sensible shoes: a liberal librarian's blog

There are three books in my reading career that I picked up and threw across the room: On the Road, The White Goddess and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.  None of the books on my 00s made me that angry (which may be a measure of literary quality, after all, to inspire such a reaction of rage).  Most of these books, in my opinion, were just insipid.  I'm willing to concede that some are just "not my cup of tea," although they may have literary merit up the wazoo (I'm thinking of the one that my book club nicknamed Slow).  I'm only listing books published in the 00s, so I must reluctantly omit The Alchemist and A Year in Provence.

The Shack  by William P. Young
My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult
The Little Giant of Aberdeen County by Tiffany Baker
Marley and Me by John Grogan
Snow by Orhan Pamuk
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon
Good Grief by Lolly Winston
The Siren's Dance by Anthony Walker

I know I really love a book when I'm compelled to pick up a phone and tell my sisters to read it, or when I force my husband to listen to a recap in excruciating detail.  SO, here are some books that made me want to stop people on the street and demand that they read them.  I'm leaving off books I read in the 00s, but were published earlier, so I have to omit two absolute favorites, A Fine Balance and The Remains of the Day. Anyway, here goes:

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski
America, America by Ethan Canin
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
Harriet and Isabella by Patricia O'Brien
Fellow Travelers by Thomas Mallon
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

There's ten. I'd also add Three Bags Full, which inspired me to stop eating mammals, and Shutter Island, which I fear is about to be royally screwed up as a film.

The Night Watch

The Night Watch was Sarah Waters's first novel not set in the Victorian era, and for several years I resisted reading it for that reason (silly me).  This one's set in World War II London, working backward from 1947 to 1941, and concerns the love affairs and other affairs of a disparate but connected group of young people.  As usual with Waters, the setting is vividly rendered and the characters breathe.  The backwards structure sets up an odd sort of suspense.  In particular, we learn at the outset that one character has spent a good portion of the war in prison, and the payoff at the end is to learn why.

Although anything Waters writes is better than just about anything else out there, I wouldn't rank this as my favorite.  Perhaps it's because the book only clocks in at about 525 pages, and she has three stories to tell, the individual stories seemed like they could have been fleshed out a bit more.  I wolfed it down myself, but I wouldn't tell a new Waters reader to start with this one.

So glad that someone besides me is bothered by the fad in literary fiction to omit quotation marks for dialogue.  Thanks, Laura Miller!

This Is Where I Leave You

Collect four adult siblings from an extremely dysfunctional family and force them to sit shiva for seven days for their father.  It's an easy premise for funny domestic fiction or an ensemble-cast movie (which is already "in development", according to IMDB).  It is narrated by Judd Foxman, who is reeling from the discovery of his wife's infidelity.  His sister and his two brothers have their own issues, and the solemnity of the occasion doesn't keep them from going at each other, sometimes physically.

The book is often laugh-out-loud funny;  the scene where Judd walks in on his wife having sex with his boss is almost Chaucerian in its bawdy, slapstick hilarity.  It's also moving and insightful about sibling and parent-child relationships.  My only complaint is the extreme emphasis on sex, which makes sense in the context of the story but got wearying to me as a reader.

You Remind Me of Me: A Novel

I was crazy about Chaon's latest, Await Your Reply.  This one, his first novel, has a similar structure in that it tells a story through three different characters, and similar questions about identity and sense of self, but it has a completely different tone.  It's way more heart than head, and very disturbing and sad.  It's about two half-brothers, unknown
to each other until adulthood, and about the mother who gave one of them up.  These characters are all emotionally broken and profoundly unloved and unmothered.  A great holiday read!

The White Tiger: A Novel (Man Booker Prize)

I finally got around to reading the Man Booker winner from 2008.  Savagely
funny and often just savage, it's a critique of contemporary India from the
viewpoint of a rich man's chauffeur.  We know from the start that the
chauffer, Balram Halwai, has murdered his employer, and although born in a
servant's caste, he is now an "entrepreneur."  It's a withering look at
corruption and inequality in India.  I have no idea if it is a fair
portrayal, but it was an entertaining read.  I don't know if it screamed
"award winner" to me, but it certainly presented an original voice.

America America is a quietly stunning book about politics, wealth, family,
love and loyalty. It bears comparison with The Great Gatsby and An American
Tragedy, but it is its own book and I would not be surprised to see it
enter the canon as a modern American classic.

It is narrated by Corey Sifter, an upstate New York newspaper publisher
looking back at his past association with the wealthy Metarey family. The
teenage son of a plumber, Corey is hired by the Metareys as a
groundskeeper/handyman, and becomes a sort of protege to patriarch Liam
Metarey. Through them he becomes involved with the presidential campaign of
Henry Bonwiller, a liberal antiwar senator whose campaign is derailed by
accusations of the coverup of a fatal accident.

Corey is a hard working, studious, almost unbearably decent boy who is
often mystified by the scenes of political and emotional drama unfolding
before him. As he begins a flirtation with one of the Metarey daughters,
and accepts Mr. Metarey's offer to pay tuition to a prestigious prep
school, he feels conflicting loyalties between his family and class origins
and the heady new world of power and wealth of which he is mostly a passive
and naive observer.

There is drama, suspense and tragedy in this book, and it is a page-turner,
if you can imagine a wistful, sad, elegiac page-turner. It is a book that
longs for decency and for the old-fashioned "American" virtues of hard
work, common sense, practical knowledge and unselfish love.  It is a book that fights like hell against cynicism, and in the face of the political treachery portrayed, it seems a quixotic fight indeed.

In The Missing, an industrial accident  unleashes a virus that creates zombie-like flesh eaters, feasting on an affluent town in Maine.

I picked this up as my annual Halloween read, but it didn't do much for me.  The story and characters were interesting enough, in a soap-opera kind of way, but there was way too much grade-school gore, and not nearly enough terror.  I like my horror novels to be truly frightening, to follow me around for days (I'm thinking of The Haunting of Hill House, or early Stephen King).  This one was just not scary.

I can't write a fair review of an "inspirational" book, because I'm not a fan of the genre.  I suppose theses tales are supposed  to be filled with cardboard characters that represent Ideas.  

To the extent that I pondered the ideas herein, I didn't agree with them.  I detest the notion that all people are in complete control of their own destiny, as if any failure is their personal responsibility.  And I'm infuriated by the notion that only men need to purse their Personal Legend; that woman's role is to love, and wait for, their men.