A Short History of Nearly Everything

Obviously, this is not about Wicked... even though that is what I am supposed to be reading... but I couldn't help it!  The library finally got in a few new audiobooks and one of them was A Short History of Nearly Everything, so I listened to it at work.  It made for good science-related listening, but man was it long.  It really did cover the history of well... everything.  It starts with the big bang (and the arguments for and against such a thing in the first place) and ends with the evolution of homo sapiens.  Overall it was a well constructed basic tour of the history of science and a good description of some of the basic tenants of physics, astronomy and biology.
Unfortunately, I think a non-scientist would enjoy this book much more than I did.  Also, it would probably help if I hadn't already read or listened to so many other history of science books.  A lot of the information in this tome was old news to me, and I found myself zoning out a lot.  I like Bill Bryson as a writer - I loved his book At Home.  But I couldn't get into this one.  I did like some of the chapters on astronomy and physics and the discussion of the early evolution of humanity was really interesting and new to me.  However, the stuff on biology was too basic for my almost-PhD self and most of the information about early astronomy I had already heard before.  Still, it was entertaining with lots of anecdotal stories about historic scientists and neat examples to understand cosmic phenomena.
So, I recommend this book heartily for the non-scientist.  Also, if you want to get into the history of science, this would be a great place to start.  7 out of 10.

Rosalind Franklin

Again, I'm behind in my posting.  I finished Rosalind Franklin: Dark Lady of DNA a while ago, but here's my take on it anyway:
This book got significantly better as it went along.  As previously mentioned, it needed some serious editing, but after about the halfway point, somebody either figured out how to edit or the author woke up and started writing better.  It still wasn't exactly Purlitzer-worthy prose, but at least it didn't drive me towards madness.
The book deserves some serious credit for being the only full length biography out there of Dr. Franklin, and   a lot of research clearly went into it.  Most people know of Dr. Franklin because she was "cheated" by James Watson and wasn't given credit for the work she did on the structure of DNA.  She has become a sort of archetype for the forgotten, down-trodden woman in science.  Based on this book, at least, she certainly didn't think of herself that way.  She published some papers on DNA structure and didn't know her X-ray images had been used without consent by the Watson-Crick team, but I'm not sure she would have cared anyways.  Her major work before and after the DNA study was on virus structure, and she became somewhat famous for this in her time.  I'm not sure she'd be happy knowing she's remembered mostly because James Watson called her "Rosy" rather than because she pioneered the use of x-ray diffraction to figure out molecular structures of virus particles.  I liked learning about her life aside from her work on DNA, and realizing that she lived a full and happy life, if a slightly lonely one.  She was independently wealthy through her parents, and used her money for travel abroad.  She may, or may not, have been in love with one of her collaborators in France and the author suggests that she was on the verge of a new romance when she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.  In the end, the main argument of the book seemed to be that Rosalind Franklin's life was tragic not because she didn't get credit for the DNA discovery, but because she died of ovarian cancer at such a young age (37).  I like that perspective.  Based on the book, I'm not sure I would have liked Dr. Franklin in real life and I'm certain I would have hated working for her, but I think I respect her even more after reading this book.
For research and sheer information content I give this book a 9 out of 10.  For writing, at 4 out of 10.  So I guess that averages to a 6.5 out of 10 overall.

Random.org has decreed that my next book will be #39: Wicked.

The Friday Night Knitting Club

Ah, chicklit.  So comforting and familiar.
This book was recommended to me by one Karen Eng (aka my sister-in-law).  It is a nice, simple story about interesting characters.  After I Know This Much is True, it feels like a vacation.  No characters with mental disorders, yay!
The book follows the exploits of Georgia Walker and the ladies who come into her knitting shop on Friday nights to do pretty much everything but knit.  I, of course, like Darwin Chiu, the snotty academic who has problems with social graces and thinks knitting is a form of submitting to "The Patriarchy."  There are many other characters, some of whom feel like the standard stock characters of chick-lit, but some who are interesting in their own right.  Georgia has a biracial daughter, Dakota, whose father reappears for the obligatory love story.  The book skates around the idea of race and mentions it frankly a few times, but Kate Jacobs doesn't really explore the issue.
The book has a tragic "twist" at the end.  Of course, since I read spoilers for just about everything, I knew this was coming.  The twist did make it less like very traditional chick-lit, which is all sunshine and roses... but who wants a character to die?  Really?!
Overall, the book wasn't the best thing I ever read, but it was enjoyable.  It worked very well as an audiobook to listen to while working, since it kept me entertained without requiring too much concentration.
In comparison to all other literature, I give it a 6 out of 10.  In the chicklit category, I'd give it an 8.

I am still slogging through the Rosalind Franklin biography.  Honestly, it is one of the worst-written books I have read in a very long time.  It seems like it was written without a copy editor.  Some sentences are only fragments while others run on and on.  And the author pays a lot of attention to the fact that Dr. Franklin was Jewish, even though she herself seems rather disinterested in religion.  The author points out every other character who is Jewish and makes some rather sweeping generalizations about supposedly Jewish traits that Dr. Franklin possesses.  I thought attributing character traits to religion and race went out with the last millenium, but apparently not.  Oh well, I keep plugging along because I do really want to know about Rosalind Franklin... but I may run out of patience before I run out of pages.

I Know This Much is True

I love me some Wally Lamb.  She's Come Undone might be my favorite book ever (though that is a hard choice).  I bought I Know This Much is True a couple years back, knowing I would love it.  I started it once and got a couple hundred pages in and then just lost interest.  This time, I had to finish it.  And I did!  Yay!
As mentioned previously, this book is ginormous.  900 pages of soul-searching redemptive modern literature... basically what Wally Lamb is known for.

The plot is incredibly complex (no surprise, since it takes so long to get through), but here's a basic run-down.  The story is told from the perspective of Dominick Birdsey, a regular Joe sort of guy in Three Rivers, Conn (the same setting as She's Come Undone).  Dom has an identical twin brother, Thomas, who has Schizophrenia and is institutionalized.  At the beginning of the book, Thomas goes into a public library and chops off one of his hands.  Yes, really.  His Schizophrenia manifests in delusions about Godly communication, and he believes that he needs to follow the Biblical dictate to cut off his right hand (if it offends thee) to get the attention of world leaders to stop the war in Iraq... the first one, that is.  Anyway, things spiral out from there.  Eventually the story encompasses the Birdsey twins, their mother and step-father, crazy Sicilian grandfather, Dom's ex-wife, Dom's friend Leo and his wife (who is also Dom's ex-wife's sister), a lesbian social worker, an Indian psychotherapist, and Ralph Drinkwater (a local Native American guy).  The story jumps back and forth in time, between Dom's childhood and the present day, and the main thrust of the book is the redemption of Dominick.  He starts out angry and isolated and unhappy and ends up "finding himself" and such. 


The book tells a really compelling story and the writing is pretty immersive, since it's all written in Dominick's voice.  I do think it was too long, though.  I enjoyed the book much more once I got past the first couple hundred pages, into the meat of the book where all the secondary characters come into play and Dominick starts to figure out that he's a bit screwed up.  I also preferred the sections of the book set in the present day, but that is mostly because the childhood stories are painful.  The Birdsey home was abusive and Thomas had some serious problems.  It is hard to read about child abuse and the initial manifestations of Schizophrenia.
The use of dialect in the book (such as yous guys), is a bit inconsistent and can be a bit jarring when it shows up, but other than that the writing is wonderful.


Overall, I give this book 8.5/10.  I would recommend it, but only if you are a patient reader with time to spare... and a stomach for some seriously sad stories.


I cheated and already started another book in audiobook format - The Friday Night Knitting Club.  A bit lighter fare.  However, in the interest of semi-consistency, here's my random number book, too:
#62: Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA
Hmm... I wonder how Dr. Franklin would feel about chick lit?

The Piano Teacher

I read The Piano Teacher by Janice Y.K. Lee in multiple formats.  I started out on my husband's kindle, then read my own paper copy, and also listened to the audiobook intermittently (the audiobook was available from the library).  That meant that I finished this book pretty fast.
The Piano Teacher is a beautiful book.  It sucks you in to its time and place (Hong Kong during and after WWII) and you feel immersed in the world of the characters.  That said, none of the characters are actually very sympathetic.  The story jumps back and forth in time.  One story line occurs during the Japanese invasion and occupation of Hong Kong and follows the romance of an Englishman, Will, and a Eurasian socialite of Chinese and Portuguese extraction, Trudy Liang.  Trudy is generally vapid and vain, but she has moments of insight and the affection between her and Will is portrayed well.  Will is a difficult character to understand.  He mostly comes across as the stalwart Englishman to whom things just seem to happen.
The second story line occurs 10 years later and follows the romance of Will and another woman, the "piano teacher" Claire.  Claire is married to a rather dull Englishman who has brought her to Hong Kong where she sort of "discovers herself."
Other characters float in and out, including Victor and Melody Chen, cousins of Trudy and employers of Claire.  There is also a strange subplot about the Crown Collection - some sort of archaeological treasure trove owned by the English in Hong Kong which went missing during the war.
The book itself is written well and I enjoyed it, but the Crown Collection plot line, which is meant to tie everything together at the end, never really worked for me.  Perhaps this was written for a British audience who would better understand the intricacies of imperial politics.  As an East Asian History major, the descriptions of the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong and the British reaction did seem accurate, and I liked learning more about this particular event.
Overall, I'd give the book 7 out of 10.  This was Lee's first novel, and I'd definitely like to read whatever she publishes next.

Random number generator says my next book is #12: I Know This Much is True.  This is a 900 page tome.  Since I'm posting this review very belatedly, I've already started this book... I've actually got only 250 pages to go.  So good but... SO. LONG.

I'm not dead!

This past month has been the month of doing stuff and then forgetting to tell anyone about it.  For example: I read two books, but left them off the blog.  Also, I worked out a lot and logged NONE of it in fitocracy, so my husband now thinks that he is in better shape than me because he has more fitocracy points.  He is probably in better shape than me... but still!

So, to pick up where I left off a month ago...

I DID finish Good in Bed over the weekend with the in-laws.  It was a very fun, easy read.  I like Jennifer Weiner as an author.  I loved In Her Shoes and Good in Bed hit a similar tone.  It's chick lit, but not the vapid sort of quickie romance that a lot of chick lit ends up being.  Yes, Good in Bed has a love story in it, but it's not the main thrust of the plot.  Most of the book focuses on heroine Cannie Shapiro's attempts at building a happy life for herself.  Romance is included, but it's not the only thing she's worried about.  Cannie seems like the kind of person I would love to hang out with - she's wickedly funny and very smart, so it made the book easier to read.  Of course, there were some things I had a hard time swallowing.  There was section of the book that was basically wish fulfillment - she meets a starlet who likes her and *spoiler* gets her screenplay made into a movie.  She goes to Hollywood and has a high old time, though not without some problems.  While Cannie's reaction to all this rang true, I just couldn't see this too-good-to-be-true storyline really fitting in with the rest of the very realistic book.  But that was really my only problem.  I guess there was also quite a bit of frank discussion of sex.  I guess the title should tell you that much.  That could be a little jarring at times, but it was never offensive to me.  I would give the book 8 out of 10. Very very good, but In Her Shoes (which was written after this book) is better.

Of course, I finished Good in Bed on the plane to New Hampshire, so by the time I go there, I had nothing to read.  To solve this problem I stole my husband's kindle and downloaded The Piano Teacher from the St Louis Public Library.  It was the only book they had in kindle format that was also on my list.  So, again, I did not use my random number generator to pick my next book.  What can ya do?

a slow couple of weeks

I am still working on Good in Bed.  I really enjoy it, I just have not had much time for reading lately.  Traveling for three weekends in a row (NC to see Pranita, Chicago for a conference, NH for family time) plus crazy work hours has not left much time or energy left over for reading.
Also, I'm falling back into bad habits.  When I really love a character in a book, I want to know what happens to her faster than the author wants me to know - so I skip around a lot in the book trying to find out what happens.  I've probably read 2/3 of Good in Bed by now via this haphazard method, but I'm only 1/3 of the way through the book overall.  Shame on me.
I'm going to bring the book with me this weekend, so hopefully I can finish it up on the flights, etc.  I will also try very hard not to be embarrassed in front of my in-laws by the suggestive title and front cover of this book - it's really not as trashy as it looks!

Edith Wharton is awesomesauce

I'm not quite sure how to write this post, my review of Edith Wharton's Short Stories. I usually go through a summary of the novel I've read and then give my opinions.  But there's multiple different stories in this fabulous little volume, so that model doesn't hold.  There are stories of ridiculous society ladies getting intellectually trounced by an interloper and of tragic lovers whose romance is ruined by the convictions of the day and their own desire to reject those convictions, among several others.

I love Edith Wharton's voice; The Age of Innocence is one of my favorite books.  She writes social commentary on par with Jane Austen, but with the added bonus of a mocking, acerbic wit.  Her short stories could be funny or tragic or both, and I devoured this little 120 page volume in two nights.  She makes fun of society ladies by also notes how impossible life can become when a woman tries to buck the conventions.
Basically, she just kicks literary butt across the centuries.

I give this book a 10 out of 10.  A good deal considering I think I paid $1 for my Dover edition paperback.

I started this book while traveling to North Carolina to help a friend with wedding planning, and I brought along a spare just in case.  This means I won't be using the random number generator to pick my next book - I'll just finish the spare book I already started: Good in Bed by Jennifer Weiner.

Wilde Life

I mentioned previously that I read 3 books on the Europe trip, but only posted about two.  The third book I read was The Picture of Dorian Grey.  I had only brought two books with me, but I found the e-book online for free and downloaded it to my e-reader.  Yes, I have an e-reader.  It is creatively named the Sony e-reader.  I use it mostly for reading work-related material. I still like the feel of real books and clearly like buying real books... hence the problem this blog is meant to address.
Anyway, I read this book on the plane home.  It's a quick read, although the language is pretty florid.  In general, I enjoyed it.  I don't know what I was expecting, exactly, but the book wasn't really what I thought it would be.

For anyone who doesn't know, here's the plot: Basil Hallward is an artist who contracts a young man named Dorian Grey to act as a model for him for several pieces.  Basil becomes obsessed/infatuated with Dorian.  The crowning achievement of this relationship is a portrait of Dorian that Basil considers to be his best work.  He gives the portrait to Dorian because he doesn't want to exhibit it - he's afraid that people will be able to see how obsessed he became with the subject of the painting, and he doesn't want to deal with people's judgment.  While the portrait is being painted, Lord Henry Wotton visits and Basil introduces him to Dorian.  Lord Henry (confusingly often called Harry) is the villain of the piece.  He espouses hedonistic ideas and basically uses Dorian as an experimental prop to see what his ideas will do to an "untainted" young man.  I'm really not sure how he's friends with the sympathetic and moralistic Basil, but he is.  Lord Henry's constant talk of beauty and sensual pleasure leads Dorian to wish that the painting will age so he can stay young, and it magically happens.  No devil involved.  This was strange, but also kind of pleasant - get the conceit out of the way and don't bother explaining it.  From that moment on, Dorian basically debauches his way across the world and each experience puts a mark on the painting.  He breaks a young actress' heart and she kills herself, then he upgrades to outright murder by killing his friend Basil when he comes to see the painting years later.  He gets quite a reputation, but people who don't have personal experience with his bad behavior find it hard to believe that he could be so evil, since they all believe that a life of sin would leave marks on his face or person.  But, aha, the portrait does that for him!  Well done portrait!  Anyway, ultimately Dorian can't deal with his own sin anymore and decides to start anew by destroying the painting.  Anyone who has seen The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen knows the rest: when the portrait is damaged, Dorian dies and the portrait goes back to being a picture of the beautiful young man he once was.

Throughout the book there is a lot of discussion of beauty and sensuality, but it's all euphemistic and veiled.  It's hard to believe how controversial this book was when it was published, given how difficult it is now to figure out exactly what sins Lord Henry is promoting.  There is, of course, a heavy dose of homoeroticism.  The relationship between Basil and Dorian reads like an unrequited romantic love.  I wonder how this played to the contemporary audience.

I spent most of the book wanting to strangle Lord Henry.  He is basically just evil - no redeeming quality can be found.  Why does Dorian listen to him?!  His speeches are verbose and hard to follow at times.  Those passages were my least favorite in the book.

Overall rating: 6 out of 10.  Not my favorite, but short and a classic.

Next book by the random number method: Short Stories by Edith Wharton.
Apparently I'm on a classic literature kick.

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress

Since I knew I would probably be reading quite a bit on our European adventure, I picked an extra book from my large collection just in case. I grabbed Mennonite in a Little Black Dress for no good reason other than it seemed like a singularly American book to read in Europe. I actually ended up reading this book simultaneously with The Bone Woman, partially because that book was depressing enough that I needed a light-hearted read to break it up a bit.

This book is a memoir by an English professor who was raised in the Mennonite community but left in her late teens. Her husband has left her and she's been in a bad car accident, so she returns to her family's home to convalesce. The book follows the time of her convalenscence with flashbacks to explain the family dynamics or the breakdown of her marriage.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It was a bit all over the place and I thought some points were over-emphasized, but it was hilarious. I started laughing out loud on our flight to Frankfurt. I think I scared the folks across the aisle. The author's family, especially her excruciatingly frank mother, are so sweet and silly that you can't help but get sucked in. The best parts were the conversations between the author and her mother or between all the women of the family, when bizarre statements would be made about things like the digestive properties of beets.

The book isn't strictly linear and it's easy to get a bit lost as the author jumps around between the present, the recent past and her Mennonite upbringing. But this isn't really a drawback, it just means that, as a reader, you cannot expect a perfect story arc. The book does sometimes seem like a flow of consciousness, and it's not organized in any particular way. But who cares? It's hysterical.

The one thing that bugged me, maybe more than it should, is the description of the break-up of the author's marriage. A big deal is made of the fact that her husband left her for a man he met on gay.com. This seems to make the break-up of the marriage seem more tragic, since it suggests that her husband was hiding his homosexuality from her until he left. But, about two thirds of the way through the book, the author casually mentions that she knew her husband was bisexual and that he had dated men before they met. This doesn't functionally change anything, but it made the initial emphasis on the gay.com thing seem a bit dishonest. Really, you find out through the course of the book that their marriage was rocky and difficult from the start and the author is very frank about their struggles.

I definitely feel I understand at least this small part of the Mennonite community better after reading this book, though I don't know that I could describe their religious beliefs. The author is much more concerned with describing the social and familial aspects of this culture than delving into the formation of the sect or its current teachings. I do know that traditional Mennonite cooking is a bit... interesting. That chapter was one of my favorites.

Overall I give this book a 9 out of 10 for pure enjoyment. If I wanted to give a rating based on strict literary merit, it would probably be lower, but I just had such a good time reading this book that I have to give credit. This will probably become one of those books that I pull out when I'm having a bad day, just to cheer me up.

The Bone Woman

Sorry for the long delay in posting. I went to Europe! The transcontinental flights and multiple train journeys gave me a lot of time for reading, so I actually managed to finish 3 books in our week long jaunt.

The first of these was The Bone Woman. I was really excited about this book, which is a memoir by a forensic anthropologist who worked with the UN to identify bodies and document war crimes in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. It might sound like a strange thing to get excited about, and I fully expected it to be depressing, but I really enjoy medical non-fiction and I wanted to learn more about those conflicts. I know the basic outline of Hutus vs. Tutsis and Serbs vs. Bosnians vs. Albanians, but I don't really understand the history or politics behind those very basic ethnic conflicts.

The book, unfortunately, was kind of disappointing. The author's life story is compelling and it was interesting to hear how she became a UN forensic anthropologist at age 23 (I now feel totally un-accomplished). However, the stories within the book never quite came together for me. A big part of the narrative was about the bureaucracy of the UN or the little interpersonal squabbles within the forensics teams, which was not compelling for me. I felt that the personal stories of the victims or even of the interactions between the anthropologists and the local communities were too few and far between. There also wasn't much in the way of historical or political background, either. The book was divided into sections based on the location of the UN mission described, and each section was headed by a one page description of the conflict involved. But that was it. I came away not understanding much more than when I started.

I give this book at 3 out of 10. It gives a very good insight into the inner workings of the UN and the war crimes tribunals, but does not educate about the conflicts nor elicit any deep emotional response to them.

ending early

I give up on The Good Earth. I have made it half way through the book, as I said I would, and now I am putting it down. It's not that I couldn't finish it. It wasn't a hard book to read, but I just didn't enjoy it.

The Good Earth is a novel about pre-revolutionary China, written by a white woman who grew up in China. Let me say straight out that I have no problem with the idea of a white person writing about Chinese people, although this is the most frequently criticized thing about this novel. I know more about Asian-American history than my Asian-American husband simply because I took some classes in college. I don't think I should feel bad about writing about Asian-American history simply because I don't belong to the "correct" ethnic group, as long as I don't try to pretend to be something I'm not (my last name is Lu, after all... I could get away with it). If you know what you're talking about, then you have my seal of approval to write about it.

That being said, Pearl S. Buck wrote this novel in a style that reads like bad translation. This must have been a stylistic choice, and I just can't understand it. The novel is not written from the first person, so this isn't a dialect issue. It seems that she just wrote the book so it would sound like people expected a Chinese novel to sound. The phrasing is awkward and forced. The wife of the main character is often referred to as "the woman." This would make sense if Wang Lung, the main character, were thinking this - maybe this is how a rural Chinese man in the 1920s would think of his wife. But it's not his thought - it's the author's!

I think I might be particularly set against this book because of my fondness for another book, published in the same year: Family by Ba Chin (sometimes also written as Pa Chin). The two books are different in that the protagonist in The Good Earth is rural and in Family, the protagonists are well educated city-dwellers. However, they deal with the same issues of generational strife and the changes wrought by modernity. Ultimately, Family just reads so much better... and it actually IS translated from Chinese.

Overall I know this novel is a product of its time - it was published at a time when many Westerners were trying to drum up support for China in their countries in order to push back against Japanese incursions. The Good Earth was instrumental in this... it presented a "positive" picture of the Chinese. It's not exactly positive from our modern perspective - the novel is dripping in misogyny and questionable parenting practices, but it presented a picture of the Chinese that westerners at the time were comfortable with (aka not threatened by). It's easy to see how the hard working Wang Lung and his dutiful wife O'Lan could be compared favorably to the evil yellow hoarde coming from Japan. I wrote my honors thesis on this stuff, guys, so I could go on all day.

Any way, bottom line, I'm not going to finish it. I can respect the novel as unique and important in its time, but that doesn't mean I have to want to read it now. Anyone who has tried to read The Good Earth and had similar problems - check out Family.

I'll give this one a 3 out of 10. I won't rate it any lower because I think it does have real value... I just didn't like it.

Next book: #61 The Bone Woman. I'm excited about this one - I love non-fiction with a medical bent.

almost forgot...

The next book is:

#43 The Good Earth

This book won both a Pulitzer and a spot in Oprah's book club. I'm not sure those two things belong in the same sentence... but they both bode well!

Kitchen Confidential

Oh Anthony Bourdain, I wish you were my uncle or cousin so you could come to family gatherings, get drunk and tell your crazy stories.

That is basically my summary of Kitchen Confidential. This is the book that MADE Anthony Bourdain. After this book was published, he became a celebrity, and actually met a lot of the chefs he talks about in the book. I know this because my edition has a new forward by Bourdain detailing the aftermath of the publication. In many ways, especially in the forward and the last chapter, Bourdain reminds me of my dad - the bad boy who takes a round about path to happiness in an artistic profession. The fact that after this book was published Bourdain married a much younger woman and had a red-headed daughter doesn't hurt the impression. So, you know, I have to like the guy.

The book is a roughly chronological account of the author's path to becoming a chef and also a revealing look at the culture of restaurant kitchens. Bourdain is frank about his drug use and the fact that he went to culinary school just to one-up a summer coworker. Given my age, I can't verify what he says about the cocaine-soaked culture of the 70s and 80s, but he certainly seems to have enjoyed it. The description of how restaurant kitchens work makes all chefs sound like pirate captains running a barely-restrained crew of hooligans. Most conversation between kitchen staff seems to revolve around sex via unconventional orifices and/or suggestions as to the nature of a given staffer's paternity. Apparently that is just par for the course in the NYC restaurant world (at least pre-1999 when this book was published).

There is a chapter about things chefs don't want you to know. Apparently, any seafood in a Sunday brunch menu is suspect and waiters will recycle uneaten bread from one table to another. Judging by the preface and the reviews I have read online, this is supposed to be scandalous. It really didn't surprise me much. In fact, that was my take on a lot of this book. Maybe it's because I live in a world of Top Chef and Hell's Kitchen. Or because I have watched Anthony Bourdain on the Travel Channel for years. But nothing in this book was particularly revelatory to me. Anthony Bourdain swears a lot? You don't say. Chefs have scarred hands? I got scars working at Panera, for Pete's sake! Soup, it's hot, who knew? Sea food might not be fresh all the time? I live in MISSOURI! If you get fresh sea food it probably came from the Mississippi and you should be worried.

I think this book just reads very differently now, more than ten years after its publication. Maybe it's like a classic Hollywood movie that seems cliche to modern audiences simply because it was the movie that invented the cliches we see all the time now. What was daring and new in 1999 is old hat in 2012.

That's not to say I didn't enjoy this book. I LOVE Anthony Bourdain. I am a huge fan of No Reservations and have used episodes of that show as preparation for trips to Osaka, Barcelona and Paris. On TV, Mr. Bourdain comes across as entertainingly crass, and that's also true in this book. There is a lot of language in this book that I would never use in polite society. And there are also a lot of clever turns of phrase and funny anecdotes. I did laugh out loud (occasionally on a city bus) while reading this book, which is pretty rare for me.

Still I somehow expected more. The chronology was not consistent throughout the book. At some points I wasn't sure whether something was happening before or after the author stopped inhaling and injecting large doses of illegal substances... which makes a big difference in how you interpret certain behavior.

Some of the chapters were written as articles for magazines, and at some points the book read more like a series of essays rather than a cohesive whole. That's not really a bad thing, it's just not what I hoped for.

Also, on a sad note, Bourdain's ex-wife Nancy comes up a lot in this book. Then, she was not his ex, and he writes sweetly about her and how well she puts up with his insanity. Knowing that they are now divorced and he has remarried made reading this somewhat bittersweet.

So, I guess, I enjoyed the book overall and was happy that I read it, but it has not aged as well as its author. Still, I really enjoyed it. Even though it is not of the same literary caliber as Wives and Daughters, I did have a better time reading it, and that is mostly what I'm judging on. So I'll give it a 6.5 out of 10 for overall experience with an added 9 out of 10 for a few select, hilarious chapters.

I promise soon I will rate a book as something other than 6/10. Honest.

The Tombs of Atuan

I finally finished the "quick read" that I started when I was getting a little disheartened with Wives and Daughters. This book is only 180 pages long, but it is NOT a simple read.

The Tombs of Atuan is, apparently, the second book in the Earthsea Cycle. It is young adult novel, but it deals a lot in death and loneliness. Ursula Le Guin was doing the depressed and murderous teen thing long before Katniss Everdeen came around.

The following review will contain spoilers, because to make any sense out of this book, I have to give stuff away. Sorry.

The novel follows a girl called Arha who is a priestess in a very complex temple system in a desert in an alternate world. Arha isn't actually her name. It means something along the lines of "the devoured one." Arha is the name given to every priestess of this one particular temple within the complex, and every new priestess is thought to be the reincarnation of the old one - much like the Dalai Lama. The gods this priestess serves are called the "nameless ones" and basically seem to be scary and evil. There are also lots of politics within the temple complex since multiple gods are worshipped at multiple different temples. And, of course, all of the priestesses are raised in the complex, so it's full of teenage girls all the time.

Most of the plot revolves around the arrival of a wizard/sorcerer/mage/weird dude who shows up trying to steal half of a ring that is apparently hidden in the labyrinth underneath Arha's temple. Arha is supposed to kill him because he has defiled her temple, or something like that, but does not want to. She has already order the starvation and burial of three prisoners, and has nightmares about it. This girl is only in her teens, and she's already had to take responsibility for the death of men without really understanding why. As my high school friends would say, "girl's got issues."

And it just gets more complicated from there. One of the other priestesses is trying to get rid of Arha and is constantly testing her. This priestess, who also happens to be an embittered old lady, catches Arha bringing food to the wizard while she has him locked up in the labyrinth. This forces Arha to decide whether to fully help out the intruder and face the wrath of the old lady or kill him and hope the other priestess decides not to kill her.

And, of course, the ring that the wizard wants will magically make the world peaceful once it is restored to its whole shape. Seriously.

All of this, plus a lot of other stuff I just can't get into right now, happens in only 180 pages. And still there is a lot of angsty hand wringing and descriptions of nightmares.

This book is intense, but in a strange way that I am not used to. It is beautifully written, and I sympathized with Arha (whose real name is Tenar) even as she was having teenage fits of hubris and then falling to pieces. I think the book as a whole is meant to be about choice and responsibility... how does this young girl take responsibility for the deaths that have taken place on her watch and how does she find an identity outside of the one assigned to her from birth (as a reincarnated Arha). My personal preference, though, would have been to tell this story in a less complicated setting. The issues of this alternate world and magic and gods, etc, just got a little distracting. I thought the interaction between the characters was more interesting than the world in which they lived.

I purchased this book at my local book store with the intention of trying to broaden my reading list to include more Science Fiction and Fantasy, since several of my dearest friends (Hi Becks!) love this sort of stuff. I picked this book in particular because Ursula K Le Guin is mentioned in the book The Jane Austen Book Club. See, I really can connect everything back to Jane Austen! On a side note, if you haven't read that book, you should... it's awesome.

Anyway, maybe this book was not the best entry point for fantasy. The alternate world of Earthsea is never really built up completely. Characters talked about separate nations and priest-kings becoming god-kings, but never really explained it. It was very easy to get lost in the details. Perhaps some of this is accomplished in other books in the "cycle."

So, I guess, I would give this book a 6 out of 10. It was beautiful and interesting, but just not my cup of tea. I'll try a few more fantasy books (I have to, after all, since they are on this list), but maybe Harry Potter is the limit of my love for this genre. Oh well, at least I tried.

Resisting the urge to punch Molly Gibson

I finally finished Wives and Daughters. It was a bit of a slog, I'm not going to lie. The language is very dense and whole chapters went by where it seemed as though the only plot development was a character's foreshadowing sneeze. I've complained before of the level of description, and that did not change in the second half of the book.

Overall, I actually enjoyed this book more than I expected. The characters are mostly endearing and there is something about the novel that pulls you in and makes it fairly easy to keep reading. You are just shocked after several hours of reading to find yourself not very much farther than you were when you started.

However, I did have some major personal issues with this novel as a whole. I know it's a classic and rightly so, but by the end I just wanted to smack little Molly Gibson upside the head! She is such a Pollyanna, as my dad would say. Characters fall all over themselves to describe how sweet and demure she is, but she spends half the novel completely senseless to what is going on around her. Half the time she is so empathetic and manages to provide exactly the kind word that is needed at the right time, and the other half she has no idea that men are in love with her and that her step-sister is boy-crazy. She's described as intelligent, but we're never given any real example to back this up. Granted, she's not in a society that provided many opportunities for display of female intelligence, but Lady Harriet took up far less page space and cut a much more impressive figure in this way. In the end I think I liked Cynthia, the step-sister, better, simply because she was self-aware. She might have jilted multiple lovers and flirted with every Y chromosome in site, but at least she knew what she was about and wasn't easily fooled by others. But of course, we're not supposed to like her.

This book almost felt like Tess of the D'Urbervilles or The Woman in White, where male authors put their personal stamp on how they define female virtue (while also beating you over the head with obvious symbolism). But Wives and Daughters was written by a woman! And an intelligent, independent woman at that. Elizabeth Gaskell was great friends with Charlotte Bronte, but scrawny Jane Eyre could have whooped little Molly's Victorian tush!

Alright I think that is enough feminist venting. I was just surprised that Wives and Daughters, often described as Elizabeth Gaskell's finest work, would waste so much time on such a mousy character. Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen, suffers from the same sort of heroine problem, but very few critics would claim it was Ms. Austen's finest work. I am now more excited to read North and South for comparison. Based on the mini-series, I can't imagine that Margaret Hale will come across quite as pathetic as Molly Gibson... or at least I hope not.

One other interesting point about Wives and Daughters - there were a lot of references in conversations that made no sense. The handy footnotes in my edition explained most of these as nods to current plays or Victorian inside jokes. There was also a lot of random French. I can only imagine what readers 50-100 years from now will think of the modern references in a book like Bridget Jones' Diary.

Overall, I give this book a 6 out of 10. English literature lovers everywhere are horrified.

I started another book while I was reading Wives and Daughters, just to give me a sense of accomplishment. The Tombs of Atuan is short and geared toward younger readers, so I was getting disheartened at my slow pace through the Hollingford social whirl, I could plop down and read 10 pages in 5 minutes and get a sense of progress. I should finish that up in the next couple days and, after that, I am on to......

#15. Kitchen Confidential.

Well that ought to be quite a change of pace.

still working

I'm still working on Wives and Daughters; about half way through now. I'm thoroughly enjoying it, but Elizabeth Gaskell is a member of the Dickensian group of writers who feel the need to describe the exact shade of purple in the hair ribbon of the second cousin of the earl seated to the right of the main character's sister at the dinner party. It makes for a rather long novel. The writing is beautiful, but I can't help but think how different this book would be if written today. Do modern readers and writers have less patience, or are authors simply more concise? Or are there simply fewer hair ribbons to describe?

I have one nit pick with this novel thus far, aside from the Hyacinth/Cynthia business mentioned previously. I cannot get past the paternalistic nature of the relationship between the heroine Molly Gibson and Roger Hamley. Molly is not a mouse, and expresses her opinion quite frankly to women who outrank her, but she takes Roger's word as law and goes on and on at length in her own mind about how much she wants to learn from Roger in all things. I do appreciate that a scientist like Roger is expanding her horizons and getting her to read more widely. But if a friend of mine were in a relationship like this, I would think she was just parroting the man's interests to keep him around. I'd probably find it insipid, in fact.

I'm sure the context makes a huge difference. Perhaps Mrs. Gaskell felt the need to highlight Roger's learning and Molly's interest in it as justifications for the natural sciences. I just wish Molly had some more personal agency in her scientific pursuits. For heaven's sake, could she at least make up her own reading list?! Roger is constantly giving her books to read on subjects which end up interesting her, but why can't she once say "we spoke of X previously, do you have any books on that?" And another thing, an entire book on the different shapes of bee hives and wasp nests? Seriously, Mrs. Gaskell, that is your great example of scientific literature?!

Hopefully all this will be resolved in the next 300 pages. If not, Molly Gibson might end up categorized in my mind with Fanny Price, the dull and demure heroine of Mansfield Park. Yes world, be shocked... there is a Jane Austen novel I don't adore.

Hyacinth

I'm a little more than a quarter of the way through Wives and Daughters (yay) and a strange theme seems to be recurring throughout the book. Elizabeth Gaskell seems obsessed with hatred for the name Hyacinth and its derivative Cynthia. Two of the main characters keep going on at length about how frivolous the name Cynthia is. I wonder if this was a contemporary joke that just has not aged well.

My mother's name is Cynthia! And I don't think anyone today would suggest that Cynthia as a name is any more unusual or flouncy than Molly or Phoebe. Of course, other characters also repeatedly discuss the name Molly as being quaint or homely, which may or may not be a good thing. I think you could have removed 50-100 pages from this book just by removing all this chatter about people's names!

So, be warned Cynthias of the world: Elizabeth Gaskell thinks your parents were silly.

Cutting for Stone

So I guess this isn't really a good book blog if I don't say something useful about the books I read, so here is my review of Cutting for Stone. I don't think I included any spoilers you wouldn't find on the book jacket.

I loved this book. A lot. I have now recommended it to all my friends and they are a little tired of hearing about it, I think. The book spans the first 50 or so years of the life of Marion Stone, one of two identical twin boys born to an Indian nun and, presumably, the British surgeon with whom she worked. The paternity thing is not entirely clear. The boys are born at a hospital in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, where there parents work. Their mother dies during the birth, and the presumed father flees Ethiopia immediately afterward. The boys end up being raised by two other doctors on the staff, Hema the OB/Gyn and Ghosh, the internist. The love story of these two adults was sweet and completely fleshed-out, even though they were secondary characters. I think that was what I appreciated most about this book - the fact that even the secondary characters felt like complete people. This meant that there were lots of small story lines going at once, but they all knit together pretty well. It also meant that my happy ending loving heart was satisfied when at least a few of the characters ended up well settled and satisfied, even if other characters had a harder go of it.

Marion and his twin brother Shiva grow up around the hospital and both ultimately become doctors (no wonder I love this book, right?). In the course of their lives, they also experience all the upheaval of the coups and dictatorships that dominated Ethiopian politics up until the 1990s. I learned a lot about African history in general, and Ethiopian history in particular, through this novel, without ever feeling like I was being lectured (again, no wonder I love it).

Marion also ends up working at a poorly funded inner city hospital in New York, and there's a lot of interesting discussion of the American residency system and how international doctors are often used to plug holes in our safety net. Studying at a very wealthy, very prestigious medical school, I had never really heard or thought about this. Here, we are expected to intern at a select set of very good hospitals, and the thought that residency might mean something completely different for international medical students never really occurred to me.

There were a few points in the book where I felt the coincidences or plot devices seemed a little far fetched, but in the midst of the engrossing story, I couldn't really argue with the plotting. The character of Genet made me want to scream, and Marion's continued devotion to her was frustrating, but perhaps that was a real and fair portrayal of how some people deal with love and loss. Not everyone marries the guy they fell in love with at 18 and has a nice comfy life like mine. I might be just a bit spoiled.

Overall, I would give this book a 10 out of 10. It is definitely on my short list of favorite books and I would recommend it for anyone interested in medicine, intricate generational sagas, political history, or just generally awesome fiction.

The switch to Wives and Daughters has been a little tough. It's just a very different sort of book. I am enjoying it though. Elizabeth Gaskell has a beautiful writing voice, although I do sometimes have to skip passages where Hyacinth Clare Kirkpatrick Gibson starts droning on about herself. She's very much like Mrs. Bennet, only not even amusing. Just annoying. Maybe more like Mr. Collins. Yes, I do believe most characters can be compared quite appropriately to someone in a Jane Austen novel.

I am cheating just a little with Wives and Daughters - I am listening to the audiobook at work and then reading my paperback at home. It is just so long and dense, and I have a lot of books to get through. I found the audio recording via librivox.org. So here is my shameless plug for an organization with which I am in now way affiliated:
Librivox is a great organization that posts audiobooks of literature in the public domain (anything published before 1923). All the recordings are made by volunteers, so they are not of the quality you will find on Audible. However, they are free! And, thus far, the recordings I have listened to have been quite good. Multiple volunteers will read a given book. In the five chapters I have listened to from Wives and Daughters, only two have had the same reader. Of course, there was one narrator who sounded like an 85 year old Australian with a serious smoking history, so I had to just read that chapter in the book itself. But, overall, a pretty good deal. So, if you like classic literature and want an audiobook, I would recommend trying librivox before you run off to buy it on Audible.

My lovely husband is out of town for the week and my thesis update is all done, so hopefully this coming week will be very productive in the reading department, if only for lack of anything else to do. I'm hoping to finish Wives and Daughters by Friday, but we shall see. That Hyacinth character might just be the death of me.

I lied

Apparently I DID stay up until 1:45 am to read the last 100+ pages of Cutting for Stone. Sigh. It was so worth it. More on that later, I do have to sleep sometime soon.

The magical random number generator from random.org (a real website, I swear) says the next book is:

#52: Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell

Here we go...

almost done...

Alright, it's been one week so far.

I'm almost done with Cutting for Stone, which means I'm not quite making my goal of one book per week, but since this book is 658 pages long, I think that's ok. Sadly, I'm not going to finish the last hundred pages tonight, since my thesis update is tomorrow and I should probably at least pretend to be well rested and prepared.

But I would gobble it up right now if I could. This book is just SO good. My mother-in-law recommended it, so if Bev Lu ever gives you reading suggestions, do as she tells you. The woman knows her literature. (Hi Bev!)

I will post a thoroughly gushing review as soon as I'm actually done with this book.

Now back to my thesis...

Day One

I own too many books. WAY too many books. And still I keep buying more. It's an addiction, I guess. But now the guilt has gotten to me. I have resolved that before I can buy a SINGLE NEW BOOK, I have to finish all the ones I already own.

Here's the loooooong list of books I own but have not read:

1. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler
2. The Amateur Marriage - Anne Tyler
3. The Accidental Tourist - Anne Tyler
4. The Bean Trees - Barbara Kingsolver
5. Animal Dreams - Barbara Kingsolver
6. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle - Barbara Kingsolver
7. The Lacuna - Barbara Kingsolver
8. Midwives - Chris Bohjalian
9. Bluebird, or the Invention of Happiness - Sheila Kohler
10. Good in Bed - Jennifer Weiner
11. Certain Girls - Jennifer Weiner
12. I Know This Much is True - Wally Lamb
13. Reading Lolita in Tehran - Azar Nafisi
14. Girl, Interrupted - Susanna Kaysen
15. Kitchen Confidential - Anthony Bourdain
16. The Carbon Age - Eric Roston
17. Motiba's Tattoos - Mira Kamdar
18. Like Water for Chocolate - Laura Esquirel
19. March - Geraldine Brooks
20. Pope Joan - Donna Woolfolk Cross
21. China Men - Maxine Hong Kingston
22. Rut - Scott Phillips
23. The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency - Alexander McCall Smith
24. Stones From the River - Ursula Hegi
25. A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
26. The Piano Teacher - Janice Y. K. Lee
27. The Midwife - Jennifer Worth
28. Summer - Edith Wharton
29. Short Stories - Edith Wharton
30. The Ruins of Us - Keija Parssinen
31. The Memory Keeper's Daughter - Kim Edwards
32. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius - Dave Eggers
33. Mennonite in a Little Black Dress - Rhoda Janzen
34. Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese
35. Minaret - Leila Aboulela
36. The Clan of the Cave Bear - Jean M. Auel
37. The Tombs of Atuan - Ursula K Le Guin
38. Dragonflight - Anne McCaffrey
39. Wicked - Gregory Maguire
40. The Lost Daughters of Happiness - Geling Yan
41. White Ghost Girls - Alice Greenway
42. Empress - Shan Sa
43. The Good Earth - Pearl S Buck
44. Dream of the Red Chamber - Tsao Hsueh-Chin
45. Tears of the Cheetah - Stephen J. O'Brien
46. The Canon - Natalie Angier
47. The Common Thread - John Sulston and Georgina Ferry
48. Zorro - Isabel Allende
49. Silas Marner - George Eliot
50. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
51. North and South - Elizabeth Gaskell
52. Wives and Daughters - Elizabeth Gaskell
53. Cranford - Elizabeth Gaskell
54. Possession - A.S. Byatt
55. Agnes Grey - Anne Bronte
56. Servants of the Map - Andrea Barrett
57. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
58. Silent Spring - Rachel Carson
59. The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat - Oliver Sacks
60. Nickel and Dimed - Barbara Ehrenreich
61. The Bone Woman - Clea Koff
62. Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA - Brenda Maddox
63. Incantations - Anjana Appachana
64. Love is a Mix Tape - Rob Sheffield
65. The Friday Night Knitting Club - Kate Jacobs
66. London - Edward Rutherfurd
67. The Dancing Girls of Lahore - Louise Brown

It's a fairly random mix of fiction and non-fiction and, in my defense, I did not buy all of them. I did purchase the vast majority, though. I wonder how much of my total net worth (however meager it may be) is tied up in my substantial library.

There are a couple authors who show up a lot on the list. I have a habit of reading one book by an author and, if I like it, trying to read everything else the person has ever written. I've read the complete works of Isabel Allende, Amy Tan, Jane Austen and Matt Ridley by this method. I'm going to guess Mr. Ridley never thought his name would show up on a list right after Ms. Austen. This is what happens when a book worm goes into science for a career.

Of course, if I like an author and buy her other works without actually reading them... they end up on this list. Oops. I read Digging to America and A Patchwork Planet by Anne Tyler and really liked them, so I rapidly accumulated books by her... and haven't read them yet. Shame on me. The same pattern was followed for Jennifer Weiner (based on In Her Shoes) and Barbara Kingsolver (based on The Poisonwood Bible).

There are also some books that I purchased with the intent of "improving myself" through reading... or at least making myself sound better in conversation with my better-read friends. These include Reading Lolita in Tehran and Girl, Interrupted. I can't pretend to be intellectually rigorous just by having them gathering dust... though it is tempting.

And then there are some books that I bought simply because they were on sale at a used book store. I have a serious weakness for used books. For examples, see: The Carbon Age, Motiba's Tattoos and Pope Joan.

So, now I have to read all these books. I think one book per week sounds reasonable. I'll give myself two weeks for particularly long books like I Know This Much is True (897 pages... eek!) and hopefully take less time to finish up short reads like Love is a Mix Tape. If I absolutely hate a book, I'm not going to force myself to finish it. But I must make it at least halfway through before deciding to move on. I will use a random number generator to pick each new book, using the numbers in the list above, but I'm going to start with Cutting for Stone, since I'm already well into that one.

Ok, I think that sufficiently sets up the ground rules. Here goes the grand experiment!