Very Nice, Marcy Dermansky

T.S. Harris, Watery Bliss, 2016

(November 14) I really liked this -- inhaled it in one sitting -- and was struck by how much it was like Conversations With Friends: the characters are all associated with the literary world and the main character has a very flat affect.

It was highly recommended by Goop and there was a long queue for it at the library, two pretty good signs for a work of fiction.

And I think it’s a good novel, charming and absorbing, with the summer-fall romance ending up not so implausible (this trope usually beggars belief so I was wary). The original Goop description made it all extremely seductive too because of their excitement over the ending. After a few pages with these characters you realize the ending could be almost anything -- and because there are a lot of Trump-horror-show allusions, to classism, racism, and violence, you realize any ending could be really nightmarish. The tension builds all right.

An interesting feature of this novel is that there are quite a few first-person narrators handling the story and I love the dimensions this provides.

Did I like it as much as Conversations With Friends??? I think so.

Conversations With Friends, Sally Rooney

Eileen OʼSullivan, Multiplicity of Factors, 2015

(October 26)  I just inhaled this novel -- read it in less than 24 hours, almost all at once (a second sitting for the last 40 pages). 

Such an interesting and intriguing voice this first-person narrator has, and I was totally sucked into the love affair that is the focus of the book -- a completely unconventional love affair that is nonetheless conventionally compelling, but is bathed in layers of irony so deeply that it’s almost a comic novel.... except it literally is a romance. Desperate to read more Rooney, but she’s young and has barely started.

I learned of this from Habitually Chic’s Instagram.

Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon's Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart, James R. Doty

Sirup, Yin Yang and Maze Symbol in Thinking Heads as Concept of Harmony and Chaos, 2019

(October 8) Pretty much inhaled the first three-quarters of this, then tried to savour the rest more slowly. 

I heard about it through Goop, which made the story very compelling -- a young boy with no advantages and zero prospects in life learns to manifest his desires through stilling his body and practicing meditation, so clearly an instance of systematizing the “law of attraction.”

The full story was fascinating and the book does provide the steps for learning how to still the body, clear the mind and focus on the things you want. In Doty’s case, the things wanted were a medical degree, then a neurosurgery specialty, and then the ability to successfully perform surgeries that had very poor prognoses. It was very interesting.

Becoming, Michelle Obama

Amy Sherald, First Lady Michelle Obama, 2018

(August 28) I really enjoyed this and am sorry I’m finished and won’t have “Michelle” to “talk to” every day. I just loved her voice and her point of view on everything that ever happened to her. 

I didn’t think I would like the book very much, because two friends were reading it back in April when it first came out and both said they found it kind of grocery-listish and without self-insight.

But I did not find it that way at all -- Obama was very astute about her own motivations and decisions in life, I thought.

Moreover, she knew what to share about being a black kid on the south side of Chicago and being First Lady of the United States. 

The book is natural, like you're talking to her, but also profound.

She very politely gets her own back with those who criticized her as a campaign wife and First Lady, and those who were unsupportive when she was growing up. (In the first category: Christopher Hitchens, you asshole.)

I always liked Michelle Obama -- I liked her from the beginning, in 2003, when she began showing up in my blogs as a fashion influence. Like, yes, she had that, too. She was smart, she could speak well, she could dance, she looked amazing, she had the sexiest arms ever seen on a woman, she was a lawyer and a devoted mom, and her style was infectious.

I remember getting a little “diamond” peace-sign necklace because she was wearing one all the time in that first campaign (anti Iraq war). I belted cardigans over dresses. I took pride in bare arms.

I liked everything she did as a First Lady and I think she hit levels of perfection as FLOTUS that future FLOTI will have trouble matching.

And now she writes a great book (smh).

Maeve in America, Maeve Higgins

from Anglonerd.com

(July 22) It was such a pleasure to read this that I finished it before I knew it; it is so funny and touching in all the classic Irish ways (how can that style be so particular and yet so endlessly new?) as well as in all the ways.

It arrived out of the blue as something Kerry brought to the hospital for me to read... the inscription showed that Jane had brought it to her when she was in the hospital... and it is perfect for that, but also for any other time.

And despite having many other books to finish, I kept going back to Maeve’s with eager anticipation, which is how it should be with a book... not how it is with a few I’ve been slogging through for duty reasons (I’m looking at you, History of Gardens).

Anyway, I found Maeve in America so easy and delightful to read that it was restorative.

I want to give it 3.5 stars probably because it contrasted so sharply with the slog books.

The Path Made Clear, Oprah Winfrey

Cavanagh Foyle, Oprah, 2019

(July 8) Like The Wisdom of Sundays, this was not a “book,” really... more a series of quotations from people Oprah has interviewed and gained wisdom from. Oprah writes a few essays about self-discovery which are interspersed.

You can read it in about an hour.

It is beautifully made, as a book: thick, expensive paper covered with full-bleed, full-colour photographs of amazing scenery on every page. The quotes, or conversations with Oprah, are superimposed over these spectacular views. The package is no doubt meant to be used for contemplation, meditation... all the -ations.

It was fine and pleasant, but I had hoped I would learn something new or have an insight about path-finding... but didn’t.

The Light We Lost, Jill Santopolo

Roy Lichtenstein, Kiss V, 1964

(June 4) It killed me when I got to the end of this book and saw the lengthy and detailed acknowledgements thanking people who had read multiple drafts and offered advice on the realism of certain settings and actions, and who had “all made the book so much better”.... could not one of them have caught “I turned on the sink and started washing the dishes” on p. 51? (So like the “empty glass of champagne” in The Night Circus.)

And for all this help and advice, the book is still kind of unrealistic and at the same time banal in its fantasy-spinning. 

Argh, I always have a lot to say about books that are C, C+.

I can’t remember where I got the recommendation, but it must have been from someone’s Instagram account. I do remember commenters discussing a twist and how the whole set-up was so emotional and wrenching. In fact, it was the desire to find out what “the twist” was that kept me reading after I saw how unbelievable it was going to be, how much it was pandering to lovers of romantic baloney.

Jill Santopolo admits in the afterword that she started the book based on the ending of a real-life love affair she never thought would end. That makes sense, because the early part of the book, when Lucy is falling in love with Gabe and then mourning him, seems much more realistic. There are clumsy characters and cliché moments that jar but the loving and mourning seem true to life.

Gabe, though, is a little too perfect... and so reluctant is the author to tarnish his halo that even his decision to go off on a job that Lucy “can’t” follow him on (and this, too, tortures reality -- why “can’t follow”? That one job in New York is the only fulfilling work she can do?) is softened by his eventual invitation to come along. The bad thing, apparently, is “only” that he did not think to ask her along right from the start ...all along he thought he would come back to her, his one true love (despite several serious relationships over the years, including an engagement, which she keeps hearing about secondhand).

I kept hoping the twist would be that they were miscommunicating and misinterpreting each other's actions in the way Romeo and Juliet did, but, no, the twist is something else. 

It all just clanged and clanked. I don’t require 100 Years of Solitude from every novel -- but it needs to be more clever than this.

When I started it I was sort of charmed by the coincidence that it was set to a September 11 timeline -- the day itself, the Gulf War, the establishment of memorials, the killing of Bin Laden, etc., etc. -- and I had just come back from my first visit to New York where I'd seen the play Come From Away, which really took me back to 9/11 very vividly. So resonant.

But then:

The brother who expresses everything through Pinterest-level science jokes is very lame.

The scene when the first-person female narrator describes her physical looks in a way that makes sure we know she is drop-dead gorgeous and yet not an egomaniac at all is lame. Since there is no believable way to do this, such passages are always yucky and grade C. 

So it had these and many more such moments... yet there is great love out there for it! There are more than 17,000 5-star reviews of this book on Goodreads!

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Taylor Jenkins Reid

DigitalDraft, Fashion Art Print

(June 12) I liked it a lot... interesting story about a writer getting the scoop of a lifetime for reasons that really supercharge the book’s ending, quite the unique plot twist, so very enjoyable in that way... but there were some editing issues: the tale is set partially in the ’50s and ’60s, the high-glamour age of Hollywood... a time popular with Millennials recently (and I believe Taylor Jenkins Reid is a Millennial)... but there are tiny anachronisms throughout... e.g., they did not have “dirty martinis” in 1962 or 1965 (p. 222); jeans were not called “high-waisted” in 1967... I can’t remember if hip-huggers were invented by 1967, but they would have been the only departure from regular jeans available in stores (p. 236)... and so on and so on... there was sincere regard for the looks and styles of the times, but how come Taylor Jenkins Reid’s editors didn’t catch these things???

The Woman Who Walked in Sunshine, Alexander McCall Smith

Siepolo Kelebemang, Lively Soul, 2018

(July 11)  It was such a great pleasure to read one of these again. I forgot how soothing they are, and how much they uplift.

Again, there is that effort to make Mma Ramotswe’s life more complicated, but they are still lovely stories. I cried twice over poignant scenes (the final one the most memorable).

All Your Perfects, Colleen Hoover

Elisaveta Sivas, Love and Friendship, 2018

(April 11) A blogger I like raved about this book and this author, so I flagged all the Colleen Hoovers at the library and read this, my first sample, on a trip to NYC. 

The blogger had warned that it was about love and romance and that it had steamy scenes, but I didn’t realize it would be all pretty much that. I mean, it’s a realistic portrayal of how two people in a relationship will turn love into hate through misunderstanding and misinterpretation... but the husband is hopelessly unrealistic in his wonderfulness and there’s a lot of sappiness.

“Cute but sappy” was my first (and only) note on this book... because it was well done in a lot of ways but it’s a subject and a genre (really, really soft porn?) that’s kind of teenagery for me.

I have quickly unflagged all the Colleen Hoovers on my waiting list, and I will now be cautious about other authors recommended by the blogger in question (whose food, fashion, decor and lifestyle advice is always great).

Face Paint: The Story of Makeup, Lisa Eldridge

François Boucher, Woman at Her Toilette, 1738

(August 15) I really liked this -- the topic is a guilty pleasure and there was much new-to-me information and many interesting perspectives on the history of various trends and materials in makeup. Eldridge presents it in a fairly scholarly way, too, with a lot of citations and references, and a kind of reverential tone that you find with newly minted researchers, so appealing.

The book itself is beautiful -- so many stunning colour plates, photos like works of art, paper and binding finishes of the highest quality, all at a luxurious size. It’s really an art book, a coffee table book, in some ways.

This Will Only Hurt a Little, Busy Philipps

(February 19) I really liked this book but was totally shocked by it.

I've been following Busy Philipps on Instagram for a while... Caroline Hirons recommended her as a hilarious follow a few years ago, and I quickly found her very entertaining. 

When her inevitable book came out (all popular Instagrammers get a book offer), I put in for it at the library (noting it was in high demand even here in slow old Hamilton), thinking it would be “good for my blog,” since it would no doubt be short and surface-y, easy to read. 

But when it arrived, I was knocked off my feet. It starts off as I thought it would, with references to stuff that was happening on her Instagram when she started writing -- the raccoons having sex by her pool, “nearly getting killed in an Uber,” and so on. I thought: “Yep, quick read.”

But it never went that way at all after the intro page -- in fact, it quickly got kind of dark... Philipps went through a lot of shit as a young woman partly because of bad luck but also a lot because of a trusting, hopeful nature, and that’s always the saddest.

And Philipps obviously also had a lot of grudges about her career progress she’d been keeping warm for a book like this -- she really relished her opportunity to reveal what pricks some people have been to her. I kind of admire her desire to point out where beloved stars are assholes, but I’m also kind of worried that she enjoys the revenge so much. It was clear that she’s been hoping to publish a bit of a revenge book for a while.

And then there was a potential plot twist at the end, regarding her marriage, her “emotional boyfriend” and difficulties with parenting, that was all so categorically opposite to what we've been getting on her Instagram for the last two years. 

So I liked this book (I like being suprised) and I do enjoy Philipps despite these shocks and her Ahab focus... but how unsettling it all was!