The Secret History

I am so behind in my reviews. I read this over Labor Day weekend! The Secret History by Donna Tartt languished in my TBR stack from the library for a few weeks before I finally got to it. I can’t believe I almost took it back unread! It’s beautiful. The writing is lush and eloquent but never overdone and the story grips you from the beginning and never lets go. It’s rare for a literary work to be such a page turner, but I couldn’t set this one down once I picked it up.

From the beginning, you know something bad happens, but you don’t know why.  It starts with Bunny’s death, then jumps back in time where we learn Bunny is friends with his would be murderers. The book is about determining why Bunny dies and gets its drama and tension from that psychological element rather than from action. Each sentence is carefully constructed, pulling you into the story and forgetting the world around you, until when you finally do come up for air you have to shake off the feelings from the book before moving on. The books is straight-up creepy, made extra disturbing because you start to understand why Bunny had to die and almost feel like you would have done the same thing. It does that good a job rationalizing everything and getting you inside the story.

The story takes place at an east coast college, with a small group of highly intelligent students gathered around an eccentric professor named Julian. He has them study solely with him, studying Greek and isolating them from reality in many ways. Despite the creepiness, it made me long to be back in an academic environment, with a Julian pushing me to improve. Minus the whole murder aspect.

Random quote that made me laugh because I don’t want kids: “The fulfillment of the reproductive cycle was, in nature, a harbinger of swift decline and death.”

Book Riot recently did a story on who they would cast in the move, as did Flavorwire. I have to go with Flavorwire’s pick of Joseph Gordon-Levitt over the guy who plays Peeta for Richard’s role.  I think this would make an excellent movie, so hopefully someone picks up on that and the book’s recent resurgence in popularity. The novel was originally published in 1992, but I’ve seen it all over the place lately. When I was poking around trying to see why, I stumbled across an interesting fact from Wikipedia. Apparently this novel and Bret Easton Ellis’s novel The Rules of Attraction contain references to each other. I knew from the notes in the copy of The Secret History I read that the two went to college together and are friends, but Tartt didn’t mention that part. I thought that was fun and will have to give The Rules of Attraction a try now. The other random fact from my notes is that the novel was over 1,000 manuscript pages, but they got it down to 559 printed pages! The publishers didn’t think such a long debut novel would sell, especially since it’s not fantasy or science fiction, which gets away with longer page counts. So, it’s a dense book but still manages to be a quick, intense read.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

I usually try to read a book from the challenged books list every year in honor of Banned Books Week. I had to laugh when I went down the top 10 list for 2011 and all of them were checked out of the library or books I'd already read. Remind me if I ever get a book published to get a bunch of people to challenge it - that's one way to guarantee an increase in readership. :)

Anyway, I picked The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. So many people have blogged and raved about this book. Now I see why. It's funny, entertaining, heartfelt, and real. I could also see why it's been challenged, not that I agree with that, but it doesn't always portray Native Americans in the best light and really seems to be an inside look at a 14-year-old boy's head, which can be a bit dirty, unsurprisingly. Alexie is Native American and doesn't shy away from the negatives of life of the reservation. At the same time, he shows the good in their culture, their close-knit families.

Arnold, the main character, must balance between being Indian on the reservation and "white" at the school he transfers to, the one he wants to go to so he can someday get off the reservation and out of the cycle of poverty. His fellow Native Americans resent his choice, seeing it as a rejection of them. It beautifully captures teenage life and felt so real, I actually doublechecked that it's a novel and not a memoir, even though I knew it wasn't. Interestingly, it's story is extremely similar to Alexie's own biography, so there was a reason why it felt so real. I don't say that to take anything away from his writing, which is wonderful. He excels at telling a story, pulling you in. Despite the sometimes dark subject matter, it's also really funny. The illustrations are great and enhanced the novel. I highly recommend it and will definitely check out his adult books.

The Italian - Week 1

I read the first volume of The Italian by Ann Radcliff for Jean's readalong this weekend. So far, I'm enjoying it, but not as much as The Mysteries of Udolpho.

I really like Ellena, the main character's love interest. She's smart and strong, willing to stand up for herself even when it's the hard thing to do. I like that she doesn't fall for Vivaldi immediately, which is what you expect when the handsome rich man woos the poor young girl. She doesn't go for him for shallow reasons. I liked hearing things from her perspective, so I hope the narration continues to switch between her and Vivaldi.

The Marchesa's hatred of Ellena seems a bit over the top, so I'm curious if that's just the melodrama common in Gothic novels or if it's something deeper. I'm also interested in learning more about Olivia and what brought her to the convent.

I think the action will pick up more in volume 2 and have a feeling bad things are in store for Ellena in next week's reading.   

Weekly Update - Oct. 5, 2012

I made some progress cleaning up my library pile this week, returning some books I knew I wouldn't be able to get to and trying to focus my reading a bit more. I'm looking forward to some Halloween reads this month and hopefully cleaning up my library stack some more. I've got to stop reserving everything in sight and put some things in my cart to read later. I can't read everything at once, no matter how much I want too!

Update from last week:

Books I'm currently reading:

• Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling
• Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen
• All Road Lead to Austen by Amy Smith
• Joseph Anton by Salman Rushdie - I may not have time to finish this before it's due back to the library. :( It's good though, just dense.
• The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling - I have mixed feelings so far... 
• The Italian by Ann Radcliffe - Views on Volume 1 coming tomorrow!

Upcoming reads:

• Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
• The Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett
• The Shining by Stephen King
• Stories/poems by Edgar Allen Poe

Books finished:

• Broken Harbor by Tana French
• Stolen by Lucy Christopher
• Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl
• No Easy Day by Mark Owen

Posts this week:

• Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
• YA Update
• Ulysses by James Joyce

Books abandoned:

• The Rise of Rome by Anthony Everitt - I really liked this one and the next book, but I just haven't been in the mood or had the time for these. I want to return to both of these some day, and would like to own a copy of The Greek Myths for reference.  
• The Greek Myths by Robert Graves
• The Convert by Deborah Baker - The premise of this biography was good - Jewish American girl moves to Pakistan in the 60s and converts to Islam - but it just bored me. Again, I may just not be in the right mood.
• Please Ignore Vera Dietz by A.S. King - I got about halfway through and was enjoying this one, but then it alluded to upcoming scenes involving animal cruelty. I literally let out a yelp and dropped the book. I just can't handle that.

Song of Achilles

While the idea of Song of Achilles intrigued me, I wasn't confident about liking the result. It's a retelling of the events leading up to and during the Trojan War told from the perspective of Patroclus. I enjoy ancient Greek literature, but wasn't sure how this would come together. It might be boring and dry. It might not hold up well in comparison to The Illiad. It might not say anything new. Fortunately, it's engaging and tells a familiar story from a fresh perspective.

Miller weaves together a beautiful, moving story. It begins well before the war, when Patroclus is a child. You see the downside of being a prince as he is exiled, bringing him into Achilles' world when he's sent off to another kingdom.

Despite being a hero, I've never really cared for Achilles. In Homer, he comes across as arrogant and whiny, unwilling to do his duty if he doesn't get his way. Shown here, through Patroclus' eyes, Achilles is different. We see him as a young man who takes an exiled prince under his wing, caring for him and giving him friendship and love. My opinion of Achilles changed, so by the point where we get to the fit he throws during the war, I'm on his side. I never liked Agamemnon anyway.

One of my favorite aspects of the novel was learning more about Briseis and seeing Patroclus try to help the captured woman. I also enjoyed Thetis, Achilles' immortal, controlling mother. I don't remember her from Homer or anything else, so that helped make the story fresh to me.

I think this would be a good starting point for someone who wants to read the ancient Greeks but is scared to jump into Homer. Miller uses poetic language to capture the same tone as Homer, but isn't nearly as intimidating as Homer can be. It's still a novel, not an epic poem. It would give you a familiarity with some of the key characters to make Homer's story easier to follow. It made me want to get back to reading the Greek tragedians.

YA Reading Update

As I finished edits for my first young adult novel (woohoo!) and started the process of writing query letters and researching agents, I read a lot of YA novels to help me work on all of that. I decided to do mini-reviews of a lot of these so I don’t get horribly behind in my reviewing. Here we go!

Fault in Our Stars by John Green

This book is all over the book blogosphere for a good reason – it’s awesome. I avoided it for a while because it deals with cancer, but it’s worth it. Hazel and Augustus are two of the best characters I’ve read about in a while – they stick with you almost like old acquaintances instead of fictional characters.

I was surprised by the parts about Amsterdam and liked reading about the city. Ryan and I are tentatively planning our 10-year anniversary trip (which won’t happen for nearly two more years but I love travel planning!) and are leaning toward a trip to Brussels with a side trip to Amsterdam. It was nice finding a bit about the city in an unexpected place and made me want to go there even more, especially since it talks about one of the things I most want to do there.

Forever… by Judy Blume

Reading all these YA books made me want to read the book that started it all. I’m not sure that YA as a category really even existed when Blume wrote this and to me at least, she started the movement to write books specifically for teens. I’m sure someone who has studied that more will correct me, but it seems to me that she’s the mother of YA lit.

Forever… holds up well. I first read it in somewhere in the early 90s, when I was in late elementary school. At that time, we were more focused on the sex scene than anything else. I read it again a few years later, and loved it. Blume perfectly captures teenagers while crafting a readable story without all the vampires and controlling governments and craziness that’s in a lot of YA today. It focuses on a girl and her boyfriend and an average teenage relationship. It’s wonderful.

One thing that bugged me though on this reading – why does Katherine have to ask her mom’s permission to wash her hair??? She also mentions having oily hair, so she needs to wash it at least every other day – implying that most people wash it less than that? This was written in the 70s, not way back before indoor plumbing, so this really confused me. I need to ask my mom if she knows what’s up with that.

Matched by Ally Condie

I avoided this series for a while because I’m burned out on dystopian/paranormal stuff but I finally gave in. I think the characters come alive in this series and it held my interest so much that I read it in nearly one sitting and immediately checked out the next book. It has a lot of normal relationship and teenage issues in addition to the issues coming from the society, so I think that helped get me past my initial hesitation.

Tyrell by Coe Booth

If you want more realistic YA, here you go. Tyrell is about a 15-year-old homeless kid in the Bronx. His dad’s in jail, his mom is worthless, and he’s struggling to provide for the family when he should be in school. While the book is fictional, it feels very real and the author worked with homeless kids in the Bronx and grew up there, and it felt like a story she’s seen many times.

My heart broke for Tyrell. He tries so hard, but he’s just a kid. How is he supposed to support himself, his mom, and his little brother without turning to a life of crime like many of the people he knows? The people with money are the drug dealers, while he’s living in a nasty motel room that’s serving as a homeless shelter. I wanted to reach through the pages and help him, and give his mom a good lecture, not that it would do any good. I just don’t understand how she could not even try to do anything, and how she tried to keep her younger son in special needs classes so she could get extra money from the government. That made my blood boil.

I noticed Booth realized a sequel to Tyrell’s story, called Bronxwood, that came out last year. I need to check it out!

Along for the Ride by Sarah Dessen

I’ve read several of Dessen’s novels and have enjoyed them all. In this one, I noticed how she incorporates a lot of family life and issues into her stories, so it’s not just about a girl and her relationship struggles. That was one of the weak points in my novel, so this inspired me to go back and work on the family scenes and develop those characters more. Dessen writes parents as people with their own lives and the parents in my book at that time weren’t written that way. I think my novel is much stronger as a result and just hope some agent out there feels the same way!

Do you have any recommendations for realistic YA novels?

Ulysses

I finished Ulysses this summer and for some reason keep putting off writing about it. I wrote my thoughts on episodes 1-6 back on Bloomsday, June 16, when I first started reading it. I finished it about a week later, but I think it sort of wiped me out and I felt I needed to write some grand post about it and struggled to find the time or the right words.

Overall, Ulysses was less impenetrable than I expected. Yes, it's confusing. Yes, you have to work at it. Yes, I missed a lot. But, it's not impossible. It's also better than I expected. I didn't go overboard with reference materials. I referred to the introduction of my edition a lot, which had a chart of the episodes with the corresponding event from the Odyssey, the narrative form, the body part, the color, etc. This was simple but helpful in giving me a starting point of a reference for each episode. I know I missed a lot, but I was still able to follow along and I think I enjoyed it more than if I had focused too much on reference materials. I might reread it at some point with reference materials and do more of an in-depth study, but for now I'm happy to have read it at all!

Here's a run down of the remaining episodes.

Episode 7: This is written as a newspaper, except not on the fourth-grade reading level most papers use. :) It's the first time Bloom and Stephen meet in the book. The main focus seems to be money vs. art - you can either sell out and make money or stay true to your art but not both.

Episode 8: This is a poetic chapter, in blank verse. This chapter focuses on the feminine. Priests embrace their feminine side - is he saying that makes you closer to God? Is that the ideal? Not feminine or masculine, but something in the middle? Bloom also reflects a lot on labor as he hears about a woman in labor for three days. A baby is born every second, someone dies every second. The circle of life. People don't stop and enjoy life - shows people rushing through dinner like savages.

Episode 9: Bloom, Stephen, and others discuss Shakespeare. They consider his plays autobiographical - should we then consider Ulysses autobiographical, like Portrait of the Artist of the Young Man is? They talk about how Ireland doesn't have a Shakespeare yet, a definitive writer of the Irish experience, a national epic. That's why Joyce was trying to achieve here with Ulysses, and I think he succeeds.

Episode 10: The perspective shifts, starting with a priest who presided over a funeral earlier in the narrative. He walks through a park, and the perspective shifts through various people as they see one another, eventually getting to Bloom and Stephen. I think he's trying to show how we're all connected.

Episode 11: At a pub, we hear snatches of conversations, including the barmaids making fun of Bloom. This section was more like what I expected - hard to comprehend, seemingly random, nonsensical sentences.

Episode 12: This section varied between lists and dialogue. He lists Irish heroes, but half the list isn't Irish. Is he commenting on the Irish, that their own heroes aren't even their own? "Ireland sober is Ireland free." Bloom wonders if he's really Irish, as a Jew.

Episode 13: Some girls play at the beach while Bloom watches. Cissy tries to get Father Conroy's attention, but, like Bloom, he can't keep his eyes off Gerty. Bloom masturbates while watching Gerty (ewwww!!!!). When Gerty leaves, he realizes she is lame and is glad he didn't realize that earlier. Our fantasies are sometimes better than the real thing.

Episode 14: The narrative styles progress through the styles of various authors in chronological author. Shows Joyce's range. This parallels Mina's labor. The men discuss abortion, birth, saving the mother or baby. Bloom says they shouldn't be discussing such topics at that time. We are all born the same but die differently.

Episode 15: This episode takes the form of a play. It's the longest section. It's mainly a series of hallucinations. Bloom pictures being with other women, including wife Molly's best friend. He imagines being ruler of Ireland, Bloomusalem. In his mind, Bloom goes on trial and is a womanly man who bears eight children. Stephen also hallucinates, imagines he's a cardinal, primate of all Ireland. Everyone dreams of power. In real life, they are at a brothel. Boylan offers to let Bloom watch as he does Molly; Stephen hallucinates about his mother.

Episode 16: Ireland is England's Achilles' heel. England will fall. Why has Ireland fought for England more than against it? Bloom is more fatherly to Stephen in this section, which follows a more traditional narrative.

Episode 17: Told through a series of Q&A, Bloom takes Stephen to Bloom's house. Bloom thinks of Boylan and Molly's previous lovers. Molly gets into bed and tells him about her day. She thinks about how she and Bloom haven't had sex in 10 years.

Episode 18: This is Molly's famous monologue - eight paragraphs, 62 pages, no punctuation. Yeah. It's mainly about sex - why do women have a hole, why do men feel compelled to fill it and their bellies? When a women gets old she might as well die. She thinks of her daughter becoming a woman. She imagines being with Stephen, plans to study so he'll think she's smart. She wishes people weren't so uptight about sex. What would it be like to have sex like a man? It hasn't been the same between her and Bloom since their son died.

So what does it all mean? I have no idea. This is just one day in the life of these characters, just a snapshot. It's not enough to judge them. We learn how Molly's perspective differs from Bloom's - you can't judge based on one person's view. We can never get the whole picture. We can't know all.

Ulysses was actually the first book I finished from my Classics Club list, even though I'm just now posting about it. It's the fourth one I'm posting about. I'm hoping to pick up speed on my list a bit this fall.