afractured_tale (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} afractured_tale) wrote,@ 2008-09-27 20:55:00 |
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Books Books Books of 2008
Hopefully my goal of 50 books in a year will be obliged this year... I'm doing pretty well so far.
#1. The Memory Keepers Daughter by Kim Edwards 12/15/07 - 1/03/08
I didn't like this book. I usually HATE female writers because they write WAAAY too emotional and if I want to be emotional I'll rather be watching Oprah, you know what I mean? This book is about this doctor who of course marries a "beautiful" girl who gives birth to a baby who is mentally disabled. As soon as the baby arrives the doctor takes it away and tries to put it in a hospital while telling his young wife the baby died. Of course his lie gets him in the end because his wife eventually finds out years later that the nurse who was in love with said doctor was the one who took care of the daughter all along.
It's a good concept for a book but because it was written with too many flowery words and too "girly" and takes about two pages just to describe the house and the snow and shit like that I just couldn't take it anymore. At least I read til the end which I usually don't do in books that are way too girly and over descriptive and trying too hard to be an "Oprah's Book Club."
I know I'm describing this work in a very simple manner but what's the use for elaborating on a book which made me roll my eyes too many times to care. UGH! No character name is even worth mentioning is this book. Talk about Chick Lit. This takes the cake and that's pretty sad considering I'm a chick.
#2. Book of Unforgettable Travels from the files of Conde Nast Traveler 1/2/08 - 2/28
I was given this book by my friend Dana on my birthday because I love to travel and I'm old enough to know that I need to travel as much as I can before it's too late. I love all the destinations in this book. The one about Iceland interested me so much I want to go there one day. The descriptions about Savannah were wonderful and would love to go there too. One of the things I love about the book was how the travel writers were detailed enough to tell us where to go and what to do in less "touristy" places. Someday it would be so much fun to just go backpacking all over the place with just me, my camera, and some water (but of course I wouldn't mind a nice male traveler that might pass me by and walk along with me).
#3. The Sunflower by Richard Paul Evans 2/28/08 - 3/23/08
Another book about some high maintenance chick who hates getting dirty and the guy who changes her. All right - so the beginning started out well (the beginning meaning the first two pages) and after that it all went down hill because of it's sugary sweet oh so cliche happy ending story. My friend thought I might like this story because I love stories about philanthropy. This is about an orphanage in Peru where a doctor (the guy who changes the high maintenance chic) provides for children who were abandoned by their parents because they just couldn't take care of them anymore. High maintenance chick (who was scorned by a runaway groom) arrives in Peru with a little coaxing from her friend. At first she does not like anything. The poor hotel that isn't exactly the Ritz, the food which isn't exactly a five star restaurant, the weather which isn't exactly Hawaii, but then of course everything changes when high maintenance chick meets doctor, falls in love with doctor, fall in love with kids doctor provides for and la di da. This book had so much potential but I found it too cliche (How many stories like these are in circulation anyway?). It sucks. I love the kids but none of these characters seemed real to me at all and I couldn't stand one more story of high maintenance chick looking at herself and wonders where she's gone wrong and in the end of course, she doesn't think about the Ritz or fixing her hair, she's thinking about doctor and kids. UGH... it's one cliche after another. Good for you high maintenance chick!! You are finally not selfish anymore. How wonderful for you.
#4. The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory 3/23/08 - 4/21/08
Sure it's historically inaccurate and the movie sucked big time but I couldn't put this book down. Now this is one (albeit trashy) chick lit that I truly enjoyed. I loved bitchy Anne who was so manipulative and greedy and smart and jealous. I loved fat Henry and oh so innocent and naive Mary. I love George with his incestuous and homosexual affairs and Anne's last days inside the Tower of London before she got beheaded. It's not my favorite book in the world but I loved it none the less. After reading two books which erased some of my brain cells this one actually gave some of it back.
#5. On Beauty by Zadie Smith 4/21/08 - 5/6/08
This story was OK. Zadie Smith is well known because of her other book White Teeth. A big family saga about two families, one liberal, one conservative, one mixed raced with a black American mother (from the South! with a horrid Southern dialog only someone who is NOT American would think is correct) and a white British father, and the other a British African family. It's mostly set in the East coast in a fictional Ivy league university setting. There are a lot of issues explored. Culture, race, sex, sickness, death but there were also the cliche characters who populate this story. There's the younger son who tries to hide his well to do upbringing (and his half white self) by pretending to act like he's some kid from the ghetto, then there's the daughter who is way too smart for her own good and the ultra conservative professor with a slutty daughter who sleeps with both the liberal father and his religion seeking son, etc... I really like Smith's writing, no part of the book was ever boring. But a British writer who only spent a couple of months (a year?) in America cannot write a whole book about America and its culture. American kids were talking in British slang (being American, the difference in speech was very noticeable). One great example as an Amazon reviewer pointed out, is this, "Who you on the phone to?" (which is completely British) when normal American kids would say "Who you talking to?" Or "Who are you on the phone with?" She also writes about Thanksgiving, our national holiday, which happens on the fourth Thursday of November but of course Smith hardly stayed in the U.S. long enough to know this, because in her book, Thanksgiving as set on a Friday! haha. Smith's version of America is a stereotype. And there were too many British terms for it to be a novel set in "America." When I was reading it, I was pretending it was set in London. It's America set in Smith's London. It's America written by a tourist.
#6. Choke by Chuck Palaniuk 5/6/08 - 5/22/08
Like all Palaniuk novels this one was interesting from the get go. When I read this all I can think about is Edward Norton because main character and sex addict Victor Mancini of Choke sounds eerily like The Narrator/Tyler Durden of Fight Club. Victor likes to make people heroes in various restaurants he goes to. He lets people save his life so therefore they can feel better about themselves and in turn they'll remember him forever and send him checks which he uses to pay for the hospital his mother is in. Palaniuk's writing is as always attention grabbing. It grips you and won't let you go until the very end. You find your self breathing a sigh of relief because you realize that you are better than the people he writes about. They are all the bottom of the barrel yet all of them have some sort of heart where you feel sorry for them and realize that what they're doing makes sense. It's because of this Palaniuk is one of my favorite writers. He is officially cool. If you know someone who don't like books to begin with let them read Palaniuk's works because I can guarantee that they would not stop reading. No matter how crazy his stories are it makes sense somehow. For example, here is Victor's explanation on why he needs people to save him.
Somebody saves your life and they'll love you forever... It's as if you're their child. For the rest of their lives these people would write me. Send me cards in the anniversary... They call you on the phone. To find out if you're feeling okay... or if you maybe need cheering up or cash. You gain power by pretending to be weak. By contrast, you make people feel so strong. You save people by letting them save you. All you have to do is stay fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog. People really need somebody they feel superior to. So stay downtrodden. People need somebody they can send a check at Christmas. So stay poor...
#7. The Gathering Anne Enright 5/22/08 - 6/5/08
Irish lit at its best or worst? I like reading European literature. I've been interested in Irish literature recently because I'm planning to take a trip to Ireland next March, however the story of the Gathering about a large Irish family getting together after the death of the wayward older brother did not really give me anything to hold on to. I loved reading about the time the grandmother and the grandfather eventually met, even when the initial man Veronica (the narrator) imagined her grandmother with wasn't the one she ended up with. I wanted to learn more about Liam (the brother who committed suicide) I wanted to learn more about everyone to make it more memorable. In the end, it just felt like I was done with the book and that was that and nothing left an impression in my brain.
#8. After Dark by Haruki Murakami 6/5/08 - 6/15/08
Haruki Murakami is one of my favorite authors and I always like reading every one of his books, including this one even though nothing much happens. So this is about an ordinary girl Mari who has a beautiful sister who everyone admires. Mari's sister sleeps like Princess Aurora - sleeping all day and all night but no one knows the reason why. Mari on the other hand doesn't sleep much at all and during her late night insomnia she encounters interesting characters from a Chinese "sex slave" to a young musician who had a crush on her model sister. Nothing was really solved. It felt like "a day in a life" of a young Japanese girl with some kind of "supernatural" element thrown in. Murakami is a story teller. No matter how ordinary the story he always makes it extraordinary.
#9 White Horses by Alice Hoffman 6/15/08 - 6/21/08
Even since I've read Here on Earth by Alice Hoffman, she's always been a very reliable author for me. She knows how to make me turn the page even when some of her mystical writing gets in the way. Plus, she really has a way of writing about tall, dark and handsome men, even when these men aren't exactly Prince Charming but rather more "Heathcliff" type characters. This is about a dysfunctional family, about a girl named Teresa who has always believed in a fairytale about a dark handsome stranger who would save her and take her away one day. As she grows up, she starts to believe this "stranger" is her brother Silver who is mean, arrogant, selfish... but Teresa for reasons unknown has always been intrigued by him. There is incest and rape and physical abuse in this story and Alice Hoffman does well with weaving all of these elements together because in the end not all dreams come true and not all fairytales end in happily every afters.
#10 The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri 6/21/08 - 7/14/08
I HATE this book. I was actually surprised I hated it so much because there was a lot of praise about it and I mean Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for goodness sakes! This book had no heart. I did not like Gogol or Nikhil as he prefered to be called. I too share something in common with Gogol because my parents are immigrants and as I was growing up they try to instill in me the cultural traditions as well but this book didn't really explore any of that except in the first few chapters. I don't feel anything for the characters and Lahiri does not write how they feel, does not write about who they really are, does not even really write about the most important thing and that is the struggle of Gogol to find himself (and when he did "find" himself it was too little too late). I had to skip through paragraph after paragraph of stereotypical descriptions of a WASP family who live in the east coast and Gogol wondering why his parents couldn't be like the parents of his WASP girlfriend and why they don't eat cheese or drink wine. It's so fucking trite and by the middle of the book I just wanted to throw it away. It is written in present tense and nothing captured me. I asked my co-worker who is Indian and who has read the book and seen the movie about her opinion of Lahiri's tale and she just laughed and started her opinion with two words: It's stupid (she went on for more detail but in short, it is Stupid because she could have done SO MUCH MORE!) How can you write about an important matter of immigration, of culture, of trying to find yourself and in the end, nothing was solved and nothing was learned? I was so disappointed.
#11 - East of Eden by John Steinbeck 7/14/08 - 7/27/08
After reading a lemon, I'm glad I've got to discover East of Eden again. A lot of people are put off by this masterpiece because of the book's thickness. It also takes awhile to get used to the family sagas. This is my favorite book of all time. The last time I read this was almost 4 years ago and I'm happy to have read it again. Caleb and Lee are my favorite characters. They represent so much of us and so much of who we want to be. We all try to be good people but we all have faults. God made us that way. We are selfish and mean and jealous but we strive to be better people. I remember a particular scene where Caleb felt guilty for being so jealous of his good and golden younger brother Aron and wonders why anyone could love him but Abra (Aron's first love)tells him why...
Abra: I think I love you Cal
Cal: I'm not good.
Abra: It's because you're not good.
Steinbeck's writing is beautiful. Now, unlike Lahiri's work where emotion was hard to find, East of Eden has every emotion you could want and nothing of it is trite or weak. Caleb Trask has got to be one of my favorite characters in Literature. He's the very symbol of the everyday man, he is not good but because he realizes he isn't perfect and tries to be better, he is almost too good.
#12. A Spell of Winter by Helen Dunmore 7/27/08 - 8/5/08
Helen Dunmore is a good writer but I just couldn't get my heart and soul in this novel because nothing whatsoever was explained!! The heroine is named Cathy and she and her brother has been kept in a house somewhere in England to fend for themselves with the help of a maid and a rather disturbing nanny. Their mother ran away and their father went to a nut house - why their parents abandoned them and why they were kept in the dark was never explained. Cathy and Rob become close because they only have each other and eventually they begin a secret affair and is found out by her obsessive nanny. Things go on from there but when Cathy eventually leaves the dreary house behind and eventually marry, nothing seemed right at all because again, nothing was solved. I was like, "what? that's it?" The description on the back of the book glorified it as some kind of Gothic horror story but horror story it was not.
#13. We were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates 8/5/08 - 9/1/08
I thought The Namesake takes the prize for Worst Book I read so far this year but surprisingly it is this book that takes the cake. The story started out okay. Oates introduces us to a very PERFECT happy family who live in a PERFECT large farm... with PERFECT kids who have CUTE nicknames such as "Button, Baby, Ranger and Pretty Boy" (doesn't it just want to make you eat sugar?) and PERFECT farm animals who have also have oh so SWEET and CUTE names too. OH goody goody gosh!!!! I had to skip parts of this book because you find yourself reading TWO WHOLE PAGES of useless descriptions of farm animals and directions and even the mother's red hair! Seriously, how many times does Oates have to tell us that Corrinne the mother, has red hair and wears glasses? and that Marianne the daughter is so beautiful and popular? well, it seems every other page she has to do this because apparently we're too stupid to figure anything out.
To put it simply this story is about a PERFECT SWEET family whose lives fall apart on Valentine's Day because Marianne, the oh so perfect beautiful daughter nicknamed "Button" (believe me, Oates had to remind me on every third page or so that Marianne's nickname is Button and that she is a cheerleader and very popular because she is so NICE!!) got raped. Michael the Dad, couldn't deal with what happened and eventually Marianne is sent away and eventually because of the rape, the oh so perfect and handsome father becomes a fat alcoholic, Corrinne the mother who has to save everything shuns her daughter away and so on and so forth.
I hated this book. Not one of the characters are worthy of being remembered. In the end, I was just pissed off because the characters were unrealistic, after being shunned for 20 years the daughter was not even a tiny bit ANGRY??, most of the characters were caricatures, and I did not feel sorry for any of them not even Marianne who seems like such a doormat. By the end of the book she was around 30 years old and Oates still writes her as a "virginal" 16 year old who is nice and forgives every one which makes her more pathetic and idiotic.
Anyway to summarize this book even more, I shall put a review here from an Amazon.com reader because I completely agree with the comment and will urge more people to NOT READ THE BOOK even when it is free or you have nothing better to do or if you're stuck with this book because someone super glued it to your hand:
A family of unappealing characters with pitiable interpersonal skills live in a junk-cluttered, animal-fur covered (I couldn't stop thinking how smelly) purple house out in the boonies. Some pathetically stupid high school students make the predictable dumb mistakes, and launch this family into several decades of evil deeds towards each other that display their deplorable morals and illustrate how dysfunctional they were from the very start. (What do you expect from parents that address their children through their pets??)
I didn't believe once in their "gift for happiness": those people were not likeable and certainly not enviable as narrator Judd claims. Oates over-worked that point, and then drags readers through one pathetic turn after another until, in the last 15 pages, everything suddenly, implausibly, becomes sunny and rosy, forgiven and healed. Too late: the reader is so beyond nauseated to as be incapable of sharing in the apparent relief and re-birth the characters ostensibly enjoy at an overdue family reunion.
I hated it. Oates uses silly techniques which makes things worse. For example, the narrator begins his self-righteous and bitter story by taking the reader on a driving tour of his hometown. So trite -- it goes so far as to include the directions! Then it gets worse: I was repeatedly frustrated and infuriated by the excessive use of foreshadowing, fragmented memory and flashback to build up events. Ultimately, the events were never fully brought to light as they end up being obscured by useless tangents that are cluttered with digressions and idiotic descriptions of irrelevant details. Moreover, it was supremely irritating to have to skim 25% of the text to skip over pointless character-developments of pets and the mother's antiques/junk.
I don't recommend this book to anyone. Rather, I DISrecommend it as the worst book I have ever forced myself to read (I had to for a book club). It digs up that gray, bitter, ugly feeling of remembering something or someone bad that you have worked long and hard to forget about or grow out of. Painful, pathetic, useless, just pray it'll fade away.
#14. Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman 9/2/08 - 9/5/08
NOW THIS IS A WONDERFUL BOOK! Finally, after reading the god awful We Were the Mulvaneys, I got to read a book where everything is a page turner and every character made you react to them, even when they are supposed to be the bad guy. This is a very popular and well known book in the U.K. (it's titled Black and White here in the U.S.) The characters live in a world where Crosses (Blacks and other people of color) are the ruling class and the naughts (whites) are the minority. Much of the racism in this book is very reminiscent of the Civil Rights movement in the U.S., the Apartheid history of South Africa, and the IRA rebellions in the UK. The story is about Sephy (a Cross) and Callum (a nought) two best friends who grew up together and eventually fall in love with each other despite belonging to different classes/races. There is so much in this YA book to make you read every single page and never stop until the end because it really pulls you in, it makes you think about everything and some scenes stay with you for a very long time even after you have read the book. There are beautiful and innocent Romeo and Juliet moments, there is action, and there is terrorism. It's a great book. This is the first YA book I've read in a VERY long time and I'm so glad I was able to read such a great work!
#15. Blue Diary by Alice Hoffman 9/5/08 - 9/11/08
It took awhile to get really involved with this book. It's told through many different perspectives but the one I liked reading best was 6th grader Kat's point of you and is told in first person. It's basically about a rape and a murder done by a tall dark and handsome man (whom everyone respects), 15 years before when he was some crazy guy who didn't care about anyone but himself. He changes when he meets and marries Jorie and is glad his awful past is buried but the past comes back to him when his picture is shown on the news and is reported to have murdered a 15 year old girl. I liked this book actually. Hoffman sometimes gets a little descriptive and whimsical with her writing but I can get past that because it's a good story and it's done in a way to make it a page turner as well. It's not the best book I've read so far this year but it's good enough for reading by the pool, the beach, or in your backyard.
#16. Peony in Love by Lisa See 9/12/08 - 9/16/08
When I read a couple pages of this book, my heart sank because it reminded me of "Memoirs of a Geisha" and I absolutely HATED that book because it was inaccurate, it was superficial, and it was idiotic. In the beginning of "Peony in Love" all Peony did was talk about her beauty and how she was going to be married and how she was going to be the perfect wife.. I rolled my eyes... BUT I'm so glad I kept reading because this is a GREAT book and it kept me reading and wanting to know more about Chinese history and culture especially what happens after death. I love the mother best I think. She is made to be the stereotypical Chinese mother in the beginning... cold, regal, proper... but when See delved more into her character I admired her so much. It was very sweet and the ending was beautiful.
#17. In Her Shoes by Jennifer Weiner 9/16/08 - 9/25/08
It's funny. The reason I read this book started because of my co-workers brother of all people. He said though he's a guy, the movie In Her Shoes was very good. A straight guy recommending a chick flick? How rare is that? So I watched it and liked it and even shed some tears! ah! And I am the kind of girl who rolls her eyes on hackneyed and cliche chick flicks and literature. I really liked the movie so I had to read the book and I'm happy to say the book was even better. The book delved more into the Maggie character - a character we are supposed to hate because she's a thief, she's a slut, she's a mess... Maggie is the beautiful and skinny sister who gets anything she wants just by strutting her beautiful body around town, while Rose the chunkier, smarter sister is the less attractive one, the one with low self esteem but owns a number of expensive and AMAZING shoes and has the money. Maggie is thrown out from Rose's apartment (after she does the unthinkable deed of sleeping with her sister's boyfriend and gets caught!) and after ten months of being apart, both Rose and Maggie grow up, change for the better and realize they need each other. Many things happen in between of course - Rose gets engaged, Maggie "goes" to Princeton, and they realize they have a Grandmother! The book was funny, enjoyable, I still love the EE Cummings poem in the end. It's beautiful!
Hopefully my goal of 50 books in a year will be obliged this year... I'm doing pretty well so far.
#1. The Memory Keepers Daughter by Kim Edwards 12/15/07 - 1/03/08
I didn't like this book. I usually HATE female writers because they write WAAAY too emotional and if I want to be emotional I'll rather be watching Oprah, you know what I mean? This book is about this doctor who of course marries a "beautiful" girl who gives birth to a baby who is mentally disabled. As soon as the baby arrives the doctor takes it away and tries to put it in a hospital while telling his young wife the baby died. Of course his lie gets him in the end because his wife eventually finds out years later that the nurse who was in love with said doctor was the one who took care of the daughter all along.
It's a good concept for a book but because it was written with too many flowery words and too "girly" and takes about two pages just to describe the house and the snow and shit like that I just couldn't take it anymore. At least I read til the end which I usually don't do in books that are way too girly and over descriptive and trying too hard to be an "Oprah's Book Club."
I know I'm describing this work in a very simple manner but what's the use for elaborating on a book which made me roll my eyes too many times to care. UGH! No character name is even worth mentioning is this book. Talk about Chick Lit. This takes the cake and that's pretty sad considering I'm a chick.
#2. Book of Unforgettable Travels from the files of Conde Nast Traveler 1/2/08 - 2/28
I was given this book by my friend Dana on my birthday because I love to travel and I'm old enough to know that I need to travel as much as I can before it's too late. I love all the destinations in this book. The one about Iceland interested me so much I want to go there one day. The descriptions about Savannah were wonderful and would love to go there too. One of the things I love about the book was how the travel writers were detailed enough to tell us where to go and what to do in less "touristy" places. Someday it would be so much fun to just go backpacking all over the place with just me, my camera, and some water (but of course I wouldn't mind a nice male traveler that might pass me by and walk along with me).
#3. The Sunflower by Richard Paul Evans 2/28/08 - 3/23/08
Another book about some high maintenance chick who hates getting dirty and the guy who changes her. All right - so the beginning started out well (the beginning meaning the first two pages) and after that it all went down hill because of it's sugary sweet oh so cliche happy ending story. My friend thought I might like this story because I love stories about philanthropy. This is about an orphanage in Peru where a doctor (the guy who changes the high maintenance chic) provides for children who were abandoned by their parents because they just couldn't take care of them anymore. High maintenance chick (who was scorned by a runaway groom) arrives in Peru with a little coaxing from her friend. At first she does not like anything. The poor hotel that isn't exactly the Ritz, the food which isn't exactly a five star restaurant, the weather which isn't exactly Hawaii, but then of course everything changes when high maintenance chick meets doctor, falls in love with doctor, fall in love with kids doctor provides for and la di da. This book had so much potential but I found it too cliche (How many stories like these are in circulation anyway?). It sucks. I love the kids but none of these characters seemed real to me at all and I couldn't stand one more story of high maintenance chick looking at herself and wonders where she's gone wrong and in the end of course, she doesn't think about the Ritz or fixing her hair, she's thinking about doctor and kids. UGH... it's one cliche after another. Good for you high maintenance chick!! You are finally not selfish anymore. How wonderful for you.
#4. The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory 3/23/08 - 4/21/08
Sure it's historically inaccurate and the movie sucked big time but I couldn't put this book down. Now this is one (albeit trashy) chick lit that I truly enjoyed. I loved bitchy Anne who was so manipulative and greedy and smart and jealous. I loved fat Henry and oh so innocent and naive Mary. I love George with his incestuous and homosexual affairs and Anne's last days inside the Tower of London before she got beheaded. It's not my favorite book in the world but I loved it none the less. After reading two books which erased some of my brain cells this one actually gave some of it back.
#5. On Beauty by Zadie Smith 4/21/08 - 5/6/08
This story was OK. Zadie Smith is well known because of her other book White Teeth. A big family saga about two families, one liberal, one conservative, one mixed raced with a black American mother (from the South! with a horrid Southern dialog only someone who is NOT American would think is correct) and a white British father, and the other a British African family. It's mostly set in the East coast in a fictional Ivy league university setting. There are a lot of issues explored. Culture, race, sex, sickness, death but there were also the cliche characters who populate this story. There's the younger son who tries to hide his well to do upbringing (and his half white self) by pretending to act like he's some kid from the ghetto, then there's the daughter who is way too smart for her own good and the ultra conservative professor with a slutty daughter who sleeps with both the liberal father and his religion seeking son, etc... I really like Smith's writing, no part of the book was ever boring. But a British writer who only spent a couple of months (a year?) in America cannot write a whole book about America and its culture. American kids were talking in British slang (being American, the difference in speech was very noticeable). One great example as an Amazon reviewer pointed out, is this, "Who you on the phone to?" (which is completely British) when normal American kids would say "Who you talking to?" Or "Who are you on the phone with?" She also writes about Thanksgiving, our national holiday, which happens on the fourth Thursday of November but of course Smith hardly stayed in the U.S. long enough to know this, because in her book, Thanksgiving as set on a Friday! haha. Smith's version of America is a stereotype. And there were too many British terms for it to be a novel set in "America." When I was reading it, I was pretending it was set in London. It's America set in Smith's London. It's America written by a tourist.
#6. Choke by Chuck Palaniuk 5/6/08 - 5/22/08
Like all Palaniuk novels this one was interesting from the get go. When I read this all I can think about is Edward Norton because main character and sex addict Victor Mancini of Choke sounds eerily like The Narrator/Tyler Durden of Fight Club. Victor likes to make people heroes in various restaurants he goes to. He lets people save his life so therefore they can feel better about themselves and in turn they'll remember him forever and send him checks which he uses to pay for the hospital his mother is in. Palaniuk's writing is as always attention grabbing. It grips you and won't let you go until the very end. You find your self breathing a sigh of relief because you realize that you are better than the people he writes about. They are all the bottom of the barrel yet all of them have some sort of heart where you feel sorry for them and realize that what they're doing makes sense. It's because of this Palaniuk is one of my favorite writers. He is officially cool. If you know someone who don't like books to begin with let them read Palaniuk's works because I can guarantee that they would not stop reading. No matter how crazy his stories are it makes sense somehow. For example, here is Victor's explanation on why he needs people to save him.
Somebody saves your life and they'll love you forever... It's as if you're their child. For the rest of their lives these people would write me. Send me cards in the anniversary... They call you on the phone. To find out if you're feeling okay... or if you maybe need cheering up or cash. You gain power by pretending to be weak. By contrast, you make people feel so strong. You save people by letting them save you. All you have to do is stay fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog. People really need somebody they feel superior to. So stay downtrodden. People need somebody they can send a check at Christmas. So stay poor...
#7. The Gathering Anne Enright 5/22/08 - 6/5/08
Irish lit at its best or worst? I like reading European literature. I've been interested in Irish literature recently because I'm planning to take a trip to Ireland next March, however the story of the Gathering about a large Irish family getting together after the death of the wayward older brother did not really give me anything to hold on to. I loved reading about the time the grandmother and the grandfather eventually met, even when the initial man Veronica (the narrator) imagined her grandmother with wasn't the one she ended up with. I wanted to learn more about Liam (the brother who committed suicide) I wanted to learn more about everyone to make it more memorable. In the end, it just felt like I was done with the book and that was that and nothing left an impression in my brain.
#8. After Dark by Haruki Murakami 6/5/08 - 6/15/08
Haruki Murakami is one of my favorite authors and I always like reading every one of his books, including this one even though nothing much happens. So this is about an ordinary girl Mari who has a beautiful sister who everyone admires. Mari's sister sleeps like Princess Aurora - sleeping all day and all night but no one knows the reason why. Mari on the other hand doesn't sleep much at all and during her late night insomnia she encounters interesting characters from a Chinese "sex slave" to a young musician who had a crush on her model sister. Nothing was really solved. It felt like "a day in a life" of a young Japanese girl with some kind of "supernatural" element thrown in. Murakami is a story teller. No matter how ordinary the story he always makes it extraordinary.
#9 White Horses by Alice Hoffman 6/15/08 - 6/21/08
Even since I've read Here on Earth by Alice Hoffman, she's always been a very reliable author for me. She knows how to make me turn the page even when some of her mystical writing gets in the way. Plus, she really has a way of writing about tall, dark and handsome men, even when these men aren't exactly Prince Charming but rather more "Heathcliff" type characters. This is about a dysfunctional family, about a girl named Teresa who has always believed in a fairytale about a dark handsome stranger who would save her and take her away one day. As she grows up, she starts to believe this "stranger" is her brother Silver who is mean, arrogant, selfish... but Teresa for reasons unknown has always been intrigued by him. There is incest and rape and physical abuse in this story and Alice Hoffman does well with weaving all of these elements together because in the end not all dreams come true and not all fairytales end in happily every afters.
#10 The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri 6/21/08 - 7/14/08
I HATE this book. I was actually surprised I hated it so much because there was a lot of praise about it and I mean Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for goodness sakes! This book had no heart. I did not like Gogol or Nikhil as he prefered to be called. I too share something in common with Gogol because my parents are immigrants and as I was growing up they try to instill in me the cultural traditions as well but this book didn't really explore any of that except in the first few chapters. I don't feel anything for the characters and Lahiri does not write how they feel, does not write about who they really are, does not even really write about the most important thing and that is the struggle of Gogol to find himself (and when he did "find" himself it was too little too late). I had to skip through paragraph after paragraph of stereotypical descriptions of a WASP family who live in the east coast and Gogol wondering why his parents couldn't be like the parents of his WASP girlfriend and why they don't eat cheese or drink wine. It's so fucking trite and by the middle of the book I just wanted to throw it away. It is written in present tense and nothing captured me. I asked my co-worker who is Indian and who has read the book and seen the movie about her opinion of Lahiri's tale and she just laughed and started her opinion with two words: It's stupid (she went on for more detail but in short, it is Stupid because she could have done SO MUCH MORE!) How can you write about an important matter of immigration, of culture, of trying to find yourself and in the end, nothing was solved and nothing was learned? I was so disappointed.
#11 - East of Eden by John Steinbeck 7/14/08 - 7/27/08
After reading a lemon, I'm glad I've got to discover East of Eden again. A lot of people are put off by this masterpiece because of the book's thickness. It also takes awhile to get used to the family sagas. This is my favorite book of all time. The last time I read this was almost 4 years ago and I'm happy to have read it again. Caleb and Lee are my favorite characters. They represent so much of us and so much of who we want to be. We all try to be good people but we all have faults. God made us that way. We are selfish and mean and jealous but we strive to be better people. I remember a particular scene where Caleb felt guilty for being so jealous of his good and golden younger brother Aron and wonders why anyone could love him but Abra (Aron's first love)tells him why...
Abra: I think I love you Cal
Cal: I'm not good.
Abra: It's because you're not good.
Steinbeck's writing is beautiful. Now, unlike Lahiri's work where emotion was hard to find, East of Eden has every emotion you could want and nothing of it is trite or weak. Caleb Trask has got to be one of my favorite characters in Literature. He's the very symbol of the everyday man, he is not good but because he realizes he isn't perfect and tries to be better, he is almost too good.
#12. A Spell of Winter by Helen Dunmore 7/27/08 - 8/5/08
Helen Dunmore is a good writer but I just couldn't get my heart and soul in this novel because nothing whatsoever was explained!! The heroine is named Cathy and she and her brother has been kept in a house somewhere in England to fend for themselves with the help of a maid and a rather disturbing nanny. Their mother ran away and their father went to a nut house - why their parents abandoned them and why they were kept in the dark was never explained. Cathy and Rob become close because they only have each other and eventually they begin a secret affair and is found out by her obsessive nanny. Things go on from there but when Cathy eventually leaves the dreary house behind and eventually marry, nothing seemed right at all because again, nothing was solved. I was like, "what? that's it?" The description on the back of the book glorified it as some kind of Gothic horror story but horror story it was not.
#13. We were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates 8/5/08 - 9/1/08
I thought The Namesake takes the prize for Worst Book I read so far this year but surprisingly it is this book that takes the cake. The story started out okay. Oates introduces us to a very PERFECT happy family who live in a PERFECT large farm... with PERFECT kids who have CUTE nicknames such as "Button, Baby, Ranger and Pretty Boy" (doesn't it just want to make you eat sugar?) and PERFECT farm animals who have also have oh so SWEET and CUTE names too. OH goody goody gosh!!!! I had to skip parts of this book because you find yourself reading TWO WHOLE PAGES of useless descriptions of farm animals and directions and even the mother's red hair! Seriously, how many times does Oates have to tell us that Corrinne the mother, has red hair and wears glasses? and that Marianne the daughter is so beautiful and popular? well, it seems every other page she has to do this because apparently we're too stupid to figure anything out.
To put it simply this story is about a PERFECT SWEET family whose lives fall apart on Valentine's Day because Marianne, the oh so perfect beautiful daughter nicknamed "Button" (believe me, Oates had to remind me on every third page or so that Marianne's nickname is Button and that she is a cheerleader and very popular because she is so NICE!!) got raped. Michael the Dad, couldn't deal with what happened and eventually Marianne is sent away and eventually because of the rape, the oh so perfect and handsome father becomes a fat alcoholic, Corrinne the mother who has to save everything shuns her daughter away and so on and so forth.
I hated this book. Not one of the characters are worthy of being remembered. In the end, I was just pissed off because the characters were unrealistic, after being shunned for 20 years the daughter was not even a tiny bit ANGRY??, most of the characters were caricatures, and I did not feel sorry for any of them not even Marianne who seems like such a doormat. By the end of the book she was around 30 years old and Oates still writes her as a "virginal" 16 year old who is nice and forgives every one which makes her more pathetic and idiotic.
Anyway to summarize this book even more, I shall put a review here from an Amazon.com reader because I completely agree with the comment and will urge more people to NOT READ THE BOOK even when it is free or you have nothing better to do or if you're stuck with this book because someone super glued it to your hand:
A family of unappealing characters with pitiable interpersonal skills live in a junk-cluttered, animal-fur covered (I couldn't stop thinking how smelly) purple house out in the boonies. Some pathetically stupid high school students make the predictable dumb mistakes, and launch this family into several decades of evil deeds towards each other that display their deplorable morals and illustrate how dysfunctional they were from the very start. (What do you expect from parents that address their children through their pets??)
I didn't believe once in their "gift for happiness": those people were not likeable and certainly not enviable as narrator Judd claims. Oates over-worked that point, and then drags readers through one pathetic turn after another until, in the last 15 pages, everything suddenly, implausibly, becomes sunny and rosy, forgiven and healed. Too late: the reader is so beyond nauseated to as be incapable of sharing in the apparent relief and re-birth the characters ostensibly enjoy at an overdue family reunion.
I hated it. Oates uses silly techniques which makes things worse. For example, the narrator begins his self-righteous and bitter story by taking the reader on a driving tour of his hometown. So trite -- it goes so far as to include the directions! Then it gets worse: I was repeatedly frustrated and infuriated by the excessive use of foreshadowing, fragmented memory and flashback to build up events. Ultimately, the events were never fully brought to light as they end up being obscured by useless tangents that are cluttered with digressions and idiotic descriptions of irrelevant details. Moreover, it was supremely irritating to have to skim 25% of the text to skip over pointless character-developments of pets and the mother's antiques/junk.
I don't recommend this book to anyone. Rather, I DISrecommend it as the worst book I have ever forced myself to read (I had to for a book club). It digs up that gray, bitter, ugly feeling of remembering something or someone bad that you have worked long and hard to forget about or grow out of. Painful, pathetic, useless, just pray it'll fade away.
#14. Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman 9/2/08 - 9/5/08
NOW THIS IS A WONDERFUL BOOK! Finally, after reading the god awful We Were the Mulvaneys, I got to read a book where everything is a page turner and every character made you react to them, even when they are supposed to be the bad guy. This is a very popular and well known book in the U.K. (it's titled Black and White here in the U.S.) The characters live in a world where Crosses (Blacks and other people of color) are the ruling class and the naughts (whites) are the minority. Much of the racism in this book is very reminiscent of the Civil Rights movement in the U.S., the Apartheid history of South Africa, and the IRA rebellions in the UK. The story is about Sephy (a Cross) and Callum (a nought) two best friends who grew up together and eventually fall in love with each other despite belonging to different classes/races. There is so much in this YA book to make you read every single page and never stop until the end because it really pulls you in, it makes you think about everything and some scenes stay with you for a very long time even after you have read the book. There are beautiful and innocent Romeo and Juliet moments, there is action, and there is terrorism. It's a great book. This is the first YA book I've read in a VERY long time and I'm so glad I was able to read such a great work!
#15. Blue Diary by Alice Hoffman 9/5/08 - 9/11/08
It took awhile to get really involved with this book. It's told through many different perspectives but the one I liked reading best was 6th grader Kat's point of you and is told in first person. It's basically about a rape and a murder done by a tall dark and handsome man (whom everyone respects), 15 years before when he was some crazy guy who didn't care about anyone but himself. He changes when he meets and marries Jorie and is glad his awful past is buried but the past comes back to him when his picture is shown on the news and is reported to have murdered a 15 year old girl. I liked this book actually. Hoffman sometimes gets a little descriptive and whimsical with her writing but I can get past that because it's a good story and it's done in a way to make it a page turner as well. It's not the best book I've read so far this year but it's good enough for reading by the pool, the beach, or in your backyard.
#16. Peony in Love by Lisa See 9/12/08 - 9/16/08
When I read a couple pages of this book, my heart sank because it reminded me of "Memoirs of a Geisha" and I absolutely HATED that book because it was inaccurate, it was superficial, and it was idiotic. In the beginning of "Peony in Love" all Peony did was talk about her beauty and how she was going to be married and how she was going to be the perfect wife.. I rolled my eyes... BUT I'm so glad I kept reading because this is a GREAT book and it kept me reading and wanting to know more about Chinese history and culture especially what happens after death. I love the mother best I think. She is made to be the stereotypical Chinese mother in the beginning... cold, regal, proper... but when See delved more into her character I admired her so much. It was very sweet and the ending was beautiful.
#17. In Her Shoes by Jennifer Weiner 9/16/08 - 9/25/08
It's funny. The reason I read this book started because of my co-workers brother of all people. He said though he's a guy, the movie In Her Shoes was very good. A straight guy recommending a chick flick? How rare is that? So I watched it and liked it and even shed some tears! ah! And I am the kind of girl who rolls her eyes on hackneyed and cliche chick flicks and literature. I really liked the movie so I had to read the book and I'm happy to say the book was even better. The book delved more into the Maggie character - a character we are supposed to hate because she's a thief, she's a slut, she's a mess... Maggie is the beautiful and skinny sister who gets anything she wants just by strutting her beautiful body around town, while Rose the chunkier, smarter sister is the less attractive one, the one with low self esteem but owns a number of expensive and AMAZING shoes and has the money. Maggie is thrown out from Rose's apartment (after she does the unthinkable deed of sleeping with her sister's boyfriend and gets caught!) and after ten months of being apart, both Rose and Maggie grow up, change for the better and realize they need each other. Many things happen in between of course - Rose gets engaged, Maggie "goes" to Princeton, and they realize they have a Grandmother! The book was funny, enjoyable, I still love the EE Cummings poem in the end. It's beautiful!
