at the end, which I think is a particularly lame gimmick. But everything else---very good.
Lost and Found, by Carolyn Parkhurst (2006)
I think I was only about a tenth of the way into the book when I started feeling sorry that at some point it was going to end. That is a very good sign for a book.
This is the sort of book where an assortment of people talk from their own points of view. The abundance of interesting topics for them to talk about is justified by them all having been chosen for a reality game show: each pair was chosen because they have some good secret or story. One pair is a mother-daughter pair, and the daughter recently revealed an enormous and life-changing secret to the mother. One pair is a married couple, one man and one woman, both gay but members of a group that thinks homosexuality can be cured. You'd think this would make the book all soap-opera-ish and eye-rollingly dramatic, but it's written so calmly and matter-of-factly, it comes across only as "Don't people have interesting lives!," not "Jesus, not another huge secret."
The combination of the cover art (parrots on a deep yellow map background) and the reality television backdrop made me feel like I wouldn't want to read the book, but I was completely wrong. This was a book that enthralled me with its issues and plots, without making me feel afterwards as if I'd fallen for cheap sensationalism. I did feel sad when it was over: I could have read a thousand more pages about these people, easy.
The Whole World Over, by Julia Glass (2006)
A bad second novel after a good first novel is such an extra disappointment. Reading the first one, the good one, you think, "Oh, hooray, a new author to love! Perhaps she will write many, many wonderful books for me to read!" The second book finally arrives---and it sucks. What a crashing blow. Not only is the book a bust, so perhaps is the entire author.
Reading The Whole World Over, I was repeatedly reminded of the crappy novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo last month: when I was writing, deadline was the only thing of importance, and so plot, character, and all originality and sense were sacrificed. The Whole World Over is lame in that same way. I feel the author's deadline, the expectations to create a second novel after the great first novel. She has failed. Perhaps now the pressure will be off, and there can be hope for a third novel.
The main character is a woman nicknamed Greenie. Her husband Alan is such an unrelenting ass, I couldn't understand how they got together in the first place. Greenie is no prize herself. When Greenie falls in love with someone new, the new relationship doesn't make any more sense than the one she had with Alan, nor is her new love an appealing character. "I'm one of those people who can't stop searching my way around the world" he tells her, in between lectures on water conservation/quality and fish health.
Greenie OF COURSE has a campy gay male friend, "honey"ing and "my dear"ing all over the book, pledging undying support and making Greenie laugh so hard. Please don't even get me started on this overused and insulting device, so common to female authors of a certain age.
There is an irritating child in this book, precocious and cutesy in a cheap sitcom way. The author clearly finds him adorable. Every time he spoke, I wanted him to shut up.
After this child gets involved in a mishap (he and a friend try to free some horses into the wild, after reading too many wild-horses-run-free type books; the horses are found and everything is fine), the parents act as if he has killed someone. The child hands his father a toy horse, and the father reflects that "To hold it, now, felt like holding a toy revolver." What? The father then removes the child from the mother's care, which makes total sense to the mother: obviously she has totally failed. What? The mother lies to her son about why she won't send his toy horses with him; she says she'll give them to another child, but instead she throws them away. What? Again and again reading this book, I thought, "This makes no SENSE."
The characters are always laughing at whatever anyone else says, or waiting for someone else to laugh. Everyone is always thinking about how funny everyone else is, or about how they themselves have just made a joke, or about how funny their thoughts are, or about some great "pun" or "irony." None of it is even slightly funny. This is the author trying to tell us how funny her characters are, when she is unable to show us. "'Her name is like a sneeze,'" says the precocious and cutesy child about his nanny Consuelo; "'Oh say oh choo!'" And then? We read that "Greenie had not laughed so hard in months." Uh huh. Because it is so funny.
The characters are always being offended at other people's totally rational remarks (someone who wears his funeral suit to work "because he didn't have time to change" is outraged at the "thoughtlessness" of a customer who remarks on his spiffiness), or having ridiculous fights that don't make sense. I don't mean "fights that don't make sense" in a way that reflects real-life fights, which are often far from rational; I mean fights where, as you read them, you think "Huh?" This is exasperating, and all the adrenaline comes from frustration and confusion rather than from empathy with the warring characters
The author is so self-conscious about her writing, her characters become self-conscious too. As Walter walks along the street, he remembers his grandmother: "Voolishness, voolishness, voolishness, he heard Granna say in her small but confident voice with that shameless Wagnerian accent." Yes, I completely agree, the accent is ridiculous. If the author knows it, the right way to fix it is to leave it out, not to have her characters admit its ridiculousness.
So many little details are wrong or silly. Again, this reminded me of NaNoWriMo: the way, when speed is the most important thing, you can breeze past the details and work on them later. The important thing being that you must then work on them later. You can't leave in something like a woman finding out she's pregnant "yesterday," but then in the next paragraph revealing that she has already had a check-up, unless you are going to explain that she has been having intensive fertility treatments that meant she found out at the doctor's office and not after peeing on a stick at home. She can't, one week later, have another check-up already, with an ultrasound that reveals twins and lets them "hear two separate heartbeats," unless, again, you explain that this woman somehow has special circumstances that mean an OB will see her before she's a couple months along, or would have some reason to "suspect" twins that early. Another time, a woman walks the wrong way on a bridge. "No one questioned her going the wrong way." In the very next paragraph, someone questions her going the wrong way.
Toward the end, the author brings in the events of September 11th. My first reaction was "How DARE she." How dare she exploit that day for her own fictional, dramatic purposes. I don't know why I would feel this way: plenty of authors bring in real live horrible events such as wars. But I did feel that way, and nearly closed the book right then, even so close to the end. I didn't feel her characters were good enough to deserve this connection with something so serious and real. I didn't want to experience their poorly-drawn fictional anguish when other poorly-drawn characters were missing or in danger. Especially offensive was when the Little Mr. Shirley Temple child started asking his innocent-youth questions and explaining things in his innocent-youth way, mangling his words cutely as usual and asking about "Osaddam."
I was angry at this book. It is a waste of paper, a waste of what I had assumed was talent. It is so riddled with flaws, I don't see how it was even published.
Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld (2005)
When this book was on my library's New Releases shelf, I passed it up again and again. I was assuming it was one of those mean, exaggerated, bitter, insider books exposing the nasty underbelly of an institution. I hate those. They never seem true, and their extreme venom makes me want to defend a situation I would normally be opposed to, and this makes me feel crabby.
Earlier this month, though, I read another book by Curtis Sittenfeld, and I liked it so much that I went in search of this one. Two weeks later, I'd read all the other books in my library pile but not yet Prep. I nearly returned it, I was so sure I wouldn't like it. But I have a rule: either return a book or read it, but no fair leaping ahead to the next batch from the library. So I started reading it, and there went the next two days because I did almost nothing else.
I loved it. It's not mean at all. There's no feeling that the author has an agenda against boarding schools. If anything, the book gave me a less negative impression of boarding schools: the kids may be wealthy, but the school experience overall sounded very similar to the experience I had in public high school: same basic emotions, same basic interpersonal relationships, same basic growing up. The narrator, Lee, is real and likeable, and didn't have any of the annoying precocity I dislike in fictional children. The author notes in an end-of-book interview that Lee is actually narrating from her late 20s, remembering her time in high school. Perhaps this is what keeps this from being too much of a coming-of-age story, and more of the kind of thing adults can identify with. We remember high school, too.
The Boleyn Inheritance, by Philippa Gregory (2006)
I always know when I have a new Philippa Gregory book that I shouldn't plan to do anything else until I've finished reading it. I feel embarrassed that I like such fiction---but there it is, I do, and I think she's a gifted storyteller even though her tastes run to the sensational.
In theory, I don't like historical fiction: it's everything I dislike about history, plus it's usually fictionalized to the point of significant inaccuracies so you can't even use it to make yourself look smarter later on. But this series on Henry VIII (in which The Boleyn Inheritance is the most recent) is more the sort that makes a history-hater think, "Hey, maybe I like history after all."
Burnt Bread and Chutney, by Carmit Delman (2002)
Her sister and her mother are both "stunningly beautiful." Her parents are nearly perfect in every way. Her grandmother is wise beyond belief. Her ancestors were amazing in so many ways.
It's all boring, and makes for a dull memoir. We don't need dirt, but we do need humanity: this book would make a nice anniversary present for her parents, but it's not for the general public. I made it halfway through before I couldn't read another word.
Burnt Toast, by Teri Hatcher (2006)
If you think of Teri Hatcher as a bright, insightful person with something fresh to share with the world, then it is likely you will enjoy this book. If instead you think of her as a lightweight who's lucky she got into acting because she sure wasn't going to get anywhere on the strength of her insight-a-day-calendar thoughts and ideas, you probably won't get past the introduction.