A Year in Books: The Best of the Best

Looking back on what I've blogged about in the last year, I've had a chance to catch up with some amazing books, as well as to discover some talented writers like Curtis Sittenfeld.

Here's a list of favorites, along with links to my posts about them:

The Raising by Laura Kasischke
Longbourn by Jo Baker
The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion
Where'd You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple

Sense and Sensibility by Joanna Trollope
Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld
Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw

And then there were some books that almost made the best of the best list. I enjoyed them, but not quite as wholeheartedly as the others:
 
The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan (Amazing narrative voice in an utterly chaotic and violent world.)
Northanger Abbey by Val McDermid (I loved her decision to relocate the action to the Edinburgh Book Festival. I just wasn't as impressed by her translation of the Gothic.)
The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling)
The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling)

One last book that I enjoyed, but didn't quite love, was Alice McDermott's Someone. I appreciated the quietly observant narrative voice, and the fact that it was an absorbing book where very little happened. It starts to fall apart, though, in the last quarter when McDermott starts bringing in more dramatic plot points, as though she felt like she needed to speed up the action for the conclusion.

As for the so-so, or even terrible, books, I've already had my say about them.

Now I'm just wondering what I should read next...

A New Year, A New Name

It's been just about a year since I started this blog, and I'm celebrating by giving it a new name: Shelf Space. When I first started blogging as Chick Lit and Cozies, I really did think that's what I was going to focus on. In the last year, I've found that I wanted to write about about a wider range of books and genres, as well as the book world in general - including both publishing and libraries. The new name reflects those wider interests.

As for what I've been reading...I've been on vacation for the last few weeks, so I've gotten very behind in blogging - but not at all behind in reading. I made the monumental mistake of bringing two enormous novels from the library along on my camping trip, so I spent an inordinate amount of effort making sure they didn't get as wet as the rest of us. I probably won't get around to full reviews anytime soon, so here are my thoughts in capsule form:

The Book of Life by Deborah Harkness: Really, really disappointing, especially in the first third. Once my expectations were sufficiently lowered, I was able to enjoy the last third of it, but I really wish this had been a stronger conclusion to the trilogy. The best parts of this book are when Harkness puts aside the totally incoherent, over-the-top plot and focuses in on the details of the magical world, such as when the house torments everyone by incessantly playing Fleetwood Mac. The worst parts in this book are the plot and the unconvincing bad guys. I pictured them all twisting their mustaches and leering. And, why on earth would witches think that the way to figure out a witch's power is to open one up? Did they think magical power is like a kidney stone?

The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling): This book, on the other hand, was not disappointing at all, but rather a thoroughly enjoyable mystery. The solution is a little anticlimactic, but Rowling does such a good job with creating a mystery and cast of characters that it doesn't matter. This isn't really a far stretch from the Harry Potter books, which are mostly mysteries in a magical world themselves.

Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld: I was curious about Sittenfeld because I know that she's updating Pride and Prejudice for the Austen Project for Harper Collins. When I read the blurb about the book, I was expecting a kind of escapist mean girls plot, but that's not it at all. This book was totally absorbing - a really well crafted, heartbreaking story with an incredibly frustrating protagonist.

When Not to Finish a Book

There's a lively debate out there about the virtues of finishing books (or not). I've spent years feeling a sense of obligation to finish every book that I start, and it's only recently that I've allowed myself to leave behind the ones that I'm not enjoying. There's no reason that reading should feel like a chore, especially considering how many books are out there that I do want to read, but will probably never have time to get to. Re-discovering the pleasure of reading is something that I've written about before and think is important.

So, here is a partial list of books that I gave up on this year, along with some very subjective reasons why:

Amy Tan's The Valley of Amazement:  
I was really excited about this book when it first came out. I loved The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife, but I hadn't read anything else by Tan since I was an undergraduate.

The Valley of Amazement is ok. I didn't particularly care about the main character, and that made me realize that part of what I liked about The Joy Luck Club was how engaging and real the characters felt. I don't always have to like the characters in a novel, but it isn't a good sign when I just don't care about what's happening to the main character.

In the long run, it wasn't the main character that made me give up on this one, but instead a graphic scene involving a medical procedure that left me feeling queasy. Maybe that's being too sensitive on my part, but, added to the fact that I didn't care much about the storyline, I just didn't feel like continuing to read. I don't think that we need to go so far as to put trigger warnings on all new novels, although that's a complicated issue that I will write more about at some point. At the same time, I'm just not particularly interested in reading graphic descriptions of violence or brutal medical procedures. If that makes me an overly sensitive reader, or if it means that I'm unwilling to tackle gritty subjects, that's just the way it is.

Dave Eggers's The Circle: 
Topic-wise, I should have loved this novel. I feel all sorts of ambivalence toward Facebook, and I can imagine really enjoying a conspiracy-theory book about corporate data-mining. However, this one left me completely cold for many reasons, not least of which that the main character is a non-entity.

Even more than that, I found certain elements totally unbelievable. Obviously, something this dystopic is going to have unrealistic elements, but they have to be somewhat credible. It felt like Eggers was slipping up on details that should be easy. For example, the online customer service help desk that the main character works at isn't remotely like a customer service desk anywhere. In what world does a list of FAQ's really answer all the scenarios that your customers ask about? In the tech world? Really? Then, in what world are ALL your customers that satisfied, no matter how brilliant and customer service-oriented you are? Sorry, don't believe it. I didn't get much further than this sequence before I gave up.

Donna Tartt's The Secret History:

I started this book after multiple friends told me that I had to read it, and I have no idea what the hype is all about. The writing isn't particularly engaging, and the storyline is neither believable nor compelling. The main character is a young man who goes off to an east coast college to get away from his awful family, and he becomes absolutely determined to get into this Greek class, despite the fact that the professor is really strange and doesn't want to let him in. The main character follows the extremely insular clique of Greek students around, and they seem unpleasant and totally unbelievable (although my husband tells me that I might have found them more believable if I had gone to Bennington). Eventually, they clue him into what he needs to do to get into the class, and he says the magic words to the professor. When he does get in the class, things get really dull, and he is more and more cut off from anything going on in the rest of the school. As time passes, the students in the Greek class get weirder and weirder, and then it seems that someone dies in the middle of some sort of Bachanalian rite...and then I stopped reading because I really didn't care. 

Bernhardt Wilton's Lookaway, Lookaway:

This novel seemed promising when I read the review, but I very quickly tired of what felt like a caricature of southern life. It didn't seem like Wilton was interested in creating characters so much as types who would behave in stereotypically predictable ways. When the frat boys were about to rape a farm animal, I gave up.

There are a few others that I've given up on in the last few months, but this is a representative sample. Reading this over, I see that characterization is important to me, as well as a realistic plot. It's not that I don't like fantasy, but I don't want to spend the whole novel thinking "who does that?"

What are some books that you've given up on?

 

Joanna Trollope's Modern Take on Sense and Sensibility

 Erica by Donald Durham is CC BY-ND 2.0

Sense and Sensibility has never been my favorite Austen novel, but after reading Joanna Trollope's updated version, I'm looking forward to re-reading it. Trollope's version was the first in the Austen Project's re-writings, and I think that it works even better than Val McDermid's Northanger Abbey, which I reviewed recently. In addition to being highly entertaining, Trollope's version works because, on the whole, there aren't any off notes or any moments where the connections to Austen's novel seem forced. Trollope has seamlessly incorporated modern equivalents for the situations in which the characters find themselves, and I think that she does it effectively - and, for me, she's done it in a way that makes me see Austen's novel anew.

Here's what I mean: years ago, when I read Sense and Sensibility in Pat Spacks's Austen and Richardson class, she remarked that this is a novel about depressed men. She's absolutely right about that - Edward Ferrars and Colonel Brandon, in particular, are depressed figures, and the women's challenge is to change their emotional registers and expectations to match those of the men.

In Trollope's re-writing of Sense and Sensibility, none of this is lost, but she also emphasizes the extent to which Marianne's enthusiasms, depths of despair, and disconnectedness are connected to depression. And she doesn't do this in a way that simply diagnoses her (which I would have hated), but rather makes her character make more sense to me as a reader. It's not that these elements aren't in Austen's novel, but they somehow came through to me more clearly in this version.

Likewise, she translates Marianne's passion for poetry into a love for moody pop music, which Marianne strums on her guitar as she wallows in teen-agerly angst. Even her physical delicacy is made more legible with Trollope's choice to make her an extreme asthmatic.

When updatings of classic novels work, they not only entertain, but also render what is historically distant understandable to a modern reader - even to a modern reader who has spent a good deal of time reading Austen and studying the novels in their historical context. For undergraduates encountering Austen for the first time, her novels can seem incredibly foreign and incomprehensible. Why is it such a big deal that Marianne is sending Willoughby letters in London? Why can't Elinor and her mother just go out and get jobs? How much money do they need? One of the most useful essays on explaining money in Austen's novels is Edward Copeland's contribution to Approaches to Teaching Pride and Prejudice, where he avoids attempting to quantify the value of money in modern terms, but rather in terms of quality of life - i.e., how many servants you could afford on X pounds a year and what that meant in terms of labor you had to do yourself.

For me, one of the reasons that Trollope's Sense and Sensibility works so well is because she renders the circumstances of Austen's characters in modern terms - and she does so in a way that makes me want to revisit the novel. That's not to say that any of these translations are necessarily accurate, but only that they are a useful lens for revisiting Austen's novel.

And, aside from the pitch perfect translation of Austen's world to the modern day, Trollope has done a marvelous job rendering the characters, especially the most obnoxious. Her Fanny Dashwood is brilliant, as are Mrs. Jennings and her son. As a reader, you're right there with Elinor and Marianne wanting to throttle all three of them. What more could you ask for?

Love, Lies, and Facebook at the Book Festival: Val McDermid Re-Writes Northanger Abbey

Performer on the Royal Mile by Tom Brogan is CC BY-ND 2.0

I haven't yet gotten around to reading Joanna Trollope's version of Sense and Sensibility, but I rushed right out and got a copy of Val McDermid's Northanger Abbey as soon as I read Jo Baker's review in the New York Times. McDermid's Northanger Abbey is the second installment in Harper Collins's Austen Project, and it is soon to be followed by Curtis Sittenfeld's Pride and Prejudice and Alexander McCall Smith's Emma. (Full disclosure: I'm not a big Alexander McCall Smith fan, so I'm not in a big rush for that one to come out.)

There has been no shortage of reimaginings of Austen's works in recent years, and Harper Collins's series is up against the brilliant Lizzie Bennet Diaries and Emma Approved by Pemberley Digital, as well as Jo Baker's Longbourn (which I reviewed in an earlier post). In the rush to remake all things Austen, Northanger Abbey is the novel that has gotten relatively little attention, however. As Val McDermid explains in the Huffington Post, updating Northanger Abbey is complicated because its satire on Gothic fiction requires more decoding for modern readers than the love plots of her other novels. I'm not sure that I agree about that, but it is certainly true that Northanger Abbey hasn't been re-made as relentlessly as the other novels. For that reason alone, McDermid's novel is particularly welcome.

I thoroughly enjoyed the first half of McDermid's version. Her decision to move Catherine's (or Cat's) trip from Bath to the Edinburgh Book Festival is an excellent one, and the venue aptly evokes the atmosphere of Austen's crowded scenes of pleasure seekers hoping to see and be seen. Even apart from the connection to Austen's novel, the sequences in Edinburgh work in McDermid's Northanger Abbey as Cat comes under the sway of Isabella Thorpe, barely conceals her disgust at the obnoxious Johnny Thorpe, and becomes enamored of Henry Tilney - facebooking, texting, selfie-taking, and tweeting along the way. Edinburgh in August is the perfect destination for Cat's trip with the Allens, and it's easy to understand why she gets swept up in the excitement.

When the action moves to Northanger Abbey itself, however, it slows down and becomes somewhat less engrossing. There are two reasons for this: 1) often seen from afar in the crowds of Edinburgh, Henry Tilney is understandable as a distant figure. However, once they're staying the same house, Tilney remains friendly, but there doesn't seem to be any actual chemistry between the two of them. 2) The Gothic storyline doesn't work as well as the fast-paced excitement of the sequences in Edinburgh.

Superficially, drawing a Gothic parallel to the Twilight series should work perfectly because of its overwrought romance and the evolving conventions of the vampire myth. In McDermid's novel, however, the Gothic elements somehow aren't believable and feel tacked on. Whenever Cat looks at General Tilney or Henry and wonders if they're vampires, it doesn't feel credible. It doesn't help that the fictive horror series that she's addicted to - the Hebridean Harpies - reminds me of the campy grade-school series American Chillers that my son used to really like.

I know, I know. Cat's belief in General Tilney as Gothic villain is supposed to be absurd. In Austen's novel, Catherine's determination to find horror is the object of satire, and the entire point is that she has no actual basis for her fantasies about the General.

The difference, though, is that Austen is able to sell Catherine's fantasy to us so that we both laugh at her silliness and understand its appeal. If you don't believe me, re-read the scene where Catherine investigates the black cabinet in the middle of a rainstorm (chapter 21). Catherine's anxiety is palpable, and Austen's prose evokes just the right atmoshere, even while she makes sure that we don't forget just how much Catherine longs to find a mystery just like this one. McDermid's novel, while enjoyable, doesn't work quite the same magic.

Nevertheless, McDermid's Northanger Abbey is worth reading - especially for the first half.

What To Do with All These Books?: Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

If I had a time machine and could travel forward 150 years, I would find someone studying literary history and insist that she should read Robin Sloan's Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore if she wants to understand the complicated relationship between books and computers in 2014.

Yes, I know, that probably sounds sort of strange as a fantasy. However, as someone who studies literature, it makes sense. There is much debate about how representative any set of texts might be, whether we're talking about the canon, forgotten works that have been recently recovered, or the abundance of novels that we now have the technology to study without actually reading. The most significant realization to come out of distant reading is that we can no longer pretend that the narrow swath of books that we've traditionally studied is anything but a tiny fraction of what was read in a particular period.

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, on the other hand, is beautifully representative because it absolutely captures our relation to technology in the current moment. A similar example is Sophie Kinsella's I've Got Your Number, which weaves our dependence on smart phones into its narrative structure.

Let me back up: Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore is a novel about seeing books - books as data, books as holding mystical secrets, books as narratives. The narrator dabbles in data visualization, and the book's central quest begins with him visualizing the "reading" (decoding, actually) patterns of the strange patrons who frequent the bookstore where he works.

I don't want to give too much away, but the tensions in the narrative come from competing ideas about what books are for. Google, and all of its computational power, is pitted against traditional and mystical ways of interacting with books. On one level, this is a narrative about whether books are information to be processed or narratives to be savored. Ultimately, what's at stake is what we want from books in the context of both large-scale digitization and the labor-intensive study that we often devote to books that are deemed worthy of unpacking. I won't tell you who wins.

The Costs of Amazon's War with Hachette

Recent publishing news has been dominated by the fight between Amazon and Hachette  over e-book pricing. Although details of the negotiations are not public, we do know that Amazon has already taken retributive action against Hachette by removing the pre-order option for Hachette titles, not offering the usual discount on Hachette hardcover titles, and keeping their stock of Hachette titles low enough to slow down shipments. As many observers have pointed out, Amazon's tactics have hurt their customers as much as publishers and authors because the online retailer isn't stocking merchandise that their customers want. For many shoppers who have come to rely on the convenience of Amazon - and for those whose local brick and mortar bookstores have closed down - this severely limits their access to Hachette titles. Amazon recently posted a statement explaining this tactic as business as usual and part of negotiations on behalf of its customers.

Why does this matter?

1) It reduces options for shoppers: Gumming up access to Hachette titles means that shoppers lose access to A LOT of books. Hachette owns Little, Brown, which publishes a lot of mainstream fiction, including JK Rowling's new Cormoran Strike book, The Silkworm. For shoppers whose local brick and mortar bookstores have closed down, options are limited.

2) It is going to determine the terms for other publishers: As Jeremy Greenfield explains in the Atlantic, Amazon controls much of the book - and most especially the e-book market - and this is the first big fight over e-book pricing following the court ruling against Apple for supposedly colluding with publishers to fix prices in the e-book market (a charge that Apple disputes). Hachette is not only the first publisher to come up for contract negotiations with Amazon since the ruling's two-year embargo on negotiations, but it is also one of the biggest. The outcome of this fight is likely to dictate terms for other publishers.

3) If Hachette loses, it's going to hurt publishers: Most people are angry about Amazon's tactics for numerous reasons, not least of which is the perception that Amazon is trying to put publishers out of business. Authors and (unsurprisingly) independent booksellers have condemned Amazon for its actions. As Brad Stone asserts in The Everything Store, Amazon views publishers as "sickly" gazelles and itself as a cheetah. 

Now, most people would agree that publishers are not entire innocents: they are businesses, after all, and they are not always operating in their authors' best interests in terms of profit sharing. Their emphasis on profits leads them to reject a lot of books that they don't anticipate being able to sell, which means that there is potentially less experimentation in the book market and more emphasis on commercial viability. Many authors have been drawn to self-publishing on Amazon because they can get their work out there, which gives them a platform to market their work and, perhaps most importantly, make more per title than they ever would through traditional publishers. This has led many to assert that publishers and, indeed editors, are not necessary in the book world.

I disagree. Not with the proposition that there is, perhaps, too much gatekeeping in the commercial publishing world. A good friend of mine who also happens to be a talented writer recently recounted her experiences talking to agents about her latest novel in process. It was a comedy of second-guessing marketability.

However, I do think that publishers and editors add significant value to the books that they produce. They select works with promise and usher them through the editorial process. A book rarely arrives on an editor's desk ready to publish, and a good editor has a sharp eye for a work that can be shaped into something better. I don't want to see editors and publishers driven out of business through Amazon's aggressive business model.

4) It gives Amazon even greater control over the self-publishing market: I am excited about the surge in indie-published work that we're experiencing. And, while Amazon has done quite a bit to foster that surge, the indie revolution is another reason that I want to see Amazon facing more robust competition.

Let me explain: I have written elsewhere about the problem with Kindle publishing from a long-term perspective. I know that not all authors are thinking about the long-term preservation of their books, but, as a librarian, it's my job to think about it. The library where I work is currently unable to purchase Kindle titles for the collection because we cannot loan them out. 

Further, there is no way for us to archive Kindle titles even if we could buy them to loan to our patrons. That means that we can't be certain that these titles will be available for future readers or for future researchers to study. That's what concerns me the most, and I am hoping to find a some sort of a solution. Regardless of the quality of any individual self-published title, we'll be faced with a huge gap in the literary record if we don't find some way to preserve a portion of the self-published titles that make up a substantial slice of the current publishing world. Imagine, for example, if no one had saved zines or eighteenth-century pamphlets.

I know that the Hachette Amazon dispute is not going to resolve the archiving question. However, I feel confident that we're not going to see any answers if one corporation has an e-book monopoly.

How to Create Suspense: Laura Kasischke's The Raising

Laura Kasischke's 2011 novel The Raising is an absolute page-turner. I raced through the last two hundred pages, both dreading what was coming next and needing to know. I'm not usually a big fan  of horror, but Kasischke's prose is so fluid and engaging that I was drawn in from the opening pages. That and the constant cliffhangers - which, admittedly, began to feel somewhat manipulative somewhere around the middle of the novel.

Kasischke's cliffhanger technique reminded me of Mary Higgins Clark novels that I read in college. Multiple narrative points of view - interlaced with suspense - means that the narrative shifts just as something interesting is about to happen. Each cliffhanger/shift would send me racing through the next section because I wanted to know what had happened to the character we'd just left behind. Then, just as I had become interested in another thread of the story, it would shift again.

I'm guessing this is pretty common to horror and suspense fiction. Indeed, it's a pretty common technique in fiction (see, for example, almost any novel by Trollope) because it's an effective way to build suspense. 

What struck me most about Kasischke's novel, however, was the sheer number of smaller chunks of narrative point of view or chronology that she was balancing. The novel is divided into a hundred or so chapters, as well as six sections, and Kasischke balances both multiple chronologies and points of view. There are 5 main narrative points of view - and even more characters with backstory - and absolutely everyone gets fully fleshed out. Not only does she move between those points of view, but the chronology is completely fragmented so you don't learn about the events that began the narrative until the end. 

And all the narrative units are balanced masterfully here, even managing to camouflage what is ultimately an overly complicated storyline. It wasn't until

I was recounting the plot to my husband in chronological order that I realized how much too much it all was. As I was reading it, I was totally along for the ride.

And all of this made me start wondering about the writer's process. How does one construct, storyboard, and keep track of such an elaborate narrative? Is it all carefully planned out in advance or does the writer create first a straightforward narrative and then slice it up and fit it back together like a jigsaw puzzle until just the right effect has been created? I kind of like the idea of jigsaw puzzle writing, but the narrative process is probably much more deliberate than that. Considering the degree of control Kasischke commands over the narrative, I imagine that the sense of skilled orchestration in the final third of her novel doesn't happen by accident.

Put on Hold: The Library Ebook Borrowing Dilemma

In general, I prefer reading books in print, except when I'm traveling. As I've discussed in the past, whenever I'm on the road, I would infinitely rather bring my Kindle along loaded with a few books to read or not--depending on my mood. That's the main thing: I never quite know what my reading mood is going to be when I'm on the road, and I almost never actually want to read what I've brought with me. That's mostly because I tend to bring books with me out of obligation--i.e., books that I feel I should read rather than books I want to read. (A topic that I've talked about at length here.)

So, bringing my Kindle along is the perfect solution, and I love that I can check books out electronically through my public library and Overdrive. In theory, when I decide that I'm not really interested in whatever critical study I've brought with me, I can download the chick lit novel that I might actually enjoy.

The only problem is that I never want to read any of the books that are available for checkout at any given moment. As a result, I search through the options and wind up putting a the handful of books I'd actually like to read on hold for the future. Unfortunately, by the time those books are available, I'm usually in the midst of some other book or a busy semester and have no time to read.

Here's what I wish: that when you put books on hold--either ebooks or, for that matter, any books from the library--you could set a target date. That way, if your book becomes available earlier, it would just move to the next patron. Then, when your target date arrives, you would move to the front of the queue.

I know, I know. That would be a logistical nightmare for libraries and whoever manages the queues for ebooks. I also know that I could buy books for my Kindle...but I can dream, can't I?

Somebody's Top 100 Mysteries, But Not Mine

From The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rhinehart (1908). 

http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015002717935?urlappend=%3Bseq=30

When I saw a link on Twitter asking if I had read the top 101 crime novels of all time, of course I clicked on it. The quiz is based on a list of the 100 top mysteries of all time compiled by Mystery Writers of America (for some reason, it's actually 101). When I took the quiz, I was surprised only to score a 32 because I'm a pretty devoted mystery reader.

And then I realized what was missing from the list: women. Ok, it's not that there aren't any women on the list--there are, in fact, 23 books authored by women on the list. However, it is still an overwhelmingly male list, and it also doesn't really represent the kinds of mysteries that I like. Why are there so many Graham Greene and John Le Carré titles on the list? I know both Greene and Le Carré are very popular, but their spy thrillers tend to put me to sleep. Where's Anna Katherine Green's That Affair Next Door? Josephine Tey's Miss Pym Disposes? M.M. Kaye? Patricia Wentworth? How on earth did Sara Paretsky not make the list? And, why is Margery Allingham only on the secondary, "recommended" list?

There are a lot of really good mysteries on that list, but, on the whole, it doesn't look at all like the must-read list that I would put together. Maybe I'll have to get to work on that...

What would you add?

A (Very) Little Romance: Match Me If You Can by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

I wasn't planning on writing a review of Susan Elizabeth Phillips's chick lit novel Match Me If You Can, but it left such a bad impression on me that I must. I started out by enjoying it: the quirky opening seemed promising as the protagonist pleads with a drunk who has passed out under her car. She has to get to a crucial meeting that will supposedly save her business. The main character, Annabelle, is trying to revive her late grandmother's matchmaking service so that she can show her family that she's not a total failure, and her meeting is with a millionaire sports agent looking for a wife. At first, she seems pretty engaging, especially when she's sparring with her high profile client, Heath Champion (aka, the Python). The best part of this novel is her refusal to treat him like a superstar who's always right.

As the novel continued, however, I began to have misgivings. The first moment was when Portia, Annabelle's business rival, begins a relationship with Heath's bodyguard-with-a-heart-of-gold, Bodie. From the beginning, Portia is presented as a bitchy, overly ambitious businesswoman who is hated by all of her staff--because, you know, all high-powered female executives are unfeeling monsters making ridiculous demands under the guise of "high standards." I feel pretty confident that she'd have a lawsuit on her hands for forcing her employees to undress for regular, public weigh-ins. Of course, I'm not a high-powered lawyer, so what do I know? Her relationship with Bodie hinges on his understanding that she needs to be dominated in order for her real, softer side to come out. It reminded me of the first Vicky Bliss novel, Borrower of the Night, where her chauvinist colleague, Tony, says that she just needs to be dominated. Unlike Portia, Vicky treats this comment as the piece of ridiculousness that it is. Portia, however, has a life-changing experience. Ick.

Aside from the Portia sub-plot, Annabelle's friends felt like a bunch of stereotypes, as did the male athletes whom she bosses around whenever they show up to hang out with her (and I personally couldn't imagine why they put up with her. She really didn't seem like a lot of fun). The women are all part of a book club, but the men don't like to read. The women all get together to watch female erotica, and the men sit around talking football.

And then there are the sex scenes....there was a *lot* about women opening up like flowers and things like that. I think the romantic scenes would have been more effective without all of the over-the-top imagery. I read a reviewer somewhere saying that Phillips usually writes really good sex scenes, but these read a bit more like gynaecological exams.

As you might be able to tell, I wasn't particularly impressed with Match Me If You Can. I hadn't heard of Susan Elizabeth Phillips before finding this one in my public library's ebook database, and I was surprised to discover how incredibly popular she is. To each his or her own, I guess.

Finding a Place on the Prairie: Bich Minh Nguyen's Pioneer Girl

"Wagon Wheel" by David Hepworth is licensed under CC by 2.0

Pioneer Girl by Bich Minh Nguyen is the story of Lee Lien, a second generation Vietnamese-American, who is obsessed with the Little House on the Prairie books. For Lee, the Little House books are more than a great series, but also a way for her to come to terms with her own nomadic childhood and uncertain sense of self. Like Laura Ingalls Wilder, Lee's childhood and adolescence was punctuated by frequent moves from one mid-western town to another. In Lee's case, she and her brother criss-crossed the mid-west with her mother and grandfather who supported the family by managing a series of Chinese buffet restaurants.

Some of the strongest sections of the book come in Lee's descriptions of her many childhood moves and the seemingly identical restaurants that her family manages. Nguyen skilfully interweaves a sense of dislocation, as well as the subtle, and not so subtle, layers of racism experienced by Lee and her family. Lee underscores the irony that her Vietnamese mother and grandfather run generic Chinese restaurants catering to a clientele that isn't particularly interested in the difference. The restaurant that Lee's family owns at the end of the story finds a degree of success, in part, by developing their own recipes for banh mi and jettisoning the orientalized script that characterizes so many Chinese menus.

Likewise, Lee must find her own identity in this story, and this, unsurprisingly, is not a straightforward question for her. She is unmoored in multiple ways: her second-generation immigrant identity in a rented apartment in a mid-western town leaves her with no clear sense of home; she has recently finished a PhD program, but has no job--in part, her adviser suggests, because she wrote a dissertation on Edith Wharton rather than on ethnic lit; and, for many reasons, she can't connect with either her mother or her brother.

As an escape from these various crises, she becomes intrigued by the possible connection between her family and Rose Wilder Lane, Laura Ingalls Wilder's daughter, who may have visited Lee's family's restaurant in Vietnam and left behind a gold pin. As the story progresses, this connection reveals other connections: between Lee's constantly-moving childhood and Laura's, as well as Rose's vexed relationship with her mother and Lee's own family situation.

To some extent, this novel is most effective at the upper registers. What I mean is that Nguyen has created a compelling main character, and the broad brushstrokes of Lee's experience present an absorbing view of an individual and of her family's experience as immigrants. What didn't work quite as well for me were some of the machinations of the plot: the brother's anger at the family, the family friend who may or may not have helped them out at various points, and the search for Rose's grandson. As a reader, I didn't care as much about those elements as about Lee's narration of her lived experience. For me, it was enough that Lee was obsessed with Rose and wanted to find out more of her story by reading her letters and diaries and visiting places where her she lived. While Lee's interest in Rose made little sense to her family, it made perfect sense within the logic of this narrative.

Becoming a Pioneer Girl

I was browsing in our local bookstore this morning, and I came across Bich Minh Nguyen's Pioneer Girl, a novel that interweaves a literature PhD's childhood love of the Laura Ingalls Wilder novels with her own family's immigrant history. I immediately knew this is a book that I *must* read: I loved the Laura Ingalls Wilder books as a child, it has a mystery at the heart of it, and the novel revolves around questions of American identity.

I was also drawn to the story because it brought to mind a recent conversation that I had with a grad student about how many historians could trace their scholarly interests to the Laura books. As the grad student put it, Laura's stories, with all their minute detail about daily life and making things like maple candy, are a "gateway drug" for young history-minded readers, especially young girls. Likewise, I'd say my interest in nineteenth century lit comes from my favorite children's books: Little Women and the Little House series. Even though a much more critical re-reading of these stories as an adult has worn off some of their aura, I also have very fond memories of my childhood obsession with these semi-fictional/semi-autobiographical accounts of life in the nineteenth century. As a little girl, I wanted to be one of those characters. If I were in elementary school right now, I'd probably be addicted to the American Girl stories, even though I don't think they are nearly as well written as the Little House series. I was sad to read recently that the American Girl doll series is moving away from the historical focus toward dolls that are marketed as mini versions of their owners. I may be romanticizing my own childhood too much, but this seems like a missed opportunity to spark young girls interest in history.

This is a long way of saying that I'm bringing a LOT of baggage to Pioneer Girl. I'll let you know what I think of it when I'm done. 

Teaching Notes, Or What I learned during My Winter Semester

I haven't been posting much in the last few months because most of my reading time has been taken up by prepping for my women's lit class. Teaching this class has been a learning experience for me. I came into it with all sorts of assumptions--e.g., that students taking a women's lit class would automatically be enthusiastic about the material, that many of them would be practiced readers, and that they would already be familiar with canonical novels like Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre from high school or other English classes. On the first day, I realized how naive I had been: only two or three of them had read P&P or JE, few of them had experience (much less enjoyed) reading fiction, and most of them were there to fulfill a general education requirement.

We began the semester with Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre, two books that I originally worried would be too familiar, but also assumed everyone would be excited about reading. As it happened, the students were overwhelmed by the reading load and I'm fairly confident that they weren't all able to keep up. Even the more advanced students found the prose really difficult to understand, so it was hard for them to get through over a hundred pages per week.

 As a result, the focus has been on making the texts legible by walking through extended scenes, reading aloud, and focusing on who's speaking and what's being referred to. Our most productive time in class has been spent taking turns reading sections aloud to help the students figure out what is happening in a particular scene before attempting any kind of analysis. My hope is that the novels have made more sense to them and that--maybe--they've even enjoyed them more as a result.

For the second half of the class, we're reading a series of short stories from the Norton Anthology of Women's Literature, and I'm hoping that the reading will be more manageable and more enjoyable for them because they won't be racing to keep up. Next time I teach this class, I'm going to assign more short stories so that we can really break down each story in class. Last week, we did a close reading exercise using a passage from Edith Wharton's "The Angel at the Grave," and the students seemed to find the process of paraphrasing the text to be both challenging and productive. It's so tempting to stray from the text in discussion, but a paraphrase exercise forces you to focus on what's on the page. Once they had a better idea about what the passage was saying, they were in a better position to pay attention to its language and imagery--and then to move on to thinking about the effects of those elements.

On the whole, I can say that I have learned as much this semester as (I hope) my students have. I am looking forward to teaching this class again at some point so that I can incorporate what I've learned into the syllabus from the beginning. It's easy to forget that a syllabus is more than just deciding what you want the students to read and that it can take several iterations before you have crafted a successful class. For this semester, it has been enough to be reminded that my job is to teach my students how to be readers and thinkers rather than just to expose them to a series of greatest hits.

Can You Trust Him?: The Rosie Project and the Unreliable Narrator

I'll say right at the outset that Graeme Simion's The Rosie Project is a delightful novel. Simsion has a light touch and has created a completely engaging narrative voice that has just the right balance of objective distance and lack of self awareness.

This balancing act of objectivity and the inability to see himself clearly shows the ways in which Simsion is playing with the motif of the unreliable narrator. This figure plays a key role in creating narrative tension--an unreliable narrator who, at least at first, gives the impression of telling the reader everything in an open and trustworthy way means, when handled well, that the author can conceal the story in plain sight. Think of Lockwood, Wuthering Heights's opening narrator, who has absolutely no insight into Heathcliff's household. Or, Agatha Christie's criminal narrator in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, a narrative innovation which outraged many of her readers.

Simsion gives us a narrator whose scientific mindset, obsession with standardizing all aspects of his life, and social ineptitude allow him to dissect every encounter in a seemingly insightful and objective way. Of course, Don Tillman, the narrator, is completely deaf to all emotional aspects of any scene, which means that he has both uncanny insight into what is happening around him and doesn't get it at all.

What makes this really work, though, is Simsion's comedic touch. The Rosie Project is a funny novel. Reading this novel is a little like one of those thought experiments where a space alien arrives on earth and has to have the function of all objects and bahavioral norms explained. The humor is not accidental, either, and it brilliantly shows (rather than tells) what Don means when he says that he adopted humor as a defense mechanism.

While this novel works in many ways, it also made me wonder if it would have worked better as a short story. Not that it felt too long, but rather that the conceit of Don's hyper-objective narrative voice would have been so well suited to the freedom of the short story to capture a moment and move on without needing to adhere to the machinery of a novel's plot. For me, the novel worked less well toward the end when Don's narrative moves toward the inevitable conclusion and greater level of emotional awareness. The novel ends the way that the plot dictates that it should, but I felt a little sad to see it happen.

What is Women's Lit?

This semester I'm teaching again for the first time in a long time. I love my job as a librarian, but I sometimes feel like I spend most of my time pointing researchers toward sources rather than  actually engaging with those sources. So, I picked up a women's literature class at a university not too far away, and I'm back in the classroom.

There are many ways that I could have designed this course, but my main goal was to keep it as fun as possible, both for me and for the students. I've been reading a lot of chick lit in the past few years, so I was imagining a class that takes a look at the origins of chick lit. Looked at from that perspective, the obvious starting point was Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Bronte's Jane Eyre--in other words, two classic love stories that a lot of contemporary women's literature is responding to and revising.

Once I had decided on my motif for the class--i.e., how women writers have been re-writing and re-thinking the ways in which P&P and JE set up the love story as defining women's opportunities--I had to decide which texts to spend the rest of the semester reading. There are so many possibilities that I finally decided to punt on the question by assigning the Norton Anthology of Women's Lit and giving myself some room on this first time through with the course to figure out exactly what it's about.

I'm pretty content with the shape of the course and its readings, which run from Sui Sin Far up to Toni Morrison and Jhumpa Lahiri. The Norton has a pretty diverse selection of texts, so we'll be able to look at the love story, and narratives about plots and possibilities for women, from different perspectives of race, class, gender, and sexuality. My plan is to transition from Jane Eyre to the second half of the class by having us read an excerpt from Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl where she says "Reader, I didn't marry him" so that we can talk about how narratives for black women were different from that of a Jane Eyre, regardless of how disadvantaged Jane may have seemed in her own story. I also plan to bring in Rachel Blau DuPlessis's Writing Beyond the Ending to frame the second half of the class in terms of her claim that twentieth-century women writers create stories that are intentionally not leading up to the traditional happy ending of marriage.

Once I had all this in place, however, I realized that the narrative that my syllabus has a distinct problem: plenty of contemporary women's fiction, especially chick lit, is about the happy ending defined romantically. In fact, that's one of the criticisms of chick lit, and many would say that chick lit is unfairly dismissed for exactly those reasons. So, by focusing on literary fiction that writes beyond the ending I'm not really staying true to the debates about what women are allowed to write or the ways in which women's fiction isn't always taken seriously.

Given that the semester is only 14 weeks long, and I can't pile on as much reading as I'd like, what would a women's lit syllabus that takes these questions into account look like? Something tells me that it is going to be several semesters before I have any answers.

The History of Mysteries: Miss Cayley, Detective

Grant Allen's Miss Cayley

Grant Allen serialized "Miss Cayley's Adventures" in the Strand magazine in 1898. The Strand is best known as the magazine where the Sherlock Holmes stories first appeared. Capitalizing on the popularity of mysteries and the rise of feminists known as "New Women," Allen created an independent female detective who decides to solve the problem of supporting herself by traveling round the world in search of adventures. She turns out to be extremely resourceful as she solves mysteries, exposes fraud and hypocrisy, and upends expectations about proper womanhood. 

Anyone who's familiar with Allen's The Woman Who Did knows that his feminist credentials are questionable at best. This story is still worth reading, though, and Allen has created a likable, opinionated character in Miss Cayley.

The first installment, "The Adventure of the Cantankerous Old Woman," is available here.

From "The Adventure of the Cantankerous Old Woman"