The Notebook, Nicholas Sparks

Will Davies, Harlequin Romance cover

(May 21) OMG.

I wanted to read this because I’d heard so many mildly disparaging comparisons -- “oh, this is sentimental, like The Notebook,” or “this has same kind of blind devotion from fans as The Notebook.” I wanted to know exactly what kind of sentimental this was, or what kind of oxycontin it was. It seemed like a cultural touchstone.

But OMG it was so bad. The opening acknowledgements sounded like they were written by one of my former C students, which was very alarming.

However, the story itself was written more competently than the acknowledgements -- the expression of the ideas is quite competent, in fact. It’s just that the ideas aren’t very powerful or even interesting.

I kept waiting for something “big” to happen, but suddenly the book was over and nothing “big” had happened at all. Everything was just perfect in a Redbook magazine kind of way.

At the end we find out that Sparks based this story on his grandparents’ actual lives, and that makes you wince and think, oh that’s cute, and maybe it explains why Sparks kept everything so generic … he just didn’t want to go there about his grandparents.

But then he did go there -- or somewhere -- with several hot sex scenes. So.

And that’s all the characters do -- eat, have sex, wear nice outfits. There is nothing else going on. The “events” are like snapshots described to us -- which might be an interesting idea in the right hands, but here is just really only about the clothing, the food and the mild porn. Nothing deeper.

Maybe it made for a great movie -- I haven’t seen the movie and don’t want to now. Maybe the movie injected some life into the story... because it is a cute concept and could be really powerful... and I think the movie must be better and that that is what everybody thinks of when they think of The Notebook, because the criticisms are really mild. People have ragged on Twilight so harshly, and I think it’s superior, creatively, to The Notebook.

So either the movie is acceptable and that’s what people identify as The Notebook, or people feel bad that it’s about real-life old people and therefore let it off the hook. Maybe people see it as a blank canvas and inject their own powerful imaginations into it. I cannot otherwise account for its huge, huge popularity.

About a third of the way in, I started to think, “This is just like The Bridges of Madison County,” which is a real insult, ay. But by the end, The Notebook made The Bridges of Madison County look good. O_o

Where Angels Fear to Tread, E.M. Forster

John Singer Sargent Hylda, Almina and Conway, Children of Asher Wertheimer, 1905

(May 20) All these terrible things happen; and yet it is very funny. O_o

Silk, Alessandro Baricco, translated by Ann Goldstein

(May 13) What an amazing and powerful little book. It’s only 132 pages, but it packs the kind of wallop you might expect only from long, pretentious sagas or old masters.

And it’s written so sparingly! It’s like living in a haiku for a little while. Even though it’s a translation, the book is nothing but the plainest and most common words in English, so you suspect that in the original Italian it would also be plain, unadorned vocabulary. So it doesn’t feel like you might be missing nuances. Although with this kind of book you probably are.

The story seems completely original when you are in it, but within a few minutes of finishing it, I realized it was another form of “The Beast in the Jungle,” and a story about limerence.

Andrea (from whom I got this recommendation) thought it was like music -- the pacing, the repetitions, the flourishes -- and with this I agree.

Easy Way to Stop Smoking, Allen Carr

American Cancer Society, "Smoking Is Very Glamorous," 1972

(May 9) Well, it worked for me -- so, to be fair, I've got to give it 5 stars. I didn't particularly expect it to work, and I didn't particularly care if it worked, and it certainly didn't work right away -- but 11 days after I finished this book, I just spontaneously stopped smoking (and have remained non-smoking till now, four months later).

The "switch" flipped for me, the way the book mysteriously hints it will. I'm not sure just exactly which idea it is among all the ideas that Allen Carr drills into you that does the trick, but he does harp on some basic concepts over and over. Some of them are old chestnuts, but a couple of them were interesting new points of view for me ("a cigarette's sole function is to create the desire for the next cigarette" and "you think quitting smoking is hard because everyone tells you it's hard").

Still, none of these saws seemed transformative at the time of reading. Something unknown just kicked in after 11 days.

The Sentimentalists, Johanna Skibsrud

Jeff Greenberg, Silhouette of Man Fishing, Lake Erie, Lorain, OH

(May 2) I read this because it won the 2010 Giller Prize, but I am totally shocked that it did so.

Because it was one of these pointless wandering tales of people dealing with emotions that are never spelled out for the reader, other than to refer us to a boat or a swinging light bulb or a can of ham. How are we supposed to know what these things mean to characters when we never get to know them as other than shell-shocked?

It was like Housekeeping or Tinkers or The Patron Saint of Liars. The genre confounds me.