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a_reader_is_me2011-01-23 09:16 pm
katealaurel) wrote in a_reader_is_me2011-01-23 09:16 pm
Books 1-5: Cather, Byatt, Grossman, Donoghue, Murakami
I'm way behind on the articles-- 2/20, both for the EpiDoc guidelines push I'm helping with-- but finished my fifth novel yesterday, which feels pretty great.
Title: My Antonia
Author: Willa Cather
Number of Pages: 175
Book Number/Goal: 1/5 novels between December 21 2010 and January 31 2011
My Rating: 3/5
Jacket Summary: (actually the Wikipedia summary) The book's narrator, Jim Burden, arrives in the fictional town of Black Hawk, Nebraska, on the same train as the Shimerdas, when he goes to live with his grandparents after his parents have died. Jim develops strong feelings for Ántonia, something between a crush and a filial bond, and the reader views Ántonia's life, including its attendant struggles and triumphs, through that lens.
Review: I'd been meaning to read My Antonia ever since it started coming up over and over again in high school quiz team matches, and finally got to it for this month. It was a hit-or-miss book for me, but the "hits" were really lovely.
If you're not a fan of "prairie literature," or hated Laura Ingalls Wilder when you were a kid, then you shouldn't even bother with this. It's an exemplar of the genre, and that means (for me, at least) that it's characterized by obsessive descriptions of daily life on the American prairie, including farming, dugouts, and the town/country divide, and suffers thematically from the moralism of the time. But it's also marked throughout by a deep love of the prairie's natural landscape, and the effect that it has on those who are steeped in it. Occasionally, the book rises to incredible heights of lyricism and insight, and for me, those made it worth reading.
Looking for a book with the same lyricism and love of nature, but without the prairie moralism? Paul Harding's Tinkers, last year's fiction Pulitzer winner, and probably my favorite book read in 2010. Beware the intricate fractal writing structure.
Title: The Children's Book
Author: A.S. Byatt
Number of Pages: 675
Book Number/Goal: 2/5 novels between December 21 2010 and January 31 2011
My Rating: 5/5
Jacket Summary: (Wikipedia summary) The Wellwood family (Olive, Humphrey, Olive's sister Violet, and many children) are Fabians, living in a world of artists, writers, craftsman, all moving into new ways to express art, and living an artful life, before the horrors and loss of the Great War. While the central character of Olive is a writer of children's literature, supporting her large family with her writing, the title of the book refers to the children in the book: Tom, Julian, Philip, Elsie, Dorothy, Hedda, Griselda, Florence, Charles/Karl, Phyllis and others, following each as they approach adulthood and the terrors of war.
Review: Read it now. Read it now. Do not stop, do not pass go, read it now. I can't review this book properly because I can't put my reaction to it fully into words, still, even though I finished it right around New Year's. If you care about art, artistic influence and integrity, women in academia, ethics, mythology and culture, non-monogamous relationships, or the struggles of unconventional families, read this. I was in tears for at least the last fifty pages, which (for me) is a recommendation.
Title: The Magicians
Author: Lev Grossman
Number of Pages: 402
Book Number/Goal: 3/5 novels between December 21 2010 and January 31 2011
My Rating: 4/5
Jacket Summary: Quentin Coldwater is brilliant but miserable. He's a senior in high school, and a certifiable genius, but he's still secretly obsessed with a series of fantasy novels he read as a kid, about the adventures of five children in a magical land called Fillory. Compared to that, anything in his real life just seems gray and colorless.
Everything changes when Quentin finds himself unexpectedly admitted to a very secret, very exclusive college of magic in upstate New York, where he receives a thorough and rigorous education in the practice of modern sorcery. He also discovers all the other things people learn in college: friendship, love, sex, booze, and boredom. But something is still missing. Magic doesn't bring Quentin the happiness and adventure he thought it would.
Then, after graduation, he and his friends make a stunning discovery: Fillory is real.
Review: Right after finishing The Children's Book (and still kind of wrecked from the emotional wallop of the end of that one), I started The Magicians and stayed up until 4am reading it in one go. My reaction to it is mixed but positive; obviously it was engaging enough to keep me up until 4, but it was also extraordinarily bleak. Some novels are bleak in a constructive way, making you question what you value and consider how to make life fuller-- but this was bleak in an almost nihilistic way, leaving me feeling like there wasn't any hope for the characters, or me either. No one progresses.
That said, I'd still recommend it. My friends also mostly had mixed reactions, but on balance negative; I'd say that the reworking and implicit criticism of Narnia (thematically at the core of the book in my view) make it worthwhile, even if you don't get the same easy enjoyment I did out of the magic-college conceit. (Way better than magic-high school.)
Be warned, though: everyone's right when they say the fox sex scene is disturbing.
Title: Room
Author: Emma Donoghue
Number of Pages: 336
Book Number/Goal: 4/5 novels between December 21 2010 and January 31 2011
My Rating: 4/5
Jacket Summary: (from Amazon) In many ways, Jack is a typical 5-year-old. He likes to read books, watch TV, and play games with his Ma. But Jack is different in a big way--he has lived his entire life in a single room, sharing the tiny space with only his mother and an unnerving nighttime visitor known as Old Nick. For Jack, Room is the only world he knows, but for Ma, it is a prison in which she has tried to craft a normal life for her son. When their insular world suddenly expands beyond the confines of their four walls, the consequences are piercing and extraordinary. Despite its profoundly disturbing premise, Emma Donoghue's Room is rife with moments of hope and beauty, and the dogged determination to live, even in the most desolate circumstances. A stunning and original novel of survival in captivity, readers who enter Room will leave staggered, as though, like Jack, they are seeing the world for the very first time.
Review: Another up-until-4am read-in-one-sitting book for me. The premise is deeply disturbing, but the book is oddly sweet and hopeful despite that, and has quite a few flashes of witty humor. It didn't, however, emotionally hook me; it was an excellent book, but not one that changed anything in me or will really stick. Still highly recommended for cleverness, tenderness, and extremely strong writing.
Title: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Author: Haruki Murakami
Number of Pages: 607
Book Number/Goal: 5/5 novels between December 21 2010 and January 31 2011
My Rating: 5/5
Jacket Summary: (from Amazon) Bad things come in threes for Toru Okada. He loses his job, his cat disappears, and then his wife fails to return from work. His search for his wife (and his cat) introduces him to a bizarre collection of characters, including two psychic sisters, a possibly unbalanced teenager, an old soldier who witnessed the massacres on the Chinese mainland at the beginning of the Second World War, and a very shady politician.
Review: Fantastic (in all senses). I now sympathize with everyone who's been urging me to read it for years. This didn't have the same emotional pull for me as The Childrens' Book, but it was much more intellectually fulfilling, and impacted me just as deeply. (That last isn't to say that The Childrens' Book lacked intellectual depth-- but it proceeds much more linearly and in a traditional structure, whereas with Murakami I was constantly trying to weave together threads from ten different sources, half of them deliberately cut too short. Terrible metaphor, sorry.)
I think I have a lot to say about this book-- it certainly left me with enough problems to sort out-- but I just finished it yesterday, and suspect I need to discuss it with someone before I'll be able to articulate those thoughts in writing. In the meantime, you get my strong recommendation.
There's also a pretty terrific exchange on the difficulties of translating Murakami available here.
Coming soon: academic article reviews (yes, really). Also: I ordered a Kindle, which I'm pretty excited about. Any thoughts on it from comm members?
crossposted to my journal
Title: My Antonia
Author: Willa Cather
Number of Pages: 175
Book Number/Goal: 1/5 novels between December 21 2010 and January 31 2011
My Rating: 3/5
Jacket Summary: (actually the Wikipedia summary) The book's narrator, Jim Burden, arrives in the fictional town of Black Hawk, Nebraska, on the same train as the Shimerdas, when he goes to live with his grandparents after his parents have died. Jim develops strong feelings for Ántonia, something between a crush and a filial bond, and the reader views Ántonia's life, including its attendant struggles and triumphs, through that lens.
Review: I'd been meaning to read My Antonia ever since it started coming up over and over again in high school quiz team matches, and finally got to it for this month. It was a hit-or-miss book for me, but the "hits" were really lovely.
If you're not a fan of "prairie literature," or hated Laura Ingalls Wilder when you were a kid, then you shouldn't even bother with this. It's an exemplar of the genre, and that means (for me, at least) that it's characterized by obsessive descriptions of daily life on the American prairie, including farming, dugouts, and the town/country divide, and suffers thematically from the moralism of the time. But it's also marked throughout by a deep love of the prairie's natural landscape, and the effect that it has on those who are steeped in it. Occasionally, the book rises to incredible heights of lyricism and insight, and for me, those made it worth reading.
Looking for a book with the same lyricism and love of nature, but without the prairie moralism? Paul Harding's Tinkers, last year's fiction Pulitzer winner, and probably my favorite book read in 2010. Beware the intricate fractal writing structure.
I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.
Title: The Children's Book
Author: A.S. Byatt
Number of Pages: 675
Book Number/Goal: 2/5 novels between December 21 2010 and January 31 2011
My Rating: 5/5
Jacket Summary: (Wikipedia summary) The Wellwood family (Olive, Humphrey, Olive's sister Violet, and many children) are Fabians, living in a world of artists, writers, craftsman, all moving into new ways to express art, and living an artful life, before the horrors and loss of the Great War. While the central character of Olive is a writer of children's literature, supporting her large family with her writing, the title of the book refers to the children in the book: Tom, Julian, Philip, Elsie, Dorothy, Hedda, Griselda, Florence, Charles/Karl, Phyllis and others, following each as they approach adulthood and the terrors of war.
Review: Read it now. Read it now. Do not stop, do not pass go, read it now. I can't review this book properly because I can't put my reaction to it fully into words, still, even though I finished it right around New Year's. If you care about art, artistic influence and integrity, women in academia, ethics, mythology and culture, non-monogamous relationships, or the struggles of unconventional families, read this. I was in tears for at least the last fifty pages, which (for me) is a recommendation.
Title: The Magicians
Author: Lev Grossman
Number of Pages: 402
Book Number/Goal: 3/5 novels between December 21 2010 and January 31 2011
My Rating: 4/5
Jacket Summary: Quentin Coldwater is brilliant but miserable. He's a senior in high school, and a certifiable genius, but he's still secretly obsessed with a series of fantasy novels he read as a kid, about the adventures of five children in a magical land called Fillory. Compared to that, anything in his real life just seems gray and colorless.
Everything changes when Quentin finds himself unexpectedly admitted to a very secret, very exclusive college of magic in upstate New York, where he receives a thorough and rigorous education in the practice of modern sorcery. He also discovers all the other things people learn in college: friendship, love, sex, booze, and boredom. But something is still missing. Magic doesn't bring Quentin the happiness and adventure he thought it would.
Then, after graduation, he and his friends make a stunning discovery: Fillory is real.
Review: Right after finishing The Children's Book (and still kind of wrecked from the emotional wallop of the end of that one), I started The Magicians and stayed up until 4am reading it in one go. My reaction to it is mixed but positive; obviously it was engaging enough to keep me up until 4, but it was also extraordinarily bleak. Some novels are bleak in a constructive way, making you question what you value and consider how to make life fuller-- but this was bleak in an almost nihilistic way, leaving me feeling like there wasn't any hope for the characters, or me either. No one progresses.
That said, I'd still recommend it. My friends also mostly had mixed reactions, but on balance negative; I'd say that the reworking and implicit criticism of Narnia (thematically at the core of the book in my view) make it worthwhile, even if you don't get the same easy enjoyment I did out of the magic-college conceit. (Way better than magic-high school.)
Be warned, though: everyone's right when they say the fox sex scene is disturbing.
Title: Room
Author: Emma Donoghue
Number of Pages: 336
Book Number/Goal: 4/5 novels between December 21 2010 and January 31 2011
My Rating: 4/5
Jacket Summary: (from Amazon) In many ways, Jack is a typical 5-year-old. He likes to read books, watch TV, and play games with his Ma. But Jack is different in a big way--he has lived his entire life in a single room, sharing the tiny space with only his mother and an unnerving nighttime visitor known as Old Nick. For Jack, Room is the only world he knows, but for Ma, it is a prison in which she has tried to craft a normal life for her son. When their insular world suddenly expands beyond the confines of their four walls, the consequences are piercing and extraordinary. Despite its profoundly disturbing premise, Emma Donoghue's Room is rife with moments of hope and beauty, and the dogged determination to live, even in the most desolate circumstances. A stunning and original novel of survival in captivity, readers who enter Room will leave staggered, as though, like Jack, they are seeing the world for the very first time.
Review: Another up-until-4am read-in-one-sitting book for me. The premise is deeply disturbing, but the book is oddly sweet and hopeful despite that, and has quite a few flashes of witty humor. It didn't, however, emotionally hook me; it was an excellent book, but not one that changed anything in me or will really stick. Still highly recommended for cleverness, tenderness, and extremely strong writing.
Title: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Author: Haruki Murakami
Number of Pages: 607
Book Number/Goal: 5/5 novels between December 21 2010 and January 31 2011
My Rating: 5/5
Jacket Summary: (from Amazon) Bad things come in threes for Toru Okada. He loses his job, his cat disappears, and then his wife fails to return from work. His search for his wife (and his cat) introduces him to a bizarre collection of characters, including two psychic sisters, a possibly unbalanced teenager, an old soldier who witnessed the massacres on the Chinese mainland at the beginning of the Second World War, and a very shady politician.
Review: Fantastic (in all senses). I now sympathize with everyone who's been urging me to read it for years. This didn't have the same emotional pull for me as The Childrens' Book, but it was much more intellectually fulfilling, and impacted me just as deeply. (That last isn't to say that The Childrens' Book lacked intellectual depth-- but it proceeds much more linearly and in a traditional structure, whereas with Murakami I was constantly trying to weave together threads from ten different sources, half of them deliberately cut too short. Terrible metaphor, sorry.)
I think I have a lot to say about this book-- it certainly left me with enough problems to sort out-- but I just finished it yesterday, and suspect I need to discuss it with someone before I'll be able to articulate those thoughts in writing. In the meantime, you get my strong recommendation.
There's also a pretty terrific exchange on the difficulties of translating Murakami available here.
Coming soon: academic article reviews (yes, really). Also: I ordered a Kindle, which I'm pretty excited about. Any thoughts on it from comm members?
crossposted to my journal