The unfairness of it all...

I recently finished listening to The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, and it was a downer. Newland Archer sped up his engagement and wedding in order to quell feelings he had for his fiancee's cousin, but to no avail. He was still in love with her to the very end, at which point he was old and sad and couldn't even bring himself to go visit her. The cousin, Ellen, was persona non grata because she had left her husband but couldn't divorce lest it shame the family. It was, in short, a book about obligations vs. desires. I enjoyed the book very much, but it left me feeling sort of bummed. Luckily, things are a little better these days in terms of marrying outside one's class or race, but there is still a lingering stigma.

Marissa

Looking for a book to help me sleep.

First of all, I would like to say that i really dislike pregnancy insomnia. Usually I can sleep just fine. Not lately. However, being up this late did allow me to finally finish The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera. This book has been annoying me for about a week and I am glad to be through with it.

It doesn't seem to be a novel at all. Rather, it is this collection of stories and recollections. Some are in the first person and some are clearly fiction. They mostly deal with the struggle of the Czech people throughout recent history. And also sex. It all seemed so random and disjointed to me.

Unfortunately though, as tough as this material was to slog through, it didn't help me get to sleep!

Couldn't put down the Book of Illusions!

Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions was published in 2002. I am so surprised that I had not heard of it or read it before now. This book is fantastic. It is a wonderful layering of stories, a Vermont literature professor, a 1920s silent film star, and a mysterious young woman. I could not put it down. (That's usually the test for me - some books I just read so quickly because they are so interesting I have to keep reading and reading to find out what happens!)

This story hinges on the mysterious disappearance of this silent film star. The author is able to really show us America back in the 1920s as well as in the present day - I'm telling you, this book is so. good.

Short stories!

I don't know why I don't like short stories more. It is nice to sit down and quickly read a whole story - even when you don't have a lot of time, you can read one and then go about your business while turning over the ideas.

The next book on the list of New York Times Best Books of 2006 is The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel by Amy Hempel. I had not heard of this author before. I really liked this collection. Her work is very direct and her sentences are very short. Not a lot of extra words in here. But the stories were really interesting and good and full of emotions. I liked these a lot.

Books 101-110

Here are the next 10 books on the list.

101. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera (1979)
102. Born in Exile by George Gissing (1892)
103. Borstal Boy by Brendan Behan (1958)
104. Bouvard and Pecuchet by Gustave Flaubert (1881)
105. A Boy's Own Story by Edmund White (1982)
106. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)
107. Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote (1958)
108. Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1973)
109. The Breast by Philip Roth (1972)
110. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (1945)

It takes a lot of the fun out of a crime story...

...when there isn't a whole lot of suspense. John Banville's The Book of Evidence is kind of a unique way to write a book. Basically, this guy has been arrested for a crime, and the book is his confession. So at the outset you know that he has been caught - hence there is sort of no suspense about how it is going to end. The story was OK, and it was an interesting idea. It just wasn't a page turner and didn't really stand out that much for me.

Imagine...

The Book of Daniel is based on a really cool premise. The book imagines that the Rosenbergs had children, and follows Daniel, the older son, as he grows up through the 1950s and 60s and deals with his parents' deaths. The idea of it was so great, I was really excited to read this one.

It turned out not to be my favorite book, though. The way it was written was really confusing and there were a lot of flashbacks and jumping around points. I can definitely tell it is good literature, but for a casual reader like me, it wasn't the greatest. I'm sure I missed a lot of important stuff. So I was a little bummed out - I really wanted to like this more than I did.

Seventeen-year-olds are amazing.

What I think is most amazing about Bonjour Tristesse is that it was written by Sagan when she was just 17. When I was 17 my biggest concerns were (1) friend drama and (2) math class. Meanwhile, Sagan at 17 put together this amazing short novel. Very impressive.

The narrator of the novel is also a 17 year old girl, Cecile. She and her father are on vacation with a woman her father, a widower has been dating. When her father turns his attentions to another woman, Cecile decides to take matters into her own hands and manipulate the situation so that the woman she prefers can win back her father's heart. The novel is very short and beautifully written. I liked it a lot.

Extra credit.

The version of 1001 Books that we are using ends with books published in 2005. I had been thinking recently about how it is going to take me probably 20-30 years to read all of these books, and, during those years, a lot of other really good books will be published.

So I decided to read the New York Times Best Books of the Year for the years 2006-on, one every month or so. This way I can also read some newer good books as the years go on.

The first Best Book of the Year that I read is Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart, one of the Best Books of 2006. This book is a clever story that satirizes American values and how those values and ideals are transmitted across the world. Sometimes it seemed like the author was getting a little too cute, such as where the main character's girlfriend leaves him for the evil Professor Jerry Shteynfarb. On the whole though, I thought the book was funny and interesting. Halliburton, cost plus contracts and even Dick Cheney come into play in a story about a Russian guy who is trying desperately to get back to the US and finds himself the Minister of Multicultural Affairs in Absurdistan, a tiny republic on the Caspian Sea.

Next up, back to the regularly scheduled programming. Bonjour Tristesse is next on the list.

Perspective.

I love Bonfire of the Vanities. I read it in high school, college and now again at 33. I feel like I took away different impressions from the book now as compared to when I read it years ago. Plus, now that 23 years have passed since it was written, a lot is different in New York and it seems more dated, more of a reflection on New York society at the time.

So I'm sitting here watching the Weather Channel, watching New York and Connecticut get walloped by Hurricane Irene and thinking of how much I enjoyed this book and how much it makes me think. I was a lot more ambivalent about Sherman this time around. When I was younger, I was rooting for him as the hero of the book, and I wasn't sure I liked him this time. I found his moral ambiguousness startling. I thought it was inconsistent for him to stick up for Maria through almost to the end of the book, even though her interests and his diverged, while he was very easily able to dismiss Judy, his wife, for getting too thin and too interested in her decorating business. Usually Sherman acted entirely in his own interest but when it came to Maria, he had this glaring weak spot that proved to be his undoing.

Anyway, I loved this book as much as I did the first time. I raced through it and was sorry to see it end!

Huh.

Blood and Guts in High School is one of those books that is wayyyy over my head. It is sort of a stream of consciousness writing, involving a woman named Janey (I think) and her life as a young woman. I struggled to figure out what was going on. The narrator is so unreliable - in the opening chapter you are told that Janey is ten years old but then the way the story goes, it is obvious that she is not ten years old at all and is probably a woman. Interspersed with the text are some graphic drawings and a sort of Arabic grammar text (ostensibly created by Janey when she was held captive by a "Persian slave trader").

This type of book is not my favorite. I never seem to know what is going on, and, as the book continues, I find myself caring less and less.

Justin Time.

The Body Artist is a very measured, very well-edited, very beautiful book. It is evident that the author thought very carefully about each word in the book - each one has meaning and there are no extraneous words. It is a very short book but definitely takes some thought to read because of how carefully it is assembled.

The book deals with a woman who is grieving the loss of her husband and discovers a mysterious person living in the home she is renting. As she talks to him (his name really isn't Justin Time), he gives her a new perspective on time and how things work. He is somehow able to simultaneously live in the past, present and future. The book is kind of sad, but also really pretty. I liked it.

Message in a Bataille?

I know I should be getting more out of Georges Bataille's work than I do. Blue of Noon is the second of his books that I have read (the memorable L'Abbe C was the first). I just don't like his books. I don't understand what message he is trying to send. The protagonists do crazy things for seemingly unexplained reasons.

You may recall that the guy in L'Abbe C pooped outside someone's window. In this book, the main character decides he likes a woman named Xenie. Rather than make cute little jokes at her expense or offer to buy her a drink, he stabs her in the leg with the prongs of a fork, drawing blood. Yuck. And the book just goes on from there. I never get interested enough to care about the characters and they just do things that are totally absurd.

At least it was short!

Thoughts on The Bluest Eye.

I am not sure how I hadn't read The Bluest Eye before. I had heard of it but never read it. Good book, obviously, I can see why it is on the list. Definitely deals with some difficult topics and themes. It's not just the incest that I found difficult (though that was hard to read about for sure) but also the racism, the child abuse, the whole structure of society. The book definitely made me think.

It's (not) a wonderful life.

I am not what you would call a movie buff. In fact, movies are not something I have ever really gotten into. It sounds weird, but it is just not my thing. There are many classics that I haven't seen and honestly, I'm not all that interested in seeing them.

I knew who Marilyn Monroe was, obviously. I kind of had a vague outline of the fact that she was a movie actress, had a number of high-profile relationships, and died from a drug overdose at an early age. Beyond that I knew nothing and I haven't seen any of her movies.

Reading Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates was a really fascinating look at Marilyn Monroe. It was difficult to read at times because her life was so difficult and sad. And some of the things that happened to her as a child were horrible. Reading about children being harmed is difficult.

The amount of work that went into writing this and the different ways Oates approached the story was just amazing. I particularly liked how it got kind of less coherent toward the middle and end and you couldn't really tell whether the things that were portrayed in the book really happened - because Monroe herself wasn't sure what was real and what was not. (I seem to like the unreliable narrator). I also liked how Oates handled the ending - you aren't sure whether Monroe was assassinated or overdosed on her own and was imagining the people conspiring to kill her.

Is this book going to make me want to watch a whole bunch of Marilyn Monroe movies? No. I did enjoy this book tremendously though. All 738 pages. I couldn't put it down.

Addendum.

So I posted last night's entry and then realized I had more to say about The Blithedale Romance.

I thought the whole idea of them all kind of getting away from the world to live in the Utopian society kind of interesting. I know it was kind of in fashion at the time (and have read that Hawthorne also did this himself for a brief period). It reminded me of The Bell, except that all the action in this book is kind of on the periphery of the society, and the book is not as concerned with the inner workings of the society itself. In The Bell the book was much more about the society and its growth, and this book was a lot more about the personal relationships between the characters.

At various periods of history this sort of Utopian society has come into vogue. Back in the 1850s, again in the 1960s with commune living and maybe also to some extent now as we build societies over the Internet and form digital friendships or renew old friendships with people who live across the world from us. (Whatever happened to Second Life, anyway? Wasn't that supposed to be the next big thing in, like, 2005?) I wonder what that says about us at those periods where we are so dissatisfied about what is going on that people feel the need to retreat and often in such an extreme fashion.

Anyway, just a ramble about something that was rattling around in my head last night.

Behind the scenes of a Utopian society.

I find Nathaniel Hawthorne's books to be very difficult. I feel like I am not getting enough from them. There is so much symbolism and things going on in the margins that is important- and I just know I'm missing a lot of it.

I liked The Blithedale Romance. I thought it was an interesting story and I liked that some of the mysteries in the book stayed unsolved. I liked how Hawthorne didn't feel the need to wrap everything up in a neat little package at the end. I liked the exploration of the relationship between Priscilla and Zenobia and how they related to Hollingsworth. I definitely liked it more than I thought I would. Not that I got everything out of it that Hawthorne intended...but I definitely am glad I read this and got a lot out of it.

A short novel about a difficult situation.

Blindness by Henry Green is one of those literary books. You know the ones. It is really well written and deals with an interesting topic - but it isn't a page turner or anything. This book is about a young man who was blinded on his way home from boarding school and how he and his family members deal with the situation. While it wasn't a gripping story, I thought it was really well written.

The book did get kind of slow, especially in the middle part, where it was kind of like, oh dear, now I am blind, whatever am I going to do? But I felt like the last third of the book or so got more interesting. I particularly liked how intricate and developed the relationships were between the family members.

Books 91-100

Here are the next 10 books on the list.

91. Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates (2000)
92. Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker (1984)
93. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (1970)
94. Blue of Noon by Georges Bataille (1957)
95. The Body Artist by Don DeLillo (2001)
96. The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe (1987)
97. Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan (1954)
98. The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow (1971)
99. The Book of Evidence by John Banville (1989)
100. The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster (2002)

I LOVE Bonfire of the Vanities. I've read it several times and I can't wait to read that one again! Some of these others look really good, too!

Loved the book. The main character? Not so much.

The Blind Assassin is a phenomenal book. The characters and the whole story are just so interesting, I couldn't put this book down. I really like Margaret Atwood's writing.

You know what I really didn't like, though? The main character in this book. As I was reading it, Iris mildly annoyed me. I felt like she wasn't standing up for herself and her family and allowing herself to be led along because that was what was easiest for her. However, once I saw how everything turned out at the end, I got really mad at Iris. I think she screwed her family over, both her sister as well as her daughter and granddaughter, for pretty much no reason.

I think Atwood's a fantastic writer and I am sure that she intended for her readers to feel this way about Iris. It was a really interesting experience to read a story that I was really interested in - even though the main character was making me angry!