Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert

Pablo Picasso, Girl Before a Mirror, 1932

(September 29) Read this to be able to join in on the general sneering, for that's the only reaction to it I ever saw on my internet travels. Case in point: it was endorsed by Oprah, in some ways the worst thing that can happen to a book's credibility (though it means it will sell well).

But I liked Eat, Pray, Love quite a bit. I liked Gilbert's voice, I identified with her quest, I laughed out loud many times.

The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins

(September 15, September 20, September 25) This "Young Adult" series was getting all kinds of hype because Mockingjay came out in August... so I took it up in hopes it was the next Harry Potter or Golden Compass.

The Hunger Games was a bit disappointing, at first, because nothing can be Harry Potter or The Golden Compass or even Twilight, after all, and also because I found it really Young Adult, really teenagery... with teenage preoccupations (dating, clothes, rejecting authority). Collins worked hard to come up with a story that would allow her heroine to balance two amazing love interests forever.

But then, by Catching Fire, the story had built up momentum for me, despite the Contrive-o-matic Machine lumbering along in the background. It was interesting to see what Collins was going to do with this love triangle, after all.

Mockingjay took the series into darker and more horrific territory than I ever would have imagined. There were some really interesting points made about how a rebel movement can be just as corrupt as the government it attempts to overthrow; it wasn't just a Star Wars-style battle between good and evil. But the final book is one long blood-bath and the resolution of Katniss's love troubles is very anti-climactic.

Year of Wonders, Geraldine Brooks

Hendrik Kerstens, Shopping Bag, 2008

(September 5) I enjoyed this quite a bit, even though it is a tad grisly in its descriptions of plague victims and the day-to-day brutality of 17th-century village life.

It's a little like a Sarah Waters novel, in that the first-person narrator is crafted to have the preoccupations and language of a bygone age -- but Brooks is not as convincing with this as Waters was with her Victorians. On the other hand, if Brooks did try to make it as authentic as possible, no one would be able to understand it. See Pepys' Twitter account.

This is also a little like Diana Gabaldon's 18th-century novels with all the interesting details about medical knowledge and superstitions of the time.

What I really liked about it was that it set up certain expectations about the outcomes for certain individuals -- and then did not take us there at all! Quite surprising! In fact, the way the novel ends is basically a bolt from the blue. But an interesting bolt -- for our heroine is much better off and more empowered in the culture of "our enemy" than she ever was before.

What I found hard to take: all the sad dying. But, what are you gonna do? It's a novel about the Plague Year.