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.