Money

Somewhere between my beginning Money: A Suicide Note by Martin Amis and my book club discussion of it (which started about two minutes after I finished reading), the following happened, roughly in this order:

• About twenty pages in, I feared that it was the most misogynist book I had ever picked up.
• I mentioned this to my significant other and he took the book from me, opening it at random, and read, "Then I tried to rape her again." He balked and returned the book to me, commenting that he'd be interested in hearing the reaction from my all-female book club.
• Despite my frequent discomfort, I became aware that there was some utterly beautiful writing in this book.
• I figured out what the twist at the end of the book would be.
• Martin Amis writes himself into the book and, surprised by this, I ditched my previous assumption as to how things would turn out and just went along with things for a while.
• I lost count of the instances of exploitation, physical violence, intended violence, or verbal abuse toward women. But I also realized that the book wasn't misogynist at all. (And even if it had been, I had forgotten that no one beats John Updike for the title of most misogynist writer ever.)
• Whatever his faults, one had to admit that the narrator was unflinchingly honest.
• I returned to support my previous prediction of what the ending would be, despite the author being a character in his own novel.
• I became aware that I was actually feeling sorry for the main character, somewhere around his futile attempts at reform.
• I snickered at a very self-aware section that talked about the rush of finishing a book.
• The twist ending sets in, as I predicted.
• I finished the book.
• While discussing the book with my book club, I realized that I actually really had enjoyed it.

Money is a first person narrative, told from the perspective of John Self, a director on the verge of making his first major film after creating a name for himself by directing commercials that generally featured busty women in hot pants. He is a hedonist the likes of which you may have never encountered; he seems to live on prostitutes and pornography. Weighing sixteen stone, he consumes copious amounts of fast food and is always either drunk or hungover. He lives in London but makes frequent trips out to New York, where he has started to collaborate with Fielding Goodney, a young film producer, who insists that John should actually be spending more money. Also living in New York is Martina Twain, a "friend" of John's and the most normal person in the narrative. She's married and while John certainly wants her, you don't sense the same kind of filthy thoughts directed her as he seems to direct towards every other woman. Back in London, John has an unfaithful girlfriend named Selina who he knows is only interested in the money and potential security he can provide, though as John repeatedly gives into her demands, one can see that Selina clearly has most of the power in this relationship. John's father, Barry Self, is also in London (his mother died when John was young), though they don't have a fantastic relationship. Barry once invoiced John for the costs of his upbringing, which came to a little under nineteen thousand pounds; John wrote him a check for twenty.

John Self has an idea for a movie, which he originally calls Good Money (though eventually this becomes Bad Money and the obvious significance of this should not be lost on you). He and Goodney are looking to procure a writer for the script and four solid actors, though three of the four have basically been locked down and only the fourth is up for minor discussion by the time the book starts. First we have Lorne Guyland, whose career is waning, though he is unaware that. Slated to play the father, Lorne is constantly suggesting "improvements" to the script, which often feature explicit nudity and sex and the ultimate triumph of his character. Lorne repeatedly takes off his clothing when having conversations with John to make a point. Cast as Lorne's wife is Caduta Massi, who might be childless in real life (and thus seems to compensate for this by surrounding herself with family and children) but she is a strong motherly figure. She refuses to perform any nude scenes or any sex scenes with Lorne... and loathes all scenes with Lorne in general. Sexy Butch Beausoleil will play the younger waitress sleeping with both father and son, but refuses to do any menial chores; she agrees with Lorne that there should be explicit sex, but wants to emphasize that as the young woman, she is giving herself to an old man out of pity. And then Spunk Davis (whose name is intentionally awkward) is the questionable fourth; an intense Christian who doesn't smoke, drink, believe in violence, or have sex, with only one film to his credit. Two of John Self's duties are to try and convince Spunk to change his name and to be okay with a father-son fight. Goodney has also settled on a writer, who produces an excellent script that threatens to ruin the entire film with its incisive honesty into the characters/actors portraying the characters, which doesn't fly with actors who each want to be seen as a shining hero. Oh, and there's also this "Frank the Phone" character, an unknown someone who calls John when he's at his lowest moments and berates him for his behavior.

The majority of the novel is spent in drunken binges, reflections on handjobs, and John's careening between interactions with the people above (which are often drunken and sometimes sexual in nature). The surprise guest (as I mentioned before) is the character of Martin Amis, who appears as a writer that John occasionally sees around his London neighborhood and eventually John speaks to him at a pub. Amis comes into play when John tries to "save" the script by having Amis re-write it to appease the actors. At this point, John's life seems to be working itself out: Selina leaves him after becoming pregnant with Martina's husband's child, Martina kicks her husband out, and John essentially moves in with Martina, resulting in an interesting companionship where John can't seem to perform now that he actually "has" Martina. Of course, it doesn't last.

So why did I actually enjoy this novel? Don't get me wrong, there's a lot that just wasn't up my alley. I would never actually want to know these people or have anything to do with them, but that's the beauty of reading about them in a novel... when you've had your fill, you can set the book down. Of course, with this one, you don't want to set it down; despite the content, it's hard to refute that Martin Amis is quite the wordsmith. I don't know that I've ever encountered a writer who can make me laugh while simultaneously cringing to the same degree as Amis. I certainly don't like John Self as a person, for he's an incredibly unsavory character, but I can't help but be pulled in by his narrative. He's riding the wave of his success, completely binging on cigarettes, women, alcohol, porn and whatever else he can get ahold of. Money is at the root of almost every single interaction and Self appears to be the only one who cannot see that he's in for one heck of a crash should the money dry up. Such satire generally aims to bring about some reformation in the main character, but with the subtitle like "A Suicide Note" and with John's general grasp of the world, it is hard to hope for any true reform... which aids in the creation of an atmosphere of such tragedy and devastation while everything is still terribly funny. Self is only bringing all of this upon... well... himself.

Martin Amis, as you may well know, is the son of writer Kingsley Amis, who famously took little notice of his son's work. Evidently he once complained of his son's writing that all he's doing is, "Breaking the rules, buggering about with the reader, [and:] drawing attention to himself." Martin Amis attended many schools (and like John Self, he was familiar with both England and New Jersey), but ultimately he graduated from my college at Oxford University, Exeter College. He has been cited as "the Bad Boy" of English fiction (mostly because of his chosen topics for his novels), but I prefer the description the NY Times has used, which says Amis is simply at the forefront of "the new unpleasantness" style.

His comic talent lies simply in describing things as they are in the postmodern world and he is firmly rooted to this time period, describing it for all the energy and chaos it embodies. It might not be an obvious comparison, but it's actually somewhat clear to me that he found Jane Austen to be an influence upon his work, given the unflinching honesty and biting wit that he uses to describe characters. Perhaps that's why I ultimately found this to be quite an impressive novel. Of course, the fantastic sentence construction, shockingly beautiful prose and great comedic insight had to help.

I might not recommend this novel to the squeamish (and indeed, I'm not sure I'd ever actually *give* this novel to anyone, because I'm not sure what kind of message that would send), but if you're able to move beyond the unpleasantness, it's quite a compelling read. Would I wish to live in this world of selfishness, manipulation, and obscenity? Heavens no. But will I be reading more Martin Amis in the future? Fuck yeah.

Rebel Angels

So, remember how I said I wouldn't continue reading this series unless I stumbled upon a used copy of the next books? Well, I found one of Rebel Angels, the second in the series by Libba Bray, and I also had an afternoon where all I wanted was something easy to read that I could finish quickly. This fit the bill.

Of course, that doesn't mean that I liked the second novel any more than the first. I actually preferred the first, because this seemed to fall victim to the usual muddled second novel problems.

It is shortly before Christmas at Spence, a finishing school for girls in England, and everyone is getting ready to return to their homes for the holidays. Gemma is scheduled to head to London for Christmas with her grandmother, father, and brother; Felicity will also be in London with her father the Admiral and her mother, who is hosting the most popular ball of the Christmas season; and poor, orphaned Ann will be staying at Spence with the servants. It's been nearly two months since the girls learned about the Order, visited the Realms, and had their terrible encounter with Circe. This resulted in the death of their friend Pippa, who chose to remain in the Realms rather than face a loveless marriage and continue keeping her epilepsy a secret. While Felicity, Gemma and Ann miss her dearly, Gemma is unwilling to enter the Realms again for fear of what she'll find there, after having smashed the stones that kept the magic from flowing freely. It is only after a visit from Kartik (the young Indian man ordered to watch Gemma in the last novel by his own sect, the Rakshana) where he urges her to enter the Realms again to bind the magic in the Temple that Gemma and her friends attempt to return. Of course, what Gemma doesn't know is that Kartik has been ordered to help her find the Temple, bind the magic to the Rakshana instead of the Order, and then kill her. Kartik has mixed feelings on this last bit, seeing as he seems as conflictingly smitten with Gemma as she is with him.

Rather than separate the girls for the course of the narrative (which takes place entirely during the Christmas break), Felicity uncharacteristically invites Ann home with her for the holidays with the plan of spreading the rumor that Ann is really descended from Russian royalty. Before Gemma even makes it home from the train station, she meets Simon, a young aristocrat of good breeding. He's rumored to have a bit of a reputation as a ladies' man, but he seems rather open in his courtship of her. There are a number of other details that all come into play in terms of the narrative: Gemma's brother is desperately trying to break their father's addiction to laudanum (and later, opium) while home from his duties as a doctor at Bethlam Bedlam insane asylum; Gemma learns of a girl at Bethlam who might also have access to the Realms and know where to find the temple; there's concern over a new teacher at Spence who might know more than she lets on; Gemma meets up once again with Miss Moore, their old art teacher from Spence who lost her job as a result of Gemma and her friends; Felicity's family has taken on a new ward which irritates Felicity, though perhaps not for entirely selfish reasons; and while it might be nice to see Pippa again, Gemma is uncertain whether Pippa can be trusted, as souls in the Realms who do not cross over are usually corrupted. Of all these, the last is the most interesting, as Bray seems to have no problem turning beautiful Pippa into a rather terrifying creature before the book is over.

So as you can see, there's a lot of balls in the air and Bray tries her best to keep them all going. I found that there were a few too many scenes that didn't seem that necessary. One of which involved Gemma dressing up as a boy to pull her father out of an opium den. Perhaps the most irritating scene of all, though, took place at a ball when Simon persuades Gemma and her friends into trying absinthe... which unsurprisingly has a bad effect on Gemma, who already sees visions of ghostly things without any aid from substances. Exactly why we needed a scene where she starts screaming and Simon tries to calm her down, under the belief that she's screaming because of his rather forward behavior, I do not know. Nor do I know why Simon seems totally fine with her afterward, as I would imagine he'd be a little put off. Ultimately, however, I suppose the worst sin is that despite being a fantasy novel, I found that once again, I simply didn't find myself captivated by the Realms. All the fantasy and magic seemed too vague and not quite interesting for me. Ann is annoying, Felicity is a bit too brazen (though really, she's the one I mind least), and Gemma still doesn't seem like she's a heroine who is capable of bringing any kind of resolution to the Realms and the Order. She's not terribly bright and I still can't imagine her as being a proper redhead. And as if that wouldn't make her stand out enough, she has the whole childhood in India thing going for her and she still manages to be this shrinking violet. Ugh.

Despite all this, we know perfectly well that I'll finish the series, but I wish that I could hope for something better than the first two novels. Ah well.

The 351 Books of Irma Arcuri

The 351 Books of Irma Arcuri is a rich and incredibly sensuous story about books, love, and the equations that make up our lives.

Philip Masryk is a brilliant mathematician/investment consultant who often finds himself scribbling mathematical formulas to represent the interactions and events around him. While he finds this to generally be a helpful way of viewing the world, people often become variables that are hard to predict. He's been married twice and has two ex-step-children, in whose lives he still plays a very minor role, but the only constant in his life has been his friend and lover, a book-binder named Irma Arcuri. The book opens as Philip is notified of her disappearance and the fact that she has bequeathed to him her collection of 351 books, all of which she had bound herself and a few of which she has written. No one seems to believe that Irma is actually dead, simply that she has chosen to disappear from her life and perhaps embark on some other adventure, but Philip wants to find her and believes that the secret to doing so lies within his newly inherited library.

Philip's search spans literature and continents, though many of his revelations are found within the people that make up Philip's life. The narrative goes back and forth in time, concerned not only with Philip and Irma's relationship but with Philip and Irma's individual relationships with others... such as Philip's two ex-wives, his best friend, Philip's two ex-step-children, and perhaps even a woman Philip meets in a bar after Irma has already disappeared. Philip, who has not read much of anything contained within Irma's library, selects which book to read next in a very calculated manner, believing that Irma has planned this.

The 351 Books of Irma Arcuri is clearly an homage to literature and the role it plays in our lives. Bajo chooses a very intriguing mix of titles to highlight here (including Borges, Cervantes, Camus, Sebald, and others), and makes things all the more interesting when Philip realizes that in re-binding these books, Irma may have made adjustments to the text within, too. In addition to presenting something that treats books as precious touchstones in our lives, Bajo has also captured the sensual experience surrounding literature and the intimacy of sharing stories with another. This is a very sexual book and Bajo doesn't shy away from dealing with sex quite directly. I never found it to be too ridiculous, though... just quite prevalent. (It was so very sensual, in fact, that even though I usually pass books along to my mother, I told her that this was unsuitable for parents and if she wanted a copy, she'd have to go and get one herself. My significant other, however, has already been told to move this up to the top of his list.)

For a true book lover, it's hard to not find something deeply seductive about the allure of books. And when you add a beautiful and sexy woman into the mix... well... let's just say that I would have crumbled just as easily as any other of Irma's conquests. There are some truly beautiful passages and ideas being expressed... in addition to the steamy sex scenes mentioned above. There were a few flaws within the narrative and I'm not entirely sure that the ending left me satisfied, but as I believe this is Bajo's first novel, I consider myself quite impressed. Selections from Philip's reading have the habit of flowing into the text without too much notation, so the reader must keep on his or her toes to understand just which writer is responsible for what he/she is reading. There were moments when it came to Philip's relationship with his ex-step-children where I wasn't convinced of the storyline's necessity, or at least of its prominence, but nothing too severe. The only thing that truly irked me with this book was the fact that nearly all of the characters in the novel are runners... and Philip seems to run so often that I was convinced his heart would burst. Is it possible for someone to run that often every day and still stand? Let alone participate in all those sex scenes? Sure, he was raised by steeplechaser parents, but even so! I felt like quite a sedentary creature as Philip sprinted through towns in multiple countries, no matter his occasional complaints about getting older. It seemed excessive.

On the whole, I loved this novel -- when you find yourself as a reader being seduced by the main characters, it's hard not to connect with it. If you're looking for a luscious read and you're up to being challenged by a twisting and turning storyline, then I sincerely recommend a comfy chair beside a fire, a glass of wine, and this novel. You'll find it to be a pleasurable experience.

The Magicians

Before I say anything, I want to thank Lev Grossman for being generous with his time and visiting my book club to discuss his book, The Magicians. He was open to all questions, insisted that we should pull no punches, and a lot of the stories he shared about writing the book were great. We were very excited about having an author there to discuss his book, and the fact that he spent two hours with us was a testament to his willingness to chat with readers.

That said, The Magicians is not without a few flaws and because I want to discuss everything in depth, this review has two parts to it. The first part is my usual review -- a general overview of the book and my overall reaction. The second part is a bit weird, because it's more or less a bunch of individual topics of discussion from the book, which means there are spoilers galore. BUT the second part ALSO has more to do with the visit that Grossman paid to my book club, so feel free to make your own decision about how much you read.

To start, if you heard this book described as "Harry Potter for adults" and you're looking for a magical book that could in any way merit the term "fantasy," this is not the book for you. If you are looking for a fiction book that deals with magic as though it is brought into our existing world for a select few as another facet of life, but there is a distinct lack of joy and wonderment, then your search is at an end.

I've had mixed feelings about The Magicians from the moment I read its description in a review, and those mixed feelings continue even now, after I've gotten to speak with the author and ask some lingering questions. I was initially intrigued by the idea, but had already decided to wait for paperback when my book club selected it, with the tantalizing potential of actually having Lev Grossman come to talk to us through the contacts of one of the members. I bought it; I took off the slipcover so it wouldn't be damaged as it knocked about in my purse; and I was immediately annoyed by the embossed "L.G." on the front cover. I like pretentiousness, don't get me wrong, but seriously? I should have taken this as a sign of things to come.

Those embossed initials don't even come close to the tone of the novel in general and the main character in particular. And not in a good "this is a really fascinating character" kind of way. I have so rarely wanted to punch a fictional person as much as I wanted to punch Quentin Clearwater, our protagonist. I'm a pacifist and I dislike violence, but it was a visceral reaction that would surge through me, forcing me to set the book down and take a deep breath before I could pick it up again. This annoyance would abate, and there were moments of pleasure and amusement, but through it all, I couldn't help but think that if I could just get in one solid punch, I'd be able to feel better about everything. Of course, Quentin does get punched at one point, and while I was pleased by that scene, I can't say that it really made me feel better, so perhaps I'm wrong about the therapeutic punching. (Note: despite the fact that Quentin is very closely aligned with the author in tone, this pugilistic impulse never focused on the author, thankfully. Though perhaps it helped that a month passed between my reading the book and discussing the book with the author and my book club.)

The basic storyline is this. Quentin Clearwater has grown up in Brooklyn with a penchant for magic tricks, an obsession with a series of children's books set in a land called Fillory, and a very acute awareness of his own incredible intelligence. He's always been advanced, he's always been an A-student, yet now that he's applying to and interviewing for colleges, he somehow feels a bit nervous. But when he shows up for his interview, he discover the body of his interviewer, dead of seemingly natural causes. A rather out-of-place and attractive paramedic offers Quentin a folder that might or might not have belonged to the dead interviewer and Quentin takes it, despite his friend cautioning otherwise. When Quentin inspects the contents, a slip of paper is blown away and in chasing it, he finds himself entering what appears to be an alternate world. Of course, it's not an alternate world but it might as well be; it's upstate New York and Quentin has arrived/been summoned to take an entrance exam for an elite school -- and once passing, he learns that the school is a school for magic. Instead of college, he will attend Brakebills and learn how to be a magician. Magic is real. His world is forever changed, but whether it's for the better or worse is up for debate.

Sound familiar? It should. (Well, at least up until the the better or worse bit.) It's the plot of countless fantasy novels where a young person is spirited away from a boring or painful existence and exposed to a world of magic. It is impossible not to think of Harry Potter (though Grossman insists that he conceived of the idea of this novel before The Boy Who Lived entered our lives). What makes The Magicians different is that it includes a few things that other similar novels do not (notably, lots of sex, alcohol, and swearing) and it ventures to pose some questions left unimagined in Narnia or Hogwarts. Instead of staying in school for the duration of the novel, these magicians continue on, into the world, and are left to ask "what's the point?" If you can cast a spell, can you ever really grow up? And if magic cannot make you happy, can anything?

A few words of assessment before I launch into spoiler-land. First of all, I am glad that I read this book. And I'm glad that it was written. I'm just not sure that Grossman was the best one to do it. It was very hard not to associate Quentin with Grossman (and Grossman himself admitted to being quite closely aligned with Quentin when he discussed the novel with my book club) and I think we get too bogged down with Quentin to really explore the more interesting questions about magic that the book touches upon. I did, however, like the book more after speaking with Grossman. Sure, it was nice to have a few suspicions validated, but it also reminded me that books are written by imperfect people with original ideas, and I'd rather have them attempt to bring those ideas into the world than leave them to languish in their minds.

For fantasy-lovers, I urge a bit of caution in reading this novel. True, the book is riddled with touchstones and nods to other works (Fillory is quite obviously Narnia and jokes are made at one time about Quidditch)... but perhaps the biggest issue that I had with The Magicians is that the tone of the novel felt calculated. It was as though Grossman (being a fantasy reader himself) knew his market well -- and to win over the readers with a sense of being "in" on things, he left these nods to other stories so readers could go, "hey, I know where he got that idea!" or "look at that joke about this other book!" But instead of feeling like there was camaraderie between reader and writer in this recognition, there was a touch of disdain. Even as Grossman tried to lure the readers in by presenting himself as one of them, it felt as though he looked down on their love of these other works. Quentin is never really happy (and indeed, my book club unanimously agreed that without medication, he was incapable of happiness), and so I had the distinct impression that if I took delight in those other fantasy novels and expressed happiness, then I was being seen as a bit childish. The novel judges fantasy as a genre for never dealing with deeper issues, and so similarly, the reader, too, feels judged. Grossman himself didn't give this impression in person, and insisted that he's always loved fantasy (though he does have some HP issues). Perhaps it was simply my own misreading, but this seemed to be a book with a lack of respect for lighter fantasy, save as a medium through which to tell people that they're indulging in escapism. If you can be happy, then you can't possibly have it in you to tackle the bigger questions of magic. Magic was discussed without any spark of belief or wonder or joy... and so I found it very hard to see any appeal in the worlds that Grossman conjured, or feel any concern for the characters who populated them. All of this doesn't stop the book from being very interesting and having some excellent moments that made me laugh or feel deeply for the characters. There are some delightful scenes that I re-read with relish. But on the whole, I had serious doubts about how honest Grossman was being, with the readers and himself, as it pertained to his relationship with fantasy writing.

From this point on, I warn you that I will give things away. If you want to read the book and don't want any plot points spoiled, stop now. If you have read the book already, don't think you will, or don't think that knowing things about the ending of the book will stop you, then by all means, keep reading and feel free to initiate discussion on any of the topics that I raise. If nothing else, this was a great book for raising discussion questions, both about the book itself and the fantasy genre as a whole. My formal review ends here. Now it's just summaries and interesting discussion topics.

___

Here's the quick summary of the rest of the book. The major bulk of the novel is spent in "Book One," where Quentin attends Brakebills and learns magic. The most shocking incident occurs when somehow, a magic force (referred to as "the Beast") "hacks" into Brakebills and seems to do nothing except freeze a class in place and devour a student, departing after a few hours of keeping the class frozen in place. The encounter with the Beast alerts us to the reality of other "dimensions" of existence. As for the rest of the magical education, there are a few interesting parts (the most notable being a semester where the students are transformed into geese, fly to Antarctica, and then spend the semester mostly in silence and practical application of the rudiments of magic in every possible condition) but otherwise it's not terribly memorable. Quentin acquires a girlfriend (Alice), as well as a few other friends, mostly by virtue of their being thrown together in their studies: Eliot (gay, cruel, and somehow Quentin's closest friend after Alice), Janet (self-obsessed and a bit promiscuous), Josh (lazy and skirting along), and Penny (detached, brilliant, though not quite a friend as punches Quentin fairly early on). When Quentin and Alice enter the real world (Book Two), they become lost as to what they should be doing (or at least Quentin does), and only gain direction (perhaps too late, though, as Quentin has cheated on Alice by having a threesome with Eliot and Janet) when Penny discovers that Fillory is real. (Now, if the reader is looking at a hardcover edition of this book, s/he would probably assume that we go to Fillory at some point, because there are maps. But we don't get to Fillory until we're already SEVENTY PERCENT THROUGH THE BOOK. So you'd be forgiven if you were surprised when we actually do go, because I had almost given up on ever getting to actual Fillory.) They do, indeed, go to Fillory (Book Three) and take upon themselves the quest of finding the guardians of Fillory who seem to have disappeared and left the land a bit lawless. Naturally, this goes horribly wrong as they're confronted with true violence and they discover that the Beast is actually one of the children who appeared in the Fillory books that was left behind and learned how to manipulate magic for his own purposes. Alice dies in destroying the Beast, and Quentin nearly dies as well. He revives, mends, and finds his way back to "the real world," (Book Four) where he gives up magic for a time, but when given the opportunity to re-join his friends and return to Fillory... he chooses Fillory once more.

Now, here are a few "fun facts" that my book club learned from Lev Grossman.

1. Grossman based the structure of the novel on Brideshead Revisited, which is one of his favorite novels. As strange as this might sound, consider the basic arch -- a rather idyllic beginning in an elite college atmosphere followed with an abrupt (and alcohol-sodden) entry into the "real world" where the characters find it hard to cope.

2. Grossman claims that he thought of the idea for this novel in the mid-90s, "before Harry Potter" as a result of his exposure to authors like Ursula K. Le Guin (with whom Grossman is now acquainted and on a first-name basis) and other fantasy literature that featured students schooled in magic.

3. There's no getting away from the comparison that Fillory is startlingly like Narnia. It's foolish to suggest otherwise. And in fact, Grossman told us that the first draft of The Magicians actually was set in Narnia, with Aslan and CS Lewis as characters. Of course, he then spoke with some intellectual property lawyers and friends who told him that sure, it's possible, he could go ahead with a book set in Narnia, but the legal issues would put him up against the CS Lewis estate and Walt Disney Pictures... so you're also up against unlimited money to fund a legal battle that could drag on. So the idea of immediately being set in Narnia was abandoned and Fillory was born.

4. In talking with Grossman, one inevitably finds that he tends to name drop. He's a journalist who does a great deal of interviews and he wrote a book that draws heavily on other novels, so it's easily forgiveable. He admits to constantly adding in things that serve as nods to other works of fiction. You'd be right in your guess that the whole turning-into-geese thing is a nod to TH White's The Sword in the Stone and that the cacodemons imprisoned in the backs of Brakebills graduates are inspired from Larry Niven. Another one that I might add to this (which wasn't explicitly mentioned, though Grossman did mention this author as an inspiration) is Phillip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy. In this series, you find that a lot of power and magic is invested in children and when they grow up, their daemons stabilize -- and indeed, "growing up" might simply be synonymous with having sex. Grossman made a point of insisting that fantasy tends to see sex as the end of magic, whereas he believed that "sex isn't the end of magic, it's the beginning." I found this to be a great viewpoint, though the sex that occurs in The Magicians isn't always magical. On the whole, though, Grossman tended to say "I don't know if any of you have read [insert author/book]" quite a lot, as he must be fairly used to addressing audiences that wouldn't know his more obscure influences. Quite proudly, I can say that there wasn't a single reference to a book or author that he made which at least one of my book club members hadn't read.

5. Grossman repeatedly mentioned that one of the issues he had with Harry Potter (and there were several) was with the character of Dudley Dursley. When Grossman interviewed JK Rowling, he even left some of his limited interview time to address the question of Dudley. Rowling insists that Dudley is simply an unimaginative child who has no interest in magic, but Grossman believes that he would. A child on the fringe of a magical world without any interest in it whatsoever? It rubbed him the wrong way. Julia (a girl Quentin grew up with and ends up dating his best friend while Quentin pines for her) is Grossman's answer to Dudley. Quentin thinks he sees Julia at the exam, then is confronted by her at a later date, when she's completely lost it -- she's a person driven mad by the limited exposure to this magical world and then denied access. Grossman's other issue with Harry Potter is with the fact that Harry is too much of a jock and never seems to pick up a book for the duration of his magical education. Clearly, Quentin's obsession with fantasy books is correcting what Grossman believed should have been a trait of Harry. Jokingly, he even called Harry "a bit of a douchebag." Of course, he also said that he was a fan of Rowling's series, "in the limited way on can be a Harry Potter fan."

6. As far as his alignment with Quentin is concerned, Grossman admitted, "Quentin is very much like me at his age... he's very much like I was at 34" (the age at which he started writing the book). He also noted that his own battle with depression certainly found its way into Quentin's character as well, along with his somewhat distant relationship with his parents.

7. The most surprising revelation of the evening, however, was when Grossman told us that originally, it was Janet and not Alice that was supposed to die. If you search the book, you'll notice that there's a great amount of foreshadowing that points to this. (Indeed, while reading the book, I was of the opinion that Janet would get it in the end... after all, she's one of the first to admit to sex and it's always the girl who has sex that ends up dying in the horror movie.) Eventually, an intervention was performed by his editor who sat him down and explained that Janet must be given a reprieve and Alice is the one who has to be sacrificed. This surprised me greatly, as I always rather assumed Alice would have to die, too, (after all, in the first scene with Alice, the breaking of the glass animal seemed to suggest that she'd be similarly shattered in the end). When I asked how on earth the book would end with Alice alive, Lev started to explain, stopped and smirked. "No, it really wouldn't have worked at all well, would it?" (I'll talk more about Grossman's use of female characters in the novel later.)

8. Yes, there will be a sequel, and as of now, Lev Grossman is planning for a trilogy. (One of our group adamantly insisted that he simply couldn't plan a trilogy as it didn't have a chance of working well. Instead, she suggested, he should write a sequel and if things go well, then go for the third, but if he plans for three, he'll fail miserably. Lev took this in stride.)

I found a lot of what Grossman had to offer in our book club discussion to be fantastic. While I might have been the only one to come with a list of questions (it's just how I function, and hence why I have a ridiculous number of individual discussion points about the book), we always had things to ask and we spent nearly three hours in discussion. So from here on out, I'm basically just noting certain topics of conversation about the book (particular scenes or themes).

The epigraph. The book begins with a selection from Shakespeare's The Tempest. It's from act five, where Prospero is telling the audience that he's going to give up magic once he's back in the real world. In addition, when Quentin is taking the entrance exam for Brakebills, part of the exam asks him to read a passage from The Tempest and translate it into a made-up language. Clearly The Tempest means something to Grossman here -- which is not surprising in terms of the main character/author link. Prospero is frequently aligned with Shakespeare as an aging "magician" speaking directly to the audience as he spins his tales and controls the fates of those on stage. It doesn’t seem out of line that Grossman is making a nod to himself as Quentin – a dissatisfied creature who expects more from himself than what can be given. But I wanted to know why Grossman had selected this particular epigraph, as the idea of Quentin giving up magic is kind of ridiculous and Grossman seems to know that. Once exposed to magic, there's no going back. So when it looks like Quentin has "given up" magic at the end of the novel, I never believed for a moment that this would hold true. Grossman nodded and said that at the end of many fantasy novels (particularly Narnia, which was a huge influence here), everyone seems to get kicked out of the magical land and then return to the nonmagical one without too much fuss. They renounce magic and seem okay with it. Of course, it's not like they have to go back to their exact lives, but it's kind of a "you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here" kind of thing. Grossman also said that he thought some people might have been fooled into believing that Quentin really was giving up on magic, though if they did, then they didn't quite understand what he was doing with much of this book.

The Brooklyn joke. Throughout the book, Grossman kind of beats this joke to death -- the idea that once he's gotten to Brakebills, Quentin hates Brooklyn and would rather die than return to it. Granted, I think this can stand for the larger idea of being banished to one's previous existence after having one's eyes opened to a bigger world than that which we knew. After all, no college student is totally comfortable when they return home for the holidays and find themselves in under his/her parent's roof and rules once more. Grossman himself lives in Brooklyn, so one must assume that he has some fondness for it, but he said that while he was writing this book, "I was living in Brooklyn over the Bagel Delight ... Brooklyn just seemed like the most unmagical place." (And yes, that would be in Park Slope, mere blocks from my apartment.) I suppose I fault Grossman's lack of imagination here, or perhaps it was simply a darker point of life that led him to believe there was no magic in the real world at all, and Brooklyn was the one to bear the weight of that accusation. Needless to say, though, the joke was overused and irritated this Brooklynite.

The idea of games in novels. In reading The Magicians one might easily come away with the idea that Grossman believed a magical game to be a staple of fantasy, something one must include but he didn't seem very pleased about doing so. Welters is somewhat based on chess because Grossman wanted there to be some measure of intellectual strategy (he did not reference the giant chess game from HP in his explanation), but during the game, Quentin essentially throws in the towel and suggests that the game is pointless. To me, this seems like pretty clear criticism. Grossman, however, said that he loves novels with games in them. Thus, I felt a huge disconnect in what the novel seemed to be saying about games and what Grossman seemed to suggest about his own feelings.

The issue of his female characters. For a bunch of feminists, this was a big topic for us. Grossman's female characters are simply not as developed as his male characters. Granted, no one is as well-developed as Quentin, but the female characters like Julia, Alice, and Janet tend to be vehicles for larger ideas rather than characters in their own rights. One of the suggestions that Grossman said he receives from people is to re-write The Magicians from the perspective of Julia, the girl who didn't make it into Brakebills and essentially loses it as a result. Julia tracks down Quentin and accosts him, pathetically showing him the magic that he assumes she learned off of an internet site. Of course, by the end of the novel, Julia is a hedgewitch with enough of a grasp on magic that Janet and Eliot seem to think she's an acceptable addition to their party which will return to Fillory. Janet is a girl of uncertain motivation, which is most likely the result of the drastic destiny change. Originally Grossman planned to kill her off, but instead, she survives to make us all wonder what her purpose might have been throughout the novel if not to serve as a casualty in the fight against the Beast, aside from sleeping with several other characters. Well, that and foolishly (and irrationally, I think) unleashing the cacodemon imprisoned in her back the night after she receives it because she feels sorry for it. And then there's Alice. Alice, whose brother died at Brakebills, turning into a niffin after performing a spell for a girl than went wrong. Alice is smart, loving, and sympathetic... yet she's still defined through her relationship with Quentin. Despite coming off as the best and brightest of her class, she's evidently content to do nothing in her first year out of Brakebills, contrary to her own impulses, simply because that's what Quentin wishes to do. It's natural that her depiction should be limited when viewed through the eyes of another, but I feel that Alice definitely got the short end of the stick here, because she could have been much more than simply the one who could see and do the things that Quentin could not.

The "fox rape" scene. When in Antarctica, the professor in charge turns the students into foxes for a while -- and in this baser state, without human inhibitions, Quentin and Alice have sex for the first time. In the scene, it's a little uncertain how willing Alice is in the situation, though it's noted that her eyes rolled with pleasure (and later she mentions that it was nice). What is clearly written is that these instincts simply took over them. While I referred to this as the "fox rape" scene in my head (and another of the girls in book club definitely saw this as a rape scene), I don't necessarily think this was a rape against Alice -- I kind of thought that both Quentin and Alice were violated when they were forced into this state where they had no control over the fact that they were attracted to each other. I'm also not outraged or upset with the scene's inclusion, though. I actually thought it was an interesting event, given the context of their whole world where they give themselves over to the judgment of their teachers. I would have been irritated if this event had suddenly opened them up to a real relationship, but instead, it was treated as this awkward thing that neither of them knew how to deal with. I was more skeptical about the detached orgies that seemed to happen when the students were in Antarctica (Grossman evidently was remembering Adams House at Harvard, which was called the sex dorm).

Very precise details that may or may not have a purpose. Now, fantasy novels are usually chock full of lovely details that often serve a purpose. Small, seemingly random, things are noted -- and chances are, you'll see them have meaning within the larger whole of the book. Oftentimes, we come across something early on that plays an important role later in the book. True for lots of fantasy and certainly true for J.K. Rowling, who always seemed to have something like this pop up in a book. There are a few things like that in The Magicians... and a few things that should have been tied in a whole lot better. In fact, a lot of things that should have been tied in. There was a great amount of detail that felt wasted to me... detail for the sake of detail, which is just poor writing.

An example of a good tie-in: When the paramedic (who we later learn was Jane Chatwin, the youngest of the children who went to Fillory) is introduced, it's noted that she has a single button that's different from the other buttons. Later, we're told that in the last Fillory book, the children are given buttons that would allow them to go to Fillory any time they wanted, but one of the older children hides them, insisting that it's not right that they should have that ability. The idea is that the buttons were lost forever, but in fantasy, few things are ever lost forever. An astute reader might put the button clues together early on, but it's not necessary. Penny finds a button and gets them to Fillory and we meet Jane later on. This was a great detail that slipped in and then had a purpose later on.

This, however, was one of the few things like that. There were many many other details that popped up and had no value. They only served as points of annoyance, because it was meaningless detail. (1) Quentin evidently calls Alice "Vix" as a term of endearment as a result of their foxy beginning... once. Or rather, it's mentioned that he called her this, but that's the only time we ever see it used. Chances are, this came up again in some draft, so really, it's poor editing to leave it in. (2) At the beginning of their magical education, the students spend night and day with a marble each -- and this marble is the focus for much of their initial experimentation. Quentin names his marble "Martin" (the name of the child who becomes "The Beast"). After such focus on the marbles, you'd think something might come up again later. All I can come up with is that this is hinting to the reader that the real Martin is much more important than we might realize, as he comes back as the Beast, but I feel like I'm just forcing meaning into that one. (3) Disciplines... everyone goes through the idea of having a Discipline but Quentin never tests into one... and then it hardly seems to matter! The only purpose seems to be to get Alice and Quentin closer to "the Physical Kids" -- Janet, Eliot and Josh -- but then the concept of Disciplines gets rather abandoned. It was rather annoying to introduce this structure and then never have anything come of it. It felt like the desire to "sort" people in an HP way. (4) The silver statue of the bird that is in Fogg's office. It's a partially transformed metal bird, serving perhaps as a reminder about magic that doesn't quite work. I asked Grossman if this was the weathervane that Richard was drunkenly convinced he could transform into a real bird. Grossman smiled and said he hadn't thought of that.

I could keep going, but I'll stop here. There wasn't any indication that these things would come back in future novels, but perhaps I'll be pleasantly surprised. (Well, except that Alice is dead, so we can't call her Vix. And we've moved beyond marbles. And Disciplines. So that leaves the silver bird.)

Alice and Quentin skip a year. A Brakebills education is supposed to last five years, but rather randomly, Quentin, Alice, and Penny are approached in their second year by faculty who suggest that they should take an exam to see if they're ready to skip a year. There's no purpose this, aside from banding them together and then breaking them apart. (This little threesome will be an important focal point later on, too, when Alice sleeps with Penny to get back at Quentin for his Janet/Eliot threesome.) When we asked him about this, he admitted that five years started to seem a little long, and this was an easy way to create the Alice-Quentin-Penny tension. I'm not quite sure that's enough for me, but ah well.

Slipping out of character. Grossman allows his characters to slip out of character when the mood suits or it’s good for a laugh. Pretentious and articulate young people are suddenly baffled when one of them has a somewhat complicated conversation with an adult; Quentin’s parents are first seen as concerned and then brushed off quite easily and find themselves surprised when he’s in the house and home on breaks; it’s suggested that Quentin has never called anyone “sir” before. It was irritating to see that it was easy to break out of character to have a laugh.

The stand-out sentences. Perhaps it's not a criticism of the book, but of Grossman's style. He has certain sentences that pop-out painfully. They're probably intended to be clever or beautiful and poetic... but really, they just seemed dreadfully out of place. They didn't even feel like Grossman, really, so I half-wondered if they were sentences or phrases that he had gotten from other places or people. Some examples: “That guy was a mystery wrapped in an enigma and crudely stapled to a ticking fucking time bomb. He was either going to hit somebody or start a blog. To tell you the truth, I’m kind of glad he hit you.” and “Just then, for an instant, the film of reality slipped off the spokes of its projector.”

Of course, there were some great things that Grossman included, which I feel a need to list out here, as I know the overall tone of these points are fairly negative. (1) After talking about annoying lines, I'll start with a line that I really enjoyed. When Alice has just died and the Beast/Martin has been defeated: “Quentin either fainted or died, he didn’t know which.” (2) When the students are transformed into geese to fly off to Antarctica, I thought that Grossman did a great job of presenting a very single-focus perspective. I also liked the reality of things here; as when Quentin is tossed off the tower by a teacher and he “shat on her feet in panic.” (3) It was predictable, but I liked the fact that Quentin and Alice were the only ones to embark on the optional Antarctica survival trial. (4) The swearing. Sure, sometimes it's over-the-top, but it's nice to recognize that young adults swear a great deal, and certainly would in some of these situations. It was also interesting how Grossman would very consciously seem to make a stance on certain swearing... for instance, when the phrase "howling cunt" is used, he writes that "howling" was a big word at Brakebills that year. (5) My favorite scene of the book is when Quentin and Alice have split and Quentin loses it when he realizes that Alice has slept with Penny. Unable to do anything else, he seizes ahold of his anger and becomes a cheerleader for their departure for Fillory, which everyone has been consciously/unconsciously putting off. For once, Quentin becomes the one to actually *do* something. (6) And finally, here's a big one. I didn't so much appreciate the explicitness of certain things when it came to Quentin's opinion on magic, but if he was going to do it, I liked how he phrased it when Alice talks to Quentin: “That’s what makes you different from the rest of us, Quentin. You actually believe in magic. You do realize, right, that nobody else does? I mean, we all know magic is real. But you really believe in it. Don’t you.” Quentin *believes* in magic magic, he doesn’t just trust it as a type of science. Of course, this is also part of the fact that he believes magic can make him happy, which he slowly comes to realize is not the case.

And last but not least... the whole unhappiness issue. It pervades the entire book. I would have preferred this to be a bit subtler, but nope. From the very beginning, Quentin is unhappy. Indeed, it almost appears as though he blames books for his unhappiness, or at least for giving him a vision of happiness that he cannot achieve: “In Fillory, things mattered in a way they didn’t in this world. In Fillory you felt the appropriate emotion when things happened. Happiness was a real, actual, achievable possibility. It came when you called. Or no, it never left you in the first place.” Grossman has pointed out in interviews that he wrote The Magicians while struggling with his own depression, so he certainly channeled his own experience to craft that of Quentin's. Indeed, Grossman noted at our book club that he thinks Quentin's depression clouded his abilities -- that he was on the cusp of not making it into Brakebills because it blinded him to certain things, and so he required the extra push from Fogg to get out of the haze to recognize what he was capable of doing. Even when he makes it into Brakebills, Quentin "experiments" with being happy... laughing out loud and toying with the idea, but it doesn't suggest that anything is genuinely felt. At one point, Quentin wonders, “Wasn’t there a spell for making yourself happy? Somebody must have invented one. How could he have missed it? Why didn’t they teach it?” The only surprising thing here is that to recognize his unhappiness suggests that he had somehow broken out of it for a time. Prior to the obsessive studying required for skipping up a year, Quentin doesn't seem happy, but he must not have been quite as down, for he notices a difference as he slides: “He recognized the irritable, unpleasant, unhappy person he was becoming: he looked strangely like the Quentin he thought he’d left behind in Brooklyn.” Of course, Quentin feels terribly alone in his unhappiness (and Grossman has said that he was definitely wrestling with his own depression while writing part of The Magicians, but not a single one of the magicians seem happy and each one of them has different ways of dealing with this. When asked why most people can’t do magic, Eliot says: “One, it’s very hard, and they’re not smart enough. Two, it’s very hard, and they’re not obsessive and miserable enough to do all the work you have to do to get it right.” He continues with points, but this second point is perhaps the most telling. Shortly after that, there's a scene where Quentin and Eliot are on the river, looking at the eight-woman skull out of West Point -- it's beautiful summer weather for Quentin and Eliot, but it's cold and gray for the women, who are described as grim. Quentin and Eliot know that the enchantment on Brakebills locks the women out of the beautiful summer weather that Quentin and Eliot got to experience. But really, it’s Quentin and Eliot who are the miserable ones, it simply has nothing to do with the weather. I rather enjoyed the dark and twisted Fogg who takes the graduates into the cellar where they're forced to have a cacodemon imprisoned in their backs. Fogg (who seems to have given the unhappiness issue even more thought than the students) asks them, “Can a man who can cast a spell every really grow up? ... I think you’re magicians because you’re unhappy.” He twists this into something positive, that magicians can use the pain, but he doesn’t seem to make a terribly convincing case here. Indeed, when we see adult magicians, we see Alice's eccentric parents who seem to live separate lives. Later, when Alice and Quentin are having sex in her parents’ house, Alice makes Quentin promise her that they’ll be happy, and she says it as though they’re arguing. The novel says that Quentin wouldn’t have disagreed with her in the throes of sex, but it doesn’t explicitly say that he promised, and indeed, if he had, that's a promise he would have broken. I'm not sure if Lev Grossman was all that surprised when my book club unanimously agreed that, without medication, Quentin has no chance of ever being happy. And even with medication, I'm a little skeptical. (Side note: the effects of medication mixed with magic... this was never touched upon in the book and I was a little surprised. Perhaps in the sequel.) Clearly, the question of whether these unsatisfied people can ever be happy is a main question of the book, and indeed, the book seems to suggest that the best one can hope for is simply to be invested in a project. Or at least that seems to be the best Quentin can hope for.

So... that was a very long review/discussion topic post. Sorry about that. I did a lot of studying of this book to make sure we were prepared to meet the author, and on top of that, this really was an interesting book in the commentary it make about magic and fantasy. I didn't like the main character and the book felt like it could have achieved so much more with the material, but ultimately, it was a really great book for discussion and one has to give Grossman credit for bringing this idea into the market.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

Not to be trite, but The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is one of the tastiest reads that I've devoured this year. It's one of those rare books where you'll fret over your desire to gobble it down versus savoring it in small bites. It's a delicious-- okay, I'll stop now. But seriously, it's a great book, you should read it.

The setting is Bishop's Lacey, a small, sleepy English town in 1950. Flavia Sabina Dolores de Luce, eleven, is better at chemistry than most of us can probably ever hope to be. (And the Dolores is a lie. She sometimes fabricates things.) She is our narrator and when asked what her passion is in life, Flavia unhesitatingly says chemistry. She even has her own lab which was originally created by a great-uncle and then used by her mother, who died in Tibet when Flavia was still a baby. It's her sanctuary in her her family's sprawling and somewhat dilapidated manor house where Flavia lives with her reclusive father (Colonel de Luce), two sisters (Ophelia and Daphne, whom she loathes), and Dogger (Colonel de Luce's once-manservant/driver and now gardener with a loose grip on the day-to-day, as he came back from the war a bit shattered).

The novel starts on a seemingly normal day (after a fight with Ophelia, Flavia stole her lipstick, melted it down to mix with the essential oil of poison ivy leaves, and reformed the lipstick using a .45 caliber slug) and then something peculiar happens. The housekeeper opens the kitchen door to discover a dead jack snipe with a stamp impaled on its beak. Flavia's father is visibly shaken and later, Flavia eavesdrops at the keyhole of his study to see and hear him argue with a redheaded man Flavia has never seen in her life. For her quiet philatelist of a father, this is uncommon behavior -- but perhaps more uncommon is when Flavia walks through the cucumber patch in the pre-dawn hours and discovers a body. It is the redheaded man with whom her father had been arguing and he breaths his last word into Flavia's face: "Vale!" Unlike most eleven-year-olds, Flavia does not run in fear: "I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn't. Quite the opposite. This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life."

Well, I think you can guess by this point that Flavia is not the kind of girl to simply leave this matter to the authorities, particularly when she calls them and once arriving, they tell her to run along. While the police conduct their investigation (in which her father is the prime suspect), Flavia does some sleuthing of her own. The result is a fantastic journey into her father's less-than-innocent school days, priceless stamps, and magic tricks that go horribly right.

By far, the most delightful part of this novel is the refreshing voice of Flavia, whose steadfast determination and piercing intelligence might be characteristic of a mystery novel detective, but her charm and occasional childish whimsy make for something original and fresh. With her knowledge of poisons and capacity for revenge, she is certainly a dangerous force; though despite her vast knowledge of chemistry and her very adult means of analysis, she is still a child wrapped up in fights with her sisters and desperate to clear her somewhat distant father, for he is the only parent she has left. Flavia also knows something adults tend to forget, which is that the best way to get information is to ask someone, and in a small town, certain people will always know everyone's business. Her search for information takes her all over Bishop's Lacy (on her trusty bicycle, Gladys) and as a result, we are exposed to a delightful cast of small-town characters, who might not always be as smitten with Flavia as the reader, but certainly understand that this is a remarkable young girl who sees far more than anyone else.

When I finished the novel, I rather lamented the fact that the story is so wrapped up in Flavia's family history that a second might be a difficult thing to pull off -- but evidently, Alan Bradley is working on a another Flavia de Luce novel, for which I can only be thankful. Bradley himself is retired from a career in media and television, and this is his first novel (though he did co-author a Sherlock Holmes work). He won the Crime Writers' Association Debut Dagger Award for this particular tale, so mystery lovers should take note. And even if you are not a mystery lover, I heartily recommend The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. I don't think that you'll be disappointed with the remarkably enchanting Flavia de Luce -- and if you love books, I recommend buying this in hardcover, as it's a beautiful little volume, compact and elegant without a dustjacket. Though really, if you're a friend of mine with whom I exchange presents at the holidays, forget everything you've read here -- you'll be getting this novel soon enough as a gift.

Sense and Sensibility - Read Aloud

Loving Austen's work as I do, it would take me months to write a real review of Sense and Sensibility that would encompass my emotional and intellectual reactions to the novel and its place in Austen's oeuvre, so the only thing I'll be "reviewing" here pertains to my latest reading of the book that spans April to September of 2009. My significant other and I read aloud to each other. (Yes, it's sickeningly adorable, we know.) It started as a project of reading the other our favorite novels. Since he had already read my actual favorite, Persuasion (at my encouragement the year before), I selected Pride and Prejudice and to continue the Austen education (as we're still muddling through his selection of Moby Dick), he requested Sense and Sensibility.

Reading a novel aloud, you might guess, makes for an interesting experience, particularly when it's a novel that you're quite familiar with... because somehow, you stumble upon things you never noticed. Words that you might have skipped over in a quick read or never knew how to pronounce are brought into the spotlight as definitions are requested or pronunciation corrections given. In addition, to read a novel aloud to someone means that reading is no longer this solitary communion between reader and novel. With an additional participant, there's an added dimension of dialogue and discussion. We try not to get "teacher-y" with leading questions, as obviously one of us knows how the story will turn out while the other is being exposed to everything for the first time. I also tried not to let my Austen research seep in too much as side commentary, but I couldn't always help myself. Some things, like how the novel was originally titled "Elinor and Marianne" or that it was originally published without Austen's name, but rather it was listed as "By a Lady"... well those things are harmless. Telling him that in the Ang Lee version, Emma Thompson plays Elinor and in real life, she married Willoughby... well, that got a little confusing for him.

So, my listener and I might summarize the basic plot of the novel as such: Elinor and Marianne Dashwood are two sisters with very different means of expression. Both are thoughtful and feeling young women, but Elinor tends to keep things to herself whereas Marianne sees no reason to hide emotions. Their father dies and their family (including mom and a little sister that we basically ignore) moves into a cottage owned by their mother's cousin, but not before Elinor develops an attachment to her half-brother's wife's brother Edward Ferras, who is considered out of her league in terms of fortune by his family. Once they move to Devonshire, Marianne falls head over heels for the dashing Mr. Willoughby, though she also inspires a quiet love in the older Colonel Brandon, who has a somewhat complicated past. Austen originally intended to show "sense" triumph over "sensibility," but as she wrote the novel, her feelings wavered on whether one should entirely discount "sensibility."

My own love for Sense and Sensibility aside, I was a little surprised at certain of his reactions to particular sections... and then quickly realized that, as an intelligent reader, he did have some points. Whenever he complained about Elinor being a bit of a wet blanket... well... he's kind of right. And yes, Marianne is incredibly selfish. And it's not terribly easy to remember all the names and family connections. (I made him a character list/family tree chart that he would occasionally consult as I read.) But it was comforting to know that a surprise at the end of the novel was just as much of a surprise for him as a first-time reader as it was for my pre-teen adolescent self when I first read it. And even more so, I was pleased that he found this to be a delightful and interesting plot-point rather than something ridiculous that reflected poor planning on the author's part.

I might adore the novel, but even I can admit that it certainly reflects Austen as a younger, less developed writer. Sense and Sensibility is a very different novel from Pride and Prejudice, but it's impossible to not make certain comparisons as both novels focus on two sisters who are not wealthy. And while S&S might have been written and published first, it's a much sadder novel than P&P, and actually a little more complex when it comes to how Austen feels about her characters. This is not to say that there are more complex characters here, it's just that this is a more interesting novel to study in terms of an author's complicated relationship with her characters. Austen might align herself with Elinor, but we must admit that there's the touch of the Marianne about her.

I've discussed Sense and Sensibility with people any times before, but never in a situation where our reading at the same pace allows us to address immediate scenes and actions. As a result, we often discussed particular phrases as it pertained to her writing style, making comparisons with P&P or Persuasion. We spent a lot of time talking about some of the supporting characters (and why their voices are so much more fun to do than the main characters'), why Austen considered certain scenes to be necessary in the general arch of the story, and where we saw clear foreshadowings of particular scenes or characters in P&P.

Overall, if you're looking to read an Austen novel to your significant other, I would recommend Pride and Prejudice over this one, unless you're prepared to handle a few outbursts. ("Yes! We get it! Elinor is bottling it all inside! But can't she just punch Lucy in the nose just once?" or "Wait a minute. That was a duel. There was a duel in an Austen novel and we don't even get to see it?! And they both miss?! That's utterly ridiculous!") We had a great time, though, and it was a quick read for us. It's a beautiful, fantastic novel that any real literature fan should experience -- preferably before the Ang Lee version, though I consider it to be one of the best Austen movie adaptations out there.

Next up for our reading? Wuthering Heights. But we're still disemboweling whales on his side, so I might try to make it through a bit more of that before we start to tackle Heathcliff and the moors.

A Great and Terrible Beauty

A Great and Terrible Beauty has edged its way onto many a tabletop display in bookstores and I finally decided to break down and see why. To start, the cover is pretty darn alluring for its market of adolescent girls. Giant type over a beautiful girl in a corset... immediately, we're clued in that we're going to find a historical novel with some luscious undertones and most likely a romantic (though probably forbidden) storyline in the background, but with one girl's struggle to fit into a particular mold of society taking precedence. (Or at least if you study bookcovers like I do, you might think this.) And this is true... somewhat. I'll admit, though, I was surprised when the back of the book told me about the supernatural elements at play that were more than the usual ghosts and suspense found in Gothic novels.

This is the first in a trilogy of books set in the late 1800s about Gemma Doyle, a young British girl raised in India. On her sixteenth birthday, she feuds with her mother over her desire to visit London and runs off, only to then have her mother and another man die in a strange and mysterious way. Also mysterious is the fact that Gemma witnesses their deaths in an overpowering vision, but cannot understand what forces are at work, both in their deaths and in her vision. Gemma's father, whose hold on things already seems tenuous at best, suffers a nervous collapse and they return to England, where Gemma will attend the prestigious Spence boarding school for young ladies.

At Spence, she is immediately faced with the structured Victorian lifestyle that requires young ladies to be well-bred, compliant to the wishes of their elders, and highly accomplished. But let's not forget we're also dealing with adolescent girls and evidently, they remain the same no matter what the time period might be. At Spence, there is a strong clique of beautiful and wealthy girls that Gemma at once despises and yet feels pulled towards. At the same time, Gemma is still having flashes of visions and she discovers that she's been followed to England by a young Indian man (the brother of the man who died with her mother) who warns her to block out the visions at all costs. At this point, I find it hard to summarize without laughing a little bit... girl is unsure of her powers; girl is led to find a secret diary of another Spence girl who had similar powers; despite being warned by the Indian boy, she tries her powers out with her friends and they enter "the realms," a place where everything is shaped by their desires; girl is reunited with mother in these "realms" and mother warns her about taking magic into the real world; girl and friends do this anyway and subequently get in way over their heads with some darker force named Circe. Yeah. I suppose the less laughable summary would be: "As she struggles to keep her secret and still learn more about the powers she seems to possess, she and three friends play dangerously with forces beyond their understanding." but that's not quite as honest.

I admit right off the bat that I have a soft spot for young adult literature. There's something fascinating about work aimed towards a period of life where there's so much going on in terms of one's psychological development, education, and personality... not to mention the outward expression of it with inter-personal relationships. Young adults are finding out who they are and who they want to become. There's this interesting issue of trust at work whenever you're dealing with children's and young adult literature. What the author chooses to convey to the reader could shape this young person's life in ways they might not realize. It's fascinating and that's the logic I use whenever I think I should be reading a grown-up book. In addition, I really enjoy historical novels, so I was guiltily assuming that I'd really enjoy this series.

Not so much. On the teen education front, clearly Libba Bray's focus here was on the idea of personal insecurities and the question of coming to terms with one's self and having sincere friendships with others. There's also a healthy dose of forgiving each other and ourselves for the wrongs we've done or think we've done. Certain members (the leaders, really) of the pack of cruel girls at Spence become some of Gemma's closest friends (though honestly, it seems that this happens because of limited options) and they all have their own secrets, even as they bluff their way through appearing perfect. I feel that I'm not alone in thinking that these girls are not terribly likeable, but then, they're teenage girls. They do mean and hateful things to each other. When first entering the realms, Gemma is asked if she really trusts these girls and she immediately said yes -- which rather shocked me. Trust had not yet been earned and despite the professed bonds by the end of the book, I'm not sure it ever was merited. But, as I mentioned, we are dealing with teenage girls and at least Gemma herself is not some shining and perfect example of trust, honesty, and goodness. Everyone has flaws, though we might be a little too forgiving towards some of them. The historical features of the novel are more or less used for background elements and and when convenient in plotpoints -- one girl is being forced to marry a rich older man, gypsies (in a very stereotyped portrayal) populate the woods, there's the general backdrop of girls in a society that has specific expectations of them when they have different desires, etc. The time frame basically gave us some more Gothic elements, but clearly these girls were clearly created to seem more modern as a means of getting adolescent readers to relate to them. There are some steamy fantasies and underage drinking... definitely things that seem engineered to be more modern.

In the end, I also wasn't terribly swept away with the idea of "the realms" and the magical things taking place. Intrigued, perhaps, but never really convinced that they would be fantastic. In addition, I found most everything to be quite predictable, so I wasn't surprised by any betrayal, death, or revelations of character. And here's an incredibly petty criticism, but I was surprised when I discovered that Libba Bray herself is a redhead, as Gemma is not a convincing one. She lacks the spark of personality and there was a complete lack of a reaction from surrounding characters to this fact (and surely at the time, there would be something snide about Ireland or Scotland mentioned to Gemma once she reached Spence, and in India it would have been even rarer and comment-inducing). A bigger deal was the fact that she has her mother's green eyes. Alas.

What I did appreciate, I suppose, were the great pains taken to suggest that we're all flawed and no one is perfect. There was also a good emphasis on how there were very limited options for girls in Victorian times (even if everything didn't quite feel accurate enough). And perhaps another benefit might be that the adolescent girls reading this might end up reading real Gothic literature as a result, and fingers crossed that they won't stop reading when they realize they won't be getting the same kind of steamy scenes and blunt, modern language in the older stuff.

So... will I be reading the rest of the trilogy? Normally, you'd assume that a reviewer with these opinions would say no, but then you have to remember that I have trouble letting go of things. And when it's so easy to read young adult novels quickly, I find it hard to justify the abandonment of them. In the end, I'll let my pocketbook make the call. If I end up finding them at a used bookstore or on super sale, then I'll continue, but I will not be paying market price, even for a fellow redhead.

The Moving Toyshop

The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin is utterly fabulous. It cropped up on some list of great sleuthing books a while ago and recently, I decided I needed a random treat. Having forgotten all the details that merited its placement on my Amazon wishlist, I was plunged into a wickedly funny and delicious murder mystery romp that takes place over twenty four hours in Oxford.

The Moving Toyshop is the third in a series of novels featuring Gervase Fen, an Oxford don who evidently solves crimes more often than he lectures or have tutorials with students -- but knowing nothing about Gervase Fen did not hinder me here. The novel opens in 1938 London, with the poet Richard Cadogan trying to coax an advance from his publisher, as he's utterly bored, needs adventure, and has selected Oxford as his holiday destination of choice. After a late-night arrival in Oxford, he stumbles into a toy shop -- and discovers a dead body. (Just accept this ridiculous premise and move on.) After being knocked unconscious and reviving in a broom cupboard only to escape, when Cadogan tries to take the police to the scene of the crime -- the location he distinctly remembers as a toy shop is a grocer's and there is no body to be found. Cadogan seeks out his old schoolmate Fen to help him track down the killer (and the body... and the toy shop...) and a rolicking day of sleuthing ensues.

Now, we all know how much I love Oxford, and if you do, too, then I think you're certain to love this. Cadogan and Fen seem to run over every inch of the place, but there are other things that conspired to make this a new favorite book of mine... for instance, the near bar-fight over Jane Austen. Seriously, I knew before then that I was quite charmed with the book, but at that point, I knew it was fantastic. While sitting in a bar or tied up and held hostage, Cadogan and Fen play games where they name off unreadable classics or insufferable characters that are intended as sympathetic. I'm totally going to start doing this with my friends whenever we find ourselves waiting somewhere. The novel is also in that particular witty style of British novels where every man is a raging homosexual or a rake... and even the rakes seem a bit light in the loafers. The dialogue is fantastic (I don't often underline in my books these days, but there were a few exchanges that I simply knew I'd want to note for later reference) and while the circumstances of the murder mystery are clearly ridiculous, it still makes for a very amusing story.

In short, if you enjoy ridiculous British sleuthing novels, then I'd be surprised if you hadn't read this already -- and if you haven't, you simply must.

An Expert in Murder

An Expert in Murder is a quite a good book, but in many ways, it's a victim to its own complications. There's a great deal going on with it, so let me give a brief summary, get into some of its stumbling blocks, and then close with why you really should read it anyway.

Josephine Tey, a Scottish writer and playwright, is traveling by train to London in the 1930s for the final week that her play, Richard of Bordeaux, will be playing in the West End. While on the train, she meets Elspeth Simmons, a young girl who recognizes Tey from a theater review and is quite a fan of her work. Elspeth is staying with her aunt and uncle in London, but she and her beau (who happens to work backstage on Richard of Bordeaux) will be seeing the play later that week. Tey is charmed by the girl, even inviting her to meet the lead actress of the play, who is meeting Tey at the station. Elspeth does so, and in her excitement, forgets her luggage on the train and runs back to retrieve it. Tey and her actress friend leave, but when Elspeth returns to the train car, she is brutally murdered in a way that the police can only believe is premeditated. She will not be the only casualty in this complicated story of the theater and England after the first World War -- for even if the war is over, its effects are still very present in the lives of those who lived through it.

This is Nicola Upson's first mystery novel and don't let yourself be convinced otherwise as you start to read it. I say this because I knew it was the first, and yet kept second-guessing myself. There are two reasons for this. Number one: Upson gave herself the daunting task of fictionalizing history. Her main character, Josephine Tey, is based on Elizabeth Macintosh, a Scottish mystery novelist. Josephine Tey was one of two pseudonyms that Macintosh used; the other is Gordon Daviot. Upson nods to both of these, as Upson's character of Tey writes under the name Daviot. This novel focuses on events surrounding the original West End staging of Macintosh/Tey/Daviot's play Richard of Bordeaux. Now, the plot of this novel is entirely fictional, but many of the characters are modeled on real people. This is a lot of overlay to deal with, but not too much... which brings me to the second reason that I felt like I was missing something throughout the beginning chapters. There was information being glazed over in a way that suggested that these were plotpoints of an earlier novel and all you needed to know was the outcome (aka a court case ruled in favor of Tey and as a result, some other author committed suicide). These incidents that have taken place prior to the events that are taking place in this novel are actually important here in this story, but you aren't necessarily given that impression. When Tey refers to her guilt that author's suicide, the reader feels confused because we are not given much to go on, and the natural impulse is to assume there was backstory here in the form of another novel that we clearly skipped/missed. I'm not sure what could have been done to make this better, but it wasn't until halfway through the book that I realized this backstory was still very much in play. It made things confusing and you never want your reader to spend a lot of time thinking, "did I miss something?"

That said, I quite enjoyed An Expert in Murder. It has its first novel flaws, but perhaps Upson is only really guilty of being ambitious. Upson paints an incredibly vivid picture of theater in the 1930s -- which I assume might be the subject of her nonfiction works, and certainly might be influenced by her own work in theater. It's not simply the on-stage action (because really, this isn't focused on much at all, except in discussions off-stage), but the theater-owner and the backstage crew are interesting, too. One accepts that strong personalities populate the theater, and so they do not seem at all out of place with their quips. Upson doesn't shy away from depicting homosexual relationships even at this time, though mostly she acknowledges that while they might be more common in the theater world, they were still bound by certain societal rules away from the footlights. Her characters off the stage have a bit more depth. Tey was interesting as a slightly older female lead character, but Archie Penrose, the detective, was really great. Their interaction is great and restrained -- very English, but wonderfully multi-faceted. Their link is a bit contrived, but Upson has a real gift for depicting poignant facts that have to do with this time period and if the complications are somewhat easy to foresee, you'll at least appreciate what still feels like genuine emotion without being overly dramatic. The complications of having survived friends and loved ones who were lost in a war, the attempts to move on with one's life, the inability to escape atrocities committed on and off the battlefield... Upson really shines here. I wasn't was thrilled with the ending of the murder mystery (don't worry, no spoilers here), but it came with what felt like a caricature of an evil villain. But even that wasn't quite enough for me to set aside the enjoyment that I'd gotten out of the rest of the novel's prose.

So I certainly believe that Upson will be a mystery writer to watch if she can keep pace with her own standards. I feel that, given the amazing depth of this work, they must be rather high. With all the plotpoints and characters, things felt slightly contrived, but despite these few issues, I still think the book was quite worthwhile and I look forward to the next Josephine Tey mystery, where hopefully Upson will have ironed out a few kinks. Oh, and I'll admit that this is another book where I was lured in by the cover -- I think it's just lovely.

Bunnicula: A Rabbit-Tale of Mystery

Bunnicula: A Rabbit-Tale of Mystery was written by James and Debra Howe about a vampire rabbit that comes to live with a family. When we read and love books as children, I suppose it's only natural for us to want to pass along that love to a new generation, so when I realized that my godson was coming upon the age and reading ability where Bunnicula might suit, I immediately bought it for him. It was only after the purchase that a friend asked, "So wait... he's a vampire rabbit? But he only drains vegetables? Where's the danger?"

It took a moment to admit that I couldn't exactly remember, and so I re-read Bunnicula to find that no matter what Chester the cat might suggest, there isn't really any danger (well, at least from Bunnicula), but the book remains delightful.

Bunnicula is written from the perspective of Harold, the Monroe family dog, but in his manuscript, he maintains that he has changed the names of the innocent for their protection. Harold has a peaceable companion in Chester, the family cat, named after G.K. Chesterton. (Which must have triggered some subconscious memory, given that I just read a book by G.K. Chesterton, but I'm not sure which book led to the other.) Chester reads quite a lot and when the family brings home a new pet after finding him at the movie theater (a showing of Dracula), Chester suspects that Bunnicula is more than he appears. He sleeps all day and the markings on his fur form a curious widow's peak that gives him the look of wearing a cape. And Chester could swear that he saw two pointy fangs on the bunny by the light of the moon. Chester becomes obsessed with watching Bunnicula and discovers white vegetables in the house, which he believes Bunnicula has drained.

Having now read this as an adult, I actually found Bunnicula to be relatively simple in terms of plotline, but rather packed with some more complicated ideas if one chooses to think about them. For instance, Chester is convinced that Bunnicula's eating habits somehow endanger them all -- a very "today vegetables, tomorrow the world" kind of approach. Harold, on the other hand, is rather torn between supporting his friend Chester and simply leaving Bunnicula be, as he sees no harm in it -- aside from a rather startled family when they believe themselves subjected to some kind of vegetable blight after finding the white veggies. This manages to provide a rather fantastic set-up for teaching children about trusting their own opinions, not simply going along with the crowd, respecting others despite things that make them unique/different, and so forth. Chester appears to be a much less enjoyable character now that I'm older and the simple fact of him being a kitty counts for less than it did when I was eight. I mean, one could argue that Chester is instigating hate crimes (thank goodness that for all his literacy, he doesn't know the difference between a steak and a stake). His antics with spreading garlic everywhere are amusing (particularly in the time-honored tradition of humans being completely oblivious to anything in the animal world when your characters are animals), and there's a nice little jab at the concept of therapy being able to help him at the end of the book, but I found Chester to be much less of a funny kitty this time around. Our trustworthy narrator, Harold, does not let his fondness for chocolate cupcakes (though really, one shouldn't given chocolate to dogs) distract him from helping a potential new friend.

So if you're looking for a good (not too scary) Halloween book for that 8-12 year-old, then your search should be at an end. Of course, if memory serves, some more threatening things (like a potential zombie/vampire vegetable army?) seem to loom in the series. And speaking of series, I think I might have stopped after book number four, but the entire series for young readers (aka not counting spin-off books and for even younger readers) includes Howliday Inn, The Celery Stalks at Midnight, Nighty Nightmare, Return to Howliday Inn, Bunnicula Meets Edgar Allan Crow, and Bunnicula Strikes again.

Whenever I re-read books like this, I inevitably research them online and come up with some interesting facts. Evidently, James and Deborah Howe wrote Bunnicula together, but Deborah Howe died of cancer at the age of 31, before Bunnicula's publication. It seems that Deborah Howe was already an established children's author, having published a number of works and won several awards in her short life, and it was this first foray into children's literature that inspired James Howe. He continued writing the Bunnicula series, in addition to other books, after remarrying, fathering a daughter, eventually divorcing, and coming out of the closet. While Bunnicula Strikes Again appears to be the last in that series, he continues to write today.

The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

On the cover of The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, there's a sentence from a review by Kingsley Amis where he calls this book "The most thrilling book I have ever read." Clearly, strong recommendations from well-known authors can be a powerful selling tool, but I'll admit, it was the rest of the cover that sold me on this book. You can't always judge by it, sure, but you can certainly be reeled in by an attractive one. Look at this! Can you feel the energy? It's a small little volume, too, but on paper that's more appealing than the usual mass-market paperback. The crisp white and the stark black and red... Hats off to the art department at Penguin. Something about this small volume called to me and after reading the back cover description, I knew this was going to be good.

The best way that I've found to describe this book is that it feels like you're reading a car chase. In a good way. No, the whole book is not a car chase (though there is a car chase at one point), but it's a fantastic thriller that had me riveted as it raced through twists and turns in the plot, which featured poets, anarchy, and the question of what makes reality.

G.K. Chesterton published this book in 1908 and it opens on the meeting of two poets in turn of the century London -- Lucian Gregory and Gabriel Syme. Gregory loses his temper when Syme suggests that Gregory is not a true anarchist. So to prove his commitment to anarchy, Gregory extracts a vow of silence from Syme and then takes him to a secret meeting of anarchists... only to find (after Syme requests a similar promise from Gregory) that Syme is part of a secret anti-anarchy group of Scotland Yard. The two are at an impasse, unable to expose the other, and so Gregory is completely at a loss when Syme gives a rousing speech at the meeting and the secret agent is elected to serve as the local representative (called "Thursday") on the worldwide Central Council of Anarchists. And this is only the beginning as Syme joins the Council and meets its president, Sunday, who comes to represent all that Syme is battling against in this world.

Wikipedia will tell you that Adam Gopnik ran a piece in The New Yorker which described this book as "one of the hidden hinges of twentieth-century writing, the place where, before our eyes, the nonsense-fantastical tradition of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear pivots and becomes the nightmare-fantastical tradition of Kafka and Borges." Even 101 years later, I could feel that this was that missing literary link that finally made me understand how the jump to writing and appreciating Kafka's work was made possible. That tradition of literature was never my focus, and I feel that had I been asked to read this before Kafka in school, I could have found a more coherent place for it in the sequence of literary styles. I had always been dissatisfied with explanations of how Kafka brought forth such a surreal narrative, fully-formed in its own unique style, a man suddenly made insect. I knew there must have been some premonitory clue, and here I feel as though I've stumbled upon something that makes that a little clearer. Though it seems amusing to use the term "clarity" here, as the simultaneous trust in and distrust of reality is what makes it all terrifying/fascinating.

Oh, and it might be narcissistic, but I'm always going to have a small affinity for a book that treats redheads with respect. There's a fantastic line that you can bet I'll remember: "My red hair, like red flames, shall burn up the world." Awesome. And I'll leave you with an early paragraph where Syme is speaking with Gregory's sister that I particularly enjoyed:

He stared and talked at the girl's red hair and amused face for what seemed to be a few minutes; and then, feeling that the groups in such a place should mix, rose to his feet. To his astonishment, he discovered the whole garden empty. Everyone had gone long ago, and he went himself with a rather hurried apology. He left with a sense of champagne in his head, which he could not afterwards explain. In the wild events which were to follow, this girl had no part at all; he never saw her again until all his tale was over. And yet, in some indescribable way, she kept recurring like a motive in music through all his mad adventures afterwards, and the glory of her strange hair ran like a red thread through those dark and ill-drawn tapestries of the night. For what followed was so improbable that it might well have been a dream.

The Amnesiac

James Purdew cannot remember a few things. A few years, come to think of it. They seem to have just slipped his mind. And it's not as though he can simply consult his journals to refresh his memory, because the journals for those three years seem to be locked in a small safe that can only be cracked via explosives and he's misplaced the key.

In the first scene of Sam Taylor's The Amnesiac, James is rushing up the stairs to answer a telephone in the Amsterdam flat that he shares with his girlfriend, Ingrid -- and he breaks a bone, which leaves his leg in a cast. It is the day before his thirtieth birthday. After a few weeks of recuperation, their relationship unravels, though not explosively by any means. Ingird leaves to take a job where, if he went with her, he could see his life neatly mapped out for him and James is unwilling to continue along such a clear path. After the break-up, a chance encounter with Ingrid's brother conveys to him the message that Ingrid hopes James can work things out with Anna. The name means virtually nothing to James, but it does give him a flash image of recognition, even if he has no idea who Anna might be. He feels compelled to discover the secret of those missing years -- for really, with such a hole in his memory, he starts to question a good amount of the rest of his memories, too. So James returns to H (an specified university town) in the UK, where he went those missing years occurred. He begins to restore a house owned by an unknown Client, and James becomes convinced that he knew this place during those missing years. Alternately becoming obsessed with rebuilding the house and peeling back the layers of his own past, James becomes a kind of detective, digging up clues to discover what secrets are out there, even if they would best be forgotten.

Oddly (or perhaps fittingly), I cannot remember the recommendation or review that caused me to put The Amnesiac on my short-list of books to read. Book club books and other titles wormed their way into my hands before I could finally reach for it upon my shelf, and without glancing at the back cover to refresh myself of the plot (and I had forgotten most of that, beyond simply that it featured a man trying to discover something about himself that he had forgotten), I started to read.

And I could not put it down.

It's hard to describe this novel, as its appeal wasn't necessarily in the linear story. Indeed, when discussing it with others as I was still reading it, the only thing I would say is that I feared it might collapse, becoming too clever to sustain itself. And while it didn't collapse, I also didn't feel entirely satisfied with its resolution. What I did enjoy, though, was the tone of everything... when things started to spiral out of control, the language kept up as you moved along at breakneck speed, but then slowed with James's (and the reader's) attempt to understand. The details helped this, without beating you over the head with clues (though James himself keeps a box quaintly labeled "CLUES"). And these details, like common initials in a story within the story that James finds under the wallpaper or flashes of what must be memories, are what James and the reader cling to as we move along. The reader is allowed to feel satisfied with guessing when things are a bit fishy and while a handful of instances resulted in my guesses being spot on, there were an equal number of times where I felt the bottom drop as I struggled with a new twist. If you couldn't tell already, reality is a bit of a dodgy concept for James Purdew, but it's certainly interesting. I particularly enjoyed a conversation between James and Philip Larkin, where James calls Larkin out on being dead. The details scattered throughout, too, were great -- shining moments of how imperfect our recognition of details can be and what exactly we choose to recall about scenes.

So the novel might not be perfect, but it's certainly fascinating. I mean, if you were to summarize the simple plot of the novel, it involves a newly-thirty man struggling to understand his past and what it all means. That hardly sounds original, but I'm quite pleased with Taylor's twists on it.

The Graveyard Book

I've come to the conclusion that I will always read Neil Gaiman's things and even if I'm not delighted by a piece, it doesn't seem to decrease my interest in his work. It's just kind of how it is. There's something fascinating about the stories he tells and so even if I'm not immediately taken by the idea, sooner or later, I know that I'll always pick up whatever he happens to publish. In addition, I tend to prefer his novels on audio book (or at least certainly the ones geared towards a younger audience). He reads them himself and there's something about having the writer read his work... it's the closest you can get to understanding his intentions, as he's placing the emphasis on just what he wishes. I also think I just might find Neil Gaiman to be fascinating, too, and I'm always pleased to see his tweets (@neilhimself).

The Graveyard Book opens with a very chilling scene -- a man named Jack enters a home and kills a family... everyone except the baby, who happens to escape death by chance, as he toddles out the open door and into the nearby graveyard. With Jack in pursuit, the ghosts of the graveyard hide the baby after the faint spirit of his newly murdered mother appears to plead for assistance, and the man Jack is diverted and drawn away. After a good amount of discussion between the occupants of the graveyard, the baby is adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Owens, and he is christened "Nobody." Another being, named Silas, also agrees to serve as the child's guardian, as the ghosts cannot leave the graveyard, but Silas can, and therefore is able to procure food and clothing for the boy.

And so Nobody Owens (known as "Bod") grows up in a graveyard, under its protection and thus given certain advantages. For instance, he can see quite clearly in the dark and learns things that ghosts must learn, such as the abilities to fade from view or change the atmosphere to increase the levels of unease and fear. He is tutored by ghosts and only makes one living friend as a child. But always there is the threat that outside the graveyard, there is danger. For the man Jack had been sent to kill Bod and his family, and he has not stopped looking for the boy.

I found the first half of this story to be more interesting than the second, and certain moments stand out as being more memorable than others. I tended to like the idea of things best (the idea of a boy raised by ghosts in a graveyard, the idea of an ancient spirit living deep under the graveyard that is waiting for a master, and so forth), so it's not surprising, I suppose that the beginning would appeal to me more than the end, where things had played out. I certainly do recommend the audiobook, and Neil Gaiman unsurprisingly does a wonderful job. His voice perfectly fits the tone of the story; and it was that tone that I consistently enjoyed, even while certain events didn't delight me. The relationship with Scarlett, his one friend, was cute but predictable, particularly when it came to her introduction of Mr. Frost. The motivation for killing Bod's family and the continued search for Bod was not what I hoped for. It seemed too grandiose for the setting and I would have been more satisfied with something a little more focused. I also thought that while we did have some entertaining vignettes of scenes, they were quite obviously inserted for later use, and I never found myself surprised by the events. But as with all Neil Gaiman stories, there are some delightful details and moments. The focus on and description of the knife in the first scene made it so chilling. Bod's identification of the ghosts both by name and the inscription on their tombstone made me smile. When the Sleer uncertainly asked Bod if he was their master, and then if he would be their master, I almost cried.

If you enjoyed Coraline, I certainly think you'll be entertained by this -- though despite its setting, I didn't find it as unsettling as certain parts of that story. I do always appreciate that Neil Gaiman is not afraid to let children know that bad things happen in the world, often to good people who did nothing to deserve them. Families can be killed and children can lose all they have. He doesn't overly-shield them and I find that somewhat admirable in today's day and age. It's a different tack than, say, Daniel Handler/Lemony Snicket with his Series of Unfortunate Events where bad things happen, but in a more entertaining way. So, thanks again, Neil, for another fascinating tale. My ipod and I eagerly await the next.

Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count

The experience of reading this book in public was not pleasant. I got several poorly-crafted observation jokes of "trying to be more intelligent, eh?" from some co-workers, who met my withering glance and then scurried away. But that was harmless in comparison to the on-edge feeling that I had in the subway, holding my book open as little as possible to minimize the potential for people reading over my shoulder. Was I ashamed of the topic? Not at all, but the language used to discuss a semi-sensitive topic sometimes left me wondering if people might think I was a racist as page after page went on about studies connecting race and IQ. (I realize that this suggests people read more than just a word or two when glancing at the things other people read on the subway, but still, it was enough to unnerve me. All someone needed to do was see "blacks with lower IQs"...)

That said, clearly the point of this book is to say that nature has little to do with IQ and nurture far and away takes the cake. And to make that point, many discussions of race and IQ had to take place (which bring us back to me feeling uncomfortable in the subway). Even in the event of disproving things, we do need to confront some awkward truths, and within Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count, Richard Nisbett does a fair job at assuring us that we're not all doomed from the start to be limited in our abilities, though that doesn't mean we don't need to act fast in order to get our children prepared for their lives.

Nisbett includes a great deal of data to carry his point that environment is the major factor in affecting the intelligence of children (and for that matter, adults), which might seem overwhelming for someone who isn't a statistician, but I think it's all presented in a coherent manner, so I never found myself lost completely. Of course, the complex issue that is raised by Nisbett's work suggests that genes have little to do with predicting your IQ... but your cultural and socioeconomic influences do. The ugly truth of that statement? Your genes won't hold you back, but your ignorant family just might as soon as you're out of the womb, so keep those fingers crossed that you're born into an upper-middle class family that converses with each other.

Of course, that's the negative view that one can take away. The positive approach is that parents and schools (or any kind of programs) can have a big impact on the intelligence of children... provided that they're good ones. Without concerned and caring parents, experienced and committed teachers... well... things don't look good. The current socioeconomic system then becomes a kind of caste system, condemning children to repeat the lives of their parents and be unable to rise above, resulting in children who end up classified as disabled when different circumstances could have certainly avoided such a fate.

As a reasonably intelligent person, I feel that most of the conclusions drawn from this data are, in fact, things that make perfect sense if your mind ever happens to alight upon the topic. If you only surround the average child with influences that aren't encouraging or challenging, then the child's curiosity and intelligence will suffer as a result. Of course, Nisbett has data to back all of this up, resulting in some fascinating (and frightening) statistics. (And, of course, he states from the outset that not all families are alike an it's not great to make generalizations, but then the studies make their generalized statements and I start feeling awkward again.) For instance... a child in a middle class family will hear several million more words than a child in a lower class family, and beyond improved vocabulary isn't the only thing that results from that. Parents of middle class children (and again, the generalizations make me uncomfortable, but this was how it was presented in the book) are more likely to be engaged in conversation with their parents, to be asked questions that both draw out the child's opinions and logical reasoning abilities. When lower class children are spoken to by adults, they're often spoken to in terms of orders, such as to perform tasks, rather than engaged in conversation. It sounds pretty bleak, but thankfully, he did at least report on some programs that are invested in teaching better parenting skills or serving as day care facility with trained staff.

And lest you think he dodged some other issues in terms of race and IQ, Nisbitt did include chapters on "the Asian Advantage" and Jewish intelligence. While speaking of Asians, I feel that he didn't include nearly as much research in his discussion as he had with other chapters... which seemed rather odd, given that he himself does a great deal of research in Asia. He made some interesting (though not new) statements about the cultural differences between Asian and Western societies, given one's focus on the family and society's success and the other's focus on personal and individual success. What seemed a bit out of place, however, were statements like Confucius is responsible for all Asian thought, etc. (I did, however, like one Asian father commenting on the idea that it's not "Asian overachievement" so much as it's "American underachievement" when he witnessed his daugher's class give an award for completing all of the homework assignments.) And as far as Jewish intelligence, this chapter jumped away from his general format and seemed only to bring up the various theories that people have about why Jews are so smart and dismissed them pretty quickly. Perhaps he thought the majority of the book's arguments covered these, but still, it might have been worth repeating a bit.

We read this book for my book club and we actually had some great conversations result, particularly surrounding the idea of affirmative action and school funding. A great deal of Nisbett's points seemed to bring focus to early childhood development (though clearly, many educational researchers do), but almost to the point where it overlooked what can be done for older students. And I couldn't help but feel like I was waiting for Nisbett to make some kind of recommendation... to endorse certain practices or programs... but if you're waiting for that, you might as well skip to his last chapter when he tosses in a few common sense recommendations for parents (which can hardly be seen as serious, given that if someone is reading this book, they're clearly committed to their child's education and must be doing all these things already).

Don't feel intimidated by the size of the book if this isn't your usual kind of reading, for you're only reading about two-thirds of the pages... the rest are taken up by optional appendices, footnotes, and research citations. And yes, you can say that the title is stupid, as the book isn't much concerned with telling you how to acquire intelligence, be it for you or your precious little one. It was an interesting read (the studies were my favorite part, when certain things are isolated and the variables are charted) and you'll feel like it was worthwhile if you can manage to stir up some discussions on the topic. Since I work for an educational publisher, you can bet that it wasn't too hard to collect a group that wanted in on the discussion when I started talking about this book with co-workers, and I think that anyone (particularly parents) will be asking you to borrow your copy once you're finished.

Meatball Sundae

A "meatball sundae" is the idea of mixing two good ideas... and everything going horribly wrong. If the meatballs are the foundations of marketing, the things we need, and the whipped cream and toppings represent the fun stuff of new marketing... well... you can't simply just toss them together and expect the results to be awesome.

Meatball Sundae by Seth Godin was selected as the first book for a marketing book club at my office, where several marketing teams from the different divisions would come together and discuss. The discussion was fine, though I personally think our targeted audiences are a bit too varied for us to come up with any real action items as a group. Within our individual marketing teams, perhaps, but it was useful to hear everyone's thoughts. The book club leader was very organized and had prepared a handout and everything, leading our discussion in the same format as the book. It's broken up by fourteen "trends" that are defining the marketing landscape right now, which make for easy reading in short bites, and clear discussion.

Personally, I imagine if I had read this book in 2007, it might have been helpful. But reading it in 2009, it was only useful insofar as it re-emphasized certain basics. It would, however, be an interesting read for someone new to marketing or just embarking on a project. You could definitely get some pointers on launching a new product with this book, but it's not terribly helpful when it comes to marketers who have a product already. (After all, he notes that the two big take-aways from his book should be that you should "Make something worth talking about and make it easy to talk about.") It's a quick read and it's certainly skim-able, but because of his continued focus on energizing your consumer base (aka find people to spread the word of your product for you by activating the interested and turning them into campaigners), I spent most of the time wishing that we had, instead, selected to read "Tribes." The frequent use of case studies was both helpful (giving clear examples) and annoying (there wasn't a single company that he mentioned that I hadn't already heard of or studied).

So if you're looking for a marketing book, my advice to you is to make sure you're reading something new if you're looking for something to do with new marketing. Otherwise you'll find it's already behind the times.