Wrong Number
Sep. 16th, 2008 10:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trinityofoneYeah, so I think that trip to London is off the table. My mom thought it was a terrible idea, and while I liked the thought of being impulsive!Trin, practical!Trin is much stronger and gave her other side a brutal smackdown. There may have been tears.
Thanks, though, to everyone who said they wanted to hang out—hopefully we still can someday soon! Just, not next month. :(
Instead I applied for Camp Obama, the program where you're given a weekend's training and then sent to a battleground state to campaign. I really, really want to be selected, but I haven't heard anything yet and now I can't think about anything else. Come on, man! Barack me!
In the meantime, here's Poor Attempt at Distraction Booklog:
158. Breakfast With the Ones You Love, Eliot Fintushel — There are an awful lot of books that deal with the end of the world, and almost all of them employ Christian mythology if they want to include a bit of spirituality. So it’s really cool to read an End of Days book that instead involves the Jewish faith. This book also has a really interesting heroine going for it: Lea can kill people with her brain, and she’s tried to make her emotions just as dead. First person narration has been bugging me lately, but I really liked her voice; it kept this book going when the narrative got bogged down.
And it did get bogged down. A lot of what happens feels needlessly complicated; there are a lot of scenes of old Jewish guys sitting around arguing, which on the one hand made me go, “Hee! It’s my relatives arguing!” but which on the other hand made me go, “Oy. It’s my relatives. Arguing.” I really appreciated the ways in which Fintushel strived to make this book different—the end result is one of the most original things I’ve read in a while. So I respected it, but I didn’t love it. Still, worth trying if you want to sample something out of the ordinary.
159. The Road to Civil War, Brian Michael Bendis, et. al. — Less interesting than the Iron Man: Civil War collection I read, and sadly, just as confused, as Marvel insists on assembling the stories that make up this arc in a seemingly random order. I enjoyed the issues with Peter and Tony (if there were a Peter Parker Fanboys Tony Stark book, I would read it gleefully), but I have no idea what the stuff about the Fantastic Four and Thor’s Hammer has to do with anything, because as far as this collection is concerned, we’re only privileged enough to read two random issues about it. I feel like I am being punished for only being a casual comics reader. Screw you too, Marvel.
Aww, you know I don’t mean it. Shiny comics: even when you are stupid and confusing, I will always take you back…
160. Books, Larry McMurtry — You will never guess what this book is about! Okay, fine, it’s about McMurtry’s second career as a bookseller and book scout. The emphasis is really on the minutiae of the bookselling biz—details about McMurtry’s life or his writing are scarce. He skips around a lot, too, both in time and in subject, so one short chapter may follow on another short chapter about something completely different. Thus it is not a particularly focused or well-organized book, though I still found it a charming one. But then I’m a bit of a book scout myself (even though I mostly just look for things I want to read rather than books I feel will be valuable), so the topic is one close to my heart. However, hardcore bibliophiles like myself are likely to be the only ones captivated by this scattered narrative.
161. All-American Girl, Meg Cabot — I was really hoping to take the political edge off with this humorous story of an average American teen who saves the president’s life and then has a fluffy romance with his son. It didn’t quite work. First, I couldn’t stop wishing that the book were more political—that Sam, the teenage heroine, would have stronger beliefs—there’s a short bit where she disagrees with the administration about the judging of an art contest, but that’s about it. Wouldn’t it be interesting to read about a teenager who saves the president’s life but really disagrees with his policies and has to figure out if it’s appropriate to use her new time in the spotlight to take a stand? I also kept wishing that this wasn’t another book about a rich girl—a rich, white girl who goes to private school and has an eccentric live-in housekeeper. It could have been so much more interesting if this book weren’t another story about a privileged kid getting to experience more privilege.
But I’m aware that if these are the things I want, I probably shouldn’t be reading Meg Cabot. (Why I continue to read Meg Cabot books at all is an entirely different question.) I still think I would have gotten more “it is what it is” enjoyment out of this book, however, if so much of the main conflict hadn’t come from Sam being an idiot. She starts the book with a crush on her sister’s boyfriend, Jack; then she meets the president’s son, David, and develops a crush on him as well. David likes her, too, but instead of rejoicing that a cute boy is into her, Sam spends the entire damn book doing angsty variations on “But I can’t like David! I like Jack!” Um, Sam, sweetie: you can like more than one person at once. Not to be Miss “I Have a Crush on EVERY Boy!”, but you can actually like many different people at once. And I totally knew that when I was fifteen. Which makes listening to someone whine about it for 300 pages not a particularly enjoyable reading experience.
Sigh. I’d still like to read a political pick-me-up book. Other than the wonderful Ellen Emerson White, anybody know of any?
162. My Most Excellent Year, Steve Kluger — Another blend of baseball, musical theater, and extreme sappiness from Steve Kluger. This one had some nice moments, but they were buried under a sloppy pile of unrealistic plotting, teenage characters who all sound alike and not at all like teenagers, and sheer tedium. It’s clear from the beginning which characters are going to hook up; it just takes an excessively long time for them to get there, and the ride wasn’t particularly fun. Kluger’s The Last Days of Summer contained a tolerable level of saccharine sentimentality, but Year pushes the sweetness too far, without a balancing dosage of tart. It knocked me into a diabetic coma.
163. Bad Cat, Jim Edgar — The wide availability of stupid cat pictures is one of the best things about the interwebs. Unfortunately, it makes Edgar’s book of stupid cat pictures pretty much redundant. If his accompanying text were even half as funny as most of the stuff on I Can Has Cheezburger, I wouldn’t mind the redundancy, as I like having humorous content in book form. (I would buy an I Can Has Cheezburger book if there were one.) But it’s really, really not. Thus it’s not so much a case of DO NOT WANT as DO NOT NEED.
164. The Monster of Florence, Douglas Preston & Mario Spezi — I wasn’t planning to read any more true crime for a while after freaking myself out so bad with Ann Rule’s The Stranger Beside Me. However, the hold I’d placed on this at the library chose now to come up. (The LAPL: conspiring to deny me sleep since 2000.) Luckily, this book isn’t as someone-is-going-to-kill-me-in-my-bed scary as that Ted Bundy tome. Yes, the crimes committed by Florence’s Monster—brutal slayings of couples parking in the Italian countryside—were horrific, but the true horror of this account involves the terrifyingly corrupt Italian legal system. Christ! This book made me pray that I am never busted for littering or jaywalking or, you know, looking kinda sketchy while in Italy, because you can apparently be held almost indefinitely without being charged, you can be picked up on trumped-up charges, and members of the police or the Italian-equivalent-DA’s office will ignore genuine evidence and let the real killer walk if doing so can result in career advancement. The kind of “believe the lie” political maneuvering depicted here reminded me way too much of the current election cycle here in America, and so reading this book stressed me out more than it freaked me out.
The story’s simply and clearly told, with (thankfully) very little time spent lingering over the gorier details. Preston does indulge in some weird Thomas Harris fanboying (Hannibal drew from aspects of the Monster case and was set in Florence), and the narrative suffers from being very frustrating, as the case has never been resolved. In general, the book is at times quite compelling, but not exactly enjoyable: even when I was fascinated, I wanted to scream. That’s life, I guess. May I have a novel with a happy ending now, please?
165. Superman: Secret Identity, Kurt Busiek — A cool AU take on the Superman mythology. Clark Kent’s parents named him “Clark Kent” for the LOLs, and now he’s a teenager and really sick of being made fun of for sharing a moniker with a fictional superhero. But then he discovers he actually has Supes’ powers.
In this ’verse, Clark has to keep things even more on the DL, and the resulting story is much more understated. It follows Clark through four stages of his life: discovering his powers as a teenager, meeting and falling in love with a beautiful Indian woman named Lois, having kids, and watching his kids grow up and discover powers of their own. The emphasis on Clark’s personal relationships—his human connections—is really the focus in ways it doesn’t tend to be (from what I’ve seen) for regular Justice League!Superman. The message isn’t always as subtly told as I’d like, but in general, this is a quiet, lovely reflection on identity, secret and otherwise.
166. Hotel World, Ali Smith — The lives of five women intersect at a hotel in an unnamed English city. This is the kind of book for which the term literary fiction was invented: Smith is totally getting her Virginia Woolf on, with steam-of-consciousness being just the tip of the iceberg. There were parts that I found really quite moving—the opening section is told from the point of view of a ghost, and I am sucker for stuff like that—but often I found all the stylistic fanfare frustrating. After a certain point, it makes me want to shout Just tell the frickin’ story already!
I’m left undecided about how effective this complicated, dense novel really is. While there are experimental novels I truly love—Woolf’s To the Lighthouse being one of them—in general, I do prefer a certain elegant simplicity. Even with its occasional shining moments, with so much going in Hotel World, one kind of has to wonder if there’s really all that much there there.
167. The Adoration of Jenna Fox, Mary E. Pearson — Teenage Jenna wakes up after an accident with no memory of who she is—though she knows all of Thoreau’s Walden by heart. As quickly becomes apparent, what’s going on is far more complex than a case of simple old amnesia! Jenna’s slow investigation into what really happened to her ensues.
I was disappointed by this. I said “slow investigation” above because I found the pacing almost glacial: the narrative slinks along, gradually uncovering twists that utterly failed to surprise me. It doesn’t help that the first person POV was entirely affectless; I understand that this may have been partially intentional and dictated by the plot, but I found it very dull to read. Jenna might have amnesia, but I felt like I had déjà vu: I’ve just read too many other similar stories. This one needed to have something to distinguish itself, to make it stand out, but aside from some mildly interesting ideas about future issues with science and technology, there just wasn’t anything new here. I appreciate that Pearson was trying to convey some real ideas about what it means to be human, but her characters were too two-dimensional for her message to have any effect on me. And I really, really hated the trite epilogue—it seemed very fake, and cheapened the sense of realism that the rest of the narrative was at least striving for.
[Insert painfully obvious joke about not adoring Jenna Fox at all here]
Total Books: 167
Man, I feel like I’ve been hating almost everything lately. Am I choosing books badly? Am I just cranky? What is going on?
Thanks, though, to everyone who said they wanted to hang out—hopefully we still can someday soon! Just, not next month. :(
Instead I applied for Camp Obama, the program where you're given a weekend's training and then sent to a battleground state to campaign. I really, really want to be selected, but I haven't heard anything yet and now I can't think about anything else. Come on, man! Barack me!
In the meantime, here's Poor Attempt at Distraction Booklog:
158. Breakfast With the Ones You Love, Eliot Fintushel — There are an awful lot of books that deal with the end of the world, and almost all of them employ Christian mythology if they want to include a bit of spirituality. So it’s really cool to read an End of Days book that instead involves the Jewish faith. This book also has a really interesting heroine going for it: Lea can kill people with her brain, and she’s tried to make her emotions just as dead. First person narration has been bugging me lately, but I really liked her voice; it kept this book going when the narrative got bogged down.
And it did get bogged down. A lot of what happens feels needlessly complicated; there are a lot of scenes of old Jewish guys sitting around arguing, which on the one hand made me go, “Hee! It’s my relatives arguing!” but which on the other hand made me go, “Oy. It’s my relatives. Arguing.” I really appreciated the ways in which Fintushel strived to make this book different—the end result is one of the most original things I’ve read in a while. So I respected it, but I didn’t love it. Still, worth trying if you want to sample something out of the ordinary.
159. The Road to Civil War, Brian Michael Bendis, et. al. — Less interesting than the Iron Man: Civil War collection I read, and sadly, just as confused, as Marvel insists on assembling the stories that make up this arc in a seemingly random order. I enjoyed the issues with Peter and Tony (if there were a Peter Parker Fanboys Tony Stark book, I would read it gleefully), but I have no idea what the stuff about the Fantastic Four and Thor’s Hammer has to do with anything, because as far as this collection is concerned, we’re only privileged enough to read two random issues about it. I feel like I am being punished for only being a casual comics reader. Screw you too, Marvel.
Aww, you know I don’t mean it. Shiny comics: even when you are stupid and confusing, I will always take you back…
160. Books, Larry McMurtry — You will never guess what this book is about! Okay, fine, it’s about McMurtry’s second career as a bookseller and book scout. The emphasis is really on the minutiae of the bookselling biz—details about McMurtry’s life or his writing are scarce. He skips around a lot, too, both in time and in subject, so one short chapter may follow on another short chapter about something completely different. Thus it is not a particularly focused or well-organized book, though I still found it a charming one. But then I’m a bit of a book scout myself (even though I mostly just look for things I want to read rather than books I feel will be valuable), so the topic is one close to my heart. However, hardcore bibliophiles like myself are likely to be the only ones captivated by this scattered narrative.
161. All-American Girl, Meg Cabot — I was really hoping to take the political edge off with this humorous story of an average American teen who saves the president’s life and then has a fluffy romance with his son. It didn’t quite work. First, I couldn’t stop wishing that the book were more political—that Sam, the teenage heroine, would have stronger beliefs—there’s a short bit where she disagrees with the administration about the judging of an art contest, but that’s about it. Wouldn’t it be interesting to read about a teenager who saves the president’s life but really disagrees with his policies and has to figure out if it’s appropriate to use her new time in the spotlight to take a stand? I also kept wishing that this wasn’t another book about a rich girl—a rich, white girl who goes to private school and has an eccentric live-in housekeeper. It could have been so much more interesting if this book weren’t another story about a privileged kid getting to experience more privilege.
But I’m aware that if these are the things I want, I probably shouldn’t be reading Meg Cabot. (Why I continue to read Meg Cabot books at all is an entirely different question.) I still think I would have gotten more “it is what it is” enjoyment out of this book, however, if so much of the main conflict hadn’t come from Sam being an idiot. She starts the book with a crush on her sister’s boyfriend, Jack; then she meets the president’s son, David, and develops a crush on him as well. David likes her, too, but instead of rejoicing that a cute boy is into her, Sam spends the entire damn book doing angsty variations on “But I can’t like David! I like Jack!” Um, Sam, sweetie: you can like more than one person at once. Not to be Miss “I Have a Crush on EVERY Boy!”, but you can actually like many different people at once. And I totally knew that when I was fifteen. Which makes listening to someone whine about it for 300 pages not a particularly enjoyable reading experience.
Sigh. I’d still like to read a political pick-me-up book. Other than the wonderful Ellen Emerson White, anybody know of any?
162. My Most Excellent Year, Steve Kluger — Another blend of baseball, musical theater, and extreme sappiness from Steve Kluger. This one had some nice moments, but they were buried under a sloppy pile of unrealistic plotting, teenage characters who all sound alike and not at all like teenagers, and sheer tedium. It’s clear from the beginning which characters are going to hook up; it just takes an excessively long time for them to get there, and the ride wasn’t particularly fun. Kluger’s The Last Days of Summer contained a tolerable level of saccharine sentimentality, but Year pushes the sweetness too far, without a balancing dosage of tart. It knocked me into a diabetic coma.
163. Bad Cat, Jim Edgar — The wide availability of stupid cat pictures is one of the best things about the interwebs. Unfortunately, it makes Edgar’s book of stupid cat pictures pretty much redundant. If his accompanying text were even half as funny as most of the stuff on I Can Has Cheezburger, I wouldn’t mind the redundancy, as I like having humorous content in book form. (I would buy an I Can Has Cheezburger book if there were one.) But it’s really, really not. Thus it’s not so much a case of DO NOT WANT as DO NOT NEED.
164. The Monster of Florence, Douglas Preston & Mario Spezi — I wasn’t planning to read any more true crime for a while after freaking myself out so bad with Ann Rule’s The Stranger Beside Me. However, the hold I’d placed on this at the library chose now to come up. (The LAPL: conspiring to deny me sleep since 2000.) Luckily, this book isn’t as someone-is-going-to-kill-me-in-my-bed scary as that Ted Bundy tome. Yes, the crimes committed by Florence’s Monster—brutal slayings of couples parking in the Italian countryside—were horrific, but the true horror of this account involves the terrifyingly corrupt Italian legal system. Christ! This book made me pray that I am never busted for littering or jaywalking or, you know, looking kinda sketchy while in Italy, because you can apparently be held almost indefinitely without being charged, you can be picked up on trumped-up charges, and members of the police or the Italian-equivalent-DA’s office will ignore genuine evidence and let the real killer walk if doing so can result in career advancement. The kind of “believe the lie” political maneuvering depicted here reminded me way too much of the current election cycle here in America, and so reading this book stressed me out more than it freaked me out.
The story’s simply and clearly told, with (thankfully) very little time spent lingering over the gorier details. Preston does indulge in some weird Thomas Harris fanboying (Hannibal drew from aspects of the Monster case and was set in Florence), and the narrative suffers from being very frustrating, as the case has never been resolved. In general, the book is at times quite compelling, but not exactly enjoyable: even when I was fascinated, I wanted to scream. That’s life, I guess. May I have a novel with a happy ending now, please?
165. Superman: Secret Identity, Kurt Busiek — A cool AU take on the Superman mythology. Clark Kent’s parents named him “Clark Kent” for the LOLs, and now he’s a teenager and really sick of being made fun of for sharing a moniker with a fictional superhero. But then he discovers he actually has Supes’ powers.
In this ’verse, Clark has to keep things even more on the DL, and the resulting story is much more understated. It follows Clark through four stages of his life: discovering his powers as a teenager, meeting and falling in love with a beautiful Indian woman named Lois, having kids, and watching his kids grow up and discover powers of their own. The emphasis on Clark’s personal relationships—his human connections—is really the focus in ways it doesn’t tend to be (from what I’ve seen) for regular Justice League!Superman. The message isn’t always as subtly told as I’d like, but in general, this is a quiet, lovely reflection on identity, secret and otherwise.
166. Hotel World, Ali Smith — The lives of five women intersect at a hotel in an unnamed English city. This is the kind of book for which the term literary fiction was invented: Smith is totally getting her Virginia Woolf on, with steam-of-consciousness being just the tip of the iceberg. There were parts that I found really quite moving—the opening section is told from the point of view of a ghost, and I am sucker for stuff like that—but often I found all the stylistic fanfare frustrating. After a certain point, it makes me want to shout Just tell the frickin’ story already!
I’m left undecided about how effective this complicated, dense novel really is. While there are experimental novels I truly love—Woolf’s To the Lighthouse being one of them—in general, I do prefer a certain elegant simplicity. Even with its occasional shining moments, with so much going in Hotel World, one kind of has to wonder if there’s really all that much there there.
167. The Adoration of Jenna Fox, Mary E. Pearson — Teenage Jenna wakes up after an accident with no memory of who she is—though she knows all of Thoreau’s Walden by heart. As quickly becomes apparent, what’s going on is far more complex than a case of simple old amnesia! Jenna’s slow investigation into what really happened to her ensues.
I was disappointed by this. I said “slow investigation” above because I found the pacing almost glacial: the narrative slinks along, gradually uncovering twists that utterly failed to surprise me. It doesn’t help that the first person POV was entirely affectless; I understand that this may have been partially intentional and dictated by the plot, but I found it very dull to read. Jenna might have amnesia, but I felt like I had déjà vu: I’ve just read too many other similar stories. This one needed to have something to distinguish itself, to make it stand out, but aside from some mildly interesting ideas about future issues with science and technology, there just wasn’t anything new here. I appreciate that Pearson was trying to convey some real ideas about what it means to be human, but her characters were too two-dimensional for her message to have any effect on me. And I really, really hated the trite epilogue—it seemed very fake, and cheapened the sense of realism that the rest of the narrative was at least striving for.
[Insert painfully obvious joke about not adoring Jenna Fox at all here]
Total Books: 167
Man, I feel like I’ve been hating almost everything lately. Am I choosing books badly? Am I just cranky? What is going on?
