Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout

Curious Expeditions, Oldest surviving figurehead from a Maine vessel, Maine Maritime Museum, Bath, Maine

(September 11) A collection of short stories about people who live in a small town in Maine, linked by the presence of Olive Kitteridge in each story. Sometimes the story is principally about Olive; other times she is a secondary character; other times she is mentioned only in passing. The stories are gentle and subtle, and, other than the setting and various degrees of Olive, have only the question "Why are people the way they are?" in common. The private trials and tribulations of all the characters in this town are themselves very different.

But even though they're short stories, the effect of the whole thing is of reading a novel. You feel like you've had a full meal, not just a series of appetizers. It's just that the book doesn't have a novel's usual building-to-a-crisis-that-is-eventually-resolved format. There's no real crisis, no real resolution to anything, no definitive answer to the question of why people are certain ways.

So the book is more like real life than a regular novel, and is such a subtle comment on real life itself, on how we are all secondary or tertiary characters in someone else's story and they are the same in ours.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire, Stieg Larsson (translated by Reg Keeland)

Stina Persson, from the series Graphic Girls

(August 30, September 9) Nice little thriller in the John Grisham or Dan Brown tradition, but a little more thoughtful in some ways than those two examples (Larsson was very knowledgeable about economics and shared some of this) and interesting because of the setting (Sweden). Larsson is good about throwing slightly different twists into the conventional form -- the mystery's not absolutely predictable -- but there is after all a certain amount of convention about this form.

There are a few gruesome episodes throughout owing to the use of a very unsavoury sub-culture as a plot mechanism, but you've got to find a way to keep the "thrill" amped up if you're writing a "thriller" and this does... so...

I loved the heroine, Lisbeth Salander, and am reading the next one in the trilogy, The Girl Who Played With Fire, because of her... and also because of the exoticness of all the open-faced sandwiches and the shopping at IKEA and Konsum. Never thought too much about Sweden before and am now intrigued.

ETA: The Girl Who Played With Fire is also good -- in some ways I like the story better, actually. Am looking forward to The Girl Who Ran With Scissors The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest when it comes out at the end of October.

This second book reinforced the impression I got from the first that Larsson was doing product placements, like a movie. It's either that, or Swedes really like to know the brands of furniture, appliances and so on that characters are using in a book. Strange? Or clever?

Tea Time for the Traditionally Built, Alexander McCall Smith

Godfrey Ndaba, Ladies With Pots

(August 9) I love this series and am happy when there's a new one out, but I couldn't squash down the disloyal feeling that McCall Smith is just grinding them out a little bit at this point.

The quirkiness and the surprising little turns of events that make his otherwise hum-drum stories sparkle was kinda lacking from this installment.

Also, there was this off-putting comparison of men's and women's interests that was packaged to come off as "women are smarter than men" but really came off as "women are smarter than men, bless their little hearts." o_O

Cut: Movies in Fifteen Minutes, Cleolinda Jones

Johnny Cannon, Les Clark, Frenchy de Tremaudan, Joe D'Igalo, Norm Ferguson, Blue Rhythm

(July 28) My heh-ing muscles are worn out. Every page of this book made me heh-heh-heh aloud.

So these are capsule parodies of 10 blockbuster movies of the '90s and early 2000s, and they are brilliant. They are excellent summaries -- sometimes... often, actually... they impose more sense and logic than the movie in question ever had.

But they are also very funny, especially when you know the movie, and even when you don't, since Jones pokes affectionate fun at the generic clichés of movie-making as well as the ones specific to the franchises. From "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Sorcerer's Philosopher's Stone in Fifteen Minutes," for example:

Dinner in the Great Hall

DUMBLEDORE:I would like to announce that I am absentmindedly beneficent.

NEARLY HEADLESS NICK: I'm a ghost!

HERMINONE: I know everything, because I read it in Hogwart's: A History!

NEVILLE: I'm completely hapless -- OW! MY FORK IS IN MY EYE!

NEARLY HEADLESS NICK: I'm a headless ghost!

SEAMUS: I'm a half-blood! Has my water turned to rum yet?

RON: Dude, and possibly a burgeoning alcoholic.

SEAMUS: Yeah? Well, you're POOR.

RON: SHUT UP, I KNOW.

NEARLY HEADLESS NICK: I'm a disgruntled headless ghost!

PERCY: I'm overweeningly officious, which will be important four books from now.

THE FAT LADY: I'm a painting!

THE STAIRCASES: We're fickle bitches!

NEARLY HEADLESS NICK: PAY ATTENTION TO MEEEEEEEEE!

Even the scene titles are funny:
Gandalf's Cart of Exposition (from "The Fellowship of the Ring in Fifteen Minutes")
Hissyfit Chamber, Imperial Palace (from "Gladiator in Fifteen Minutes")
The Planet Seattle Kamino (from "Star Wars: Episode Two -- Attack of the Clones in Fifteen Minutes")

Ah, it's hard not to just quote the whole book.

Interview With the Vampire, Anne Rice

Richard Westall, Lord Byron

(July 22) Polar opposite of Dead Until Dark and about a beelyun times more profound than Twilight. Rich, complex, totally compelling on the poignancy of death. Dark, occasionally repulsively so; not as sexual as I expected from the hype, but extremely passionate. Louis is irresistible. True literature: all the characters are vivid and multi-layered; the settings are feasts for the senses; the passion is real and enthralling.

Amazon.com review by Patrick O'Kelley: "It is that rare work that blends a childlike fascination for the supernatural with a profound vision of the human condition." Iggziggly.

It was like a real home-cooked meal after the bland fast-food of Dead Until Dark.

Still, that's it for me with the vampire fiction. Too much gratuitous and lingered-over killing.

Dead Until Dark, Charlaine Harris

Alien Figure Running With Beer Mug, from the PSB Gallery of Thrift Store Art

(July 8) Yuck. This is one of those books that make you feel dumber for having read them; I finished it only to see if Harris ever lifted it out of the dime-store-romance bracket. She did not.

The concept is a wacky mishmash -- DUD mixes the romance novel with the murder mystery, hewing closely to all the conventions of both of those "gendres," then adds a thin veneer of sci-fi (vampirism and shapeshifterism) and a thin veneer of fantasy (telepathy).

Harris could have been so creative with this, but instead put in the barest of minimum efforts. The characters are one-dimensional and often incoherent, both the romance and the mystery are predictable, the telepathy device is vaguely sketched out and seems to come into play only when convenient, the vampirism is cursory as well.

Worse, Harris is careless with the "craft" of telling her story, which is kind of insulting to the reader in the end. DUD is supposed to be a first-person narrative, but other characters' points of view crop up randomly, even when the narrator isn't mind-reading; there are lots of lazy writing shortcuts, like "he said nostalgically" and "he guessed softly," and some downright ineptness, like "'Sure,' I said, after a notable pause"; there are lots of continuity errors -- for example, at one point, a vampire gives a talk at a historical society meeting, which turns out to be scheduled for 7:30 p.m., but the rest of the time during this one-month period this same vampire can't be out and about before 10 p.m. because it's summer and the days are long. There's an unmistakable atmosphere of cranking it out to get the book up to 300 pages and paycheque time.

I was totally shocked by this -- since it's the basis of the beloved TV show True Blood, I thought it would be at least as good, and probably better than, Twilight... but, believe it or not, Twilight somehow leaves it in the dust.

Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England, Judith Flanders

George Elgar Hicks, "Companion to Manhood," from Woman's Mission

(June 30) I loved this because of the time-travel effect of learning how people actually coped from day to day without electricity, running water and sound medical knowledge, and Judith Flanders did an impressively massive research job.

She presents the meticulous portrait partly as a way of explaining some of the unfamiliar practices of Victorian novels, like call-paying and card-leaving, partly to expose how strangely the Victorians applied morality to everything, and partly to protest the institutions and beliefs that oppressed women.

But even without these more scholarly excuses for the research, the details of domestic life are absorbing. I was fascinated by how dirty life was living with coal (your hairbrush would be black every day, even though you wore a hat outdoors) -- and how clean the Victorians actually strove to be (laundry was boiled at least three times during an eight-stage process) -- and how long and drudging all this husbandry was with the tools they had.

On the other hand, I was surprised that the time-travel effect was ultimately delusional. Flanders, I think, wanted to stress how different the Victorians were from us, but, in the end, it's apparent the differences between us are infinitesimal. We still have bizarre notions about cleanliness, food and health; we still oppress women; we still think we're in charge of the world.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

Britannia

(June 3) Andrea recommended this as a book she couldn't put down, but for the first third of it, and more, I thought I must have misunderstood her. The book was pleasant enough, but it was not "unputdownable" -- in fact, I thought it was a bit of an old chestnut -- one of those spirited romantic comedies about plucky post-war Brits who are all very well-bred and educated, even though they work for a newspaper or whatever, who have tasteful adventures righting wrongs and jolly-well throwing a teapot or two at a deserving target, and often citing lines from or telling anecdotes about Great Writers in a chummy, inner-circle-y way, all the time calling one another "darling."

There were a lot of old chestnuts in this bag, actually -- there's a lovely, gifted writer-heroine, a real Mary Sue, obviously about to fall for the wrong man when-the-man-she-should-marry-is-right-in-front-of-her, and there's her search for the topic of a new book (when of course, as always, the book you're reading is the book that was sought), and there's having the entire story told through letters (and a little bit of diary-writing, because there are things that have to be revealed that you're never going to find someone explaining to someone else in a letter) -- so, lots of irons in the fire, and overall kind of a lightweight read.

And then the heroine gets to Guernsey and many, many cool twists come into play -- all completely legitimate -- and the book does become unputdownable. It also becomes kind of completely harrowing, in terms of the whole strange concept of Guernsey having being occupied by Nazis as well as because of the individual stories of the losses, sufferings and heroics of Guernsey Islanders.

The fulsome acknowledgements the authors wrote for this smallish (260-page) book (which apparently took several decades and two people to write) suggest they were most proud of having brought to light some of the stories of the occupation of Guernsey... and perhaps they are to be congratulated for doing that... but I am baffled over why they'd decide to wrap such a story up in a light-hearted literary-snob epistolary romcom.

Did they feel they had to lighten up the occupation stories? Were there not enough Guernsey stories on their own to make a book? Or did it actually seem this was the best way to showcase an important but under-acknowledged historical event? It's like telling the story of the internment of Japanese North Americans through recipes or something.

Marley and Me, John Grogan

Lorena Pugh, Yellow Yearning

(May 28) I came to this really late -- I had heard so much about it that it became one of those books you feel like you've already read before you even open it, and from the reports everywhere I was a little afraid of its being soppy and sentimental, a kind of Chicken Soup for the Dog Lover's Soul.

But my mom had a copy and wanted to pass it on. She said, "Oh, read it, it's cute."

Well, it is cute, and I was pleasantly surprised that it was not too soppy and sentimental. In fact, I'm scratching my head about the reports of how people cried over it and also about how quickly it was made into a big Hollywood movie.

For I didn't feel that I got to know Marley as an individual at all -- he was just a collection of stories about things he destroyed, and they were pretty standard stories, I thought. My dog-nephew Buster was a way more creative thief and destructive force in his lifetime. So, I'm guessing that's what made the book so popular -- people thought of their own dogs, whom they did know and love, and they cried about losing them.

I was also a little creeped out by how often Marley was walloped and allowed to choke himself on a choke chain, and by how matter-of-factly Grogan described coming home time and again to find Marley bleeding from the mouth and paws from having tried to rip an escape hatch through a wall or a metal crate in a panic. I admit I've never owned a 100-pound dog, but... geez.

The Comfort of Saturdays, Alexander McCall Smith

Samuel John Peploe, Betty

(May 16) More of the wonderful same. It's amazing how addictive this series is, given that nothing really happens in the books.

In this installment, I was surprised that we entered into Jamie's consciousness a few times (we haven't before), and surprised that (1) Jamie is still thinking longingly of Cat and (2) Isabel is still attached to John Liamoor (if only unconsciously).

The Reader, Bernhard Schlink (translated by Carol Brown Janeway)

B.S. Wise, Oedipus and Jocasta

(May 10) It's challenging to review this book since I had such a bizarre experience with it.

There was a lot of hoopla surrounding the movie last year but I kind of avoided interest in the story because it sounded pretty dark. Then the movie won a few Academy Awards this spring and people on BookCel who hadn't read it back when it was a bestseller had taken up the book. Their very positive reviews, and those of people who'd read it years ago, persuaded me to gamely sign on as the eighty-third waiter-in-line at the library.

But when I finally got the book, I realized I had read it before. I just couldn't remember how each act in the play ended -- until I got there and went "oh yeah." I kept thinking that I must have put the book down unfinished at some point when I "first read" it. But I kept recognizing every scene and conversation, every philosophical passage, as I came to them, right till the end.

So that was either the longest sustained episode of déjà vu ever or I read the book many years ago and wasn't impressed enough to remember I'd read it when the movie came out. Is that a kind of review in itself? On the other hand, I was impressed with it this time through. It's really a very thoughtful allegory about guilt, and the love story is weirdly compelling.

I can only imagine that the first time I read it I must have thought it was about first-generation German guilt and must have thought it was being very second- or third-removed about it all. And I bet I didn't appreciate the abstract philosophizing and probably just rushed through those bits. Maybe I thought The Reader couldn't hold a candle to the most traumatizing book about the Holocaust I ever read -- Anya, by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer.

But this time through I realized it was about second-generation guilt -- a whole different kind of psychological morass, and an absorbing one. I also appreciated the author's musings on his experience much more keenly than I must have originally. How awfully afloat one must feel to be the offspring of the most vilified generation in history. But then if that generation was collectively a Hanna, is it fair to vilify?

This whole interaction was further complicated by the fact that The Reader is a book about reading, and I'm a reader who normally doesn't like to re-read books. Also, it is a translation, which I always think of as the reading equivalent of washing your hands while wearing gloves. Strange bedfellows, The Reader and I.

Lucia, Lucia, Adriana Trigiani

Vogue, 1953

(April 30)This book is the poster-child for the concept of a "light" read -- it's pleasant and engaging, it's a bit of a chick-lit book but not in the formulaic, insulting sense, it's a good story. Angela recommended it to me as light and fun, and after two books about horrible people, it seemed it might be a good palate cleanser.

And so it was! Trigiani very skillfully brings to life the experience of living in New York in the early 1950s as a first-generation Italian. She lovingly recreates the clothes, the home decor, the food, the ambiance of New York, the trends and preoccupations of post-war America, and not in a cataloguey way, but as the natural backdrop and props appropriate to a young woman's story of making her way in the world. A lot of the drama and suspense of the book relates to Lucia's love life, although the story isn't a romance per se, and Lucia is a bit of a feminist, though not in a way that makes it an anachronism. All very satisfying.

The Gift of Fear, Gavin de Becker

Edvard Munch, The Scream

(April 24) I was leery of this title because I'm against fear-mongering, but on Occupation: Girl people were talking about how the book discusses intuition, which sounded interesting (and I wondered if The Gift of Fear would support or contradict Blink).

It turns out that Gavin de Becker is also against fear-mongering and sensationalism in the media, because he thinks they dull our natural intuition about looming danger. (So I have to once again envision an Evil Publisher, who this time saw the value of a title with the word "fear" in it.)

On the other hand, de Becker is able to show he knows how to sort out threats because of a long career of protecting celebrities and political figures, and evaluating the activities of hundreds of stalkers... so all these stories make the book a sensational read. Huh.

But, on the third hand, because de Becker can produce example after example to prove his points, he does convince you not to engage with certain types of people, not to worry when a stalker verbally threatens to kill you, not to underestimate your own abilities, and so on. So ultimately a reassuring book. Huh.

The Dust of 100 Dogs, A.S. King

Carol Hegarty, Girl Running With Dog

(April 14, 2009) Again, a synopsis that sounded fabulous:

In the late 17th century, famed pirate Emer Morrisey was on the cusp of escaping pirate life with her one true love and unfathomable riches when she was slain and cursed with the dust of 100 dogs, dooming her to one hundred lives as a dog before returning to a human body—with her memories intact. Now she's a contemporary American teenager, and all she needs is a shovel and a ride to Jamaica.

Does that not sound great? So I was expecting something like The Pirates of the Caribbean writ modern, or maybe The Golden Compass with a nautical twist, or even possibly a kind of historical saga like the Outlander books.

But it’s not that at all -- it's more like Angela's Ashes minus the humour mixed with a Raymond Chandler-style hard-boiled detective novel minus the noir stylishness. It’s just sad and depressing from beginning to end. People are cruel to each other now, and were cruel to each other 400 years ago, and are also cruel to dogs.

There is nothing redeeming at all. Nobody is likable, nothing is presented in contrast to the bleakness of human life, there’s nothing to invest in whatsoever.

It’s hard to believe this book falls into the Young Adult category. If this is the literature young adults want and / or the literature publishers think they should have, then... yikes.

Actually, it seemed at times that I was reading extracts from a much longer novel, perhaps a 700-pager. The plot set-up gives the impression of a way longer trajectory than it eventually takes, and there are many scenes and characters that are amplified and expanded upon in such a way that you think they’re going to be important eventually... but they never are. There’s all kinds of gratuitous gore, the result of either violence or the indignities of the human body or both, which probably was the tipping point for the YA categorization, because it’s totally adolescent. But I could see it all working in a long historical novel full of richly imagined passages through which we come to know and like the heroine, or learn fascinating details about the differences between life in the 1660s and now, or gain crucial contextual knowledge that puts a little clothing on some narrative themes.

I could totally see that novel existing, and being decent, and the author being told, “We’ll only publish this if you cut it back to 300 pages.... and you must retain all the gory bits intact.” That would explain Dust. The only other explanation I can imagine is some kind of authorial ADHD.

I’m giving it a star only because the concept was so great, and because there are lots of descriptions of jewellery.

The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, Corinne May Botz

Frances Glessner Lee, Three Room Dwelling (detail)

(February 11) Miniaturization and unsolved deaths -- what an irresistible combination. The synopsis had me at hello, as it did everyone I told it to:

“The Nutshell Studies were a series of intricately designed dollhouse-style dioramas created by Frances Glessner Lee, a millionaire heiress with an interest in forensic science.

“She designed detailed -- almost obsessive -- scenarios, based on composites of real criminal acts, and presented them physically in miniature. Students were instructed to study the scene and draw conclusions from the evidence presented. Lee used her inheritance to set up Harvard's department of legal medicine, and donated the Nutshell dioramas in 1945 for use in her lectures on the subject of crime scene investigation. In 1966 the department was dissolved, and the dioramas went to the Maryland Medical Examiner's Office; there, Harvard Magazine reports that they are still used for forensic seminars.” (Wikipedia)

Some images of the dioramas are here and here.

The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death’s really a book of photographs, since Corinne May Botz thinks of herself mainly as a photographer, but she does provide a biography of Lee, as well as analytical hints and anecdotes about each of the dioramas.

A major letdown to me right off the bat when I got the book was to learn that the “official solutions” for the unexplained deaths depicted are not available (because the dioramas are still being used as learning tools) -- so, after poring over the photographs and weighing the various forensic opinions offered, you don’t get the thrill of finding out if you drew the right conclusions. Unsporting, I say.

Other than that, the studies are an amazing wonderland to explore.

Lee apparently lavished loads of money and time on these creations, hiring a carpenter full-time to make scale furniture, rooms, moldings, working doors with keys, and so on, and keeping many commercial suppliers busy fabricating custom pieces, while she herself made and dressed the doll corpses. She knit miniature stockings using straight pins as needles, steamed felt into tiny hats, cobbled little shoes. She was supposed to have been very exacting about the 1:12 (inch=foot) scale she used; there are collections of correspondence between her and the suppliers, complaining that dimensions in their catalogues did not sound accurate and warning that she would return her orders if the scale was incorrect.

She never called the studies “dollhouses” nor allowed them to be called that, and wanted them taken very seriously.

Despite all this seriousness and attention to detail, and although they are wonderful, the models to my eyes do look like dollhouses, because of inconsistencies in scale. If her 1:12 scale is uniformly accurate, then apparently we have baseball-sized knobs on our dresser drawers, smoke cigarettes the size of paper-towel rolls, and drink from cups and glasses with inch-and-a-half-thick walls. When the things the “people” are supposed to handle look way too big or way too fine, you’ve got to think “dollhouse.”

Also, Lee used prefabricated bisque heads and limbs to make the corpses, and there is just no way, even if the faces are individually hand-painted, that that sort of creature is ever going to look other than doll-like. You wonder why Lee didn’t sculpt her own figures out of wax or cast her own bisque or something.

On the other hand, looking through all the little death scenes, I felt more vulnerable and mortal than I ever have looking at photos of real death scenes, or watching violent movies. God, if these terrible things could happen to sweet little dolls, what chance is there for us human beings?

Tender Is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Gordon Bryant, F. Scott Fitzgerald

(February March 25) OK, so Scott was a beeeelyun times the writer Zelda ever was.

This is a beautifully told story, and I was particularly struck by the contrast between how modern Fitzgerald sounds and how long ago 1925 was... Dick Diver sounds like someone you'd meet at a contemporary party, whereas the world of Tender Is the Night is a strange alternate universe where you become an outcast if you're ever caught drunk in public.

I say Fitzgerald sounds modern, as though to imply that his contemporaries didn't; but of course Hemingway, Eliot, Faulkner, Woolf, etc., sound modern, too -- although I'd say they sound self-consciously modern, which Fitzgerald doesn't to me. He doesn't seem to be worried about creating new forms for the novel; he seems to be wanting to give you the novel version of Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale," with his own life as the lab specimen.

In conclusion: Fitzgerald was a beautiful writer. His descriptions are breathtaking. There is also something almost Shakespearean about him in his ability to sketch a whole scene and its mood in only a few words: "Amiens was an echoing purple town, still sad with the war"... "A white sun, chivied of outline by a white sky, boomed over a windless day" ...and to capture those odd perceptions we all have but don't have names for: "Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy -- one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure but turn out to have been the pleasure itself."

Also, if I'm comparing the treatment of the dissolution of the Fitzgeralds' marriage here and in Save Me the Waltz, then I have to say that Scott's version is far nobler, kinder... and sadder.

Save Me the Waltz, Zelda Fitzgerald

Zelda Fitzgerald, Self-Portrait

(December 26) I wanted to find out that the critics were wrong -- that Zelda Fitzgerald was actually a decent writer who was continuing to suffer a bias against her encouraged by fans of Scott Fitzgerald for having choked off the greater writer’s potential. This always seemed an unfair attitude to take, given that her celebrated husband wouldn’t have been much without her. After all, she provoked him to do crazy, romantic things that he later wrote about, she was the inspiration for all his major heroines, and it was well known that he pilfered from her diaries for scenes and ideas.

Or was I maybe brainwashed at a young age by Nancy Milford’s biography of Zelda?

Was Zelda actually a burden on Scott, an attention-seeker dabbling in the arts like a sort of mean-spirited Lucy to Scott’s Ricky?

“Hemingway saw that in this family the wife continually interfered with her husband’s work because she was jealous of it. Her frantic efforts to become a painter, a ballerina, and a writer were part of that jealousy.”

-- Harry T. Moore, preface to the Southern Illinois University Press edition of Save Me the Waltz

Or was she (even more sadly) simply always mentally ill?

I would say there was some oppression:

In its time, however, the book was not well received by critics...The failure of Save Me the Waltz, and Scott’s scathing criticism of her having written it -- he called her “plagiaristic” and a “third-rate writer” -- crushed her spirits.

--Wikipedia

Unfortunately, the mixed reviews for her semi-autobiographical novel (e.g., “a literary curio,” “full of rhetorical effects that owe more to derangement than to inspiration”), including Henry T. Moore’s gentle warning that the first third may seem a bit turgid, are more than fair. The first third is terribly turgid, as though Zelda wanted to prove that she knew a lot of “big words.” Random sentence by way of example: “The sum of her excursions into the irreconcilabilities of the human temperament taught her also a trick of transference that tided her over the birth of the last child.” Wha-a-a-t?

But once Alabama (Zelda) hooks up with David (Scott), Save Me the Waltz becomes quite vivid and interesting, a peek into the real lives of literary legends of nearly 100 years ago. The book takes up a non-localized-consciousness style and is as good as anything Virginia Woolf might do. The quality of the light in a certain scene, or the smell in a ballet studio or a ship cabin, or a view of the flowers in a dining room, all convey the slow dissolution of the Fitzgeralds’ heyday unbelievably effectively.

Also, to vindicate Zelda a little bit, there’s no sign that Alabama was jealous of David’s achievements (though there are plenty of signs that she couldn’t take the monotony of their partying life). If Alabama reflects Zelda, then Zelda wasn’t a “dabbler,” either -- she was, rather, desperate to feel the ecstasy she could see other artists feeling, and went in whole-hog to feel it herself.

“I have been to the Russian ballet,” Alabama tried to explain herself, “and it seemed to me -- Oh, I don’t know! As if it held all the things I’ve always tried to find in everything else.”

...

At night she sat in the window too tired to move, consumed by a longing to succeed as a dancer. It seemed to Alabama that, reaching her goal, she would drive the devils that had driven her -- that, in proving herself, she would achieve that peace which she imagined went only in surety of one’s self -- that she would be able, through the medium of the dance, to command her emotions, to summon love or pity or happiness at will, having provided a channel through which they might flow. She drove herself mercilessly, and the summer dragged on.

The Undomestic Goddess, Sophie Kinsella

Anthony Holden, This Girl Loves Carrots

(December 25) A New York Post reviewer apparently said: "Kinsella is at the top of the chick-lit game... [She] skewers high-powered city life, while delivering a romantic comedy anyone who subsists on takeout will appreciate... Light yet filling." I really can't add to or improve on that.

Sample:

..."Happy birthday to you..."
The waiter puts the tray down in front of me, but my hands are full with phones.
"I'll take that for you," says Lorraine, relieving me of Daniel's phone. She lifts it to her ear, then beams at me. "He's singing!" she says, pointing to the receiver encouragingly.
"Samantha?" Mum is saying in my ear. "Are you still there?"
"I'm just... They're singing 'Happy Birthday'..."
I put the phone on the table. After a moment's thought, Lorraine puts the other phone carefully down on the other side of me.
This is my family birthday party.
Two cell phones.
I can see people looking over at the singing, their smiles falling a little as they see I'm sitting on my own. I can see the sympathy in the faces of the waiters. I'm trying to keep my chin up, but my cheeks are burning with embarrassment.
Suddenly the waiter I ordered from earlier appears at the table. He's carrying three cocktails on a tray and looks at the empty table in slight confusion.
"Who is the martini for?"
"It was... supposed to be for my brother..."
"That would be the Nokia," says Lorraine helpfully, pointing at the mobile phone.
There's a pause -- then, with a blank professional face, the waiter sets the drink down in front of the phone, together with a cocktail napkin.

Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, Breaking Dawn, Stephenie Meyer

Edward Burne-Jones, Love Among the Ruins

(November 28, November 30, December 9, December 14) I read Twilight to find out what all the fuss was about the movie, and then I could not stop. The books are, as many have noted, like crack cocaine.

The detox program is over at Cleolinda Jones’ recaps.

Sample of Twilight in Fifteen Minutes:

EDWARD: Hello. Please... allow me to introduce... myself. I am... Edward Cullen.

BELLA: Where were you all week? And why were you such a jerk?

EDWARD: I had to... go. Somewhere. For reasons totally unrelated to wanting to kill you.

BELLA: Did you get contacts while you were somewhere? Last week your eyes were black, and this week they are golden melted topaz butterscotch.

EDWARD: *stares, turns around, leaves*

BELLA: WHAT IS YOUR DEAL?!

Twilight is basically Seventeenth Summer meets Jane Eyre meets the X-Men ... a weird and unique little creation that hooks you in, fair and square. The sequels, on the other hand, are a whole different kettle of unputdownable fish.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, David Wroblewski

Pablo Picasso, Boy with Dog

(November 20) This is such an awesome book.

I pictured myself blogging “This is such an awesome book” before I was even halfway through it, but I thought I would be writing it for much different reasons -- like, totally different.

The first half of the book is this lovely bucolic story about a sensitive boy who grows up in a dog-breeding family -- dog-breeding itself being really interesting as a science and an art -- and though the boy has a small handicap, his life is really wonderful and wondrous, and all of this is told by a very accomplished and gentle narrator. You sense that something dreadful is going to happen to test the boy and the dogs, but you hope there will be a minimum of suffering (for both people and dogs).

But then, suddenly, shockingly, this book morphs into something else entirely -- a hoary old horror story that’s haunted English literature for the last 500 years (and I think never so chillingly as in this incarnation), and it’s not only shocking that The Story of Edgar Sawtelle has the nerve to do this but it’s dumbfounding that it turns out to have been set up so well -- everything fits perfectly through the morph; the whole first half of the book brilliantly lulls you into thinking it’s quite a different tale, but then you can’t deny it was that dark, depressing tragedy all along. In other words, it’s not an Ian McEwen-style, artistic-licence “surprise!”

I can remember the moment I realized it was Shakespeare -- it actually made my hair stand on end, gave me a psychological jolt. I had been thinking, Heh, an uncle moves in on his brother’s widow, just like Hamlet -- of all the things to make me think of Hamlet!--; and, heh, the uncle’s name is Claude -- and then -- omigod the mother’s name is Trudy -- !

And then all the characters step into place -- Polonius, Ophelia, Fortinbras, Laertes, the witches... everybody (OK, the witches are from Macbeth). It’s like a black-light performance when all the suited stunt-people emerge from the backdrop and you realize the plate was really carried, not thrown, across the stage ... only this time the suited stunt-people are those ghoulish murdering Danes and their psychopath prince, our old friends. Sigh.

Even though it’s modern people and dogs filling the roles, Wroblewski captures all of Hamlet’s most enthralling issues really well and often exquisitely -- was King Hamlet really murdered, or is Hamlet insane? Was Gertrude complicit? Did Hamlet kill Polonius deliberately or by accident? In fact, his reinvention of some characters gave me new insights into the old play, particularly into the character of Laertes. And the dog versions of some of the characters offer some sweet interpretations.

However, having become so attached to the characters as they are in the first half of the book, and knowing how Hamlet ends, I had to read the last half of the book out of the corner of my eye, desperately clinging to the hope that Wroblewski would revert back to the pastoral tale eventually, or at least depart creatively from Hamlet. A writer could and might do that, right?

So, overall, quite the emotional rollercoaster ride of a book, and thrilling in a way no story about growing up in farm country should ever be.

(That other book, about the sensitive boy who learns or teaches a life lesson through his dogs and his muteness, would also have been good.)