A bookworm journalist blogs on literature and life
When I was doing some blog maintenance last week, I came across an un-posted “review” that I wrote soon after finishing Priceless (Yes, I did actually read the book!). Rather than let more than 1,100 words of bitter sarcasm go to waste, I turned the review into a post over at Book Riot that went up yesterday where I talked about the Not So Great Expectations Book Club and my thoughts on reading Richie.
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Just about every English major has to take some version of a survey class as a freshman or a sophomore — a look at the major authors and works in the Western (British and American) canon. Although there are many critiques of the canon (it’s not inclusive, the author aren’t relevant, the books are boring…), the point of studying the classics as an English major is to get a good basis for where our major literary traditions came from and how they make an impact today. At least, that’s what I took from my English major.
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My first short list of favorite reads in 2011 — which covers everything I read this year, regardless of when it was published — was more than 25 books long. I managed to cut down my list to five fiction and five nonfiction favorites. Since I don’t think I’ll be finishing any more books this year, I’m posting my fiction picks today and nonfiction picks tomorrow. Let me know what you think!
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Lu (Regular Rumination) had this great idea to do a “Great Review Catch Up” post to quickly sum up the books she read this year but never wrote reviews for. I liked the idea so much that I decided to “borrow” the idea myself and do a quick post about the books I read this year but never reviewed on the blog.
It’s a rather mixed bag of books, but there were definitely some good ones that I passed over because I just didn’t have anything (or, in one case, too many things) to say about them.
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Review: Set in French Hill, Nova Scotia, Mercury by Hope Larson is a story about family and history with a healthy dose of magic thrown in. Back in 1859, a mysterious stranger arrives on a family farm. The daughter, Josey, is enamored with the stranger and with the promise of gold he brings to her struggling family. But not is all as it appears. In the present, Tara, Josey’s descendant, is dealing with her own problems as she begins to discover what happened to her family years ago.
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Review: The Magician King was a fucking awesome book.
Honestly, that’s all I really want to say about it… but of course that’s not a real review. But that is the gushing, giddy, and inarticulate assessment that I gave to the boyfriend when he asked what I thought of the book the moment after I finished reading it on our Thanksgiving road trip.
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Review: A marriage plot is a particular kind of English novel , written by the likes of Jane Austen and George Eliot, where the central conflict of the book centers around whether or not the heroine will end up married. Those are the kinds of stories that fascinate Madeline, the central heroine of Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, and are the topic of her senior thesis. However, during the early 1980s, those kinds of stories just aren’t en vogue anymore, instead being replaced by deconstruction and the growing field of semiotics.
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One Sentence Summary: A young pharmaceutical scientist heads into the heart of darkness that is the Amazonian rain forest to find her lost coworker and confront a scientist on the loose.
One Sentence Review: Anne Patchett’s beautiful writing alone is enough reason to read this book.
Why I Read It: I have a special place in my heart of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, so hearing this one compared to it was enough to make me want to read it.
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Earlier this month I made a tentative plan to spend the rest of the year trying to read books I already have — review copies or bought copies — and limit books from the library to try and make a dent on the piles and piles of books that are starting to weigh on me.
Of course, I wasn’t going to pull myself off the lists of holds I’m on at the library, which foiled my plans: Both The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides and The Magician King by Lev Grossman arrived for me on Tuesday. Curses, effective library system! (I kid, I kid!).
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Perrotta never makes even a passing reference to September 11 in The Leftovers, and yet that event is all I could think about as I read. I think what Perrotta does is capture the feeling of what September 11 was — an inexplicable event that, in a single instant, changed the world as we knew it — and explores it without ever given that event a name. Rather than focusing so as explicitly on the facts of the event like the first pages of The Submission does, Perrotta writes about loss and our individual response to events that we cannot explain. It’s exactly the sort of book I’ve wanted to read about September 11, even if Perotta never says that.
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