Overdrive, baby!

Kelly,

I just wanted you to know that I haven't entirely fallen off the reading wagon. In fact, I'm making pretty good progress with The Making of the Atomic Bomb, but since it's 800 pages...well. That's taking a while. I'm at about page 500, so I'm thinking I will get through it in the next few weeks.

I know we're both big readers, and I'm wondering if you have a library card? I don't use the Chicago Public Library much, which is an embarrassing thing to admit. However, I use my school library all the time. After all, they know me personally, they'll buy books for the library if I request them, I have unlimited borrowing privileges, and I don't have due dates. It's basically the best thing ever! Last week, they had a workshop about how to use Overdrive, a platform for their electronic library.

Kelly, I shit you not, it is the most amazing thing ever. You can CHECK KINDLE BOOKS OUT FROM THE LIBRARY.  Basically, you select them from the library homepage, and then it takes you straight to Amazon to download the books to your Kindle.

This week, I read Richard Ford's novel Canada. On my Kindle. For free! /fans self.

This is a dangerous and awesome new development in my life. Get thee to your local library and set yourself up!

Jenny

Sigh. The Casual Vacancy.

Kelly,

I was so excited by the "let's read this book at the same time" plan. Too bad this book is so awful. And I've gotta tell you, I can hardly believe I wrote those words. It's J.K. Rowling! How can I think it's awful? I feel like I just punched one of the Weasley twins in the face.

We've talked a lot about the weight of expectations. But what do you do when you expect not to think much of a book and your expectations are low...and you actually dislike it MORE than you expected. Oof.

Here's my problem. I'm about 25% of the way through the book. Right now, if it wasn't for you, I'd put this book down and never pick it back up again.

1) Despite the rather exciting and dramatic inciting incident, there has not been a single other noteworthy plot element that has taken place in the book. And I've gotta tell you, this is *killing* me. I guess I did have one expectation going into this, which is that at the very least I could count on J. K. Rowling to have a well-plotted book. But nothing is happening. And because of nothing happening...

2)...None of the characters seem interesting, exciting, likeable, or distinctive. Literally every time the book switches perspective, I have to force myself to remember any sort of salient details about the person and his or her relationship to the other characters.

3) Speaking of characters, am I the only one who thinks that there are just too many of them? And that we know the perspectives of too many of them? My favorite phrase for this is "head hopping" and usually I actually don't usually mind perspective switching. I like knowing what everyone is thinking. But they also have to be *doing* something apparently. As it is, this is just a maelstrom of angry, worried, small-minded people thinking mean, uncharitable thoughts. Mmmm. Fun.

4) I have an awful feeling that this isn't actually a book, but rather Rowling out to prove something: let me take all the awesome and great things about Harry Potter and do *everything exactly the opposite* so that all these adult readers get that I'm serious and I mean business and that I'm a real author now! The problem to me is that the net result, at least so far, is a misanthropic, meandering mess. I'm not saying that books need to be sunny and bright and cheerful in order for me to read them, but this has really nothing to offer me.

I'm struggling.
Jenny

PS How do you say Pagford? Pag rhymes with Lag? Or more like page?
PPS How many times will she use the term "casual vacancy" and why does it make me feel like she thinks I'm too dumb to remember; Or perhaps she's worried we won't get the metaphor, yes, yes, it's about death. I get it.

Kelly's Book 4.13: Grand River and Joy

Dear Jenny,

My mother-in-law recommended this book a couple of years back. The only thing I really know about it is that it's set in Detroit -- Grand River and Joy are streets downtown. (You can see the intersection here on Google Maps, if you're interested.)

Random note about the street "Grand River." On the freeway, it's abbreviated "Gd River" and the GPS also says "Gd River." When we first moved here, I was using the GPS to navigate and I told Bill, "Get off at Grand (?) River. At least, I assume that's 'Grand' -- it's abbreviated as 'Gd' everywhere -- it's not God damned River, is it?" You never know -- Detroit can be pretty tough! Heh.

I'm also currently reading Detroit City is the Place to Be and Belle Isle to 8 Mile: An Insider's Guide to Detroit, which is an exhaustively comprehensive guide to the city. (Honestly, I have never read a more detailed city guide in my life.) So, you know... I'm gettin' all Detroit-y!

love,
kelly

Completed: Why I'm Like This

Dear Jenny,

This book was... okay. A little bit of a disappointment because I had really expected it to be hilarious. I don't know why I expected that, but I did. I guess part of it was this quote on the front: "Striking a note somewhere between David Sedaris and Anna Quindlen...." and on the back: "Knee-slapping hilarious."  And also this awesome opener that I already mentioned to you: "Author's Note: I have changed the names of some people and some places because my editor made me." Funny shit, right?

I can't remember now I even came across this book. I'm guessing I read a review, someone said it was hilarious, I read one hilarious snippet and picked it up (I really should leave myself a little note in these books to remind my Future Self why I was interested in the first place... when I *buy* a book, it just never occurs to me: "I might not read this for a long, long time." But it should. I think this blog is a good indicator that this is a Thing for me. So... yeah.)

Back to the book, then. This was a book of short "true stories" (subtitle on the front) from the author's life. Many of the stories were quite poignant. And not poignant-but-funny. Just poignant.  (So on the David Sedaris <---> Anna Quindlen scale, coming in waaaaay closer to AQ than DS.) She's a good writer and she writes her stories well -- it just wasn't what I was expecting. And I can't help but feeling like, "For that amount of time, I could just call a friend I haven't talked to in awhile and catch up with their stories." I now know quite a bit about this author and we're not even friends. After reading a book, I don't like to think, "How could I have better spent my time?"And I had that thought with this one. It's not a bad book. It's just... not what I wanted. Fortunately, it was a very quick read!

The first story was perhaps the funniest, but when the camp reject turned out to be someone else, I thought, "Huh. Who is this person?" The author tries to paint herself as sort of wacky "outsider" but  she's never the "true weirdo" in these stories (which... would probably be funnier, right?) Really... she's just a chick. Living any chick's life. She loves her grandma, her husband is the Best. Guy. Ever! and her son is pure perfection. You know... a chick like you and me. I liked her just fine. But as I said... she's not my friend. I would rather read 206 pages written by you, Jenny. (Which is why I joined Facebook, of course... Heh.)

I wrote about this in the comments on your March book post, but I'll babble on a bit more about it here... it hardly seems fair to a book (or author) but so much of a person's opinion of a work can be influenced by expectations. (I include almost anything in this, really -- movies, plays, a new album... Christmas!) I expected this book to be hilarious. It was not. I was disappointed. It wasn't a bad book. It was just not the book I expected. (Sometimes it works in favor of the book/movie/etc: I expect it to be horrible and when it's just fine, well, "That was actually all right!")

Okay... to give a quick "highlights reel" then...  the stories in the beginning of the book are funnier ("Had I known what high school would be like, I would have asked my parents to set me adrift on an ice floe at puberty." [11]) but the final ones are pretty much all-poignant-all-the-time (seeing a man in a wheelchair buying children's clothes and reflecting about her own good fortune; observing her grandma's obliviousness to her own decline; you know... poignant shit).

However, one of the most powerful parts of the book does come out of the, as I so elegantly put it, "poignant shit" (I'm a goddamned artist with words, aren't I?):

When my son emerged from his watery nest in my belly last year, my husband, conversely, submerged. He dissolved with a celebratory fizz followed by silence  like the flattening of champagne, like a bromide, into the murky depths of fatherhood, which is nothing akin to husbandhood. It was not at all his fault, but my own. I cast him off. That I did so unwittingly is not much of an excuse. But I did not know that my son would displace him so thoroughly nor that my episiotomy would hurt for almost a year. [190]

I see friends of mine wrestling with this issue (or not wrestling with it at all...) constantly. At this point in my life, it's the primary reason I don't have kids: I am selfish and want my husband all to myself. (No joke. He's mine and I'm not sharing.) I'm not saying that this happens to every woman -- in fact, I know that it doesn't! But the fear that it could happen to me (confirmed by this author and many others) is enough for me to decide that it's not worth the risk (of course, I was never all that interested in having kids anyway -- I admit it! But reports like this... they seal the deal.)

Soo... while that passage is good and moving and honest... it's not really "funny." I guess the thing about the episiotomy tries to bring the humor at the end, but... that's a valid fear for me too! I'm a slow healer! So... no. Not funny. But touching (she does re-connect with her husband in a later chapter, so that's really where the touching part comes in...) and definitely real. I think that even moms who have done a good job of balancing can still see some truth here -- any time when the choice has to be made between being "mother" and "wife," I would think that the reality of the "murky depths of fatherhood [being] nothing akin to husbandhood" are probably true. (Feel free to tell me I don't know shit about this, btw -- I'm *not* a mom, so I can only observe and report!)

Finally, I will finish on a positive note. A line that made me laugh out loud (so you know it was from the beginning of the book). She is telling a story about camp. She goes on a long riff about s'mores, which I appreciate because her deep and abiding love of the s'more is clearly similar to my own. And then she says: "I'd had seven. Which as anyone knows is four too many."[7] Bwahaha. Of course. The Universal S'more Scale, right?

After that... well. I know a lot about Cynthia Kaplan's personal life now. I didn't need to, and I'm not worse off for knowing it, but... well. It just wasn't what I was expecting.

love,
kelly

Jenny's Book 4.13: The Making of the Atomic Bomb

Kelly,

It's April and the sweet glow from the Tournament of Books is starting to fade. Sigh. You know what that means, time to replace the sweet glow with a slightly more scary nuclear one! Heh. Just kidding. The nuclear glow at Chernobyl was literally a killer: one dude looked straight into the reactor core and was dead meat.

Before I talk about this month's book, a quick review of the TOB. This year I completed a record best: 17 of the 18 titles by the final match-up. It's strange that the one I didn't get to was Bring Up the Bodies, but I honestly thought it would make it to the final round and I'd have more time for it. Oh well, I am sure I will get to it sooner or later! Interestingly, I'm supposed to read Wolf Hall for my book club next month. I'm thinking I should reread that first, and then go directly to to Bring Up the Bodies. 

In other news, I did make an April selection. It's called The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. You may remember my long standing fascination with nuclear disasters. Given that, it seemed like a shame to miss out on this rather epic tome. I think I must have bought this book around the time of the tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan. I think I might have come across the title while searching for books about nuclear power. 25 years ago, this book won the Pulitzer AND the National Book Award AND the National Book Critics Circle Award, so needless to say, that seemed like a good bet for readability. I actually have a copy, but once I committed to it for the month, I put it on my Kindle. Weighing in at approximately 900 pages, this one seems like it will be better as an eBook. It's prodigiously footnoted, but they are academic footnotes, and I tend to skip those and just skim through them at the end anyways. As we have discussed previously, Kindles and footnotes are unmixy things.

I'm also linking to a pretty interesting article about why Amazon acquired Goodreads. The most astounding fact in the article is that only 19% of Americans do 79% of the book reading. Maybe we should make a t-shirt that says, "We are the 19%!"  Heh. I do have a Goodreads account, but I do most of my list-making and such here. I'm only really active in the one group of TOB readers. I don't know why I don't use it more, you'd think it would be perfect for me. Hmm..something to consider, I guess.

I've started The Making of the Atomic Bomb. It's interesting, because although you'd expect it to start right with the Manhattan Project. However, I've been pleasantly surprised to find that it instead goes back all the way to the turn of the century with the earliest scientists working with nuclear physics and radioactivity. So far, I've read about Rutherford and now the author is introducing Bohr. I hope there's a part about the Curies! I've always wanted to know about Marie Curie.

The only question at this point is whether I can get through such a one in a single month!
Jenny

Completed: The Little Stranger

Kelly,

I'll be honest with you, I found Sarah Waters' novel The Little Stranger to be a bit of a disappointment.  This book was recommended by a colleague, and although it wasn't awful or anything, it just wasn't what I expected. (I should have thought more about this. The guy who told me about it loves Jane Eyre and all that Victorian crap.)

The back of the book and cover blurbs describe the book as a spooky ghost story. I'm not one for really scary books, but I do like a good tension-filled yarn. Stephen King said it would guarantee me several sleepless nights! Although I do suffer from sleeplessness, I can safely say it was not the result of this book.

This is the story of Doctor Faraday, a doctor in his early 40s living in a small village in England in the late 1940s. He's slowly drawn into the lives of the Ayers family. This is the family of landed gentry that own a huge, crumbling mansion called Hundreds Hall. Roderick is a man in his early 20s who was dreadfully wounded in World War II. His older sister Caroline is a spinster in her later 20s. Their mother, Mrs. Ayers, is probably only in her mid-50s, but she plays the elderly, matronly role in the story.

As the Doctor gets to know them, an accident with a young neighborhood girl sets into motion a series of tragic events that one by one effects each member of the Ayers family. Is Hundreds Hall haunted? Or, as Doctor Faraday insists, are they strictly imagining things? But the as the events at Hundreds Hall become more and more frightening, the Ayers family is convinced that they are being haunted.

Here's the deal. I was sort of in it for the ghost story, but it just wasn't that tension filled. The book was 500 pages and the spooky ghost parts happen hundreds of pages apart.  However, the biggest problem, I think, is that the narrative structure of the story is revealed through the perspective of the Doctor. He's not a first person narrator, but it's a tight third person focus on him. But he doesn't live at Hundreds, he just visits and becomes close to the family. So all the good, scary stuff is always told to him later, after it happens. It's just sort of bloodless because the immediacy is gone for every single one of the frightening events. And the Doctor never, not for a second, really believes in the ghost, so there's always a distance between the reader and the events in the mansion. I just wanted all the omg-ghosts-are-they-real-maybe-maybe-not to be a far bigger part of the book. It's interesting how suspicion shifts from character to character, but it's just a bit plodding. There's a lot of ambiance and an overall tone of dread, but it was, for me, ultimately unsatisfying.

As it is, the book is really about the changing class structures that affected the British aristocracy in the 20th century. The Ayers family are just in a different realm than the local country doctor. The crumbling house and their attempt to keep it in the family while slowly selling it off piece by piece was the real story in the book. They struggle to get on with their one servant, but even that stretches their budget to the limit. The doctor is seen as uppity for associating with the family, while at the same time, the family never truly accepts him because he's of a different class. I mean, I guess if you're in to that sort of thing, this would be a good story. I find that stuff to be pretty boring, and so I found myself feeling unmoved by the characters and their difficulties with the class issues.

Meanwhile, I read it pretty fast because it was the only book I had with me on vacation. I made my way through it pretty quickly. It doesn't drag, and it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The writing was strong. I bet it would probably make a good audiobook! It's a good story. I feel bad that I'm not more enthusiastic about it, because there was certainly nothing wrong with it. I think if I hadn't have been more interested in by the ghost story, I wouldn't have felt as disappointed. In the end, it just wasn't my cup of tea. Heh.

Jenny

The Plane! The Plane!

Kelly,

I'm writing this from the plane! Wifi on the plane! I might never read another book. Hah. Just kidding. Actually, the page is loading strangely, so I have no idea if this post even has a title.


TOB in progress...
I'm pretty pleased with the TOB so far. I've read some books I really enjoyed,  read some head-scratchers that just didn't work for me, and saw the book I hated most go down in the first round. Yes! In the end, I read far more of the titles than I thought I would. I still have to finish May We Be Forgiven and How Should A Person Be?. I decided not to bring MWBF with me to Florida because it's hardback. And that's just crazy. I will definitely finish it.

HSaPB? is just a wacky read. I wouldn't say that I liked it, but my expectations were so low, I'm finding myself pleasantly surprised. The weirdest part is there's an entire chapter called "Interlude for Fucking" and it's just...wow...I don't even know how to describe it. Lots of uncomfortable and very vivid descriptions of sex, made even more uncomfortable by the fact that the guy's name is Israel. I mean, really? It's hard not to read it as a political statement of some kind. What kind, I don't know.  I'd say more, but my child is sitting right next to me, and a sweet old man is on my other side. (Yes, motherhood means sitting in the middle seat. Blech.)

I'll be curious to see what happens in the Round 2 match-ups. I guess my predictions are for Orphan Master to win over Fault; May We Be Forgiven over Building Stories; Gone Girl over Beautiful Ruins; Bring Up the Bodies over How Should a Person Be?.

I don't know if I think Building Stories is better, but someone, sooner or later, is going to say, "It's not a novel!" I predict it in this round because the Judge's bio says that she likes to read on the train. Building Stories definitely defies train-reading! The one I'm most on the fence about is Gone Girl vs. Beautiful Ruins. I liked them both a lot, they're both strong contenders. I feel like I'd be happy either way, but we'll see how I feel after the decision.

In all liklihood, I'm just not going to get to Bring Up the Bodies before it's over. I read Wolf Hall in the summer when I was less busy. I have a feeling the same thing might have to happen with Roll Out the Barrel---just kidding!---Bring Up the Bodies. But we'll see. Maybe I will be inspired to tackle it when I get back from Florida.

As for March, I have two books with me here that could be a go. The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters. It was recommended to me by a teacher friend, and it just sounds like a good read. Sort of creepy and gothic. I actually read the first 75 pages of 500 on the plane. I'm going to be honest that it's feeling like a slow starter. According to the jacket and blurbs, it's some rip-roaring ghost story. You'd think there'd be a little more action so far. But it's engagingly written and I certainly understand the creepy house so far. I'm sure I'll keep reading it just because I'm already so far into it.

I also downloaded The Making of the Atomic Bomb to my Kindle in the airport. That sucker is 800 pages. I'm not dragging it around anywhere. Totally worth the purchase. I bought this because of my strange fascination with nuclear power. I think I originally bought a copy when the tsunami hit the Fukushima Nuclear power plant in Japan. I guess it's dumb to buy it twice, but I think I'll be much more likely to read it when I can have it with me all the time. I was inspired to put it on my list this year after reading a review from the Year in Reading series over at The Millions.

What about you? Have you started a March title yet?
Jenny