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.