0385536976
9780385536974
0385536976
3.91
538,174
Jun 11, 2013
Jun 11, 2013
liked it
After being briefly obsessed with the Gossip Girl book series in high school, and then the show a few years later (and then abandoning it once Georgin
After being briefly obsessed with the Gossip Girl book series in high school, and then the show a few years later (and then abandoning it once Georgina reappeared with Dan's baby god that show was trash and I loved it), this seemed like the next logical step. Crazy Rich Asians is Kevin Kwan trying his hand at the ever-popular genre that can best be summed up as "hey look, rich people!" The fact that the rich people featured here are all based in Singapore, rather than America or Europe, gave the book an interesting dimension and gives Kwan a chance to (briefly) touch on deeper issues of prejudice and toxic social norms within the rich Singaporean community.
Our heroine is Rachel Chu, an economics professor who gets invited to spend a few months in Singapore with her boyfriend of two years, Nicholas Young. It seems to be a perfectly normal trip: Nick's best friend is getting married, and he wants to bring Rachel home to attend the wedding and meet his family. Once the couple arrives, however, Rachel gradually realizes that Nick hasn't been completely honest about the circumstances of their trip - Nick, it turns out, is part of one of the richest families in Asia, and the wedding they're attending is going to be one of the most expensive events in recent memory. Also Nick's grandmother lives in an estate (that's hidden even on Google maps) where she's waited on by two lady's maids and protected by armed guards. This is a world where women get together for Bible study to trade stock tips and compare their latest jewelry purchases, where Nick's cousin takes a trip to Paris every year to buy herself a new couture wardrobe, and a bachelorette weekend involves jetting off to a private island in Indonesia owned by the bride's mother.
In short: wealth porn. Dirty, nasty, xxx wealth porn.
At his best, Kwan is giving us a poor man's Bride and Prejudice (the movie that is, itself, a poor man's Pride and Prejudice) - in short, a cheap knockoff of a cheap knockoff. He's trying very hard for an Austen-like feel, in all the scenes where Rachel is scrutinized and gossiped about by everyone in Nick's family, who are all determined not to let him get further involved with someone they think is beneath him. One of the best scenes, that comes closest to the kind of story I think Kwan is trying to write, has Rachel listening in awe as a group of women kindly tell their friend that it's not even worth her time to marry a man worth only a few millions - and then they proceed to itemize all of her future expenses, from country club fees to private school tuition, to illustrate why this millionaire is too poor to support her lifestyle. Moments like these, that provide realistic glimpses into the world of the super-rich, are the best part of the book, but there aren't many of them.
This story got repetitive very quickly. First, Kwan's descriptions of the luxury Rachel witnesses don't vary much, so you end up reading a lot of lines about "the most delicious dessert Rachel had ever eaten" and "the biggest house Rachel had ever seen" and "the most luxurious this" and "the most expensive that." After a while, your eyes just sort of glaze over.
Another problem was that I quickly realized that there are only three kinds of scenes in this book, and Kwan just keeps repeating them with different characters and settings. Scene 1: Rachel and/or Nick go to some fancy location so the reader can gawk at the luxury along with the characters. Scene 2: Characters talk about how awful Rachel is, and trade gossip we've already heard. Scene 3: a side character has a scene unrelated to Rachel, Nick, or the main plot. Two of Nick's cousins each have their own subplot in this book, and both storylines don't really go anywhere interesting - but I guess that's what the sequels are for.
The ending was kind of jarring, too, because it was a completely different tone from the rest of the book. While most of Crazy Rich Asians is a fluffy romp through Rich People Land, with some fun backstabbing and gossip to keep things interesting, the last few chapters take a hard left turn into Harrowing Family Dramaville, and it suddenly turns into a bad Joy Luck Club knockoff. And it happens way, way too late in the story, so the book is over before we get a chance to adjust to the new tone - it never worked for me, and I suspect Kwan did it because he couldn't think of another way to end the book.
So overall, I was lukewarm on this one. But apparently there's going to be a movie version, and I'm excited about it for two reasons. First, I read somewhere that Constance Wu from Fresh Off the Boat is going to play Rachel, which is perfect - Rachel is kind of dull in the book, but she has flashes of sass and strength that Wu will be able to bring out. No idea who they're getting to play Nick, but he'd better be just oozing charisma, because Book Nick is basically a cardboard cutout that character tote around and prop up during scenes.
I'm also really excited to see this movie because I think this story is much more suited to a visual format - if we can just see the exotic, luxurious locations, that's better than having to sit through Kwan's dull descriptions. Plus, this book is so light on actual plot that they could probably condense it down to ninety minutes and wouldn't lose much. ...more
Our heroine is Rachel Chu, an economics professor who gets invited to spend a few months in Singapore with her boyfriend of two years, Nicholas Young. It seems to be a perfectly normal trip: Nick's best friend is getting married, and he wants to bring Rachel home to attend the wedding and meet his family. Once the couple arrives, however, Rachel gradually realizes that Nick hasn't been completely honest about the circumstances of their trip - Nick, it turns out, is part of one of the richest families in Asia, and the wedding they're attending is going to be one of the most expensive events in recent memory. Also Nick's grandmother lives in an estate (that's hidden even on Google maps) where she's waited on by two lady's maids and protected by armed guards. This is a world where women get together for Bible study to trade stock tips and compare their latest jewelry purchases, where Nick's cousin takes a trip to Paris every year to buy herself a new couture wardrobe, and a bachelorette weekend involves jetting off to a private island in Indonesia owned by the bride's mother.
In short: wealth porn. Dirty, nasty, xxx wealth porn.
At his best, Kwan is giving us a poor man's Bride and Prejudice (the movie that is, itself, a poor man's Pride and Prejudice) - in short, a cheap knockoff of a cheap knockoff. He's trying very hard for an Austen-like feel, in all the scenes where Rachel is scrutinized and gossiped about by everyone in Nick's family, who are all determined not to let him get further involved with someone they think is beneath him. One of the best scenes, that comes closest to the kind of story I think Kwan is trying to write, has Rachel listening in awe as a group of women kindly tell their friend that it's not even worth her time to marry a man worth only a few millions - and then they proceed to itemize all of her future expenses, from country club fees to private school tuition, to illustrate why this millionaire is too poor to support her lifestyle. Moments like these, that provide realistic glimpses into the world of the super-rich, are the best part of the book, but there aren't many of them.
This story got repetitive very quickly. First, Kwan's descriptions of the luxury Rachel witnesses don't vary much, so you end up reading a lot of lines about "the most delicious dessert Rachel had ever eaten" and "the biggest house Rachel had ever seen" and "the most luxurious this" and "the most expensive that." After a while, your eyes just sort of glaze over.
Another problem was that I quickly realized that there are only three kinds of scenes in this book, and Kwan just keeps repeating them with different characters and settings. Scene 1: Rachel and/or Nick go to some fancy location so the reader can gawk at the luxury along with the characters. Scene 2: Characters talk about how awful Rachel is, and trade gossip we've already heard. Scene 3: a side character has a scene unrelated to Rachel, Nick, or the main plot. Two of Nick's cousins each have their own subplot in this book, and both storylines don't really go anywhere interesting - but I guess that's what the sequels are for.
The ending was kind of jarring, too, because it was a completely different tone from the rest of the book. While most of Crazy Rich Asians is a fluffy romp through Rich People Land, with some fun backstabbing and gossip to keep things interesting, the last few chapters take a hard left turn into Harrowing Family Dramaville, and it suddenly turns into a bad Joy Luck Club knockoff. And it happens way, way too late in the story, so the book is over before we get a chance to adjust to the new tone - it never worked for me, and I suspect Kwan did it because he couldn't think of another way to end the book.
So overall, I was lukewarm on this one. But apparently there's going to be a movie version, and I'm excited about it for two reasons. First, I read somewhere that Constance Wu from Fresh Off the Boat is going to play Rachel, which is perfect - Rachel is kind of dull in the book, but she has flashes of sass and strength that Wu will be able to bring out. No idea who they're getting to play Nick, but he'd better be just oozing charisma, because Book Nick is basically a cardboard cutout that character tote around and prop up during scenes.
I'm also really excited to see this movie because I think this story is much more suited to a visual format - if we can just see the exotic, luxurious locations, that's better than having to sit through Kwan's dull descriptions. Plus, this book is so light on actual plot that they could probably condense it down to ninety minutes and wouldn't lose much. ...more
Notes are private!
13
1
not set
May 2017
Jun 09, 2017
Hardcover
0307408841
9780307408846
0307408841
3.89
215,828
May 10, 2011
May 10, 2011
really liked it
A few months ago, I finally figured out how to borrow audiobooks from the library and listen to them on my phone, which has been great for both my com
A few months ago, I finally figured out how to borrow audiobooks from the library and listen to them on my phone, which has been great for both my commute and my to-read list (lately I don't seem to have the time or inclination to sit down and read books for long periods of time, so this is helping me feel less useless). Erik Larson's In the Garden of Beasts was one of the first books I downloaded, and I listened to it in February of 2017.
Listening to a book detailing the slow rise of a fascist dictarship in 1930's Germany while living in the early days of the Trump presidency was...an experience. I wish I'd had a physical copy of the book with me so I could mark quotations, because every few pages I came across a line that gave me actual chills, it was so resonant and familiar. One line that struck me the most: Larson explains that even though Hitler and his associates dialed back their extremist rhetoric in the weeks immediately following Hitler's election as chancellor, by then the majority of the country had already been swept up in a wave of hatred and violence, and there was no stopping it.
So, yeah. It's an illuminating book, to say the least, but listening to it was the opposite of relaxing. "Panic sweat-inducing" is how I'd phrase it.
Like he did with Devil in the White City, Larson explores a broad topic by narrowing his focus on a handful of influencial people. However, while Devil could never quite make a convincing connection between murdered HH Holmes and the Chicago World's Fair, In the Garden of Beasts is much more cohesive and focused.
Our guides into the early days of Nazi Germany are the Dodd family, who moved to Berlin in 1933 when William Dodd, a professor from Chicago, was appointed as the American ambassador to Germany. He brought along his wife and their two adult children, Bill and Martha, and the family found themselves in the middle of a new and frightening government.
Dodd and his daughter Martha get most of Larson's attention in this book (so much attention, in fact, that Dodd's son Bill is almost never mentioned at all, and I have no idea how he kept himself occupied when the family was living in Berlin). Dodd, obviously, is our eye into the politics of the time, and I liked that Larson never let Dodd, or the United States, off the hook when discussing America's complacency in the face of Nazi Germany. Anti-Semitism was just as rampant in the United States as it was in Germany, and Martha Dodd even admitted in her memoirs that the German government's treatment of Jews didn't bother her or her family very much at the time, because "we didn't really like Jews."
For much of book, William Dodd doesn't do very much, and mostly just acts as a witness to current events without influencing them. Gradually, he becomes aware that something very, very bad is happening in Germany, and his efforts to warn the US government about Hitler are as tragic as they are futile.
Martha Dodd kept herself pretty busy in Berlin while her father was stationed there, and the book chronicles her friendships and relationships with various key players in the SS. She also had a serious boyfriend who was a Russian Soviet, and apparently he was assigned to recruit her as a spy for the Soviets. Sadly, nothing ever comes of this. Martha, as Larson presents her, is a complicated person who didn't really notice or care what was going on around her, and continued happily skipping around Berlin with her Nazi boyfriends. I suppose the goal here was to make the readers see that these were all human beings, and not evil cartoon monsters - Larson does his best to make us understand that most of the people working for Hitler's regime were normal people with good intentions, who genuinely thought that they were doing the right thing. Maybe if I had read this book a few years ago, I would have been more sympathetic to this viewpoint.
But that's not the world we're living in right now, is it? So in conclusion, thank you, Erik Larson, for trying to make me understand that the people responsible for Hitler's rise to power were ordinary people who got swept up into something they didn't realize was wrong until it was too late. I get it, I do. But also, fuck the Nazis. ...more
Listening to a book detailing the slow rise of a fascist dictarship in 1930's Germany while living in the early days of the Trump presidency was...an experience. I wish I'd had a physical copy of the book with me so I could mark quotations, because every few pages I came across a line that gave me actual chills, it was so resonant and familiar. One line that struck me the most: Larson explains that even though Hitler and his associates dialed back their extremist rhetoric in the weeks immediately following Hitler's election as chancellor, by then the majority of the country had already been swept up in a wave of hatred and violence, and there was no stopping it.
So, yeah. It's an illuminating book, to say the least, but listening to it was the opposite of relaxing. "Panic sweat-inducing" is how I'd phrase it.
Like he did with Devil in the White City, Larson explores a broad topic by narrowing his focus on a handful of influencial people. However, while Devil could never quite make a convincing connection between murdered HH Holmes and the Chicago World's Fair, In the Garden of Beasts is much more cohesive and focused.
Our guides into the early days of Nazi Germany are the Dodd family, who moved to Berlin in 1933 when William Dodd, a professor from Chicago, was appointed as the American ambassador to Germany. He brought along his wife and their two adult children, Bill and Martha, and the family found themselves in the middle of a new and frightening government.
Dodd and his daughter Martha get most of Larson's attention in this book (so much attention, in fact, that Dodd's son Bill is almost never mentioned at all, and I have no idea how he kept himself occupied when the family was living in Berlin). Dodd, obviously, is our eye into the politics of the time, and I liked that Larson never let Dodd, or the United States, off the hook when discussing America's complacency in the face of Nazi Germany. Anti-Semitism was just as rampant in the United States as it was in Germany, and Martha Dodd even admitted in her memoirs that the German government's treatment of Jews didn't bother her or her family very much at the time, because "we didn't really like Jews."
For much of book, William Dodd doesn't do very much, and mostly just acts as a witness to current events without influencing them. Gradually, he becomes aware that something very, very bad is happening in Germany, and his efforts to warn the US government about Hitler are as tragic as they are futile.
Martha Dodd kept herself pretty busy in Berlin while her father was stationed there, and the book chronicles her friendships and relationships with various key players in the SS. She also had a serious boyfriend who was a Russian Soviet, and apparently he was assigned to recruit her as a spy for the Soviets. Sadly, nothing ever comes of this. Martha, as Larson presents her, is a complicated person who didn't really notice or care what was going on around her, and continued happily skipping around Berlin with her Nazi boyfriends. I suppose the goal here was to make the readers see that these were all human beings, and not evil cartoon monsters - Larson does his best to make us understand that most of the people working for Hitler's regime were normal people with good intentions, who genuinely thought that they were doing the right thing. Maybe if I had read this book a few years ago, I would have been more sympathetic to this viewpoint.
But that's not the world we're living in right now, is it? So in conclusion, thank you, Erik Larson, for trying to make me understand that the people responsible for Hitler's rise to power were ordinary people who got swept up into something they didn't realize was wrong until it was too late. I get it, I do. But also, fuck the Nazis. ...more
Notes are private!
2
not set
not set
Feb 2017
not set
May 10, 2017
Hardcover
1476789630
9781476789637
1476789630
3.54
253,616
May 12, 2015
May 12, 2015
liked it
Ani FaNelli has the perfect life. She works for a fashion magazine, is thin and beautiful, has thin and beautiful friends, and once she marries her Ne
Ani FaNelli has the perfect life. She works for a fashion magazine, is thin and beautiful, has thin and beautiful friends, and once she marries her New York blue-blood fiance, she'll become Ani Harrison and will have gotten everything she wants. Ani's life is a carefully crafted performance - everything she does and says is specifically engineered to project the kind of persona she wants, and hide the person she used to be.
As a teenager, Ani was TifAni FaNelli (does the name make you grate your teeth? Then Jessica Knoll did her job), a middle-class girl living in a poor neighborhood in Philadelphia who, through unusual circumstances and luck, got herself enrolled in the prestigious Bradley School. Her desperation to fit in with and be friends with her rich classmates created a sequence of events that led to a horrifying night - one that Ani is desperate to forget. But this night had further consequences, and culminated in an Incident at the school. Now, a documentary crew is making a movie about the Incident and what is being called "the Bradley Five" and they want to interview Ani to get her side of the story. Finally, Ani will have to tell the truth about what happened, and what she knows about the people involved.
Real talk, guys: I should have known what I was in for as soon as I started scanning the publisher's blurbs at the beginning of this book and saw no less than five that went "If you're a fan of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train..." That should have been a warning that what I was about to get was nothing like either of those books, but vaguely similar enough to make the publishers sprint behind the bandwagon, frantically waving Jessica Knoll's book.
Remember in The Devil Wears Prada, when Meryl Streep gives that amazing monologue about cerulean? (It's here, for those of you who don't have it committed to memory like me) I'm going to adopt her metphor because I think it applies perfectly to how you should approach Luckiest Girl Alive. Gone Girl is the Oscar de la Renta cerulean gowns, The Girl on the Train is the Yves St. Laurent cerulean military jackets, and Luckiest Girl Alive is the lumpy blue sweater that Andy fished out of some clearance bin.
That's honestly the best way I can describe this book and its appeal to potential readers. And for what it's worth, I think Andy's sweater was cute. ...more
As a teenager, Ani was TifAni FaNelli (does the name make you grate your teeth? Then Jessica Knoll did her job), a middle-class girl living in a poor neighborhood in Philadelphia who, through unusual circumstances and luck, got herself enrolled in the prestigious Bradley School. Her desperation to fit in with and be friends with her rich classmates created a sequence of events that led to a horrifying night - one that Ani is desperate to forget. But this night had further consequences, and culminated in an Incident at the school. Now, a documentary crew is making a movie about the Incident and what is being called "the Bradley Five" and they want to interview Ani to get her side of the story. Finally, Ani will have to tell the truth about what happened, and what she knows about the people involved.
Real talk, guys: I should have known what I was in for as soon as I started scanning the publisher's blurbs at the beginning of this book and saw no less than five that went "If you're a fan of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train..." That should have been a warning that what I was about to get was nothing like either of those books, but vaguely similar enough to make the publishers sprint behind the bandwagon, frantically waving Jessica Knoll's book.
Remember in The Devil Wears Prada, when Meryl Streep gives that amazing monologue about cerulean? (It's here, for those of you who don't have it committed to memory like me) I'm going to adopt her metphor because I think it applies perfectly to how you should approach Luckiest Girl Alive. Gone Girl is the Oscar de la Renta cerulean gowns, The Girl on the Train is the Yves St. Laurent cerulean military jackets, and Luckiest Girl Alive is the lumpy blue sweater that Andy fished out of some clearance bin.
That's honestly the best way I can describe this book and its appeal to potential readers. And for what it's worth, I think Andy's sweater was cute. ...more
Notes are private!
1
Apr 2017
not set
Apr 19, 2017
Hardcover
0062190857
9780062190857
0062190857
3.63
2,434
Mar 12, 2013
Mar 12, 2013
liked it
Although Richard Hell was heavily involved in the punk movement, starting several influential bands and appearing regularly in the glory days of CBGB'
Although Richard Hell was heavily involved in the punk movement, starting several influential bands and appearing regularly in the glory days of CBGB's, he never managed to achieve the same level of fame as other punk icons like Johnny Rotten, the Clash, or the Ramones. But when you look at the history of punk rock, Richard Hell's fingerprints are all over it. He wasn't the founder, by any means, but he was definitely one of the early pioneers of the entire punk movement. I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp is Hell's story of those early days, and his experiences within that culture.
For a memoir, this book is pretty slim, both literally and metaphorically. Hell spends way too much time telling you about his childhood, and the only real information of interest in this section is the fact that Hell grew up in the perfect cliche of a happy 1950's household. Parents wanting to save their children from a life of drugs and rock n' roll, beware - Keith Richards was a boy scout, Mick Jagger was a choir boy, and Richard Hell was raised in a lovely safe suburb in the Midwest.
The book finally gets good once Hell gets to New York with Tom Verlaine and they start getting into music, and I liked this section for two reasons. First, because of the clear-eyed and unsentimental descriptions of the punk music scene in New York, when it was just a bunch of hungry struggling kids trying to make a statement about something, anything. The honesty and the clarity of Hell's writing makes up for the fact that we are also subjected to a laundry list of women he slept with during this period and why it didn't work out, but frankly I was just happy that he didn't sneer at them and refer to all the women as "chicks" like Keith Richards did in his memoir.
I also liked the fact that Hell presents his music career with honesty and a lack of pretension. He doesn't claim to be called to music, or give us boring lectures on chord progressions. He got into music because it seemed fun, and a good way to get girls, and couldn't even be bothered to practice all that much (to the frequent annoyance of everyone who tried to form a band with him, it turns out that Richard Hell didn't really enjoy being in a band). This frankness was refreshing, but sometimes it feels like self-depreciation, like this excerpt where Hell, one of the coolest people on the planet, tries to claim that he's really super lame:
"All my career I've been described as quintessentially 'cool' or 'hip.' I suppose I've fostered this, on levels, in order to seem desirable to girls and to avoid standard hypocrisy and routine consumer life, but I am not cool. I'm cranky under pressure, I'm a mediocre athlete, I get obsessed with women, I usually want to be liked, and I'm not especially street-smart."
Seriously, that excerpt reads like an actress on the red carpet insisting that no, she looks just terrible and she ate a cheeseburger in the limo and honestly, she's just gross. *pose*
Hell spends a lot of time discussing his long periods of drug addiction, and honestly, if you've read any other rock n' roll memoir, there's not really anything new here. At least Hell's writing makes up for the fact that this is, essentially, just a remix of the same song you hear in every single music memoir:
"Addiction is lonely. ...Once the drug use has replaced everything else, life becomes purely a lie, since in order to keep any self-respect, the junkie has to delude himself that use is by choice. That's the worst loneliness - the isolation, even from oneself, in that lie. In the meantime the original physical pleasure becomes merely dull relief from the threat of withdrawal, from the horror of real life. The user will add any other drugs available, especially stimulants, like methedrine or cocaine, to try to make it interesting again. Eventually, I happened to survive long enough to reach a place where I couldn't kid myself anymore that it was all on purpose, and the despair and physical torment of my failed attempts to stop became my entire reality. I found a way to quit, with help. It was luck that I lived that long."
The book really started to lose me, though, once I became aware of an undercurrent of bitterness running through the entire memoir. Whenever Hell is discussing bands like the Ramones or Johnny Rotten, he's always either hinting or full-out stating that they sold out once they became famous, and you get the impression that Hell believes that his lack of real fame makes him the only true surviving punk. He's also weirdly fixated on Patti Smith, and she appears in the narrative frequently (in her introduction, Hell makes sure to inform the reader that she had amazing boobs. Rock n' roll dudes are and always will be the worst). I don't know if Hell is just angry because Smith never slept with him, but it sure reads that way. The funniest part of all of this is that I read Just Kids by Patti Smith, and I'm not sure she mentioned Richard Hell even once. Clearly, one of them had a much greater effect than the other.
By the end, there isn't really any clear point to this book. Richard Hell grows up, starts playing music, battles an addiction, and...that's pretty much it. There's no central idea or point at the center of this memoir, no goal that Hell's writing is working towards. It's just a sort of linear description of a period in his life, nothing more.
This is a detailed, clear-eyed description of the early days of a music movement, with cameos by famous and not-so-famous figures from the era, so the memoir is worth it for anyone wanting an insider perspective on that time period. But ultimately, Richard Hell doesn't actually have much to say. ...more
For a memoir, this book is pretty slim, both literally and metaphorically. Hell spends way too much time telling you about his childhood, and the only real information of interest in this section is the fact that Hell grew up in the perfect cliche of a happy 1950's household. Parents wanting to save their children from a life of drugs and rock n' roll, beware - Keith Richards was a boy scout, Mick Jagger was a choir boy, and Richard Hell was raised in a lovely safe suburb in the Midwest.
The book finally gets good once Hell gets to New York with Tom Verlaine and they start getting into music, and I liked this section for two reasons. First, because of the clear-eyed and unsentimental descriptions of the punk music scene in New York, when it was just a bunch of hungry struggling kids trying to make a statement about something, anything. The honesty and the clarity of Hell's writing makes up for the fact that we are also subjected to a laundry list of women he slept with during this period and why it didn't work out, but frankly I was just happy that he didn't sneer at them and refer to all the women as "chicks" like Keith Richards did in his memoir.
I also liked the fact that Hell presents his music career with honesty and a lack of pretension. He doesn't claim to be called to music, or give us boring lectures on chord progressions. He got into music because it seemed fun, and a good way to get girls, and couldn't even be bothered to practice all that much (to the frequent annoyance of everyone who tried to form a band with him, it turns out that Richard Hell didn't really enjoy being in a band). This frankness was refreshing, but sometimes it feels like self-depreciation, like this excerpt where Hell, one of the coolest people on the planet, tries to claim that he's really super lame:
"All my career I've been described as quintessentially 'cool' or 'hip.' I suppose I've fostered this, on levels, in order to seem desirable to girls and to avoid standard hypocrisy and routine consumer life, but I am not cool. I'm cranky under pressure, I'm a mediocre athlete, I get obsessed with women, I usually want to be liked, and I'm not especially street-smart."
Seriously, that excerpt reads like an actress on the red carpet insisting that no, she looks just terrible and she ate a cheeseburger in the limo and honestly, she's just gross. *pose*
Hell spends a lot of time discussing his long periods of drug addiction, and honestly, if you've read any other rock n' roll memoir, there's not really anything new here. At least Hell's writing makes up for the fact that this is, essentially, just a remix of the same song you hear in every single music memoir:
"Addiction is lonely. ...Once the drug use has replaced everything else, life becomes purely a lie, since in order to keep any self-respect, the junkie has to delude himself that use is by choice. That's the worst loneliness - the isolation, even from oneself, in that lie. In the meantime the original physical pleasure becomes merely dull relief from the threat of withdrawal, from the horror of real life. The user will add any other drugs available, especially stimulants, like methedrine or cocaine, to try to make it interesting again. Eventually, I happened to survive long enough to reach a place where I couldn't kid myself anymore that it was all on purpose, and the despair and physical torment of my failed attempts to stop became my entire reality. I found a way to quit, with help. It was luck that I lived that long."
The book really started to lose me, though, once I became aware of an undercurrent of bitterness running through the entire memoir. Whenever Hell is discussing bands like the Ramones or Johnny Rotten, he's always either hinting or full-out stating that they sold out once they became famous, and you get the impression that Hell believes that his lack of real fame makes him the only true surviving punk. He's also weirdly fixated on Patti Smith, and she appears in the narrative frequently (in her introduction, Hell makes sure to inform the reader that she had amazing boobs. Rock n' roll dudes are and always will be the worst). I don't know if Hell is just angry because Smith never slept with him, but it sure reads that way. The funniest part of all of this is that I read Just Kids by Patti Smith, and I'm not sure she mentioned Richard Hell even once. Clearly, one of them had a much greater effect than the other.
By the end, there isn't really any clear point to this book. Richard Hell grows up, starts playing music, battles an addiction, and...that's pretty much it. There's no central idea or point at the center of this memoir, no goal that Hell's writing is working towards. It's just a sort of linear description of a period in his life, nothing more.
This is a detailed, clear-eyed description of the early days of a music movement, with cameos by famous and not-so-famous figures from the era, so the memoir is worth it for anyone wanting an insider perspective on that time period. But ultimately, Richard Hell doesn't actually have much to say. ...more
Notes are private!
1
not set
May 2016
Aug 11, 2016
Kindle Edition
0393302318
9780393302318
0393302318
4.07
982
1983
May 17, 1985
liked it
"Yet for all her freewheeling and independence, Sylvia Beach was a woman for others. ...Although she had no pretensions to literary talent herself, sh
"Yet for all her freewheeling and independence, Sylvia Beach was a woman for others. ...Although she had no pretensions to literary talent herself, she lived her life among books, trusted her own literary judgement, and helped those artists she believed in. Indeed, she vicariously shared the joy of their success. She possessed an outgoing and vivacious personality; a nervous, restive energy; and a witty unsentimental intelligence. Occasionally she used the flattery and disarming diplomacy of the parson's daughter, but was as wise as Machiavelli. She retained her identity in a crowd of dominant personalities."
Shakespeare & Co was more than a bookstore. It was a lending library, performance venue, post office, hotel, and meeting space for some of the biggest names in the art scene of 1920's Paris. The store's legacy continues to this day - Shakespeare & Co is still operating (and I think it's owned by a direct descendant of Sylvia Beach, but I could be wrong about that) and they have a program that provides free room and board for aspiring writers. Shakespeare & Co - not just the store itself, but everything it stands for and the people it affected - exists thanks to the efforts of two women. One was Adrienne Monnier, a French bookstore owner. The other was Sylvia Beach, an American woman who came to Paris in the beginning of the 20th century and stayed in France for the rest of her life. She became the close friend of numerous artists, and kept her bookstore alive through the the 1920's, saved the books from the Nazis, and kept the shop afloat even when she was drowning in debt. She was also instrumental in getting Ulysses published, and having it smuggled into the United States when it was initially banned.
As other reviewers have pointed out, the main focus of this book is Beach's relationship with James Joyce. I knew that this would be heavily emphasized before I bought the book - flipping through it in the store, every single random page I turned to mentioned Joyce's name - but even then, there is a lot of Joyce in here. Like, this book should have been called Slyvia Beach and James Joyce. Other famous 1920's artists and authors make appearances, but it's clear that Fitch is most interested in exploring the Beach/Joyce dynamic.
Which, ugh. I don't like James Joyce's writing, and I definitely don't like James Joyce the person (a dislike that was only confirmed by the stories in this book - Slyvia Beach, despite barely keeping the bookstore in business, would frequently give Joyce money for food and rent, and he would frequently stop by the store and help himself to cash from the register). But honestly, even fans of James Joyce don't really like James Joyce. Here's what Fitch says about Joyce's efforts to make the publication and reading of his work the biggest goddamn headache for everyone involved:
"He did not merely correct or change words and phrases, he added to the copy, always complicating the material with interrelated details. He told Jaques Benoist-Mechin, 'I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.' His statement proved to be more than jest. Joyce has become the favorite of exegetes the world over."
Translation: James Joyce was a dick.
The pacing of this book is meandering, as Fitch sort of wanders from one anecdote to the other. When the book is good, it's very good, like when she's discussing Beach's efforts to keep the bookstore open during the Nazi occupation (at a time when, I might add, Gertrude Stein was busy taking vacations and helping the Vichy government) or telling stories about the artistic scene in the 1920s. One of my favorite stories was about George Antheil and his plan to drum up publicity for a performance of his Ballet Mecanique: he went into hiding while his friends fed a story to the newspapers that Antheil had gone off to Africa, and then disappeared. The plan was for Antheil to make a miraculous return to Paris, but while he was "missing" Antheil proposed to his girlfriend, and they were on their way to Budapest to get married when Sylvia Beach sent him this telegram: "FOR GOODNESS SAKE GEORGE COME BACK TO PARIS IMMEDIATELY AND DENY THIS IDIOTIC NEWSPAPER STORY LIONS ATE YOU IN AFRICA OR ELSE YOUR NAME WILL BE MUD FOREVER STOP TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE STOP SYLVIA BEACH."
I also enjoyed all of the subtle shots that Fitch takes at Gertrude Stein and her (carefully cultivated) reputation as the queen of literary Paris. Stien, as far as Fitch was concerned, ain't shit.
"Gertrude Stein's declaration that 'America is my country, but Paris is my home' more accurately described Sylvia Beach than Stein. Unlike Gertrude, Sylvia knew the language well and made her closest friendships among the French. ...On the one hand, she never attempted to deny her American heritage by embracing a national identity that was not hers by birth. She did not embrace all things French with uncritical enthusiasm. Nor did she, at the other extreme, choose to live within an American community in Paris, avoiding the French people and customs."
Ultimately, this was a frustrating read, not just because of the (over)emphasis on Joyce, but also because Fitch can't seem to find a narrative to focus on. It's just a collection of anecdotes, and even though some of them are very good anecdotes and give the reader a clear picture of life in 1920's Paris, it doesn't make up for the book's larger faults.
Sylvia Beach was cool as hell, though. ...more
Shakespeare & Co was more than a bookstore. It was a lending library, performance venue, post office, hotel, and meeting space for some of the biggest names in the art scene of 1920's Paris. The store's legacy continues to this day - Shakespeare & Co is still operating (and I think it's owned by a direct descendant of Sylvia Beach, but I could be wrong about that) and they have a program that provides free room and board for aspiring writers. Shakespeare & Co - not just the store itself, but everything it stands for and the people it affected - exists thanks to the efforts of two women. One was Adrienne Monnier, a French bookstore owner. The other was Sylvia Beach, an American woman who came to Paris in the beginning of the 20th century and stayed in France for the rest of her life. She became the close friend of numerous artists, and kept her bookstore alive through the the 1920's, saved the books from the Nazis, and kept the shop afloat even when she was drowning in debt. She was also instrumental in getting Ulysses published, and having it smuggled into the United States when it was initially banned.
As other reviewers have pointed out, the main focus of this book is Beach's relationship with James Joyce. I knew that this would be heavily emphasized before I bought the book - flipping through it in the store, every single random page I turned to mentioned Joyce's name - but even then, there is a lot of Joyce in here. Like, this book should have been called Slyvia Beach and James Joyce. Other famous 1920's artists and authors make appearances, but it's clear that Fitch is most interested in exploring the Beach/Joyce dynamic.
Which, ugh. I don't like James Joyce's writing, and I definitely don't like James Joyce the person (a dislike that was only confirmed by the stories in this book - Slyvia Beach, despite barely keeping the bookstore in business, would frequently give Joyce money for food and rent, and he would frequently stop by the store and help himself to cash from the register). But honestly, even fans of James Joyce don't really like James Joyce. Here's what Fitch says about Joyce's efforts to make the publication and reading of his work the biggest goddamn headache for everyone involved:
"He did not merely correct or change words and phrases, he added to the copy, always complicating the material with interrelated details. He told Jaques Benoist-Mechin, 'I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.' His statement proved to be more than jest. Joyce has become the favorite of exegetes the world over."
Translation: James Joyce was a dick.
The pacing of this book is meandering, as Fitch sort of wanders from one anecdote to the other. When the book is good, it's very good, like when she's discussing Beach's efforts to keep the bookstore open during the Nazi occupation (at a time when, I might add, Gertrude Stein was busy taking vacations and helping the Vichy government) or telling stories about the artistic scene in the 1920s. One of my favorite stories was about George Antheil and his plan to drum up publicity for a performance of his Ballet Mecanique: he went into hiding while his friends fed a story to the newspapers that Antheil had gone off to Africa, and then disappeared. The plan was for Antheil to make a miraculous return to Paris, but while he was "missing" Antheil proposed to his girlfriend, and they were on their way to Budapest to get married when Sylvia Beach sent him this telegram: "FOR GOODNESS SAKE GEORGE COME BACK TO PARIS IMMEDIATELY AND DENY THIS IDIOTIC NEWSPAPER STORY LIONS ATE YOU IN AFRICA OR ELSE YOUR NAME WILL BE MUD FOREVER STOP TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE STOP SYLVIA BEACH."
I also enjoyed all of the subtle shots that Fitch takes at Gertrude Stein and her (carefully cultivated) reputation as the queen of literary Paris. Stien, as far as Fitch was concerned, ain't shit.
"Gertrude Stein's declaration that 'America is my country, but Paris is my home' more accurately described Sylvia Beach than Stein. Unlike Gertrude, Sylvia knew the language well and made her closest friendships among the French. ...On the one hand, she never attempted to deny her American heritage by embracing a national identity that was not hers by birth. She did not embrace all things French with uncritical enthusiasm. Nor did she, at the other extreme, choose to live within an American community in Paris, avoiding the French people and customs."
Ultimately, this was a frustrating read, not just because of the (over)emphasis on Joyce, but also because Fitch can't seem to find a narrative to focus on. It's just a collection of anecdotes, and even though some of them are very good anecdotes and give the reader a clear picture of life in 1920's Paris, it doesn't make up for the book's larger faults.
Sylvia Beach was cool as hell, though. ...more
Notes are private!
1
not set
Apr 2016
Aug 02, 2016
Paperback
1594744769
9781594744761
1594744769
3.92
1,339,652
Jun 07, 2011
Jun 07, 2011
it was ok
It was...fine?
I liked the inclusion of old, weird photographs throughout the book, especially the way they were placed - you would read an offhand des It was...fine?
I liked the inclusion of old, weird photographs throughout the book, especially the way they were placed - you would read an offhand description of something odd, turn the page, and there was the photo showing exactly that. I liked that part, and the photos were always a pleasant surprise, even though I spent way too much time trying to figure out how they had been faked.
But there were just too many stumbling blocks for me to really enjoy this book. The biggest and most obvious issue is the whole concept of "time loops", which enable the peculiar children of the novel to remain hidden from the larger world. Time travel as a narrative device is extremely tricky to pull off, because of all the potential plot holes that spring up - it's expert-level, black diamond stuff, and Riggs isn't at the level where he can successfully navigate it.
And Jacob, our hero, was a problem. He had almost no discernible personality (probably because he's intended to be a stand-in for the reader, so we can project our own personalities onto him) and had wildly inconsistent characterization. It starts out really well, because in the early chapters, we see Jacob dealing with the fact that he witnessed his grandfather's violent death. Riggs shows us how damaging that can be, and doesn't spare us the details of Jacob's PTSD (one detail I especially loved: for a few months, Jacob can only sleep in a pile of blankets in the laundry room, because it's the only room in his house "with no windows and also a door that locked from the inside"). I was really excited that Riggs was doing this, because it's very rare for YA supernatural adventure lit like this to acknowledge that, hey, regular exposure to stuff like this is actually really really traumatizing. But then Jacob's anxiety and PTSD just kind of...go away. Throughout the story, we see him in confined spaces, witnessing violence, and encountering the same kind of terrifying situations that sent him into intensive therapy at the beginning of the book, and he just brushes them off like it's no big deal. It was like Riggs started out thinking he was going to realistically depict the traumatic aftermath of violent, scary situations, but then got bored and decided to just ignore all of Jacob's previously-established mental issues.
But honestly, the biggest problem I had was this: I wanted to read this same story, but from another character's perspective and written by another author.
Okay, so because Jacob is a minor, his father accompanies him to the island and then just hangs around in the background, quietly having a total mental breakdown that Jacob can't be bothered to notice. Because here's what's so interesting to me: while Jacob has mostly positive memories of his grandfather, the dad remembers him as an emotionally distant father who was never around and may have been having an affair. Then Jacob learns that, no, his grandpa was always traveling because he was busy hunting demons.
Fine, but imagine this story from the dad's perspective: an adult man, dealing with the death of his father, learns that he had an entire separate life as a hunter of monsters, and the man has to resume the work his father started while also working through their complicated relationship. Forget the precocious Harry Potter-lite teenage hero; I wanted to read an emotionally complex story of a man reconciling his relationship with his complicated father while also learning to hunt demons.
Long story short: this is the first book in a trilogy, but I have no interest in continuing the series. ...more
I liked the inclusion of old, weird photographs throughout the book, especially the way they were placed - you would read an offhand des It was...fine?
I liked the inclusion of old, weird photographs throughout the book, especially the way they were placed - you would read an offhand description of something odd, turn the page, and there was the photo showing exactly that. I liked that part, and the photos were always a pleasant surprise, even though I spent way too much time trying to figure out how they had been faked.
But there were just too many stumbling blocks for me to really enjoy this book. The biggest and most obvious issue is the whole concept of "time loops", which enable the peculiar children of the novel to remain hidden from the larger world. Time travel as a narrative device is extremely tricky to pull off, because of all the potential plot holes that spring up - it's expert-level, black diamond stuff, and Riggs isn't at the level where he can successfully navigate it.
And Jacob, our hero, was a problem. He had almost no discernible personality (probably because he's intended to be a stand-in for the reader, so we can project our own personalities onto him) and had wildly inconsistent characterization. It starts out really well, because in the early chapters, we see Jacob dealing with the fact that he witnessed his grandfather's violent death. Riggs shows us how damaging that can be, and doesn't spare us the details of Jacob's PTSD (one detail I especially loved: for a few months, Jacob can only sleep in a pile of blankets in the laundry room, because it's the only room in his house "with no windows and also a door that locked from the inside"). I was really excited that Riggs was doing this, because it's very rare for YA supernatural adventure lit like this to acknowledge that, hey, regular exposure to stuff like this is actually really really traumatizing. But then Jacob's anxiety and PTSD just kind of...go away. Throughout the story, we see him in confined spaces, witnessing violence, and encountering the same kind of terrifying situations that sent him into intensive therapy at the beginning of the book, and he just brushes them off like it's no big deal. It was like Riggs started out thinking he was going to realistically depict the traumatic aftermath of violent, scary situations, but then got bored and decided to just ignore all of Jacob's previously-established mental issues.
But honestly, the biggest problem I had was this: I wanted to read this same story, but from another character's perspective and written by another author.
Okay, so because Jacob is a minor, his father accompanies him to the island and then just hangs around in the background, quietly having a total mental breakdown that Jacob can't be bothered to notice. Because here's what's so interesting to me: while Jacob has mostly positive memories of his grandfather, the dad remembers him as an emotionally distant father who was never around and may have been having an affair. Then Jacob learns that, no, his grandpa was always traveling because he was busy hunting demons.
Fine, but imagine this story from the dad's perspective: an adult man, dealing with the death of his father, learns that he had an entire separate life as a hunter of monsters, and the man has to resume the work his father started while also working through their complicated relationship. Forget the precocious Harry Potter-lite teenage hero; I wanted to read an emotionally complex story of a man reconciling his relationship with his complicated father while also learning to hunt demons.
Long story short: this is the first book in a trilogy, but I have no interest in continuing the series. ...more
Notes are private!
1
not set
not set
Jul 08, 2016
Hardcover
0062372106
9780062372109
B01BITGENS
3.56
50,593
Jun 23, 2015
Jun 23, 2015
it was amazing
Or, as I called the book in my head, Everyone is a Whore Except Me and Here's Why. Better yet: The Truth About Kettle: An Autobiography by Pot.
Look, Or, as I called the book in my head, Everyone is a Whore Except Me and Here's Why. Better yet: The Truth About Kettle: An Autobiography by Pot.
Look, I'm not going to pretend that I had any good reason to read this book. Underneath the surface, this is a scathing indictment of unfair beauty standards, the fear of female sexuality, and the entire goddamn patriarchy (and Madison, delightfully, seems blissfully unaware of the deeper implications of some of her observations about the unfairness of life at the Playboy Mansion - she's just mad that all these girls were so mean to her). But that's not why I read it. I read it because "behind-the-scenes look at trashy reality show" is one of my favorite memoir styles, and I've always been weirdly fascinated by mistresses, harems, harem culture, and the whole "what men think women do when they're not around vs. what women actually do" issue. But mostly I just wanted dirt on Hugh Hefner, the weird atmosphere of the Playboy Mansion, and the women who were paid to have sex with Hefner under the guise of "girlfriends."
I wanted dirt, and hoooooly shit, readers, does Holly Madison deliver the dirt. It's hilarious that the cover photo shows Madison holding a finger to her lips, because she is holding nothing back here. A more honest picture would be Madison shouting at the reader. Reading this book is sort of like sitting down for coffee with a casual acquaintance right after she's broken up with her boyfriend, and you have to sit there and listen politely while she unloads every complaint and annoyance she ever had while they were dating. In short, Holly Madison has some things to get off her chest, and god damn was I here for that. I read this book in two and a half days.
So, some background: Holly Madison spent seven years living in the Playboy Mansion as one of Hugh Hefner's "girlfriends." In the early years, she was one of a larger group of girls (who are always referred to by Holly's hilariously oblivious narration as "the mean girls"), but later the girlfriends shrank to three members: Madison, Bridgette Marquette, and Kendra Wilkinson. The women gained fame when they starred in a reality show based around the Playboy Mansion, and then eventually moved on to get their own shows once they left the mansion. Sidebar: there are a ton of The Girls Next Door episodes on YouTube right now, and there are worse ways to waste an afternoon.
Madison's memoir is an incredible portrait of a total lack of self-awareness. She spends most of this book desperately trying to convince the reader that she is somehow different than all the other women who "dated" Hugh Hefner and posed in his magazine. See, those other girls were dumb bimbos, but not Holly! She only pretended to be dumb! The other girls were cookie-cutter blondes who all looked like clones of each other, but not Holly! Sure, she bleached her hair and got plastic surgery, but only because she wanted to fit in! It's totally different! And the other girls were opportunistic sluts who only used Hef to gain fame! Not Holly! Sure, she left the mansion and got her own reality show, and went on Dancing With the Stars, and starred in a Vegas show, but she accomplished all of that on her own! The fact that each of these projects made direct references to her history with Playboy is just a coincidence!
It is stunningly absurd that, for all the time Madison spends insisting that she's built a career on her own and has completely escaped the shadow of Playboy, she can never convince the reader that she's become famous in her own right. I mean, for God's sake, the subtitle of this book makes sure to mention that Madison is "a former Playboy bunny" because like it or not, that is Madison's sole claim to fame.
Of course, to hear Madison tell it, she was just playing the game, and was trying to get out all along. She never loved Hef, and had to pretend otherwise because it suited his cultivated image. She merely played along, Madison insists, until she was able to escape. The idea that other women may have had the exact same strategy has not occurred to Madsion, and she remains blissfully unaware of her own hypocrisy. One of the many, many bits of vengeful gossip Madison gives us is that Kendra's signature loud laugh is completely faked, and that Kendra only started doing it to distinguish herself from the other women. This, readers, is the dictionary definition of "pretty fucking rich" because have you ever heard Holly Madison's laugh? She just bleats "ha ha ha ha" in a monotone, like someone who mispronounces a word because they've only ever seen it written down.
And for all her railing against "the mean girls" of the mansion, Holly Madison is like the most petty and passive-agressive person I've ever read about. After detailing her breakup with Vegas magician Criss Angel (Vegas. Magician. Criss. Angel.) Madison gleefully quotes, at length, all of the negative reviews his show received. I'm pretty sure that Peep Show, Madison's own Vegas show, wasn't exactly showered in positive reviews, but as far as she's concerned, it was a massive hit and everyone loved her and her lifelike, nuanced acting. And Madison makes sure we know that after she left The Girls Next Door, the show was a failure without her and was quickly canceled. When Madison's own reality show is canceled after two seasons, she explains that this was right after a new president came on at E!, who wanted to move away from Playboy-related content. The implication is that, if it wasn't for this change in management, Holly's show would still be running today. When she is accused of starting a twitter fight with Hefner's new girlfriend by claiming she stole her look (a look which, remember, Madison adopted in order to fit in with all the other bleached, surgically enhanced blondes at the Mansion), Madison is adamant that she did no such thing, and only posted a generic tweet about hating copycats. I see you, Madison. You ain't slick.
And of course Holly Madison feels a personal affinity with Marilyn Monroe, unwilling patron saint of vapid starlets who want to appear complex. Here's one of the book's more rage-inducing paragraphs:
"Like me, Marilyn had suffered at the hands of some not very nice men. She was used, underappreciated, and struggled to find herself. She worked her way up in Hollywood with stars in her eyes and a kind heart, but found that Hollywood wasn't always as kind in return. She may have been publicly adored, idolized, and lusted after, but she often felt alone and trapped. Those dark demons eventually got the best of Marilyn. Part of me knows that could have easily been my fate had I not chosen to take care of myself. I only wish poor Marilyn could have done the same."
Wow. Wooooooow. I love this paragraph, because it reveals so much more about Madison's character than she realizes. She puts herself in the same category as Marilyn Monroe, one of the most famous and most talented women of her generation, and did everyone catch the way she subtlely blames Monroe for her own suicide? Gee, if only Monroe had "chosen" to take care of herself, she might still be alive! If only Holly Madison had been around to show her the way!
Underneath the drama and the fluff and the gossip, Madison is (perhaps unintentionally) exposing something much darker and far-reaching than a bunch of backstabbing mean girls. The real fascination of this memoir is watching Madison explore how she was brainwashed and virtually imprisoned, and how she went about the process of slowly undoing the damage she incurred at the Playboy mansion - a process that is still ongoing.
Simply put, Holly Madison is a survivor of domestic abuse, although she doesn't yet have the emotional vocabulary to articulate this. You only have to read a few paragraphs about Hugh Hefner's intense control issues (he apparently hates red lipstick on women, and once screamed at Madison when she dared to wear it) and the way he pits the women against each other to realize that you're reading a description of a textbook abuser. When Madison is describing the steps she took to leave the mansion (saving money, making an escape plan), she sounds exactly like everyone who ever had to go through the process of escaping an abusive partner.
It's going to be easy for reviewers to demonize Holly Madison for her choices (and as you can see from the many, many paragraphs above, it's hard not to) because, as I said in my review of Pamela Des Barres's memoir of her time as a groupie, Madison is merely a symptom of a bigger disease. The real villain of this story is not backstabbing opportunistic women, but the man who orchestrated their struggles, and encouraged fighting among them so they would forget who the real enemy was. But Madison didn't forget, and she's at her best when her writing is full of righteous fury and frustration at Hugh Hefner, the man who kept her a virtual prisoner and destroyed her self-esteem so thoroughly that she contemplated suicide. Sure, Holly Madison is awful human being, but Hefner is the Dr. Frankenstein, while Madison is merely the monster that all the villagers go after with pitchforks.
In conclusion: fuck you, Hugh Hefner. You're a bad person, I'm glad your entire empire is crumbling, and I hope whatever barely-legal girl you marry next smothers you in your sleep. ...more
Look, Or, as I called the book in my head, Everyone is a Whore Except Me and Here's Why. Better yet: The Truth About Kettle: An Autobiography by Pot.
Look, I'm not going to pretend that I had any good reason to read this book. Underneath the surface, this is a scathing indictment of unfair beauty standards, the fear of female sexuality, and the entire goddamn patriarchy (and Madison, delightfully, seems blissfully unaware of the deeper implications of some of her observations about the unfairness of life at the Playboy Mansion - she's just mad that all these girls were so mean to her). But that's not why I read it. I read it because "behind-the-scenes look at trashy reality show" is one of my favorite memoir styles, and I've always been weirdly fascinated by mistresses, harems, harem culture, and the whole "what men think women do when they're not around vs. what women actually do" issue. But mostly I just wanted dirt on Hugh Hefner, the weird atmosphere of the Playboy Mansion, and the women who were paid to have sex with Hefner under the guise of "girlfriends."
I wanted dirt, and hoooooly shit, readers, does Holly Madison deliver the dirt. It's hilarious that the cover photo shows Madison holding a finger to her lips, because she is holding nothing back here. A more honest picture would be Madison shouting at the reader. Reading this book is sort of like sitting down for coffee with a casual acquaintance right after she's broken up with her boyfriend, and you have to sit there and listen politely while she unloads every complaint and annoyance she ever had while they were dating. In short, Holly Madison has some things to get off her chest, and god damn was I here for that. I read this book in two and a half days.
So, some background: Holly Madison spent seven years living in the Playboy Mansion as one of Hugh Hefner's "girlfriends." In the early years, she was one of a larger group of girls (who are always referred to by Holly's hilariously oblivious narration as "the mean girls"), but later the girlfriends shrank to three members: Madison, Bridgette Marquette, and Kendra Wilkinson. The women gained fame when they starred in a reality show based around the Playboy Mansion, and then eventually moved on to get their own shows once they left the mansion. Sidebar: there are a ton of The Girls Next Door episodes on YouTube right now, and there are worse ways to waste an afternoon.
Madison's memoir is an incredible portrait of a total lack of self-awareness. She spends most of this book desperately trying to convince the reader that she is somehow different than all the other women who "dated" Hugh Hefner and posed in his magazine. See, those other girls were dumb bimbos, but not Holly! She only pretended to be dumb! The other girls were cookie-cutter blondes who all looked like clones of each other, but not Holly! Sure, she bleached her hair and got plastic surgery, but only because she wanted to fit in! It's totally different! And the other girls were opportunistic sluts who only used Hef to gain fame! Not Holly! Sure, she left the mansion and got her own reality show, and went on Dancing With the Stars, and starred in a Vegas show, but she accomplished all of that on her own! The fact that each of these projects made direct references to her history with Playboy is just a coincidence!
It is stunningly absurd that, for all the time Madison spends insisting that she's built a career on her own and has completely escaped the shadow of Playboy, she can never convince the reader that she's become famous in her own right. I mean, for God's sake, the subtitle of this book makes sure to mention that Madison is "a former Playboy bunny" because like it or not, that is Madison's sole claim to fame.
Of course, to hear Madison tell it, she was just playing the game, and was trying to get out all along. She never loved Hef, and had to pretend otherwise because it suited his cultivated image. She merely played along, Madison insists, until she was able to escape. The idea that other women may have had the exact same strategy has not occurred to Madsion, and she remains blissfully unaware of her own hypocrisy. One of the many, many bits of vengeful gossip Madison gives us is that Kendra's signature loud laugh is completely faked, and that Kendra only started doing it to distinguish herself from the other women. This, readers, is the dictionary definition of "pretty fucking rich" because have you ever heard Holly Madison's laugh? She just bleats "ha ha ha ha" in a monotone, like someone who mispronounces a word because they've only ever seen it written down.
And for all her railing against "the mean girls" of the mansion, Holly Madison is like the most petty and passive-agressive person I've ever read about. After detailing her breakup with Vegas magician Criss Angel (Vegas. Magician. Criss. Angel.) Madison gleefully quotes, at length, all of the negative reviews his show received. I'm pretty sure that Peep Show, Madison's own Vegas show, wasn't exactly showered in positive reviews, but as far as she's concerned, it was a massive hit and everyone loved her and her lifelike, nuanced acting. And Madison makes sure we know that after she left The Girls Next Door, the show was a failure without her and was quickly canceled. When Madison's own reality show is canceled after two seasons, she explains that this was right after a new president came on at E!, who wanted to move away from Playboy-related content. The implication is that, if it wasn't for this change in management, Holly's show would still be running today. When she is accused of starting a twitter fight with Hefner's new girlfriend by claiming she stole her look (a look which, remember, Madison adopted in order to fit in with all the other bleached, surgically enhanced blondes at the Mansion), Madison is adamant that she did no such thing, and only posted a generic tweet about hating copycats. I see you, Madison. You ain't slick.
And of course Holly Madison feels a personal affinity with Marilyn Monroe, unwilling patron saint of vapid starlets who want to appear complex. Here's one of the book's more rage-inducing paragraphs:
"Like me, Marilyn had suffered at the hands of some not very nice men. She was used, underappreciated, and struggled to find herself. She worked her way up in Hollywood with stars in her eyes and a kind heart, but found that Hollywood wasn't always as kind in return. She may have been publicly adored, idolized, and lusted after, but she often felt alone and trapped. Those dark demons eventually got the best of Marilyn. Part of me knows that could have easily been my fate had I not chosen to take care of myself. I only wish poor Marilyn could have done the same."
Wow. Wooooooow. I love this paragraph, because it reveals so much more about Madison's character than she realizes. She puts herself in the same category as Marilyn Monroe, one of the most famous and most talented women of her generation, and did everyone catch the way she subtlely blames Monroe for her own suicide? Gee, if only Monroe had "chosen" to take care of herself, she might still be alive! If only Holly Madison had been around to show her the way!
Underneath the drama and the fluff and the gossip, Madison is (perhaps unintentionally) exposing something much darker and far-reaching than a bunch of backstabbing mean girls. The real fascination of this memoir is watching Madison explore how she was brainwashed and virtually imprisoned, and how she went about the process of slowly undoing the damage she incurred at the Playboy mansion - a process that is still ongoing.
Simply put, Holly Madison is a survivor of domestic abuse, although she doesn't yet have the emotional vocabulary to articulate this. You only have to read a few paragraphs about Hugh Hefner's intense control issues (he apparently hates red lipstick on women, and once screamed at Madison when she dared to wear it) and the way he pits the women against each other to realize that you're reading a description of a textbook abuser. When Madison is describing the steps she took to leave the mansion (saving money, making an escape plan), she sounds exactly like everyone who ever had to go through the process of escaping an abusive partner.
It's going to be easy for reviewers to demonize Holly Madison for her choices (and as you can see from the many, many paragraphs above, it's hard not to) because, as I said in my review of Pamela Des Barres's memoir of her time as a groupie, Madison is merely a symptom of a bigger disease. The real villain of this story is not backstabbing opportunistic women, but the man who orchestrated their struggles, and encouraged fighting among them so they would forget who the real enemy was. But Madison didn't forget, and she's at her best when her writing is full of righteous fury and frustration at Hugh Hefner, the man who kept her a virtual prisoner and destroyed her self-esteem so thoroughly that she contemplated suicide. Sure, Holly Madison is awful human being, but Hefner is the Dr. Frankenstein, while Madison is merely the monster that all the villagers go after with pitchforks.
In conclusion: fuck you, Hugh Hefner. You're a bad person, I'm glad your entire empire is crumbling, and I hope whatever barely-legal girl you marry next smothers you in your sleep. ...more
Notes are private!
1
not set
not set
Jun 27, 2016
Paperback
0618663029
9780618663026
0618663029
3.43
12,082
Feb 02, 2016
Feb 02, 2016
it was ok
Well.
That didn't go AT ALL like I was expecting it to.
I saw some reviews of this floating around on Goodreads a few weeks ago, and when I decided to Well.
That didn't go AT ALL like I was expecting it to.
I saw some reviews of this floating around on Goodreads a few weeks ago, and when I decided to look up a plot description, it sounded like everything I wanted from a novel. The story begins with Lilliet Berne, star soprano of the Paris Opera, being offered an original role in a new opera. But as she reads the story, she realizes that the opera is based on her own life, and exposes secrets from her past that she wants to stay buried. There are only four people who know Lilliet's secrets, and she decides to find out who's working behind the scenes to expose her. As she does, the reader follows her on her journey and learns how Lilliet went from orphan farm girl, to circus equestrian, to courtesan, to imperial spy, and ended as an opera singer.
Based on that description, this book should have been my absolute jam. Opera singers! Belle Epoque Paris! Intrigue! Affairs! Courtesans! These are all things that I love, yet I did not enjoy a single page of The Queen of the Night, and I still can't figure out why.
Nothing in this book worked for me. Other reviews praised Lilliet as an awesome heroine; I found her dull. Sure, it was impressive the way she was consistently wiggled her way out of one scrape after another (her best escape is stolen directly from The Count of Monte Cristo, and I'll forgive the absurdity of it because I love a good Dumas homage), but there didn't seem to be any spark to her - it was just five hundred pages of "oh, now I have to deal with this. Well, that was a close one." Maybe the problem was Chee's prose, which struck me as very dry and removed - I wanted narration that threw itself whole-heartedly into the fantastical aspects of this story, and was willing to have a little fun with it. Chee's writing takes itself way too seriously, and as a result, I couldn't commit myself to what should have been a melodramatic adventure story.
The other major problem was the antagonist. At the beginning of Lilliet's career as a courtesan, she is purchased (literally purchased) by a man she refers to only as "the tenor." But he might as well be named "the patriarchy" because his job is to remind the reader of how thoroughly it sucked to be a woman in the 19th century. Sure, fine, I can get behind a malevolent john character when Lilliet is starting out. But then the tenor refuses to go away. Every time Lilliet escapes him, he just reappears a few chapters later, and she's back where she started, and by the time this had happened three times, I was beyond bored with the tenor. He has nothing to redeem himself to the reader, but isn't evil enough to be a compelling villain. When Lilliet finally (view spoiler)[kills him, it happens about three hundred pages too late. Chee should have killed the tenor off way earlier in the story, so he could be another skeleton in Lilliet's closet, and made up a better villain to take his place. (Also, the murder itself is so fucking easy there's no reason she couldn't have done it literally years ago. And it's stupidly absurd - she stabs him, which, yay! But then she breathes fire at him and it's pointless and I'm just glad that Chee resisted the urge to write SUITABLE FOR FILM ADAPTATION at the bottom of the page, because that's clearly what he was thinking when he wrote the scene) (hide spoiler)]
But the biggest problem is Lilliet herself, and the role she plays in this story. It's disheartening that, in a 500-page novel, our supposed heroine never really gets to be anything other than a victim. She's a victim of the tenor, she's a victim of her employers - Lilliet is early Sansa Stark, and it was frustrating. Like, I get that this is 19th century France and we can't exactly have her charging around with pistols or whatever, but give her some goddamn agency, for Christ's sake! Lilliet is reactive rather than proactive, and it makes her a lame excuse for a heroine. She never really gets to be in control, in a book that is supposed to be her story. Instead, she just bounces from one terrible scenario to another, constantly being manipulated and controlled by others.
Oh! And I almost forgot to talk about the romance element, which elicited only eye-rolling from me. So when Lilliet is working as a servant (and spy) in the Emperor's household, she meets "the composer." (He gets a name later on, but not before I got my history mixed up and thought he was supposed to be Mozart, so for most of the book I was sitting there laughing and thinking did Chee really just...?) She sees him playing, they have A Moment, then they fuck in the garden and poof! It's true love.
I never, for one second, found this romance interesting or believable, and having to read about Lilliet mooning over the composer every few pages just made me resist it more. I never saw any reason for these two to be so in love, and had no idea why they liked each other so much, which made their affair boring and perplexing. Also a major time waste - why was Lilliet wasting her time sneaking around with the composer, I wondered, when we could be doing something more useful, like, I don't know, trying to escape her horrible circumstances or murdering the tenor? It also REALLY GRINDS MY GEARS, readers, that in a story where our heroine is constantly abused, raped, and victimized by men, the thing that finally motivates her to take control of her own life is the healing power of yet another man's love. Eye rolling for days.
(oh, and the opera that was going to reveal all of Lilliet's secrets and ruin her life? Total fucking MacGuffin. Thanks a lot, Chee.) ...more
That didn't go AT ALL like I was expecting it to.
I saw some reviews of this floating around on Goodreads a few weeks ago, and when I decided to Well.
That didn't go AT ALL like I was expecting it to.
I saw some reviews of this floating around on Goodreads a few weeks ago, and when I decided to look up a plot description, it sounded like everything I wanted from a novel. The story begins with Lilliet Berne, star soprano of the Paris Opera, being offered an original role in a new opera. But as she reads the story, she realizes that the opera is based on her own life, and exposes secrets from her past that she wants to stay buried. There are only four people who know Lilliet's secrets, and she decides to find out who's working behind the scenes to expose her. As she does, the reader follows her on her journey and learns how Lilliet went from orphan farm girl, to circus equestrian, to courtesan, to imperial spy, and ended as an opera singer.
Based on that description, this book should have been my absolute jam. Opera singers! Belle Epoque Paris! Intrigue! Affairs! Courtesans! These are all things that I love, yet I did not enjoy a single page of The Queen of the Night, and I still can't figure out why.
Nothing in this book worked for me. Other reviews praised Lilliet as an awesome heroine; I found her dull. Sure, it was impressive the way she was consistently wiggled her way out of one scrape after another (her best escape is stolen directly from The Count of Monte Cristo, and I'll forgive the absurdity of it because I love a good Dumas homage), but there didn't seem to be any spark to her - it was just five hundred pages of "oh, now I have to deal with this. Well, that was a close one." Maybe the problem was Chee's prose, which struck me as very dry and removed - I wanted narration that threw itself whole-heartedly into the fantastical aspects of this story, and was willing to have a little fun with it. Chee's writing takes itself way too seriously, and as a result, I couldn't commit myself to what should have been a melodramatic adventure story.
The other major problem was the antagonist. At the beginning of Lilliet's career as a courtesan, she is purchased (literally purchased) by a man she refers to only as "the tenor." But he might as well be named "the patriarchy" because his job is to remind the reader of how thoroughly it sucked to be a woman in the 19th century. Sure, fine, I can get behind a malevolent john character when Lilliet is starting out. But then the tenor refuses to go away. Every time Lilliet escapes him, he just reappears a few chapters later, and she's back where she started, and by the time this had happened three times, I was beyond bored with the tenor. He has nothing to redeem himself to the reader, but isn't evil enough to be a compelling villain. When Lilliet finally (view spoiler)[kills him, it happens about three hundred pages too late. Chee should have killed the tenor off way earlier in the story, so he could be another skeleton in Lilliet's closet, and made up a better villain to take his place. (Also, the murder itself is so fucking easy there's no reason she couldn't have done it literally years ago. And it's stupidly absurd - she stabs him, which, yay! But then she breathes fire at him and it's pointless and I'm just glad that Chee resisted the urge to write SUITABLE FOR FILM ADAPTATION at the bottom of the page, because that's clearly what he was thinking when he wrote the scene) (hide spoiler)]
But the biggest problem is Lilliet herself, and the role she plays in this story. It's disheartening that, in a 500-page novel, our supposed heroine never really gets to be anything other than a victim. She's a victim of the tenor, she's a victim of her employers - Lilliet is early Sansa Stark, and it was frustrating. Like, I get that this is 19th century France and we can't exactly have her charging around with pistols or whatever, but give her some goddamn agency, for Christ's sake! Lilliet is reactive rather than proactive, and it makes her a lame excuse for a heroine. She never really gets to be in control, in a book that is supposed to be her story. Instead, she just bounces from one terrible scenario to another, constantly being manipulated and controlled by others.
Oh! And I almost forgot to talk about the romance element, which elicited only eye-rolling from me. So when Lilliet is working as a servant (and spy) in the Emperor's household, she meets "the composer." (He gets a name later on, but not before I got my history mixed up and thought he was supposed to be Mozart, so for most of the book I was sitting there laughing and thinking did Chee really just...?) She sees him playing, they have A Moment, then they fuck in the garden and poof! It's true love.
I never, for one second, found this romance interesting or believable, and having to read about Lilliet mooning over the composer every few pages just made me resist it more. I never saw any reason for these two to be so in love, and had no idea why they liked each other so much, which made their affair boring and perplexing. Also a major time waste - why was Lilliet wasting her time sneaking around with the composer, I wondered, when we could be doing something more useful, like, I don't know, trying to escape her horrible circumstances or murdering the tenor? It also REALLY GRINDS MY GEARS, readers, that in a story where our heroine is constantly abused, raped, and victimized by men, the thing that finally motivates her to take control of her own life is the healing power of yet another man's love. Eye rolling for days.
(oh, and the opera that was going to reveal all of Lilliet's secrets and ruin her life? Total fucking MacGuffin. Thanks a lot, Chee.) ...more
Notes are private!
1
not set
not set
Jun 09, 2016
Hardcover
4.14
81,085
Aug 05, 2014
Aug 05, 2014
did not like it
**spoiler alert** By now, I know what to expect when I start a book in Lev Grossman's The Magicians trilogy. There will be extensive, immersive world-
**spoiler alert** By now, I know what to expect when I start a book in Lev Grossman's The Magicians trilogy. There will be extensive, immersive world-building (Grossman is at his best when he is taking genuine joy from creating his own Narnia- or Hogwarts-like world, rather than trying to smugly point out all of their respective flaws), Quentin will stay just on the bearable side of utterly insufferable, there will be at least one character who I wish had an entire book of their own, and the last hundred pages of the novel will be so brutally unrelenting that it'll make me want to go back to bed and re-read the Narnia books to remind myself that fantasy stories that are more pretty than painful still exist.
But The Magician's Land is different. The final hundred-ish pages of the book are not good-painful, they're just painful - in short, this book is less thank-you-sir-may-I-have-another, and more like a hundred pages of Lev Grossman smacking me with my own hands while jeering, "Stop hitting yourself! Stop hitting yourself!"
The book, as a whole, isn't bad. The world-building is still rock solid and fascinating, and I love that Grossman is still creating new things for me to discovery in Fillory. The story also benefits by moving the timeline forward, and setting this book about six years after the events of The Magician King. So now, instead of dealing with whiny, entitled twenty-somethings, our characters are world-weary almost-thirty-year-olds who are finally, FINALLY figuring out how to be grownups.
Quentin, after being kicked out of Fillory at the end of the second book, has mostly spent his time since then just bumming around, until he gets an offer to return to Brakebills - this time as a teacher. While there, two important events happen: Quentin runs into Alice, who we last saw turning into a niffin at the end of Book One; and Quentin is contacted by a group recruiting magicians to steal a mysterious magical objects. Meanwhile, Eliot and Janet are still kicking around Fillory, fully settled into their roles as king and queen, when they receive disturbing news: Fillory is dying.
Like I said, most of this book is actually very, very good. I especially loved Eliot and Janet's sections, first because I will never, ever tire of the "modern young adults react to old-school fantasy setting" schtick, and Janet and Eliot are a perfect blend of snarky can-you-believe-this-shit and genuine, unashamed love of Fillory and its magic. I especially loved Janet, who after two books of being little more than a token mean girl and a contrived wedge between Quentin and Alice, finally gets her due. The little bits we learn about what Janet has been doing between the second and third books is fascinating, and I would honestly re-read the entire Magicians series if it was rewritten from Janet's perspective. She's brave, funny, tough as nails, and takes absolutely no shit from anyone - whether they're Quentin "never was there a tale of more woe" Coldwater, or a giant magic snapping turtle. Her best line, when Eliot is trying to brainstorm ways to save Fillory: "We could put on a show! We could use the old barn!"
So yeah - lots to like here, if I'm being honest with myself, and plenty of other reviewers have spent time praising these elements. Go read their reviews if you want to hear how The Magician's Land is brilliant; I'll probably agree with most of their points. So without further ado, here's what made me furious about this book. It essentially boils down to three points.
One: Grossman is doing a lot of telling and very little showing when it comes to Quentin's development as a character.
To hear Grossman tell it, Quentin is a completely different person than he was in Book One. Grossman is correct, to a point: Quentin is no longer an entitled little shit who believes that if one world isn't up to his standards, the universe should oblige by creating another one for him (this is, in fact, exactly what happens at the end of the series, but I guess it doesn't count because Quentin didn't explicitly demand it, or some bullshit like that), and he sees people as they really are, not as characters who must fit into his personal narrative in a specific way. But Grossman is just so insistent about how much Quentin has grown as a person, telling us every few chapters that "Quentin had changed so much" or "Quentin was a different person now" and it felt like he realized that Quentin wasn't actually that different from the kid we met in Book One, and had to overcompensate. Also, certain events in the story are given much more weight than they deserve. The death of Quentin's father is portrayed as a massive, earth-shattering event that permanently changes Quentin, but since his father was never even a real character in the story, his death had no real weight for me, no matter how many times Grossman insists that it did (and oh, does he insist). Also, remember Professor Mayakovsky, of Brakebills South? We revisit him in this book, and he's suddenly recast as a wise father figure for Quentin. Is Quentin merely latching on to the nearest male authority figure as a way to cope with his father's death? Probably, but Grossman isn't interested in exploring this idea, and Mayakovsky remains in the role Quentin has assigned him. How nice.
Two: Alice and Julia, the two biggest skeletons in Quentin's emotional closet, are never treated as well as they deserve by Quentin or the narrative.
First, Alice. She turned into a niffin at the end of Book One to save Quentin and the others, and when Quentin encounters her again in Book Three, he decides he's going to save her. When he does, newly-human Alice is understandably furious with him - there's a much-quoted passage where she rips him a much-earned new one, but I can't be bothered to find it now. Rest assured that Alice is full of righteous fury, and every ounce of it is absolutely deserved. And then it's all dropped completely, and Quentin and Alice have sex and skip off to save Fillory together. Grossman doesn't go quite so far as to make Alice get back together with Quentin at the end, but it's clear that he believes everything is cool between them now. NO. I love angry Alice most of all, and Grossman robbed her of any real closure in favor of showing Quentin, the once and future king of Fillory, saving the day and (basically) getting the girl once again. Alice's rage, ultimately, doesn't matter, and Grossman kind of makes it seem like this rage is merely a side effect of her experiences as a niffin, rather than her own feelings.
Julia isn't treated quite as badly, but like Alice, she deserved more closure with Quentin than she got. Grossman never really stops the explore the fact that both of these women were essentially destroyed as a direct result of Quentin's actions, and he never has to answer for that.
Three: Grossman has gotten so caught up in the fun of creating a fantasy adventure, he forgot what he was trying to say in the first place.
The Magicians was presented as a response to the Harry Potter and Narnia books - an unflinching, realistic portrayal of how those idealized magical worlds would really function, and reveal the cracks in their perfect facades. Lev Grossman gave an interview once (which of course I can't find now) where he says that one of the points of The Magicians is that nobody actually gets to be the Chosen One - Quentin, ultimately, is just a guy who stumbled into a magical world. He isn't special, because in real life, nobody is special. No one is chosen.
So what happens at the end of The Magician's Land? Quentin saves all of Fillory by pulling a sword out of midair, kills not one but two gods, then becomes a god himself and remakes Fillory, and he does such a good job that he eliminates the need for gods in Fillory. He gets rid of the godlike powers once his work is done, because he's just so damn noble, and the day is saved and everyone cheers.
So in the end, Lev Grossman has written the exact same kind of book that he tried to debunk: a very special schoolboy travels to a magical land and becomes its king, then its savior, and all is well. What was the point of all that cynicism, all that fucking smugness from Grossman, if this was the book he was writing all along? Like, Jesus, dude, it's okay to say that you genuinely like the Narnia books. Adding darkness and death doesn't make your book smarter, or more mature. And deconstructing tropes and archetypes doesn't mean shit if you're just going to indulge yourself in all of them in the end.
...more
But The Magician's Land is different. The final hundred-ish pages of the book are not good-painful, they're just painful - in short, this book is less thank-you-sir-may-I-have-another, and more like a hundred pages of Lev Grossman smacking me with my own hands while jeering, "Stop hitting yourself! Stop hitting yourself!"
The book, as a whole, isn't bad. The world-building is still rock solid and fascinating, and I love that Grossman is still creating new things for me to discovery in Fillory. The story also benefits by moving the timeline forward, and setting this book about six years after the events of The Magician King. So now, instead of dealing with whiny, entitled twenty-somethings, our characters are world-weary almost-thirty-year-olds who are finally, FINALLY figuring out how to be grownups.
Quentin, after being kicked out of Fillory at the end of the second book, has mostly spent his time since then just bumming around, until he gets an offer to return to Brakebills - this time as a teacher. While there, two important events happen: Quentin runs into Alice, who we last saw turning into a niffin at the end of Book One; and Quentin is contacted by a group recruiting magicians to steal a mysterious magical objects. Meanwhile, Eliot and Janet are still kicking around Fillory, fully settled into their roles as king and queen, when they receive disturbing news: Fillory is dying.
Like I said, most of this book is actually very, very good. I especially loved Eliot and Janet's sections, first because I will never, ever tire of the "modern young adults react to old-school fantasy setting" schtick, and Janet and Eliot are a perfect blend of snarky can-you-believe-this-shit and genuine, unashamed love of Fillory and its magic. I especially loved Janet, who after two books of being little more than a token mean girl and a contrived wedge between Quentin and Alice, finally gets her due. The little bits we learn about what Janet has been doing between the second and third books is fascinating, and I would honestly re-read the entire Magicians series if it was rewritten from Janet's perspective. She's brave, funny, tough as nails, and takes absolutely no shit from anyone - whether they're Quentin "never was there a tale of more woe" Coldwater, or a giant magic snapping turtle. Her best line, when Eliot is trying to brainstorm ways to save Fillory: "We could put on a show! We could use the old barn!"
So yeah - lots to like here, if I'm being honest with myself, and plenty of other reviewers have spent time praising these elements. Go read their reviews if you want to hear how The Magician's Land is brilliant; I'll probably agree with most of their points. So without further ado, here's what made me furious about this book. It essentially boils down to three points.
One: Grossman is doing a lot of telling and very little showing when it comes to Quentin's development as a character.
To hear Grossman tell it, Quentin is a completely different person than he was in Book One. Grossman is correct, to a point: Quentin is no longer an entitled little shit who believes that if one world isn't up to his standards, the universe should oblige by creating another one for him (this is, in fact, exactly what happens at the end of the series, but I guess it doesn't count because Quentin didn't explicitly demand it, or some bullshit like that), and he sees people as they really are, not as characters who must fit into his personal narrative in a specific way. But Grossman is just so insistent about how much Quentin has grown as a person, telling us every few chapters that "Quentin had changed so much" or "Quentin was a different person now" and it felt like he realized that Quentin wasn't actually that different from the kid we met in Book One, and had to overcompensate. Also, certain events in the story are given much more weight than they deserve. The death of Quentin's father is portrayed as a massive, earth-shattering event that permanently changes Quentin, but since his father was never even a real character in the story, his death had no real weight for me, no matter how many times Grossman insists that it did (and oh, does he insist). Also, remember Professor Mayakovsky, of Brakebills South? We revisit him in this book, and he's suddenly recast as a wise father figure for Quentin. Is Quentin merely latching on to the nearest male authority figure as a way to cope with his father's death? Probably, but Grossman isn't interested in exploring this idea, and Mayakovsky remains in the role Quentin has assigned him. How nice.
Two: Alice and Julia, the two biggest skeletons in Quentin's emotional closet, are never treated as well as they deserve by Quentin or the narrative.
First, Alice. She turned into a niffin at the end of Book One to save Quentin and the others, and when Quentin encounters her again in Book Three, he decides he's going to save her. When he does, newly-human Alice is understandably furious with him - there's a much-quoted passage where she rips him a much-earned new one, but I can't be bothered to find it now. Rest assured that Alice is full of righteous fury, and every ounce of it is absolutely deserved. And then it's all dropped completely, and Quentin and Alice have sex and skip off to save Fillory together. Grossman doesn't go quite so far as to make Alice get back together with Quentin at the end, but it's clear that he believes everything is cool between them now. NO. I love angry Alice most of all, and Grossman robbed her of any real closure in favor of showing Quentin, the once and future king of Fillory, saving the day and (basically) getting the girl once again. Alice's rage, ultimately, doesn't matter, and Grossman kind of makes it seem like this rage is merely a side effect of her experiences as a niffin, rather than her own feelings.
Julia isn't treated quite as badly, but like Alice, she deserved more closure with Quentin than she got. Grossman never really stops the explore the fact that both of these women were essentially destroyed as a direct result of Quentin's actions, and he never has to answer for that.
Three: Grossman has gotten so caught up in the fun of creating a fantasy adventure, he forgot what he was trying to say in the first place.
The Magicians was presented as a response to the Harry Potter and Narnia books - an unflinching, realistic portrayal of how those idealized magical worlds would really function, and reveal the cracks in their perfect facades. Lev Grossman gave an interview once (which of course I can't find now) where he says that one of the points of The Magicians is that nobody actually gets to be the Chosen One - Quentin, ultimately, is just a guy who stumbled into a magical world. He isn't special, because in real life, nobody is special. No one is chosen.
So what happens at the end of The Magician's Land? Quentin saves all of Fillory by pulling a sword out of midair, kills not one but two gods, then becomes a god himself and remakes Fillory, and he does such a good job that he eliminates the need for gods in Fillory. He gets rid of the godlike powers once his work is done, because he's just so damn noble, and the day is saved and everyone cheers.
So in the end, Lev Grossman has written the exact same kind of book that he tried to debunk: a very special schoolboy travels to a magical land and becomes its king, then its savior, and all is well. What was the point of all that cynicism, all that fucking smugness from Grossman, if this was the book he was writing all along? Like, Jesus, dude, it's okay to say that you genuinely like the Narnia books. Adding darkness and death doesn't make your book smarter, or more mature. And deconstructing tropes and archetypes doesn't mean shit if you're just going to indulge yourself in all of them in the end.
...more
Notes are private!
1
not set
not set
May 22, 2016
ebook
142316492X
9781423164920
142316492X
4.33
41,932
Sep 16, 2014
Sep 16, 2014
liked it
I read the first book in the Lockwood & Co series over a year ago, mainly out of nostalgia - I was a huge fan of Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus series w
I read the first book in the Lockwood & Co series over a year ago, mainly out of nostalgia - I was a huge fan of Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus series when I was younger, and it was fun to discover Stroud's newer series. It had everything I expected from a Stroud book: scary paranormal stuff, sassy banter, fast-paced action, and a setting that I still cannot stop imagining as Victorian England. (I think it's the fact that the kids use rapiers as weapons that's throwing me off, but there's honestly no reason for me to get the time period so wrong, except for the fact that this series feels so much like a Victorian Gothic-style ghost story.)
The first book in the series was purely a nostalgia-driven delight for me, so I was excited to dive back into the story. Maybe this was just a weaker story - other reviews seem to agree that it wasn't as strong as the first book - or maybe the joy at finding a new Stroud series had worn off. Either way, I found a lot more things to nitpick about this one, and even though it was a solid, fun ghost story, I didn't enjoy it as much.
The story picks up six months after the events of The Screaming Staircase. Lockwood & Co, the ragtag agency consisting of teenage ghost hunters Anthony Lockwood, Lucy Carlyle, and George Cubbins, are still struggling to compete with the larger ghost-hunting agencies. Their latest case concerns the recently-excavated body of Edmund Bickerstaff, a Victorian doctor who was obsessed with trying to contact spirits. A powerful object was buried with him, and is quickly stolen. Lucy and the others have to track down the object and destroy it, while also trying to figure out the exact circumstances of Bickerstaff's death. Meanwhile, the skull in a jar that they acquired in The Screaming Staircase is communicating with Lucy, and getting more involved in her life.
It's all good, scary fun - there's a talking skull that's kept in a jar, for Christ's sake! But it's not as tightly constructed as the first book, and I kept finding issues. For one thing, Stroud has a lot of plot points to juggle, and some of them get forgotten for too long. At the beginning of the book, Lockwood makes a bet with a rival agency that will pit his agency against theirs, and the loser will have to publicly admit defeat. By the time they get around to actually doing this (the two agencies fighting ghosts together) the bet just seems unnecessary and stupid. There's no central haunted setpiece, like the haunted house in The Screaming Staircase, so the final ghost-hunting adventure feels a little less impressive. And, as I noted in my review of The Screaming Staircase, the murder-mystery subplot is pretty weak - once again, the kids are trying to figure out how someone died, and once again, the solution is pretty simple and anti-climactic, and I didn't even care anymore.
There was just a lot of stuff that felt like it was dashed off in a hurry, and Stroud didn't bother to spend the time making it better. At one point, the kids have to steal an object from the bad guy, and their plan is so insultingly simple and never should have worked, but it goes off without a hitch. Similarly, the ending felt way too easy. (view spoiler)[So the cursed object they're trying to track down is a mirror that kills anyone who looks into it. Such a powerful, deadly object must be pretty hard to destroy, right? Nope. The kids just smash it, and the day is saved. I almost expected one of the characters to say, "Wow, that was easy." (hide spoiler)]
But the biggest issue was the central three characters. Lucy is the strongest, but she's also the narrator, which means we get to be inside her head the whole time, so obviously she's going to be the most fleshed-out. Lockwood remains mysterious, or at least Lucy keeps telling us that he is, but the problem is that whatever Lockwood's deep dark secrets might be, Stroud isn't revealing anything, and the total lack of information just makes me not care. Oh, Lockwood has a secret room in the house that no one is allowed to go into? Look Stroud, we're kind of busy with the ghost investigation right now, can we put a pin in that?
And then there's George. Poor, forgotten George. After leaving him out of almost all the action in The Screaming Staircase, Stroud apparently decided to fix the problem by giving us an overdose of George. But it doesn't work, because George is always either a non-entity, or he's wildly inconsistent. Apparently George's primary personality trait is his intellectual curiosity (did we see that in The Screaming Staircase? I can't even remember), and in The Whispering Skull we learn that he got fired from his previous job for asking too many questions about the agency. Okay, so George is curious, and that curiosity provides a major plot point. Here's the problem: remember Lockwood's mysterious Room of Secrets? George, based on everything Stroud has established about him, should be going crazy trying to figure out what's in there. But does he? When he and Lucy are discussing what might be in the room, George is just like, nope, not curious at all, that's Lockwood's business and I don't need to know. What the hell? It's pretty clear that Stroud doesn't really have a clear idea of George as a character, which is not a problem that we should be having in the second book of a series.
So overall, not nearly as fun or well-done as the first book. But I'm still going to read the third one, because of course this one ends on the world's biggest cliffhanger. Because Jonathan Stroud is a jerk. ...more
The first book in the series was purely a nostalgia-driven delight for me, so I was excited to dive back into the story. Maybe this was just a weaker story - other reviews seem to agree that it wasn't as strong as the first book - or maybe the joy at finding a new Stroud series had worn off. Either way, I found a lot more things to nitpick about this one, and even though it was a solid, fun ghost story, I didn't enjoy it as much.
The story picks up six months after the events of The Screaming Staircase. Lockwood & Co, the ragtag agency consisting of teenage ghost hunters Anthony Lockwood, Lucy Carlyle, and George Cubbins, are still struggling to compete with the larger ghost-hunting agencies. Their latest case concerns the recently-excavated body of Edmund Bickerstaff, a Victorian doctor who was obsessed with trying to contact spirits. A powerful object was buried with him, and is quickly stolen. Lucy and the others have to track down the object and destroy it, while also trying to figure out the exact circumstances of Bickerstaff's death. Meanwhile, the skull in a jar that they acquired in The Screaming Staircase is communicating with Lucy, and getting more involved in her life.
It's all good, scary fun - there's a talking skull that's kept in a jar, for Christ's sake! But it's not as tightly constructed as the first book, and I kept finding issues. For one thing, Stroud has a lot of plot points to juggle, and some of them get forgotten for too long. At the beginning of the book, Lockwood makes a bet with a rival agency that will pit his agency against theirs, and the loser will have to publicly admit defeat. By the time they get around to actually doing this (the two agencies fighting ghosts together) the bet just seems unnecessary and stupid. There's no central haunted setpiece, like the haunted house in The Screaming Staircase, so the final ghost-hunting adventure feels a little less impressive. And, as I noted in my review of The Screaming Staircase, the murder-mystery subplot is pretty weak - once again, the kids are trying to figure out how someone died, and once again, the solution is pretty simple and anti-climactic, and I didn't even care anymore.
There was just a lot of stuff that felt like it was dashed off in a hurry, and Stroud didn't bother to spend the time making it better. At one point, the kids have to steal an object from the bad guy, and their plan is so insultingly simple and never should have worked, but it goes off without a hitch. Similarly, the ending felt way too easy. (view spoiler)[So the cursed object they're trying to track down is a mirror that kills anyone who looks into it. Such a powerful, deadly object must be pretty hard to destroy, right? Nope. The kids just smash it, and the day is saved. I almost expected one of the characters to say, "Wow, that was easy." (hide spoiler)]
But the biggest issue was the central three characters. Lucy is the strongest, but she's also the narrator, which means we get to be inside her head the whole time, so obviously she's going to be the most fleshed-out. Lockwood remains mysterious, or at least Lucy keeps telling us that he is, but the problem is that whatever Lockwood's deep dark secrets might be, Stroud isn't revealing anything, and the total lack of information just makes me not care. Oh, Lockwood has a secret room in the house that no one is allowed to go into? Look Stroud, we're kind of busy with the ghost investigation right now, can we put a pin in that?
And then there's George. Poor, forgotten George. After leaving him out of almost all the action in The Screaming Staircase, Stroud apparently decided to fix the problem by giving us an overdose of George. But it doesn't work, because George is always either a non-entity, or he's wildly inconsistent. Apparently George's primary personality trait is his intellectual curiosity (did we see that in The Screaming Staircase? I can't even remember), and in The Whispering Skull we learn that he got fired from his previous job for asking too many questions about the agency. Okay, so George is curious, and that curiosity provides a major plot point. Here's the problem: remember Lockwood's mysterious Room of Secrets? George, based on everything Stroud has established about him, should be going crazy trying to figure out what's in there. But does he? When he and Lucy are discussing what might be in the room, George is just like, nope, not curious at all, that's Lockwood's business and I don't need to know. What the hell? It's pretty clear that Stroud doesn't really have a clear idea of George as a character, which is not a problem that we should be having in the second book of a series.
So overall, not nearly as fun or well-done as the first book. But I'm still going to read the third one, because of course this one ends on the world's biggest cliffhanger. Because Jonathan Stroud is a jerk. ...more
Notes are private!
1
not set
not set
May 10, 2016
Hardcover
0312181965
9780312181963
0312181965
3.97
8,069
1998
Feb 01, 1998
liked it
I actually finished reading this book over a month ago, and even though I meant to write a review immediately, I obviously kind of forgot about that.
I actually finished reading this book over a month ago, and even though I meant to write a review immediately, I obviously kind of forgot about that. So I apologize in advance, because I'm going to be a little fuzzy on the details.
First, background: Dorothy Sayers left this book unfinished, having abandoned it in 1936. She left some fragments of the novel behind, and Jill Paton Walsh was recruited to finish the book in 1998. It's not clear how much of the book is Sayers and how much is Walsh, but it feels primarily the latter, and I'm try to articulate why I felt this way.
So when this novel starts, Peter and Harriet have returned from their honeymoon (which we saw in Busman's Honeymoon) and are settled into married life. In true Sayers fashion, a lot of time is spent leisurely exploring their new life as a couple - we get a lot of stuff about the new Wimsey/Vane household, the pressure on Harriet and Peter to have babies and provide backup Wimsey heirs, and (somewhat weirdly) occasional diary entries from Peter's mother intrude on the narrative. Sure, whatever. As I said in my review of Busman's Honeymoon, I would only recommend this book to people who are already head-over-heels in love with Peter and Harriet's dynamic, because anyone else will be confused and annoyed that we're spending so many pages not solving a mystery. I, of course, was delighted, because I would read a novel that's just Harriet and Peter having tea in real time, because it would mean lots of lovely banter like this, when the Wimseys are discussing a dinner party with the in-laws:
"'There is an argument for getting on with it,' said his lordship. 'While we can still sit together.'
'I thought husbands and wives were always placed apart,' said Harriet.
'No; for the first six months after marriage we are allowed to sit together.'
'Are we allowed to hold hands under the table?'
'Best not, I should think,' said Peter. 'Unless about to go down with the ship. But we are allowed to talk to each other for the duration of one course of the dinner.'"
I loved all of the Peter/Harriet banter, because these two are never not delightful (a fun addition in this book, that I'm sure was Walsh's idea because we never see it in any other Sayers mystery, is Peter's habit of addressing Harriet as "Domina." Swoon)
Another wonderful choice made in this novel - Harriet gets her own Bunter! Walsh is clearly just as in love with Peter and his manservant, Bunter, as I am. In this novel, Harriet gets a lady's maid named Miss Mango, who is recruited into the mystery solving and throws herself into the work with professional gusto, and it is wonderful. I feel like this was Walsh's idea instead of Sayers', because giving each of the Wimsey's a mystery-assisting servant gives the story almost too much symmetry, and feels like something a fan would write, rather than the author. I also thought that naming the character "Miss Mango" wasn't something Sayers would do, but then I remembered the man named Waffles, so who knows. Either way, Miss Mango is a fantastic addition to the team.
That's about where my love of this book ends, however. The mystery is pretty straightforward, as they usually are in Sayers novels - basically, we have a dead wife, a suspicious husband, and some potential lovers. Plus a faked break-in, so that's fun! But the solution to the mystery was not what I was expecting, and not in a good way. (view spoiler)[So the dead wife's face is really battered, and in most mysteries, wrecking the corpse's face means that you're trying to disguise the identity of said corpse. It's discovered later that the husband has a mistress who, like his wife, has red hair. So I was thinking, okay, maybe the dead body is actually the mistress, and the wife ran off? I figured there had to be a reason that the wife and the mistress looked similar, but there really isn't - it felt sloppy, and very un-Sayers, so I'm going to blame it on Walsh (hide spoiler)]
Also, since the book takes place in the 1930's but was (mostly) written in the 1990's, it unfortunately suffers the curse of bad historic fiction: excessive, distracting foreshadowing.
The events of this book take place right around the time Edward VIII was trying to marry Wallis Simpson, so there's a lot of very obvious "Gee, hope this won't have any long-reaching consequences for the monarchy!" and it was tiring. The diary entries written by Peter's mother are the worst source of obnoxious foreshadowing - they're all "oh, the king would never marry a divorced woman!" and "man, what's up with Germany lately?" It was distracting and stupid, because it was so clearly written by someone living decades after the original draft, who had the advantage of 20/20 hindsight. It was lazy and cheap, and took me out of the story completely because it was obviously not written by Sayers.
Sayers abandoned this story in 1936, but she didn't abandon Harriet and Peter - she went on to write several short stories that took place after the events of this novel (which means one of the central conflicts of this book - will Harriet and Peter have kids? - has already been resolved by later stories). I dunno, I think it's a sign that Sayers continued writing about Harriet and Peter, but never went back to try to make this book work. Maybe they should have just left it alone.
...more
First, background: Dorothy Sayers left this book unfinished, having abandoned it in 1936. She left some fragments of the novel behind, and Jill Paton Walsh was recruited to finish the book in 1998. It's not clear how much of the book is Sayers and how much is Walsh, but it feels primarily the latter, and I'm try to articulate why I felt this way.
So when this novel starts, Peter and Harriet have returned from their honeymoon (which we saw in Busman's Honeymoon) and are settled into married life. In true Sayers fashion, a lot of time is spent leisurely exploring their new life as a couple - we get a lot of stuff about the new Wimsey/Vane household, the pressure on Harriet and Peter to have babies and provide backup Wimsey heirs, and (somewhat weirdly) occasional diary entries from Peter's mother intrude on the narrative. Sure, whatever. As I said in my review of Busman's Honeymoon, I would only recommend this book to people who are already head-over-heels in love with Peter and Harriet's dynamic, because anyone else will be confused and annoyed that we're spending so many pages not solving a mystery. I, of course, was delighted, because I would read a novel that's just Harriet and Peter having tea in real time, because it would mean lots of lovely banter like this, when the Wimseys are discussing a dinner party with the in-laws:
"'There is an argument for getting on with it,' said his lordship. 'While we can still sit together.'
'I thought husbands and wives were always placed apart,' said Harriet.
'No; for the first six months after marriage we are allowed to sit together.'
'Are we allowed to hold hands under the table?'
'Best not, I should think,' said Peter. 'Unless about to go down with the ship. But we are allowed to talk to each other for the duration of one course of the dinner.'"
I loved all of the Peter/Harriet banter, because these two are never not delightful (a fun addition in this book, that I'm sure was Walsh's idea because we never see it in any other Sayers mystery, is Peter's habit of addressing Harriet as "Domina." Swoon)
Another wonderful choice made in this novel - Harriet gets her own Bunter! Walsh is clearly just as in love with Peter and his manservant, Bunter, as I am. In this novel, Harriet gets a lady's maid named Miss Mango, who is recruited into the mystery solving and throws herself into the work with professional gusto, and it is wonderful. I feel like this was Walsh's idea instead of Sayers', because giving each of the Wimsey's a mystery-assisting servant gives the story almost too much symmetry, and feels like something a fan would write, rather than the author. I also thought that naming the character "Miss Mango" wasn't something Sayers would do, but then I remembered the man named Waffles, so who knows. Either way, Miss Mango is a fantastic addition to the team.
That's about where my love of this book ends, however. The mystery is pretty straightforward, as they usually are in Sayers novels - basically, we have a dead wife, a suspicious husband, and some potential lovers. Plus a faked break-in, so that's fun! But the solution to the mystery was not what I was expecting, and not in a good way. (view spoiler)[So the dead wife's face is really battered, and in most mysteries, wrecking the corpse's face means that you're trying to disguise the identity of said corpse. It's discovered later that the husband has a mistress who, like his wife, has red hair. So I was thinking, okay, maybe the dead body is actually the mistress, and the wife ran off? I figured there had to be a reason that the wife and the mistress looked similar, but there really isn't - it felt sloppy, and very un-Sayers, so I'm going to blame it on Walsh (hide spoiler)]
Also, since the book takes place in the 1930's but was (mostly) written in the 1990's, it unfortunately suffers the curse of bad historic fiction: excessive, distracting foreshadowing.
The events of this book take place right around the time Edward VIII was trying to marry Wallis Simpson, so there's a lot of very obvious "Gee, hope this won't have any long-reaching consequences for the monarchy!" and it was tiring. The diary entries written by Peter's mother are the worst source of obnoxious foreshadowing - they're all "oh, the king would never marry a divorced woman!" and "man, what's up with Germany lately?" It was distracting and stupid, because it was so clearly written by someone living decades after the original draft, who had the advantage of 20/20 hindsight. It was lazy and cheap, and took me out of the story completely because it was obviously not written by Sayers.
Sayers abandoned this story in 1936, but she didn't abandon Harriet and Peter - she went on to write several short stories that took place after the events of this novel (which means one of the central conflicts of this book - will Harriet and Peter have kids? - has already been resolved by later stories). I dunno, I think it's a sign that Sayers continued writing about Harriet and Peter, but never went back to try to make this book work. Maybe they should have just left it alone.
...more
Notes are private!
1
not set
Mar 2016
Apr 07, 2016
Hardcover
031610969X
9780316109697
031610969X
3.71
160,444
Sep 01, 2005
Sep 28, 2005
did not like it
In the immortal words of Michael Bluth: "I don't know what I expected."
I knew what I was getting into with this, I really did. It is a well-documented In the immortal words of Michael Bluth: "I don't know what I expected."
I knew what I was getting into with this, I really did. It is a well-documented fact that Julie Powell is a delusional asshole (if you need a good laugh, look at the reviews for Cleaving, her second book - they all essentially boil down to "Wow, so turns out Julie Powell is horrible"), and even if I hadn't been aware of this, there's the fact that whenever I watch the movie adaptation of Julie and Julia, I skip the Julie parts because even Amy Adams, who is literal human sunshine, cannot make that woman appealing in any sense of the word.
Actually, the whole reason I decided to get this book from the library is because the movie was on TV the other day, and I got morbidly curious about Julie Powell's side of the story. I had already read Julia Child's My Life in France, which was the inspiration for the Julia parts of the movie, so I decided that it only made sense to complete the experience and read Powell's book.
Powell wastes no time letting her readers know exactly what kind of monster she is. On page eight (Eight! We're not even into the double-digit pages yet!) we get to see Powell's version of an Oprah "Ah-ha moment." I mentioned this in one of my status updates already, but I feel it's important that I fully explain this scene. Basically, Powell is waiting in the subway one day and witnesses:
"...a plug of a woman, her head of salt-and-pepper hair shorn into the sort of crew cut they give the mentally disabled, who had plopped down on the concrete directly behind me.
...The loon started smacking her forehead with the heel of her palm. 'Fuck!' she yelled. 'Fuck! FUCK!' ...The loon placed both palms down on the concrete in front of her and - CRACK! - smacked her forehead hard on the ground.
...It was only once I was in the car, squeezed in shoulder to shoulder, the lot of us hanging by one hand from the overhead bar like slaughtered cows on the trundling train, that it came to me - as if some omnipotent God of City Dwellers were whispering the truth in my ear - that the only two reasons I hadn't joined right in with the loon with the gray crew cut, beating my head and screaming 'Fuck!' in primal syncopation, were (1) I'd be embarrassed and (2) I didn't want to get my cute vintage suit any dirtier than it already was. Performance anxiety and a dry-cleaning bill; those were the only things keeping me from stark raving lunacy."
So in addition to being an asshole, Julie Powell also might be a sociopath, because who does that? How much of a selfish, raging narcissist do you have to become in order to watch what is clearly a mentally ill person having a disturbing episode, and your first response is, "Ugh, same"?! And then you record the scene in your memoir and frame it as some kind of profound breakthrough moment for you? Gee, I'm so glad that person had a mental breakdown and seriously injured themselves so you could have an epiphany, Julie Powell.
(you may be wondering: how does this experience lead to Powell deciding to cook her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking? I read the damn book and I couldn't even tell you.)
So anyway, Powell starts working her way through Julia Child's cookbook, keeping a blog about her progress. (This means we get a delightfully dated scene where Powell's husband suggests she start a blog, and Julie's like, what the hell is a blog? 2002 was a simpler time.) As many reviewers have pointed out, the blog-to-memoir transition was done pretty clumsily, with scenes happening out of sequence and a nonsensical structure - Powell will start a chapter about some recipe she was working on, and then break for a lengthy flashback that has almost no relation to the beginning of the chapter. It's very difficult to follow the progress she's making through the cookbook, and all the flashbacks and timeline-skipping meant that I never had any clear idea of where I was in the project, unless Powell directly referenced the date.
Along with the messy structure, another big issue with the book is that Powell is...not a great writer. She's clearly trying to be self-depreciating, and make us think that she's rolling her eyes right along with us whenever we read a scene of her throwing a tantrum about mayonnaise - but the problem is that I wasn't shaking my head and smiling in bemusement, like Powell wants me to. I was just thinking, "you are horrible, and telling me that you know you're being horrible doesn't help." Powell doesn't have the writing skill to redeem herself in the narrative, and on top of that, her prose is often practically unreadable. Try this excerpt on for size, and see if it makes any goddamn sense to you on the first reading:
"My mother is a clean freak, my father a dirty bird, semi-reformed. Between them, they have managed to raise one child who by all accounts could not care less about basic cleanliness, but whose environs and person are always somehow above reproach, and another child who sees as irrevocable humiliation any imputation of less than impeccable housekeeping or hygiene, and yet, regardless of near-constant near-hysteria on the subject, is almost always an utter mess."
Well, now I guess we know what it would sound like if Charlotte Bronte wrote all her books drunk. It made me long for the effortless, evocative writing Julia Child presented in My Life in France - her description of the proper technique for scrambling eggs is practically poetry.
And that is what really sets Julie Powell apart from Julia Child: Child loved to cook, and Powell does not. Her project, and every recipe she describes, are never presented as anything other than a chore she has to get through. There is no joy in Powell's book, no love for the dishes she prepares. And frankly, a lot of Powell's book is pretty gross. Her kitchen is always a disaster scene, with dirty surfaces and piles of unwashed dishes. Which, fine - you're working a full-time job and cooking gourmet meals every night, obviously you're going to slack off on cleaning again. But then Powell discovers that there are maggots living under her dish rack, and I was fucking done.
With Julie and Julia, Julie Powell has managed to do the unthinkable: she wrote a cooking memoir that didn't make me feel hungry, not once in three hundred pages. I'm pretty sure that's a capital offense in some countries. ...more
I knew what I was getting into with this, I really did. It is a well-documented In the immortal words of Michael Bluth: "I don't know what I expected."
I knew what I was getting into with this, I really did. It is a well-documented fact that Julie Powell is a delusional asshole (if you need a good laugh, look at the reviews for Cleaving, her second book - they all essentially boil down to "Wow, so turns out Julie Powell is horrible"), and even if I hadn't been aware of this, there's the fact that whenever I watch the movie adaptation of Julie and Julia, I skip the Julie parts because even Amy Adams, who is literal human sunshine, cannot make that woman appealing in any sense of the word.
Actually, the whole reason I decided to get this book from the library is because the movie was on TV the other day, and I got morbidly curious about Julie Powell's side of the story. I had already read Julia Child's My Life in France, which was the inspiration for the Julia parts of the movie, so I decided that it only made sense to complete the experience and read Powell's book.
Powell wastes no time letting her readers know exactly what kind of monster she is. On page eight (Eight! We're not even into the double-digit pages yet!) we get to see Powell's version of an Oprah "Ah-ha moment." I mentioned this in one of my status updates already, but I feel it's important that I fully explain this scene. Basically, Powell is waiting in the subway one day and witnesses:
"...a plug of a woman, her head of salt-and-pepper hair shorn into the sort of crew cut they give the mentally disabled, who had plopped down on the concrete directly behind me.
...The loon started smacking her forehead with the heel of her palm. 'Fuck!' she yelled. 'Fuck! FUCK!' ...The loon placed both palms down on the concrete in front of her and - CRACK! - smacked her forehead hard on the ground.
...It was only once I was in the car, squeezed in shoulder to shoulder, the lot of us hanging by one hand from the overhead bar like slaughtered cows on the trundling train, that it came to me - as if some omnipotent God of City Dwellers were whispering the truth in my ear - that the only two reasons I hadn't joined right in with the loon with the gray crew cut, beating my head and screaming 'Fuck!' in primal syncopation, were (1) I'd be embarrassed and (2) I didn't want to get my cute vintage suit any dirtier than it already was. Performance anxiety and a dry-cleaning bill; those were the only things keeping me from stark raving lunacy."
So in addition to being an asshole, Julie Powell also might be a sociopath, because who does that? How much of a selfish, raging narcissist do you have to become in order to watch what is clearly a mentally ill person having a disturbing episode, and your first response is, "Ugh, same"?! And then you record the scene in your memoir and frame it as some kind of profound breakthrough moment for you? Gee, I'm so glad that person had a mental breakdown and seriously injured themselves so you could have an epiphany, Julie Powell.
(you may be wondering: how does this experience lead to Powell deciding to cook her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking? I read the damn book and I couldn't even tell you.)
So anyway, Powell starts working her way through Julia Child's cookbook, keeping a blog about her progress. (This means we get a delightfully dated scene where Powell's husband suggests she start a blog, and Julie's like, what the hell is a blog? 2002 was a simpler time.) As many reviewers have pointed out, the blog-to-memoir transition was done pretty clumsily, with scenes happening out of sequence and a nonsensical structure - Powell will start a chapter about some recipe she was working on, and then break for a lengthy flashback that has almost no relation to the beginning of the chapter. It's very difficult to follow the progress she's making through the cookbook, and all the flashbacks and timeline-skipping meant that I never had any clear idea of where I was in the project, unless Powell directly referenced the date.
Along with the messy structure, another big issue with the book is that Powell is...not a great writer. She's clearly trying to be self-depreciating, and make us think that she's rolling her eyes right along with us whenever we read a scene of her throwing a tantrum about mayonnaise - but the problem is that I wasn't shaking my head and smiling in bemusement, like Powell wants me to. I was just thinking, "you are horrible, and telling me that you know you're being horrible doesn't help." Powell doesn't have the writing skill to redeem herself in the narrative, and on top of that, her prose is often practically unreadable. Try this excerpt on for size, and see if it makes any goddamn sense to you on the first reading:
"My mother is a clean freak, my father a dirty bird, semi-reformed. Between them, they have managed to raise one child who by all accounts could not care less about basic cleanliness, but whose environs and person are always somehow above reproach, and another child who sees as irrevocable humiliation any imputation of less than impeccable housekeeping or hygiene, and yet, regardless of near-constant near-hysteria on the subject, is almost always an utter mess."
Well, now I guess we know what it would sound like if Charlotte Bronte wrote all her books drunk. It made me long for the effortless, evocative writing Julia Child presented in My Life in France - her description of the proper technique for scrambling eggs is practically poetry.
And that is what really sets Julie Powell apart from Julia Child: Child loved to cook, and Powell does not. Her project, and every recipe she describes, are never presented as anything other than a chore she has to get through. There is no joy in Powell's book, no love for the dishes she prepares. And frankly, a lot of Powell's book is pretty gross. Her kitchen is always a disaster scene, with dirty surfaces and piles of unwashed dishes. Which, fine - you're working a full-time job and cooking gourmet meals every night, obviously you're going to slack off on cleaning again. But then Powell discovers that there are maggots living under her dish rack, and I was fucking done.
With Julie and Julia, Julie Powell has managed to do the unthinkable: she wrote a cooking memoir that didn't make me feel hungry, not once in three hundred pages. I'm pretty sure that's a capital offense in some countries. ...more
Notes are private!
1
Mar 31, 2016
Apr 2016
Mar 31, 2016
Hardcover
1416903445
9781416903444
1416903445
4.21
60,450
Apr 01, 1993
Jun 01, 2005
liked it
It's been over a year since I read the first book in Tamora Pierce's Immortals quartet, Wild Magic. I remember enjoying it almost more than Pierce's A
It's been over a year since I read the first book in Tamora Pierce's Immortals quartet, Wild Magic. I remember enjoying it almost more than Pierce's Alanna books (which will always be first in my heart, of course) but other than that, I started this book with only vague memories of the plot and characters of the previous installment.
Luckily, there's not much to catch up on - Pierce's novels are characterized by fast-paced action, a relatively small and memorable cast of characters, and fairly simple conflicts and plots. And Pierce does a good job of giving the reader enough backstory and reminders from the first book, so even if you're like me and are resuming this series after a long absence, you should be fine.
As is also the case with Pierce's books, there is almost no setup - Wolf-Speaker starts practically in the middle of the action, with a wolf pack (the same pack who Daine briefly ran with after her mother's death, when she nearly lost her own sense of humanity) contacting our heroine and asking for help. The pack's habitat is being threatened by human development, and they want her to intercede for them. Meanwhile, the rulers who control the land where the wolves live are also plotting against the king of Tortall, and let's not forget that the Immortals (powerful ancient monsters/gods who recently got released into the world) are quietly and not-so-quietly moving around the country.
Reading this book gave me strong flashbacks to The Woman Who Rides Like a Man, the third book in the Alanna series. I still consider it the weakest of the series, because after the absolutely breakneck pace of the previous books, this one seemed to move at a snail's pace while we watch Alanna hanging around in the desert and helping a local tribe. Wolf-Speaker suffers from the same problem - despite the fact that there's plenty of conflict, everything feels so slow. There's also a lot of repetition, because this book has Daine experimenting with her powers and learning to enter animals' minds, and it means that we have to read essentially the same scene over and over as she practices this skill on various animals. This repetition works for younger readers, but I was pretty bored for most of the book.
The conflict itself - rebellion against the king, aided by Immortals - isn't very interesting either, mainly because we're meeting the antagonists for the first time in this book, and the fact that Daine spends most of her time with the wolf pack means that the bad guys never get to do much. Failing to properly develop the villains, and removing Daine from the action for the majority of the book, means that the stakes never feel as high as they should.
Not that I disliked the book, overall. The fact that most of the characters are animals, each with their own personalities and conflicts, would have delighted me if I'd read this book as a child. Pierce is particularly good at coming up with animal names, and if you manage to get through this entire story without falling head-over-heels in love with Quickmunch the marmot, then I don't know what to do with you. I liked the wolf pack, and child readers will have more fun reading about them than I did - it's hard to get too invested in these characters when you know they're just a detour on the way to the main action.
Although the Alanna and the Daine stories have a lot in common, the series are trying to accomplish very different things, which becomes clear in Wolf-Speaker. Alanna's adventures were all about teaching girls that their gender doesn't stop them from being whatever they want to be, and that they can accomplish anything through determination and hard work. Daine's books teach children that the world isn't black and white, and that you can't make judgements about people (or in this case, creatures) based on what they are or where they come from.
In the Alanna books, the villains are not complex, and everyone pretty much adheres to their assigned roles - if someone is a bad guy in Book One, they're going to be a bad guy in Book Four - and the lines are pretty clearly drawn. Daine's journey, it seems, is shaping up to be a little more complex than that. In the first book, we established that many of the Immortals, like the Stormwings, are evil and scary. In the second book, Daine and the reader are forced to reconsider that idea, and realize that all Immortals are not alike. Just because they're a Stormwing, Daine learns, you can't assume they're evil. Here's a scene where Iakoju, an ogre, lays it out clearly for the readers:
"Maura frowned. 'I don't understand. If you're peaceful - if you really only like to farm - how come you're called "ogres"? Ogres are monsters, aren't they? And how come your people are always fighting with ours?'
'We are big,' replied Iajoku quietly. 'Ugly. Our color different from men color. No all ogres are same, either. Some take what they want. Some fight with men. My people, kin clans, we only like farming, not fighting. Some ogres only like fighting. Are all men the same?'"
This is a suprisingly complex concept for a kids' series, especially since fantasy audiences are trained to think of all evil-inclined creatures as one singular hive-mind (Tolkien, bless him, assured us that orcs are pure evil and that's that, and I think it set an unfortunate precedent in fantasy), and it's really the only thing that saved this book for me - I'm looking forward to continuing this series, just to see how Pierce continues to develop this idea. ...more
Luckily, there's not much to catch up on - Pierce's novels are characterized by fast-paced action, a relatively small and memorable cast of characters, and fairly simple conflicts and plots. And Pierce does a good job of giving the reader enough backstory and reminders from the first book, so even if you're like me and are resuming this series after a long absence, you should be fine.
As is also the case with Pierce's books, there is almost no setup - Wolf-Speaker starts practically in the middle of the action, with a wolf pack (the same pack who Daine briefly ran with after her mother's death, when she nearly lost her own sense of humanity) contacting our heroine and asking for help. The pack's habitat is being threatened by human development, and they want her to intercede for them. Meanwhile, the rulers who control the land where the wolves live are also plotting against the king of Tortall, and let's not forget that the Immortals (powerful ancient monsters/gods who recently got released into the world) are quietly and not-so-quietly moving around the country.
Reading this book gave me strong flashbacks to The Woman Who Rides Like a Man, the third book in the Alanna series. I still consider it the weakest of the series, because after the absolutely breakneck pace of the previous books, this one seemed to move at a snail's pace while we watch Alanna hanging around in the desert and helping a local tribe. Wolf-Speaker suffers from the same problem - despite the fact that there's plenty of conflict, everything feels so slow. There's also a lot of repetition, because this book has Daine experimenting with her powers and learning to enter animals' minds, and it means that we have to read essentially the same scene over and over as she practices this skill on various animals. This repetition works for younger readers, but I was pretty bored for most of the book.
The conflict itself - rebellion against the king, aided by Immortals - isn't very interesting either, mainly because we're meeting the antagonists for the first time in this book, and the fact that Daine spends most of her time with the wolf pack means that the bad guys never get to do much. Failing to properly develop the villains, and removing Daine from the action for the majority of the book, means that the stakes never feel as high as they should.
Not that I disliked the book, overall. The fact that most of the characters are animals, each with their own personalities and conflicts, would have delighted me if I'd read this book as a child. Pierce is particularly good at coming up with animal names, and if you manage to get through this entire story without falling head-over-heels in love with Quickmunch the marmot, then I don't know what to do with you. I liked the wolf pack, and child readers will have more fun reading about them than I did - it's hard to get too invested in these characters when you know they're just a detour on the way to the main action.
Although the Alanna and the Daine stories have a lot in common, the series are trying to accomplish very different things, which becomes clear in Wolf-Speaker. Alanna's adventures were all about teaching girls that their gender doesn't stop them from being whatever they want to be, and that they can accomplish anything through determination and hard work. Daine's books teach children that the world isn't black and white, and that you can't make judgements about people (or in this case, creatures) based on what they are or where they come from.
In the Alanna books, the villains are not complex, and everyone pretty much adheres to their assigned roles - if someone is a bad guy in Book One, they're going to be a bad guy in Book Four - and the lines are pretty clearly drawn. Daine's journey, it seems, is shaping up to be a little more complex than that. In the first book, we established that many of the Immortals, like the Stormwings, are evil and scary. In the second book, Daine and the reader are forced to reconsider that idea, and realize that all Immortals are not alike. Just because they're a Stormwing, Daine learns, you can't assume they're evil. Here's a scene where Iakoju, an ogre, lays it out clearly for the readers:
"Maura frowned. 'I don't understand. If you're peaceful - if you really only like to farm - how come you're called "ogres"? Ogres are monsters, aren't they? And how come your people are always fighting with ours?'
'We are big,' replied Iajoku quietly. 'Ugly. Our color different from men color. No all ogres are same, either. Some take what they want. Some fight with men. My people, kin clans, we only like farming, not fighting. Some ogres only like fighting. Are all men the same?'"
This is a suprisingly complex concept for a kids' series, especially since fantasy audiences are trained to think of all evil-inclined creatures as one singular hive-mind (Tolkien, bless him, assured us that orcs are pure evil and that's that, and I think it set an unfortunate precedent in fantasy), and it's really the only thing that saved this book for me - I'm looking forward to continuing this series, just to see how Pierce continues to develop this idea. ...more
Notes are private!
1
not set
Feb 2016
Mar 01, 2016
Mass Market Paperback
2253002844
9782253002840
2253002844
3.62
2,308
1942
unknown
liked it
**spoiler alert** Darling, so good to see you! How was Monte Carlo?
Oh, just delightful. I mean, this is turn-of-the-century France and I'm a woman, so **spoiler alert** Darling, so good to see you! How was Monte Carlo?
Oh, just delightful. I mean, this is turn-of-the-century France and I'm a woman, so I got to watch people have fun. It was great. So what did I miss while I was gone?
Oh my god, I have to tell you the news. You know Gaston Lachaille?
The sugar heir? I'd like him to give me some sugar, if you know what I mean.
No, shut up, I have the best worst news ever. He's getting married.
Married? So his mistress finally locked that down. Good for her.
It's even better than that. Okay, so apparently Gaston's been hanging around this poor family for like, ever--
Ew, why?
I'm not totally clear on that, but I'm like 99% sure that Gaston's dad used to bang the mom and the aunt - they used to be courtesans.
Gaston Lachaille is friends with a family of former hookers?
Yeah, he goes over there and has tea and coos over how adorable their poverty is, it sounds awesome. Anyway, so there's a daughter...
Holy shit, NO.
I'M NOT EVEN AT THE BEST PART. So apparently the mom and the aunt have been training this girl to be a courtesan for Gaston--
How sweet. If this wine wasn't so expensive I'd throw it up.
Right? Anyway, Gaston was like, "yes thanks, wrap her up, I'll take her to go" and the girl was like, "um, I'm not cool with this" and so he proposed instead.
Huh. That is like the opposite of "why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free."
So now Gaston Lachaille is marrying the girl who was supposed to be his mistress. Me and the other girls have a betting pool going - I've given them six months.
Is that the best part?
No, this is: guess how old she is?
Oh Jesus. Okay, he's...what, thirty?
Thirty-three. She's fifteen.
Holy shit.
Did I mention he's known her since she was a baby, and considered her a little kid until like, two days ago when he suddenly noticed she got boobs? And she calls him "Tonton"?
Wow. So what are the odds she's had any kind of sex ed?
Hard to say. I mean, her entire family is courtesans, so I can't imagine they're shy about discussing the facts of life. But on the other hand, when they pitched the idea of her being Gaston's mistress, she used the phrase "I'd sleep in your bed" to describe the situation. So it's equally likely she'll have a heart attack the first time he takes his pants off.
Well, mazel tov, I guess. You said you had six months in the betting pool?
Yep.
Put me down for three.
...more
Oh, just delightful. I mean, this is turn-of-the-century France and I'm a woman, so **spoiler alert** Darling, so good to see you! How was Monte Carlo?
Oh, just delightful. I mean, this is turn-of-the-century France and I'm a woman, so I got to watch people have fun. It was great. So what did I miss while I was gone?
Oh my god, I have to tell you the news. You know Gaston Lachaille?
The sugar heir? I'd like him to give me some sugar, if you know what I mean.
No, shut up, I have the best worst news ever. He's getting married.
Married? So his mistress finally locked that down. Good for her.
It's even better than that. Okay, so apparently Gaston's been hanging around this poor family for like, ever--
Ew, why?
I'm not totally clear on that, but I'm like 99% sure that Gaston's dad used to bang the mom and the aunt - they used to be courtesans.
Gaston Lachaille is friends with a family of former hookers?
Yeah, he goes over there and has tea and coos over how adorable their poverty is, it sounds awesome. Anyway, so there's a daughter...
Holy shit, NO.
I'M NOT EVEN AT THE BEST PART. So apparently the mom and the aunt have been training this girl to be a courtesan for Gaston--
How sweet. If this wine wasn't so expensive I'd throw it up.
Right? Anyway, Gaston was like, "yes thanks, wrap her up, I'll take her to go" and the girl was like, "um, I'm not cool with this" and so he proposed instead.
Huh. That is like the opposite of "why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free."
So now Gaston Lachaille is marrying the girl who was supposed to be his mistress. Me and the other girls have a betting pool going - I've given them six months.
Is that the best part?
No, this is: guess how old she is?
Oh Jesus. Okay, he's...what, thirty?
Thirty-three. She's fifteen.
Holy shit.
Did I mention he's known her since she was a baby, and considered her a little kid until like, two days ago when he suddenly noticed she got boobs? And she calls him "Tonton"?
Wow. So what are the odds she's had any kind of sex ed?
Hard to say. I mean, her entire family is courtesans, so I can't imagine they're shy about discussing the facts of life. But on the other hand, when they pitched the idea of her being Gaston's mistress, she used the phrase "I'd sleep in your bed" to describe the situation. So it's equally likely she'll have a heart attack the first time he takes his pants off.
Well, mazel tov, I guess. You said you had six months in the betting pool?
Yep.
Put me down for three.
...more
Notes are private!
1
not set
Feb 2016
Feb 26, 2016
Paperback
0316216852
9780316216852
0316216852
3.54
53,598
Apr 15, 2013
Jun 04, 2013
really liked it
It's not easy to sell people on the concept of The Shining Girls, because every time I try to describe the plot, I can't do it without making this sou
It's not easy to sell people on the concept of The Shining Girls, because every time I try to describe the plot, I can't do it without making this sound like the dumbest possible idea for a book.
This is a story about a time-traveling serial killer.
See? It sounds so dumb and so bad. And if you read it and came to the same conclusion, I would not blame you at all. But, much like the cranked-to-eleven lunacy of The Girl on the Train, this book just worked for me. In essence, this is a very, very dumb idea for a story that has been executed very, very well (which is also how I describe Pacific Rim, a movie where humans build giant robots to fight giant aliens and it's actually one of the best movies I've ever seen).
Our killer is Harper Curtis, and while on the run from gangsters in 1930's Chicago, he discovers that he can time-travel. Specifically, he finds a house that acts as a sort of portal to other time periods - and only Harper Curtis has the key.
The specifics and the logic of how and why Curtis decides to use this power to hunt and kill women across time does not matter - the point is that he does, and one of his victims manages to survive.
Kirby Mazrachi is in college in 1989 when Harper Curtis attacks her and leaves her for dead. She makes a physical recovery, but becomes obsessed with finding the man who tried to kill her. To do this, she applies for an internship at the Chicago Sun-Times with a sports writer who used to cover homicides, and enlists his help tracking down her attempted murderer. The chapters move back and forth across time, showing us the various murders that Curtis commits while, in the present, Kirby attempts to find a pattern of unsolved murders that will lead her to the man who tried to kill her. Curtis, we realize, does not kill at random. Each of his victims is, in his mind, a girl who "shines" across time, enabling him to locate her. It's not made totally clear what he means by "shining" but each woman is doing something revolutionary or noteworthy when Curtis cuts her life short.
(this is the point in the review where I'm very tempted to say that Kirby is in "a race against time" or something like that. I'll let you know that I resisted that impulse, but not happily)
Look, I'll come right out and say that book is not for everyone. The violence is detailed and gruesome, particularly the scene where Curtis first attacks Kirby and we see every horrible action. The deaths and brutalization of women and animals alike are described, and it's exactly as upsetting as it should be. Other reviewers have pointed out, and I agree, that all of Curtis's victims besides Kirby never get to be anything other than victims - each is introduced to the reader and given a backstory just to make sure that we understand how upsetting and sad her death is, and that's all we see of them. Also Kirby has a romance subplot that really didn't work for me, first because it was a distraction from the central plot, and also because I have a sneaking suspicion that Beukes included it to show us that Kirby is recovering from her trauma, as if the best way to "fix" a woman is to give her a man. But May-December romances have never been my particular thing, so maybe that's why it didn't work for me.
This is honestly more of a three-star book, but I'm giving it an extra star because Beukes made two very, very good choices in her storytelling and I have to give her credit for them. First, she sets parameters for Curtis's time travel abilities - he cannot travel further back in time than 1929, and this means that we don't have to go through some idiotic revelation that Curtis was actually Jack the Ripper or something (or, considering the Chicago location, HH Holmes). And the second very, very good thing Beukes does is a spoiler, so I'm going to hide it. (view spoiler)[So Kirby is raised by a single mom, and doesn't know who her father is. About halfway through the book, a terrible thought occurred to me: oh Jesus, are we going to find out that Curtis had sex with Kirby's mother during one of his time-travel jaunts, and he's Kirby's father and that's why they have this connection oh god no no no nooooo. It would have been an awful twist, and Beukes could have easily gone that route, and thank god she didn't, because otherwise I would have had to explain to the nice people at the library that I couldn't return The Shining Girls because I had thrown it into a river (hide spoiler)] There are some plot twists that are better left unwritten, and I'm glad Beukes resisted the impulse to write that one.
One-sentence review summary: The Shining Girls is definitely an acquired taste, and I was just lucky that it happened to be mine. ...more
This is a story about a time-traveling serial killer.
See? It sounds so dumb and so bad. And if you read it and came to the same conclusion, I would not blame you at all. But, much like the cranked-to-eleven lunacy of The Girl on the Train, this book just worked for me. In essence, this is a very, very dumb idea for a story that has been executed very, very well (which is also how I describe Pacific Rim, a movie where humans build giant robots to fight giant aliens and it's actually one of the best movies I've ever seen).
Our killer is Harper Curtis, and while on the run from gangsters in 1930's Chicago, he discovers that he can time-travel. Specifically, he finds a house that acts as a sort of portal to other time periods - and only Harper Curtis has the key.
The specifics and the logic of how and why Curtis decides to use this power to hunt and kill women across time does not matter - the point is that he does, and one of his victims manages to survive.
Kirby Mazrachi is in college in 1989 when Harper Curtis attacks her and leaves her for dead. She makes a physical recovery, but becomes obsessed with finding the man who tried to kill her. To do this, she applies for an internship at the Chicago Sun-Times with a sports writer who used to cover homicides, and enlists his help tracking down her attempted murderer. The chapters move back and forth across time, showing us the various murders that Curtis commits while, in the present, Kirby attempts to find a pattern of unsolved murders that will lead her to the man who tried to kill her. Curtis, we realize, does not kill at random. Each of his victims is, in his mind, a girl who "shines" across time, enabling him to locate her. It's not made totally clear what he means by "shining" but each woman is doing something revolutionary or noteworthy when Curtis cuts her life short.
(this is the point in the review where I'm very tempted to say that Kirby is in "a race against time" or something like that. I'll let you know that I resisted that impulse, but not happily)
Look, I'll come right out and say that book is not for everyone. The violence is detailed and gruesome, particularly the scene where Curtis first attacks Kirby and we see every horrible action. The deaths and brutalization of women and animals alike are described, and it's exactly as upsetting as it should be. Other reviewers have pointed out, and I agree, that all of Curtis's victims besides Kirby never get to be anything other than victims - each is introduced to the reader and given a backstory just to make sure that we understand how upsetting and sad her death is, and that's all we see of them. Also Kirby has a romance subplot that really didn't work for me, first because it was a distraction from the central plot, and also because I have a sneaking suspicion that Beukes included it to show us that Kirby is recovering from her trauma, as if the best way to "fix" a woman is to give her a man. But May-December romances have never been my particular thing, so maybe that's why it didn't work for me.
This is honestly more of a three-star book, but I'm giving it an extra star because Beukes made two very, very good choices in her storytelling and I have to give her credit for them. First, she sets parameters for Curtis's time travel abilities - he cannot travel further back in time than 1929, and this means that we don't have to go through some idiotic revelation that Curtis was actually Jack the Ripper or something (or, considering the Chicago location, HH Holmes). And the second very, very good thing Beukes does is a spoiler, so I'm going to hide it. (view spoiler)[So Kirby is raised by a single mom, and doesn't know who her father is. About halfway through the book, a terrible thought occurred to me: oh Jesus, are we going to find out that Curtis had sex with Kirby's mother during one of his time-travel jaunts, and he's Kirby's father and that's why they have this connection oh god no no no nooooo. It would have been an awful twist, and Beukes could have easily gone that route, and thank god she didn't, because otherwise I would have had to explain to the nice people at the library that I couldn't return The Shining Girls because I had thrown it into a river (hide spoiler)] There are some plot twists that are better left unwritten, and I'm glad Beukes resisted the impulse to write that one.
One-sentence review summary: The Shining Girls is definitely an acquired taste, and I was just lucky that it happened to be mine. ...more
Notes are private!
1
not set
Feb 2016
Feb 19, 2016
Hardcover
0385720254
9780385720250
0385720254
4.28
25,582
Apr 01, 2000
Oct 17, 2000
liked it
"So it all moves in a pageant towards the ending, it's own ending. Everywhere, imperceptibly or otherwise, things are passing, ending, going. And ther
"So it all moves in a pageant towards the ending, it's own ending. Everywhere, imperceptibly or otherwise, things are passing, ending, going. And there will be other summers, other band concerts, but never this one, never again, never as now. Next year I will not be the self of this year now. And that is why I laugh at the transient, the ephemeral; laugh, while clutching, holding, tenderly, like a fool his toy, cracked glass, water through fingers. For all the writing, for all the invention of engines to express & convey & capture life, it is the living of it that is the gimmick. It goes by, and whatevere dream you use to dope up the pains and hurts, it goes. Delude yourself about printed islands of permanence. You've only got so long to live. You're getting your dream. Things are working, blind forces, no personal spiritual beneficent ones except your own intelligence and the good will of a few other fools and fellow humans. So hit it while it's hot."
Jesus. My college diaries don't sound like that, let me tell you. But of course, Sylvia Plath has always operated on another level entirely, and her journals prove nothing else, it's that Plath was in a category by herself.
The newly-unabridged journals of Sylvia Plath are a fascinating and intimate look into her life and her mind - and at the same time, the reader is kept mostly at arm's length. For every page where we see Plath grappling with her depression, or her anxieties about writing, or her complex relationship with Ted Hughes, we have to wade through hundreds of pages that are nothing but Plath describing who she spent the afternoon with and what they wore and what the room looked like (As a writing exercise, she would record everyone's outfits and physical details of the places she visited - I'm sure it helped her as a writer, but for a reader, it's a maddening slog). And even though this book contains hundreds of pages' worth of journal entries that were previously kept out of the public eye (thanks, Ted), this is far from a no-holds-barred tell-all. Many of Plath's journals have been destroyed, and Plath went through long periods where she didn't do any diary-keeping at all. So we get to read her college journals up until July 1953, and then there's nothing until 1955 - so anyone going into this book expecting raw, emotional entries written after Plath's suicide attempt in August 1953, and her last year at Smith following her hospitalization, will be disappointed. (I freely admit that I'm one of these ghouls - the first time I read The Diary of Anne Frank in elementary school, I was genuinely disappointed that the final entry wasn't written as the Gestapo were raiding the attic)
At over seven hundred pages, this book requires a lot of commitment. Even die-hard Plath fans will find themselves struggling to stay invested - the downside of reading real diaries is that there's never anything resembling a plot to keep the reader interested, unless that plot is "we're hiding from the Nazis" or something like that. But if you stick with it, there's a lot to discover. I identified very strongly with the college entries, because it's a lot of "what am I supposed to do with my life/am I actually talented/when am I going to get a boyfriend" that will be very, very familiar to anyone who remembers that period of their lives. Plath also writes frankly about what it's really like to make a living as a writer - once she and Ted are married, they're both constantly sending stories to magazines, working on their books, and applying for writing fellowships. Plath is always reminding herself to write more in her entries, setting goals for herself like "write for two hours every day" or "finish ten poems and send them to publishers." It's a very realistic depiction of what it actually means to be a writer.
The most interesting part, for many people, will be after Plath marries Ted Hughes. I didn't know much about their married life, aside from the fact that Ted was responsible for fucking up a lot of Plath's poetry collections after her death, and the way Plath writes about their marriage is really interesting. She fucking adored Hughes, and she seemed to really love her role as a housewife - she's always baking cakes and throwing dinner parties, and at times it seems like she enjoyed being an author's wife more than being an author herself. She believed that Ted was the real talent, and seemed very happy to play second fiddle to him (so it's a delightful irony that Plath is now the more famous name, while Ted Hughes is known primarily as "Sylvia Plath's jealous husband"). As I said earlier, their relationship was complex. Plath freely acknowledges in her diaries that Ted is a surrogate father figure for her, and there's a section where she realizes Ted is cheating on her and is devastated.
Throughout the book, you can see Plath struggling with her own personal demons, and trying to push back at the depression and anxiety that eventually killed her. In a way, I appreciated how long this volume is, because it allows you to see that Sylvia Plath was more than just a writer who killed herself. She had good days and bad days, she was complicated, she was happy and sad and scared and angry, and she was alive.
"I must reject the grovelling image of the fearful beast in myself, which is an elaborate escape image, and face, force, days into line. I have an inner fight that won't be conquered by a motto or one night's resolution. My demon of negation will tempt me day by day, and I'll fight it, as something other than my essential self, which I am fighting to save: each day will have something to recommend it...Minute by minute to fight upward. Out from under that black cloud which would annihilate my whole being with its demand for perfection and measure, not of what I am, but of what I am not. I am what I am, and have written, lived, and travelled: I have been worth what I have won, but must work to be worth more. I shall not be more by wishful thinking." ...more
Jesus. My college diaries don't sound like that, let me tell you. But of course, Sylvia Plath has always operated on another level entirely, and her journals prove nothing else, it's that Plath was in a category by herself.
The newly-unabridged journals of Sylvia Plath are a fascinating and intimate look into her life and her mind - and at the same time, the reader is kept mostly at arm's length. For every page where we see Plath grappling with her depression, or her anxieties about writing, or her complex relationship with Ted Hughes, we have to wade through hundreds of pages that are nothing but Plath describing who she spent the afternoon with and what they wore and what the room looked like (As a writing exercise, she would record everyone's outfits and physical details of the places she visited - I'm sure it helped her as a writer, but for a reader, it's a maddening slog). And even though this book contains hundreds of pages' worth of journal entries that were previously kept out of the public eye (thanks, Ted), this is far from a no-holds-barred tell-all. Many of Plath's journals have been destroyed, and Plath went through long periods where she didn't do any diary-keeping at all. So we get to read her college journals up until July 1953, and then there's nothing until 1955 - so anyone going into this book expecting raw, emotional entries written after Plath's suicide attempt in August 1953, and her last year at Smith following her hospitalization, will be disappointed. (I freely admit that I'm one of these ghouls - the first time I read The Diary of Anne Frank in elementary school, I was genuinely disappointed that the final entry wasn't written as the Gestapo were raiding the attic)
At over seven hundred pages, this book requires a lot of commitment. Even die-hard Plath fans will find themselves struggling to stay invested - the downside of reading real diaries is that there's never anything resembling a plot to keep the reader interested, unless that plot is "we're hiding from the Nazis" or something like that. But if you stick with it, there's a lot to discover. I identified very strongly with the college entries, because it's a lot of "what am I supposed to do with my life/am I actually talented/when am I going to get a boyfriend" that will be very, very familiar to anyone who remembers that period of their lives. Plath also writes frankly about what it's really like to make a living as a writer - once she and Ted are married, they're both constantly sending stories to magazines, working on their books, and applying for writing fellowships. Plath is always reminding herself to write more in her entries, setting goals for herself like "write for two hours every day" or "finish ten poems and send them to publishers." It's a very realistic depiction of what it actually means to be a writer.
The most interesting part, for many people, will be after Plath marries Ted Hughes. I didn't know much about their married life, aside from the fact that Ted was responsible for fucking up a lot of Plath's poetry collections after her death, and the way Plath writes about their marriage is really interesting. She fucking adored Hughes, and she seemed to really love her role as a housewife - she's always baking cakes and throwing dinner parties, and at times it seems like she enjoyed being an author's wife more than being an author herself. She believed that Ted was the real talent, and seemed very happy to play second fiddle to him (so it's a delightful irony that Plath is now the more famous name, while Ted Hughes is known primarily as "Sylvia Plath's jealous husband"). As I said earlier, their relationship was complex. Plath freely acknowledges in her diaries that Ted is a surrogate father figure for her, and there's a section where she realizes Ted is cheating on her and is devastated.
Throughout the book, you can see Plath struggling with her own personal demons, and trying to push back at the depression and anxiety that eventually killed her. In a way, I appreciated how long this volume is, because it allows you to see that Sylvia Plath was more than just a writer who killed herself. She had good days and bad days, she was complicated, she was happy and sad and scared and angry, and she was alive.
"I must reject the grovelling image of the fearful beast in myself, which is an elaborate escape image, and face, force, days into line. I have an inner fight that won't be conquered by a motto or one night's resolution. My demon of negation will tempt me day by day, and I'll fight it, as something other than my essential self, which I am fighting to save: each day will have something to recommend it...Minute by minute to fight upward. Out from under that black cloud which would annihilate my whole being with its demand for perfection and measure, not of what I am, but of what I am not. I am what I am, and have written, lived, and travelled: I have been worth what I have won, but must work to be worth more. I shall not be more by wishful thinking." ...more
Notes are private!
1
not set
Feb 2016
Feb 11, 2016
Paperback
0385539126
9780385539128
0385539126
3.89
26,382
Aug 28, 2014
Sep 16, 2014
it was amazing
Here's an interesting thing I noticed: on the cover photo that Goodreads attaches to this review, the full title is Stone Mattress: Nine Tales. But my
Here's an interesting thing I noticed: on the cover photo that Goodreads attaches to this review, the full title is Stone Mattress: Nine Tales. But my copy (the paperback version, with the bright yellow cover) reads Stone Mattress: Nine Wicked Tales. I'm not sure why there's a difference in the titles, but I'm glad I have the wicked version.
Fuck, I love Atwood. She just gets better and better as the years go on, and I'm especially in the love with the way she's happily embracing her love of pulpy, B-movie tropes and plots that Serious Authors are supposed to shun. First she wrote a nonfiction anthology of science fiction, then she wrote a post-apocalyptic future series, and now we have Nine Tales.
It's not all fantasy and sci-fi, but the influences are clear. The first three stories revolve around an aging author named Constance, who wrote a sprawling high-fantasy series about a magical world called Alphinland, and words cannot describe how badly I want Atwood to write a good old fashioned swords-and-dragons epic, for real. Just the little glimpses she gives us of Alphinland made me wish that it was a real series. Like this description, where we see Constance inserting people from her real life into her fantasy world, and doling out the appropriate punishments and rewards:
"[Alphinland] was a dangerous place, and - granted - preposterous in some ways, but it was not sordid. The denizens of it had standards. They understood gallantry, and courage, and also revenge.
Therefore Marjorie is not stored in the deserted winery where Gavin has been parked. Instead she's immobilized by runic spells inside a stone beehive belonging to Frenosia of the Fragrant Antennae. This demigoddess is eight feet tall and covered with tiny golden hairs, and has compound eyes. Luckily she's a close friend of Constance and is thus happy to assist in her plans and devices in return for the insect-related charms that Constance has the ability to bestow. So every day at twelve noon sharp, Marjorie is stung by a hundred emerald and indigo bees. Their stings are like white hot needles combined with red-hot chili sauce, and the pain is beyond excruciating."
Gavin and Marjorie are people from Constance's past - Gavin is her old boyfriend, and Marjorie is the woman he left Constance for. They each get their own sections after Constance, so you can see the relationship from three difference perspectives, and honestly I could have read an entire book about just those three characters.
But Atwood promised us nine wicked tales, and she delivers. I Dream of Zenia with the Bright Red Teeth revisits the characters from The Robber Bride, The Dead Hand Loves You is a delightfully meta story of a horror writer striking an unfortunate deal, and in The Freeze-Dried Groom, a man purchases a storage unit at an auction and discovers it filled with the remnants of a wedding - including the groom. But my favorite (after Constance & Co) was Stone Mattress. In this story, a woman traveling solo on an Alaskan cruise realizes that one of her fellow passengers is the man who raped her in high school, and she decides to murder him. And now, in addition to a high-fantasy series (ten books minimum, please) I also want Atwood to write a murder mystery novel.
It's brief, and you can get through the whole book in a couple of days, but every page is gold. Or, more accurately, every page is Atwood. ...more
Fuck, I love Atwood. She just gets better and better as the years go on, and I'm especially in the love with the way she's happily embracing her love of pulpy, B-movie tropes and plots that Serious Authors are supposed to shun. First she wrote a nonfiction anthology of science fiction, then she wrote a post-apocalyptic future series, and now we have Nine Tales.
It's not all fantasy and sci-fi, but the influences are clear. The first three stories revolve around an aging author named Constance, who wrote a sprawling high-fantasy series about a magical world called Alphinland, and words cannot describe how badly I want Atwood to write a good old fashioned swords-and-dragons epic, for real. Just the little glimpses she gives us of Alphinland made me wish that it was a real series. Like this description, where we see Constance inserting people from her real life into her fantasy world, and doling out the appropriate punishments and rewards:
"[Alphinland] was a dangerous place, and - granted - preposterous in some ways, but it was not sordid. The denizens of it had standards. They understood gallantry, and courage, and also revenge.
Therefore Marjorie is not stored in the deserted winery where Gavin has been parked. Instead she's immobilized by runic spells inside a stone beehive belonging to Frenosia of the Fragrant Antennae. This demigoddess is eight feet tall and covered with tiny golden hairs, and has compound eyes. Luckily she's a close friend of Constance and is thus happy to assist in her plans and devices in return for the insect-related charms that Constance has the ability to bestow. So every day at twelve noon sharp, Marjorie is stung by a hundred emerald and indigo bees. Their stings are like white hot needles combined with red-hot chili sauce, and the pain is beyond excruciating."
Gavin and Marjorie are people from Constance's past - Gavin is her old boyfriend, and Marjorie is the woman he left Constance for. They each get their own sections after Constance, so you can see the relationship from three difference perspectives, and honestly I could have read an entire book about just those three characters.
But Atwood promised us nine wicked tales, and she delivers. I Dream of Zenia with the Bright Red Teeth revisits the characters from The Robber Bride, The Dead Hand Loves You is a delightfully meta story of a horror writer striking an unfortunate deal, and in The Freeze-Dried Groom, a man purchases a storage unit at an auction and discovers it filled with the remnants of a wedding - including the groom. But my favorite (after Constance & Co) was Stone Mattress. In this story, a woman traveling solo on an Alaskan cruise realizes that one of her fellow passengers is the man who raped her in high school, and she decides to murder him. And now, in addition to a high-fantasy series (ten books minimum, please) I also want Atwood to write a murder mystery novel.
It's brief, and you can get through the whole book in a couple of days, but every page is gold. Or, more accurately, every page is Atwood. ...more
Notes are private!
1
not set
Jan 2016
Feb 10, 2016
Hardcover
0393064727
9780393064728
0393064727
3.78
950
2008
Jan 17, 2008
liked it
It took me a very long time to finish this book. I would stick with it for a few weeks, and then take a break from the book to read a novel or somethi
It took me a very long time to finish this book. I would stick with it for a few weeks, and then take a break from the book to read a novel or something. All together, I think I read five or six other books while trying to get through God's Crucible. The problem wasn't that the material was boring - I've been wanting to read a good, detailed history of pre-Crusades Islam for a long time, so I was really excited to find this - but it's dense. Important historical figures appear and disappear from the narrative with very little notice, and Lewis expects you to keep up with the scores of characters and locations contained in this history. I don't recommend trying to read this book on your morning train ride, is what I'm saying.
A quick note before getting into the meat of this review: prior to reading this book, I knew almost nothing about Islam or the history of the Muslim empire except what I was able to glean from biographies of white Christian conquerors like Isabella of Castille or Gertrude Bell. So I'm not in a position to evaluate how well Lewis presents this history; I can only give you my impressions of the book from the perspective of someone who was getting most of this information for the first time.
Lewis starts his book with a quick history of the origins of Islam, and this was fascinating to me - coming from a childhood of Catholic catechism classes, it was amazing that so much is known about Muhammad (I'm spelling the name as Lewis does in his book) as a historical figure, and I was excited and fascinated by all the information Lewis provides about the founder of Islam. His first wife was an older widow who owned her own business, and was one of Muhammad's strongest supporters! The schism between Sunnis and Shiites first arose out from the question of who would succeed Muhammad after he died! One of Muhammad's later wives was once involved in a scandal involving a necklace, and it reminded me so much of Marie Antoinette's affaire du collier that I wondered if the former story really happened at all!
Once Muhammad dies, Lewis has to widen the scope of his book considerably, especially after the Muslim empire starts extending into what would eventually become Spain and France. This is where things start to get dense, but it still kept me interested. The most fascinating part of this section is when Lewis is discussing how the Muslim invasion prompted the Franks to make uneasy alliances with other scattered tribes, leading to the entire concept of a single, unified European identity. He focuses on one battle in particular, the battle of Poitiers, which for a long time was described by historians as The Battle that decided Europe's future forever. Not exactly true, says Lewis, but he spends some time discussing what would have happened if the Muslims had been able to maintain their stronghold in Europe. What would it have meant for the future if the Frankish king, Charles Martel, hadn't been able to beat back the Muslim invaders? Spoiler alert: we might have been better off.
"Had 'Abd Al-Rahman's men prevailed that October day, the post-Roman Occident would probably have been incorporated into a cosmopolitan, Muslim regnum unobstructed by borders, as they hypothesize - one devoid of a priestly caste, animated by the dogma of equality of the faithful, and respectful of all religious faiths. Curiously, such speculation has a French pedigree. Forty years ago, two historians, Jean-Henri Roy and Jean Devoisse enumerated the benefits of a Muslim triumph at Poitiers: astronomy; trigonometry; Arabic numerals; the corpus of Greek philosophy. 'We [Europe] would have gained 267 years,' according to their calculation. 'We might have been spared the wars of religion.' To press the logic of this disconcerting analysis, the victory of Charles the Hammer must be seen as greatly contributing to the creation of an economically retarded, balkanized, fratricidal Europe that, in defining itself in opposition to Islam, made virtues out of religious persecution, cultural particularism, and hereditary aristocracy."
Lewis's book is at it's best when he's discussing how much more advanced the Muslim world was in comparison to early Europe, and how a continuation of the Muslim empire (but to be fair, they were pretty powerful for a good long while) might have advanced Europe by decades, if not centuries. Sure, this is mostly opinion and speculation on the part of historians, but you can't deny that the Muslim empire was lightyears ahead of Europe in almost every aspect, and then the Pope was like, "Yes, but they don't like Jesus, so let's go set everything on fire." Ugh.
Although it took me a long time, and I don't feel like I fully absorbed all of the information Lewis was presenting, I'm ultimately glad that I read this. Even though a lot of what was presented went over my head, I learned so much from this book. It gave me good background information on the history of Islam and the founding of Europe, as well as insight into the current political climate. Long, occasionally tedious and overwrought, but important, and an interesting exploration into what could have been.
"But al-Andalus, notwithstanding its fractious mixture of Arabs, Berbers, Goths, Hispanics, and Jews, and the splintering cordilleras, was an intact creation by the end of the tenth century. By contrast, the seams of Charlemagne's Europe - once it was deprived of its animating, aging genius - began to loosen badly. The center failed to hold and the avaricious parts turned on one another while even more fierce Scandinavian and Slavic intruders tested their defenses and ravaged the countryside. If anything, the situation in 976 portended a long, antipodal continuity of the two Europes - one secure in its defensesm religiously tolerant, and maturing in cultural and scientific sophistication; the other an arena of unceasing warfare in which superstition passed for religion and the flame of knowledge sputtered weakly." ...more
A quick note before getting into the meat of this review: prior to reading this book, I knew almost nothing about Islam or the history of the Muslim empire except what I was able to glean from biographies of white Christian conquerors like Isabella of Castille or Gertrude Bell. So I'm not in a position to evaluate how well Lewis presents this history; I can only give you my impressions of the book from the perspective of someone who was getting most of this information for the first time.
Lewis starts his book with a quick history of the origins of Islam, and this was fascinating to me - coming from a childhood of Catholic catechism classes, it was amazing that so much is known about Muhammad (I'm spelling the name as Lewis does in his book) as a historical figure, and I was excited and fascinated by all the information Lewis provides about the founder of Islam. His first wife was an older widow who owned her own business, and was one of Muhammad's strongest supporters! The schism between Sunnis and Shiites first arose out from the question of who would succeed Muhammad after he died! One of Muhammad's later wives was once involved in a scandal involving a necklace, and it reminded me so much of Marie Antoinette's affaire du collier that I wondered if the former story really happened at all!
Once Muhammad dies, Lewis has to widen the scope of his book considerably, especially after the Muslim empire starts extending into what would eventually become Spain and France. This is where things start to get dense, but it still kept me interested. The most fascinating part of this section is when Lewis is discussing how the Muslim invasion prompted the Franks to make uneasy alliances with other scattered tribes, leading to the entire concept of a single, unified European identity. He focuses on one battle in particular, the battle of Poitiers, which for a long time was described by historians as The Battle that decided Europe's future forever. Not exactly true, says Lewis, but he spends some time discussing what would have happened if the Muslims had been able to maintain their stronghold in Europe. What would it have meant for the future if the Frankish king, Charles Martel, hadn't been able to beat back the Muslim invaders? Spoiler alert: we might have been better off.
"Had 'Abd Al-Rahman's men prevailed that October day, the post-Roman Occident would probably have been incorporated into a cosmopolitan, Muslim regnum unobstructed by borders, as they hypothesize - one devoid of a priestly caste, animated by the dogma of equality of the faithful, and respectful of all religious faiths. Curiously, such speculation has a French pedigree. Forty years ago, two historians, Jean-Henri Roy and Jean Devoisse enumerated the benefits of a Muslim triumph at Poitiers: astronomy; trigonometry; Arabic numerals; the corpus of Greek philosophy. 'We [Europe] would have gained 267 years,' according to their calculation. 'We might have been spared the wars of religion.' To press the logic of this disconcerting analysis, the victory of Charles the Hammer must be seen as greatly contributing to the creation of an economically retarded, balkanized, fratricidal Europe that, in defining itself in opposition to Islam, made virtues out of religious persecution, cultural particularism, and hereditary aristocracy."
Lewis's book is at it's best when he's discussing how much more advanced the Muslim world was in comparison to early Europe, and how a continuation of the Muslim empire (but to be fair, they were pretty powerful for a good long while) might have advanced Europe by decades, if not centuries. Sure, this is mostly opinion and speculation on the part of historians, but you can't deny that the Muslim empire was lightyears ahead of Europe in almost every aspect, and then the Pope was like, "Yes, but they don't like Jesus, so let's go set everything on fire." Ugh.
Although it took me a long time, and I don't feel like I fully absorbed all of the information Lewis was presenting, I'm ultimately glad that I read this. Even though a lot of what was presented went over my head, I learned so much from this book. It gave me good background information on the history of Islam and the founding of Europe, as well as insight into the current political climate. Long, occasionally tedious and overwrought, but important, and an interesting exploration into what could have been.
"But al-Andalus, notwithstanding its fractious mixture of Arabs, Berbers, Goths, Hispanics, and Jews, and the splintering cordilleras, was an intact creation by the end of the tenth century. By contrast, the seams of Charlemagne's Europe - once it was deprived of its animating, aging genius - began to loosen badly. The center failed to hold and the avaricious parts turned on one another while even more fierce Scandinavian and Slavic intruders tested their defenses and ravaged the countryside. If anything, the situation in 976 portended a long, antipodal continuity of the two Europes - one secure in its defensesm religiously tolerant, and maturing in cultural and scientific sophistication; the other an arena of unceasing warfare in which superstition passed for religion and the flame of knowledge sputtered weakly." ...more
Notes are private!
1
not set
Dec 2015
Jan 08, 2016
Hardcover
0356500152
9780356500157
0356500152
3.95
241,342
Jan 14, 2014
Jun 19, 2014
it was amazing
"Her name is Melanie. It means 'the black girl', from an ancient Greek word, but her skin is actually very fair, so she thinks maybe it's not such a g
"Her name is Melanie. It means 'the black girl', from an ancient Greek word, but her skin is actually very fair, so she thinks maybe it's not such a good name for her. She likes the name Pandora a whole lot, but you don't get to choose. Miss Justineau assigns names from a big list; new children get the top name on the boys' list or the top name on the girls' list, and that, Miss Justineau says, is that.
There haven't been any new children for a long time now. Melanie doesn't know why that it. There used to be lots; every week, or every couple of weeks, voices in the night. Muttered orders, complaints, the occasional curse. A cell door slamming. Then, after a while, usually a month or two, a new face in the classroom - a new boy or girl who hadn't even learned to talk yet. But they got it fast.
Melanie was new herself, once, but that's hard to remember because it was a long time ago. It was before there were any words; there were just things without names, and things without names don't stay in your mind. They fall out, and then they're gone."
It's time to admit, as a society, that the zombie craze is finally on its last legs - if it's not over already. And honestly, I think we're way overdue anyway. I was tired of hearing about the damn things around the time I stopped watching The Walking Dead. Going into this book and knowing that it dealt with zombies (as will anyone who reads even three pages, so for anyone preparing to charge into the comments and accuse me of spoiling the entire book: shut up), I was pretty sure that I knew what I was going to get. There are only so many ways to tell a zombie apocalypse story, and I had seen/read enough variations to be able to guess what was coming.
So I'm delighted and grateful to report that yes, MR Carey has managed to tell a zombie apocalypse story in a new way. It's not just his unconventional choice of narrator - he knows better than to let his entire novel rest on a single gimmick. The Girl With All the Gifts rexamines and reinvents several staples of the zombie genre, and does something new with them. Considering how oversaturated the market has become, it's pretty astonishing that he manages to take so many familiar tropes and do something new with them. I won't go into more detail, because the less you know about the circumstances of the story going into it, the better. Start with the premise everyone knows - this is a book about zombies - and let yourself discover everything alongside the characters.
And there's plenty to discover. Carey is apparently most well-known for his work writing comic books, and it shows - the book is over four hundred pages long, and he keeps the action zipping along at a consistently maintained clip. Even when the characters aren't running from one (very well staged and described) action setpiece to another, there's no real downtime. Even when characters are just standing around and talking, their conversation addresses hidden drama or results in a tense confrontation, and there's no time for the reader to get bored. Like me, you'll probably tear through this in a matter of days, because every time a chapter ends you'll have to read the next one.
Carey made the wise decision to let multiple people narrate his story, so we aren't just confined to Melanie's extremely limited knowledge base. By letting us into the heads of people who know way more than Melanie does about the circumstances of the zombie plague, Carey lets his readers get all the information they need, while still maintaining suspense. And the ending (again, no spoilers) was possibly the best ending to a zombie apocalypse novel I've ever found, not counting Shaun of the Dead. Carey's ending acknowledges the true hopelessness of a zombie apocalypse, but manages to resolve his story in a satisfying way. It's impressive, to say the least.
I had a very cheesy line worked out about how MR Carey has managed to reanimate the dead zombie genre (haha, see what I did there?) but I came up with a better one: the zombie genre is Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, MR Carey is John Travolta, and The Girl With All the Gifts is the syringe of adrenaline, sending a jolt of life back into a tired and dying genre. The zombie craze is on its way out, but The Girl With All the Gifts makes a great final encore. ...more
There haven't been any new children for a long time now. Melanie doesn't know why that it. There used to be lots; every week, or every couple of weeks, voices in the night. Muttered orders, complaints, the occasional curse. A cell door slamming. Then, after a while, usually a month or two, a new face in the classroom - a new boy or girl who hadn't even learned to talk yet. But they got it fast.
Melanie was new herself, once, but that's hard to remember because it was a long time ago. It was before there were any words; there were just things without names, and things without names don't stay in your mind. They fall out, and then they're gone."
It's time to admit, as a society, that the zombie craze is finally on its last legs - if it's not over already. And honestly, I think we're way overdue anyway. I was tired of hearing about the damn things around the time I stopped watching The Walking Dead. Going into this book and knowing that it dealt with zombies (as will anyone who reads even three pages, so for anyone preparing to charge into the comments and accuse me of spoiling the entire book: shut up), I was pretty sure that I knew what I was going to get. There are only so many ways to tell a zombie apocalypse story, and I had seen/read enough variations to be able to guess what was coming.
So I'm delighted and grateful to report that yes, MR Carey has managed to tell a zombie apocalypse story in a new way. It's not just his unconventional choice of narrator - he knows better than to let his entire novel rest on a single gimmick. The Girl With All the Gifts rexamines and reinvents several staples of the zombie genre, and does something new with them. Considering how oversaturated the market has become, it's pretty astonishing that he manages to take so many familiar tropes and do something new with them. I won't go into more detail, because the less you know about the circumstances of the story going into it, the better. Start with the premise everyone knows - this is a book about zombies - and let yourself discover everything alongside the characters.
And there's plenty to discover. Carey is apparently most well-known for his work writing comic books, and it shows - the book is over four hundred pages long, and he keeps the action zipping along at a consistently maintained clip. Even when the characters aren't running from one (very well staged and described) action setpiece to another, there's no real downtime. Even when characters are just standing around and talking, their conversation addresses hidden drama or results in a tense confrontation, and there's no time for the reader to get bored. Like me, you'll probably tear through this in a matter of days, because every time a chapter ends you'll have to read the next one.
Carey made the wise decision to let multiple people narrate his story, so we aren't just confined to Melanie's extremely limited knowledge base. By letting us into the heads of people who know way more than Melanie does about the circumstances of the zombie plague, Carey lets his readers get all the information they need, while still maintaining suspense. And the ending (again, no spoilers) was possibly the best ending to a zombie apocalypse novel I've ever found, not counting Shaun of the Dead. Carey's ending acknowledges the true hopelessness of a zombie apocalypse, but manages to resolve his story in a satisfying way. It's impressive, to say the least.
I had a very cheesy line worked out about how MR Carey has managed to reanimate the dead zombie genre (haha, see what I did there?) but I came up with a better one: the zombie genre is Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, MR Carey is John Travolta, and The Girl With All the Gifts is the syringe of adrenaline, sending a jolt of life back into a tired and dying genre. The zombie craze is on its way out, but The Girl With All the Gifts makes a great final encore. ...more
Notes are private!
1
not set
Dec 2015
Dec 20, 2015
Paperback
0804138141
9780804138147
0804138141
3.90
224,113
Sep 15, 2015
Sep 15, 2015
really liked it
I read Mindy Kaling's first memoir/essay collection Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (and other concerns) about four years ago, but I just realized
I read Mindy Kaling's first memoir/essay collection Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (and other concerns) about four years ago, but I just realized that I never actually wrote a review for it - I also just realized that I never made a "memoir" shelf, so that's been corrected. I'll go back and write a review of Kaling's first book at some point, I promise.
The cliff notes version of my thoughts on Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me is that I enjoyed it, but Kaling was very clearly being selective with what she wanted to share and what she wanted to leave out, and the whole thing felt slightly incomplete. Overall, it was funny but ultimately unsatisfying.
I'm happy to report, therefore, that Why Not Me? is a much more focused and tightly-constructed memoir. Kaling's first book was a mishmash of funny essays and stories about her childhood and time spent working in Hollywood; Why Not Me? has a much clearly defined thesis: how Mindy Kaling achieved her success as a writer/actor/producer, what contributed to this and what didn't help, and how she grapples with that success.
There are still a few funny essays thrown in - "Things to Bring to My Dinner Party", "4am Worries", and my favorite, "A Perfect Courtship in My Alternate Life" where Kaling imagines an alternate-universe Mindy who teaches Latin at a private school in New York and has a sparring flirtation with the history teacher. She has a whole chapter of the emails exchanged by this fictional version of herself and the history teacher, and I would absolutely watch that movie - especially because I imagined Chris Messina as the history teacher. Kaling probably did too, because when she's introducing the section she writes, "I will have a stern man in anything I ever write; I just love a gruff guy with a heart of gold. I guess what I'm saying is Walter Matthau is the man of my dreams."
But for the most part, the book deals with Kaling's work. She has a chapter titled "A Day in the Life of Mindy Kaling" and guys, Mindy Kaling's life is exhausting. On days when she's shooting her show, she gets up at 5 am and goes to bed at 12:30 am. In between is nothing except work, meal breaks, and a nap. "About 50 percent of the time," Kaling writes, "I have enough energy to remove my clothes and put on pajamas when I go to bed. Otherwise I just fall asleep in the clothes I went to work in, which I like to think of as a sexy, ongoing walk of shame."
For me, the message that comes across most clearly in Why Not Me? (and to a lesser extent, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? is this: Mindy Kaling is not successful because of luck or good connections. Mindy Kaling is successful because she works so, so hard for everything she has. She might not be your favorite comedian, her show might not be your favorite show, she might not understand that no one really cares that much about her relationship with BJ Novak (seriously girl: you dated, you broke up, you're still friends. We've all heard the song; stop releasing remixes and pretending they're new), but you can't deny that Kaling has earned everything she has.
The title of the book addresses this plainly - like a lot of women in comedy (especially minority women in comedy) Kaling frequently encounters people who act like she is doing something radical and presumptuous by appearing on TV.
"The conversation about me and my show is so frequently linked to the way I look that people who are deciding whether or not to watch my show must think subconsciously, Oh, that's that show about body acceptance in chubby women, because that's all they seem to hear about it. And my show is about so much more than that! It's about the struggles of a delusional Indian thirtysomething trying to scam on white dudes!"
In its best moments, this book is a response to all the people who ever looked at Mindy Kaling and sneered, "Why should you be on TV?" Kaling's response: "Because I work really hard and also, why not?"
At the end of the book, Kaling addresses the concept of confidence. It's something she gets asked about a lot, and she cites a Q&A she did once where a young Indian girl asked her where she gets her confidence.
"Context is so important. If this question had been asked by a white man, I might actually have been offended, because the subtext of it would have been completely different. When an adult white man asks me, 'Where do you get your confidence?' the tacit assumption behind it is: because you don't look like a person who should have any confidence. You're not white, you're not a man, and you're not thin or conventionally attractive. How were you able to overlook these obvious shortcomings to feel confident?'
...Confidence is just entitlement. Entitlement has gotten a bad rap because it's used almost exclusively for the useless children of the rich, reality TV stars, and Conrad Hilton Jr., who gets kicked off an airplane for smoking pot in the lavatory and calling people peasants or whatever. But entitlement in and of itself isn't so bad. Entitlement is simply the belief that you deserve something. Which is great. The hard part is, you'd better make sure you deserve it. ...Work hard, know your shit, show your shit, and then feel entitled." ...more
The cliff notes version of my thoughts on Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me is that I enjoyed it, but Kaling was very clearly being selective with what she wanted to share and what she wanted to leave out, and the whole thing felt slightly incomplete. Overall, it was funny but ultimately unsatisfying.
I'm happy to report, therefore, that Why Not Me? is a much more focused and tightly-constructed memoir. Kaling's first book was a mishmash of funny essays and stories about her childhood and time spent working in Hollywood; Why Not Me? has a much clearly defined thesis: how Mindy Kaling achieved her success as a writer/actor/producer, what contributed to this and what didn't help, and how she grapples with that success.
There are still a few funny essays thrown in - "Things to Bring to My Dinner Party", "4am Worries", and my favorite, "A Perfect Courtship in My Alternate Life" where Kaling imagines an alternate-universe Mindy who teaches Latin at a private school in New York and has a sparring flirtation with the history teacher. She has a whole chapter of the emails exchanged by this fictional version of herself and the history teacher, and I would absolutely watch that movie - especially because I imagined Chris Messina as the history teacher. Kaling probably did too, because when she's introducing the section she writes, "I will have a stern man in anything I ever write; I just love a gruff guy with a heart of gold. I guess what I'm saying is Walter Matthau is the man of my dreams."
But for the most part, the book deals with Kaling's work. She has a chapter titled "A Day in the Life of Mindy Kaling" and guys, Mindy Kaling's life is exhausting. On days when she's shooting her show, she gets up at 5 am and goes to bed at 12:30 am. In between is nothing except work, meal breaks, and a nap. "About 50 percent of the time," Kaling writes, "I have enough energy to remove my clothes and put on pajamas when I go to bed. Otherwise I just fall asleep in the clothes I went to work in, which I like to think of as a sexy, ongoing walk of shame."
For me, the message that comes across most clearly in Why Not Me? (and to a lesser extent, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? is this: Mindy Kaling is not successful because of luck or good connections. Mindy Kaling is successful because she works so, so hard for everything she has. She might not be your favorite comedian, her show might not be your favorite show, she might not understand that no one really cares that much about her relationship with BJ Novak (seriously girl: you dated, you broke up, you're still friends. We've all heard the song; stop releasing remixes and pretending they're new), but you can't deny that Kaling has earned everything she has.
The title of the book addresses this plainly - like a lot of women in comedy (especially minority women in comedy) Kaling frequently encounters people who act like she is doing something radical and presumptuous by appearing on TV.
"The conversation about me and my show is so frequently linked to the way I look that people who are deciding whether or not to watch my show must think subconsciously, Oh, that's that show about body acceptance in chubby women, because that's all they seem to hear about it. And my show is about so much more than that! It's about the struggles of a delusional Indian thirtysomething trying to scam on white dudes!"
In its best moments, this book is a response to all the people who ever looked at Mindy Kaling and sneered, "Why should you be on TV?" Kaling's response: "Because I work really hard and also, why not?"
At the end of the book, Kaling addresses the concept of confidence. It's something she gets asked about a lot, and she cites a Q&A she did once where a young Indian girl asked her where she gets her confidence.
"Context is so important. If this question had been asked by a white man, I might actually have been offended, because the subtext of it would have been completely different. When an adult white man asks me, 'Where do you get your confidence?' the tacit assumption behind it is: because you don't look like a person who should have any confidence. You're not white, you're not a man, and you're not thin or conventionally attractive. How were you able to overlook these obvious shortcomings to feel confident?'
...Confidence is just entitlement. Entitlement has gotten a bad rap because it's used almost exclusively for the useless children of the rich, reality TV stars, and Conrad Hilton Jr., who gets kicked off an airplane for smoking pot in the lavatory and calling people peasants or whatever. But entitlement in and of itself isn't so bad. Entitlement is simply the belief that you deserve something. Which is great. The hard part is, you'd better make sure you deserve it. ...Work hard, know your shit, show your shit, and then feel entitled." ...more
Notes are private!
1
not set
Dec 2015
Dec 16, 2015
Hardcover