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Dec. 11th, 2009 05:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trinityofoneOkay, start placing your bets now on whether or not I will be able to finish this by the end of the year. I am so far behind it's hysterical—as in, I may become hysterical if I think too much about how behind I am.
61. I’d Rather We Got Casinos, Larry Wilmore — Funny, but not as funny as you know it would be if Wilmore were reading it aloud. Also, it made me uncomfortable, but that’s kind of the point.
62. Seeking Whom He May Devour, Fred Vargas — Dull dull dull mystery about a female film editor/plumber and two local sheep farmers/eccentrics pursuing a murderous “werewolf” across the French countryside. The werewolf’s on foot, and the three of them are in a rickety old truck repurposed from transporting sheep, so the chase is about as high-speed and exciting as being stuck behind a farm vehicle on a narrow road. I just did not get this book at all. The characters had all these weird traits—one of the shepherds is obsessed with definitions and mythology; the other is, um, old; and as for the editor/plumber, Camille, well…her two chosen careers are “editor” and “plumber,” an unlikely mix to be sure, but Vargas never connected this to anything interesting or profound about her character. She’s an editor and a plumber. Also a part-time amateur werewolf hunter.
Maybe part of the problem I was having was that some of these characters have been featured in Vargas’ earlier books, including Camille and a Commissaire Adamsberg, who’s barely in the first two-thirds of this novel but is supposedly the series’ main character. (I figured this out based on the fact that the front of my copy had “Commisaire Adamsberg Investigates” solemnly imprinted upon it.) Okay, my bad for not reading the other books first, but a talented author can still make her characters come alive whenever they come on stage. Everyone in this book seemed as flat as the landscape was hilly.
It may have also been a bad translation. A clue: there’s an ongoing joke about Camille not being able to remember (or not caring to remember) another character’s dog’s name. There are a lot of puns—I think they’re meant to be puns; jokes, anyway—based on the other, incorrect things she calls this dog. But in English, the dog’s given name is Woof, and none of Camille’s mistakes (or inability to remember the frickin’ name) make any sense based on that moniker. It’s entirely possible that this gag was HILARIOUS in the original French, but in English it’s just…puzzling.
Equally puzzling: why I persisted in reading this book to the end. Maybe it was so I could discover that the killer was exactly who I expected, based on the character serving no other purpose in the narrative.
63. Christine Falls, Benjamin Black — Ridiculously boring—not to mention just plain ridiculous—mystery by a literary author (John Banville) slumming it in genre fiction under a pseudonym. (I have never understood this—why not just genre hop under your real name? All the cool kids are doing it!) The plot is convoluted, involving unwanted pregnancies and a baby smuggling ring and nuns. Actually, what the plot is is thin and convoluted, somehow; there’s very little mystery to be solved, really, but our hero, the drab and (we’re told) physically imposing medical examiner Quirke, sure takes his time. And along the way a lot of women throw themselves at him for no reason—so much for gritty realism—and Quirke’s young female relative is sexually assaulted for no reason other than the fact that Black/Banville couldn’t come up with any other kind of climactic event to finish off this slow slog of a book. I was just glad the damn thing was over. We sell a lot of copies of this novel (and its sequel, which I now have no intention of reading) at my store, but when there are exciting and complex literary mysteries out there like The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo to read, I really do not understand why.
64. The Best of Everything, Rona Jaffe — Utterly addictive novel about a group of young women who work at a publishing company in New York City. The obvious thing to say is, "If you like Mad Men, then you'll love this book!"—and that's absolutely true. I also think it's true that Mad Men wouldn't exist without this book. Jaffe is funny and brutally honest—at least until the end, which takes a bizarre turn into preachy, morality tale territory. Nevertheless, this is a wonderful read that—unfortunately?—will continue to resonate with the working women of today.
65. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Kurt Vonnegut — I read this in less than the time it took me to fly from L.A. to Chicago, and though I remember liking it, I don’t remember anything all that substantial about it. This is a problem I have with Vonnegut a lot. It’s possible that his books are too easy for me to read, and thus I gobble. At some point in the future, I will have to force myself to gooooooo sloooooow.
Hurrah, another review that’s more about me than about the book! \o/
66. Dance Dance Dance, Haruki Murakami — The sequel to A Wild Sheep Chase, which is Murakami’s earliest novel in English translation in America. It’s also not one of my favorites, and neither is this one: as usual with Murakami it had at least one jaw-droppingly amazing imagery-rich sequence (I won’t spoil it), but it never really came together for me—I wasn’t moved by it the way I was by Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World or so many of his others. I’d mark this as one for the completists only.
67. Jingo, Terry Pratchett — I liked this—especially the bits about the alternate reality as recorded by Vimes’ PA—but not as much as I liked the previous three Watch books. Still, even a Terry Pratchett novel that you don’t love tends to be pretty darn enjoyable, and this was.
68. Geek Charming, Robin Palmer — This book has a delightfully sparkly cover, which left me hoping that it would contain a delightfully sparkly read. It starts out with some small promise: the POV of Dylan, spoiled Beverly Hills brat and Queen Bee of her high school’s popular crowd, is energetic and amusingly shallow—sort of like Clueless’ Cher, if without the wit of Amy Heckerling/Jane Austen backing her up. Unfortunately, Dylan’s POV alternates with that of the titular geek, Josh, and I found his narration far less authentic. First of all, Josh is a film nerd, not a geek as the title promises, but I was willing to adjust my expectations. However, Josh’s nerdiness seems confined to dressing badly and referring to movie directors (none of whom produced any work before about 1970; kids these days!) by their first names—i.e., “I drove past a diner where Quentin sometimes eats.” That’s not geeky or charming; it’s just obnoxious.
Josh, while thus very far from this admitted geek-lover’s ideal man, is still a reasonably likeable character—technically much more likeable than Dylan—and the book actually does a nice job showing, through a plot stolen from the aforementioned Clueless, Can’t Buy Me Love, and about a billion John Hughes movies, how Josh and Dylan begin to trust each other and gradually become friends. So for the most part, Geek Charming maintains the level of derivative, harmless, and mildly diverting fluff.
However, there were several things about this novel that drove me INSANE. For one thing, Palmer kept getting easily researched facts wrong, which really did not help her in the places where the novel was already tilting toward inauthenticity. Like, for example, when Josh takes Dylan to one of my favorite L.A. landmarks, The Apple Pan, a cute—and for L.A. standards, old—restaurant on Pico Boulevard. I was all, “Oh, cool—The Apple Pan!”…until it’s mentioned that Dylan and Josh are squirming around in their booth, trying to ignore another couple committing major PDA in a neighboring booth. As anyone who has spent two seconds in The Apple Pan can tell you, IT DOESN’T HAVE ANY BOOTHS. Part of its charm is that there’s just one long, three-sided counter, with standing room along the wall for the endless wait for a seat (not part of its charm). Palmer supposedly lived in L.A., but even if she never actually made it to the home of the insanely yummy hickory burger and the best damn tuna sandwich around (really!), she couldn’t look it up on the internet? Also, I’m pretty sure that at least 9 out of 10 Star Wars fans would agree that Chewbacca’s nickname is spelled “Chewie”—“chewy” is what you want your granola bars to be.
(I was going to add to this list Josh’s claim that Woody Allen originally wanted Annie Hall to be called Anhedonia. I’d always been under the impression that he’d wanted the title to be Anne Hedonia, which would have been, you know, a joke. But I can’t confirm this, so I’ll just have to be satisfied that my idea is funnier.)
Palmer makes a bold choice by not going with the expected ending, but even there she really doesn’t follow through—I could understand making the point that Josh and Dylan don’t need to get together and that they’re better off if they’re just friends if part of the idea was, as it momentarily seemed to be, that Dylan doesn’t need to define herself through her boyfriend or even have one at all. So why have her hook-up with some random guy who’s introduced on the second-to-last page? Gosh, thank goodness Dylan didn’t have to suffer through being INDEPENDENT.
69. The Fairy Rebel, Lynne Reid Banks — This was one of my favorite books when I was a lass (…and Scottish, apparently…) and I recently, for reasons I no longer recall, became obsessed with tracking it down. Thanks to the invaluable Bookman in Orange County (truly the only reason to visit the entire area), I finally got my hands on it. And it was very nearly as wonderful as I remembered. Yay!
This is an incredibly quick read, about a rebellious denim-clad fairy named Tiki, and Jan, the lonely ex-actress she befriends. The length makes every scene seem essential and perfectly distilled, like a tale that’s been passed along and refined over generations, but at the same time, the story’s also wonderfully original and delightfully fresh. The only thing that bugged me, reading as a 25-year-old rather than a child of less than a decade, was how controlling—and even slightly condescending—Jan’s husband seemed, especially in early scenes. But it’s a minor thing—too tiny to waste more than an eyeroll on. There are delightful pink-haired fairies to enjoy!
70. I’m the One That I Want, Margaret Cho — The written version of Cho's fabulously funny (and now classic) one-woman show, this book is alternately hilarious and excruciating. A lot of the material will be familiar to those who know Cho's act (though she left out the lesbian cruise/"Where's MY parade?" bit! WHY?), but there's also lots--and lots and lots and lots--of Cho's struggles with body issues, with drugs, with disastrously low self-esteem. I appreciate that Cho went through all of that, and that she overcame it, but it is painful to read about, especially when for much of the book, the balance is toward "here are all the horrible things that happened to me and how shitty I felt about myself" rather than "and here's what I learned/how I moved beyond it all." Ultimately, unlike the show, this book is not comedic, it's depressing—it made me feel bad. Which doesn't in the least make this a book that shouldn't have been written, but does make it one that I don't really want to read.
Total Reviews: 70/191
61. I’d Rather We Got Casinos, Larry Wilmore — Funny, but not as funny as you know it would be if Wilmore were reading it aloud. Also, it made me uncomfortable, but that’s kind of the point.
62. Seeking Whom He May Devour, Fred Vargas — Dull dull dull mystery about a female film editor/plumber and two local sheep farmers/eccentrics pursuing a murderous “werewolf” across the French countryside. The werewolf’s on foot, and the three of them are in a rickety old truck repurposed from transporting sheep, so the chase is about as high-speed and exciting as being stuck behind a farm vehicle on a narrow road. I just did not get this book at all. The characters had all these weird traits—one of the shepherds is obsessed with definitions and mythology; the other is, um, old; and as for the editor/plumber, Camille, well…her two chosen careers are “editor” and “plumber,” an unlikely mix to be sure, but Vargas never connected this to anything interesting or profound about her character. She’s an editor and a plumber. Also a part-time amateur werewolf hunter.
Maybe part of the problem I was having was that some of these characters have been featured in Vargas’ earlier books, including Camille and a Commissaire Adamsberg, who’s barely in the first two-thirds of this novel but is supposedly the series’ main character. (I figured this out based on the fact that the front of my copy had “Commisaire Adamsberg Investigates” solemnly imprinted upon it.) Okay, my bad for not reading the other books first, but a talented author can still make her characters come alive whenever they come on stage. Everyone in this book seemed as flat as the landscape was hilly.
It may have also been a bad translation. A clue: there’s an ongoing joke about Camille not being able to remember (or not caring to remember) another character’s dog’s name. There are a lot of puns—I think they’re meant to be puns; jokes, anyway—based on the other, incorrect things she calls this dog. But in English, the dog’s given name is Woof, and none of Camille’s mistakes (or inability to remember the frickin’ name) make any sense based on that moniker. It’s entirely possible that this gag was HILARIOUS in the original French, but in English it’s just…puzzling.
Equally puzzling: why I persisted in reading this book to the end. Maybe it was so I could discover that the killer was exactly who I expected, based on the character serving no other purpose in the narrative.
63. Christine Falls, Benjamin Black — Ridiculously boring—not to mention just plain ridiculous—mystery by a literary author (John Banville) slumming it in genre fiction under a pseudonym. (I have never understood this—why not just genre hop under your real name? All the cool kids are doing it!) The plot is convoluted, involving unwanted pregnancies and a baby smuggling ring and nuns. Actually, what the plot is is thin and convoluted, somehow; there’s very little mystery to be solved, really, but our hero, the drab and (we’re told) physically imposing medical examiner Quirke, sure takes his time. And along the way a lot of women throw themselves at him for no reason—so much for gritty realism—and Quirke’s young female relative is sexually assaulted for no reason other than the fact that Black/Banville couldn’t come up with any other kind of climactic event to finish off this slow slog of a book. I was just glad the damn thing was over. We sell a lot of copies of this novel (and its sequel, which I now have no intention of reading) at my store, but when there are exciting and complex literary mysteries out there like The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo to read, I really do not understand why.
64. The Best of Everything, Rona Jaffe — Utterly addictive novel about a group of young women who work at a publishing company in New York City. The obvious thing to say is, "If you like Mad Men, then you'll love this book!"—and that's absolutely true. I also think it's true that Mad Men wouldn't exist without this book. Jaffe is funny and brutally honest—at least until the end, which takes a bizarre turn into preachy, morality tale territory. Nevertheless, this is a wonderful read that—unfortunately?—will continue to resonate with the working women of today.
65. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Kurt Vonnegut — I read this in less than the time it took me to fly from L.A. to Chicago, and though I remember liking it, I don’t remember anything all that substantial about it. This is a problem I have with Vonnegut a lot. It’s possible that his books are too easy for me to read, and thus I gobble. At some point in the future, I will have to force myself to gooooooo sloooooow.
Hurrah, another review that’s more about me than about the book! \o/
66. Dance Dance Dance, Haruki Murakami — The sequel to A Wild Sheep Chase, which is Murakami’s earliest novel in English translation in America. It’s also not one of my favorites, and neither is this one: as usual with Murakami it had at least one jaw-droppingly amazing imagery-rich sequence (I won’t spoil it), but it never really came together for me—I wasn’t moved by it the way I was by Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World or so many of his others. I’d mark this as one for the completists only.
67. Jingo, Terry Pratchett — I liked this—especially the bits about the alternate reality as recorded by Vimes’ PA—but not as much as I liked the previous three Watch books. Still, even a Terry Pratchett novel that you don’t love tends to be pretty darn enjoyable, and this was.
68. Geek Charming, Robin Palmer — This book has a delightfully sparkly cover, which left me hoping that it would contain a delightfully sparkly read. It starts out with some small promise: the POV of Dylan, spoiled Beverly Hills brat and Queen Bee of her high school’s popular crowd, is energetic and amusingly shallow—sort of like Clueless’ Cher, if without the wit of Amy Heckerling/Jane Austen backing her up. Unfortunately, Dylan’s POV alternates with that of the titular geek, Josh, and I found his narration far less authentic. First of all, Josh is a film nerd, not a geek as the title promises, but I was willing to adjust my expectations. However, Josh’s nerdiness seems confined to dressing badly and referring to movie directors (none of whom produced any work before about 1970; kids these days!) by their first names—i.e., “I drove past a diner where Quentin sometimes eats.” That’s not geeky or charming; it’s just obnoxious.
Josh, while thus very far from this admitted geek-lover’s ideal man, is still a reasonably likeable character—technically much more likeable than Dylan—and the book actually does a nice job showing, through a plot stolen from the aforementioned Clueless, Can’t Buy Me Love, and about a billion John Hughes movies, how Josh and Dylan begin to trust each other and gradually become friends. So for the most part, Geek Charming maintains the level of derivative, harmless, and mildly diverting fluff.
However, there were several things about this novel that drove me INSANE. For one thing, Palmer kept getting easily researched facts wrong, which really did not help her in the places where the novel was already tilting toward inauthenticity. Like, for example, when Josh takes Dylan to one of my favorite L.A. landmarks, The Apple Pan, a cute—and for L.A. standards, old—restaurant on Pico Boulevard. I was all, “Oh, cool—The Apple Pan!”…until it’s mentioned that Dylan and Josh are squirming around in their booth, trying to ignore another couple committing major PDA in a neighboring booth. As anyone who has spent two seconds in The Apple Pan can tell you, IT DOESN’T HAVE ANY BOOTHS. Part of its charm is that there’s just one long, three-sided counter, with standing room along the wall for the endless wait for a seat (not part of its charm). Palmer supposedly lived in L.A., but even if she never actually made it to the home of the insanely yummy hickory burger and the best damn tuna sandwich around (really!), she couldn’t look it up on the internet? Also, I’m pretty sure that at least 9 out of 10 Star Wars fans would agree that Chewbacca’s nickname is spelled “Chewie”—“chewy” is what you want your granola bars to be.
(I was going to add to this list Josh’s claim that Woody Allen originally wanted Annie Hall to be called Anhedonia. I’d always been under the impression that he’d wanted the title to be Anne Hedonia, which would have been, you know, a joke. But I can’t confirm this, so I’ll just have to be satisfied that my idea is funnier.)
Palmer makes a bold choice by not going with the expected ending, but even there she really doesn’t follow through—I could understand making the point that Josh and Dylan don’t need to get together and that they’re better off if they’re just friends if part of the idea was, as it momentarily seemed to be, that Dylan doesn’t need to define herself through her boyfriend or even have one at all. So why have her hook-up with some random guy who’s introduced on the second-to-last page? Gosh, thank goodness Dylan didn’t have to suffer through being INDEPENDENT.
69. The Fairy Rebel, Lynne Reid Banks — This was one of my favorite books when I was a lass (…and Scottish, apparently…) and I recently, for reasons I no longer recall, became obsessed with tracking it down. Thanks to the invaluable Bookman in Orange County (truly the only reason to visit the entire area), I finally got my hands on it. And it was very nearly as wonderful as I remembered. Yay!
This is an incredibly quick read, about a rebellious denim-clad fairy named Tiki, and Jan, the lonely ex-actress she befriends. The length makes every scene seem essential and perfectly distilled, like a tale that’s been passed along and refined over generations, but at the same time, the story’s also wonderfully original and delightfully fresh. The only thing that bugged me, reading as a 25-year-old rather than a child of less than a decade, was how controlling—and even slightly condescending—Jan’s husband seemed, especially in early scenes. But it’s a minor thing—too tiny to waste more than an eyeroll on. There are delightful pink-haired fairies to enjoy!
70. I’m the One That I Want, Margaret Cho — The written version of Cho's fabulously funny (and now classic) one-woman show, this book is alternately hilarious and excruciating. A lot of the material will be familiar to those who know Cho's act (though she left out the lesbian cruise/"Where's MY parade?" bit! WHY?), but there's also lots--and lots and lots and lots--of Cho's struggles with body issues, with drugs, with disastrously low self-esteem. I appreciate that Cho went through all of that, and that she overcame it, but it is painful to read about, especially when for much of the book, the balance is toward "here are all the horrible things that happened to me and how shitty I felt about myself" rather than "and here's what I learned/how I moved beyond it all." Ultimately, unlike the show, this book is not comedic, it's depressing—it made me feel bad. Which doesn't in the least make this a book that shouldn't have been written, but does make it one that I don't really want to read.
Total Reviews: 70/191
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Date: 2009-12-12 05:12 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-12 05:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-12 05:58 am (UTC)There were so many details that stuck with me; it's been ~15 years and I still remember the little girl's patch of blue hairs, and the tiny fairy blue jeans, and the fairy gifts (god how I wanted those gifts--though didn't the last one turn evil?) and the wasp attacks. Aie, wasp attacks!
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-13 04:19 am (UTC)I just went back there this summer after not going for about five years and I swear the counterman was about a million times less grumpy. I mean, my friend that I went with was like, "what's THAT guy's problem?" and I was like, "seriously, he is like Pollyanna compared to before!"