There is only gray…

I’m over halfway through The Host and I’m more in love with this book than I have been with a book in a very long time. On the surface it’s a lot like an adult version of the Twilight Series. It is in the most plain way about the interaction between species and good and evil and many other confusing things. But it is more different from those books than Huck Finn is different from it. 

What I’m struck the most by in this book is that there is a complete lack of black and white in this book. It’s about two species, one ostensibly good and one ostensibly bad and yet both is good and bad. It’s about good vs. bad vs. good vs. bad. It’s the unbelievable gray area in which we are all lost all the time. 

I think that’s why it’s one of the best character studies I’ve read in a long time. It takes you to the edge of certainty, the knowledge that one way is correct and then slams you back in the opposite direction without a second thought. Characters that are filled with hate are given second chances by those they plague and the good are made to suffer for those that they are most like. It’s a moral battle on an epic scale. I can’t wait to finish it, to see how it resolves. It is a glorious tale.

 

Eclipse, almost

I’m nearly finished with this book and I’m happy that I’m finally getting to the end even though it’s sad to see the series slipping slowly to the end.

I started this book about two months ago and got about halfway through before I couldn’t read anymore. I don’t know if it was the pressure of Breaking Dawn coming out and the series coming to a close and I don’t know. I just got stuck. I don’t know how or why really. It was just a crazy confluence of weird events that made me feel funky about these books that I’ve loved.

And now…well, I couldn’t be happier with the turn of events. I’m reading slowly, a chapter at a time trying to savor the sweetness that must end in some conflict as this book surely must. When will it happen? How will it end? Where is the future?

 

Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist

I inhaled this book. In some ways the book is like one long, stream-of-consciousness thought that twines its way from the end of night to the beginning of a new day. I’m kind of in love with the fact that it manages to be harsh and sweet, abrupt and yet unbelievably lengthy at the same time.

When I saw the trailer for the movie based on this book I got really excited. It looked silly and sweet and it’s got Kat Dennings and Michael Cera which is basically like a double dose of awesome. Owning to the fact that I know that every movie ruins a great book I figured that I might as well read the masterpiece that inspired the movie in the first place.

I read this book in its entirety yesterday. I picked it up from the library around 1:30 and by 11:00 last night I’d drunk in all 183 of its mixed-up, confusing, and emotionally-addled pages. I’ve always been a fast reader but for some reason this book seemed to push me along like I couldn’t stop if I wanted to. I didn’t watch TV. I just read and read and read. I didn’t have that feeling when I got to the end of the book where I was almost mad that it was over. I hate that feeling.

This book was perfectly pitched and timed. There were the appropriate climaxes and dips. There was love and hate and some things that not PC enough to describe in this blog. It was the kind of book that’s truer to real life than most but that also maintains that storyline that’s so implausibly perfect it would never happen to you.

I’m really happy I read this before the movie, though I can see why it will make such a good movie. Pick it up if you get a chance. It’s that sweet little twist in life that we all need sometimes.

 

Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings

I read these two books last week in such a hurry that one would think my life depended on me finishing them. I absolutely adored them. They are earnest and confusing and angsty and everything else that is true and bizarre about the stage of life we call adolescence.

I’m won’t go too much into details here because I think everyone should find out for themselves about these marvelous stories. The books center around our heroine (anti-heroine? honestly, it’s hard to tell) Jessica Darling. Jessica is a wacky, smart and unbelievably confused 16 year old girl at the beginning of Sloppy Firsts. By the time we finish Second Helpings, she’s off to college, finished with high school and just as smart as she was with a very helpful dose of stupid. One of my favorite parts about these books is that they’re so much about the process of becoming aware of how much of a moron you are in high school.

It would be a joke if these books were anything other than painful and morose. They’re brilliantly funny at times. Jessica is a crack narrator whose forays in life are always done with the utmost timidness or the utmost energy. She has no halfway.

I found so much of my awkward, geeky self in these books. Though I’ve matured in the years since college I’m still a dorky human being. I may look and even sound like a normal human being if you were to meet me on the street one day but underneath I’m still the mass of confused neuroses that I was years ago. I’m wiser about things. I don’t go at them from an evasive and clueless way. But they’re still there.

Maybe that’s what makes the books so appealing. Everyone can find a piece of themselves in the book. The characters are honest and flawed. But most of all they are real people. They beautiful girls are vapid and shallow sometimes and unbelievably kind at other times. The boy next door turns out to be like the jock you’ve always tried to avoid. There’s that one guy who for some reason drives you up a wall with a combination of sheer annoyance and downright attraction. We’ve all been there in the messy, emotional puddle called life.

If you’re still not convinced, well, there’s probably nothing I can say to change your mind. But know that great knowledge often is best learned from the most unusual of teachers. Megan McCafferty is brilliant and wise. Just, take a chance. You might surprise yourself.

 

New books!

I just started reading Megan McCafferty’s Sloppy Firsts. I’m only a short way into the book but so far I have this to say about it: finally, someone has managed to write an honest book about what it’s like to be a spazzy, awkward-shaped teenager in high school!

It’s not like I thought my high school experience was all that more horrible than anyone else’s. It’s just, wooooooh, nice to know the experience is shared.

 

More thoughts on David Foster Wallace

Ever since I heard on Sunday about the tragic death of David Foster Wallace, I haven’t really known what to think. It’s hard to know what to say about the death of someone you didn’t actually know but that had a huge cultural and personal impact on yourself or someone you know.

I never had an exceptionally personal connection to him. But my brother on the other hand…

I’ve learned a lot from my brother over the years. He’s taught me how to be sarcastic and to deal with the inner workings of a crazy family. He’s been a parent to me in a lot of ways. He’s protected me and helped me when I needed it. He’s my brother, plain and simple. It doesn’t necessarily sound like a lot. But to me it’s meant more than you can imagine.

Not to long ago when my brother and I were both at our childhood home for one of our ever rarer visits he came into my room, handed me a copy of David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and said something along the lines of “Read it.”

My brother has always been remarkably close-fisted about sharing his interests with me. He’s remarkably wide-reaching in what he does read and listen to but he’s never been one to give me suggestions. I have two main influences from an entire life knowing him: Weezer and an uncanny love of Sci Fi. So for my brother to actually come and hand me a piece of writing that I know he considers important enough to share with his bonkers little sister, well, it’s pretty important.

I think I read at least part or all of one essay but I tend to be rather like a bird with essay collections. I rarely sit down and read the whole thing in one sitting. I generally can’t be bothered and the sheer shifting of topics is rather tiring. Anyway, the book never got moved back to my apartment and thus it’s still sitting in my room, probably under my bed, gathering dust.

About two months ago I was wandering around the used book section of my local bookstore and I saw a copy of Wallace’s A Broom of the System. I thought about buying it but then I remembered that although I am generally financially solvent, I having been lacking in finances. Of late, I’ve been borrowing books from the library-a weird sort of fusion between my child and adult selves.

So I got A Broom of the System and Consider the Lobster out of the library and set about reading them. Unfortunately, mostly due to sheer size of my library, I’ve been inundated with books as of late. I actually managed to start one of the essays from Consider the Lobster but by the time the due date came up I already had at least five other books started and/or waiting to be read and I returned the books.

These memories have been pinging around my mind the past few days as I try to make sense of the loss of one of the great writers of our generation. Wallace was one of a host of unbelievably talented writers who all came of age at a certain time and in a very short amount of time have changed the way the world and the way I think of writing. The poetry of their writing (for that, more than anything, is what it is) has changed the way I think of literature. We need not read those dull tomes of pain when we can read the great novels of love and pain and confusion.

I’m going home in a few weeks and one of the things I won’t fail to do is to put Wallace’s book in my luggage to cart back to Boston. I may even drag back some of my brother’s copies without his knowledge (is this ok, brother?). Sometimes it drives me crazy that we only realize the greatness of someone once they are gone from this world.

You will be missed, David Foster Wallace. I hope this honors your memory. I’m sorry it took me this long.

 

Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name

I came to this book sort of sideways. I’ve loved Dave Eggers for years what with A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and the 85 or so iterations of McSweeney’s that are floating out there in the world. But as far as his little literary cabal is concerned, I’ve never really gotten into their work. But when I say Vendela Vida’s (Egger’s wife) Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name sitting forlornly in the discounted books section of my favorite local bookshop I decided that it needed a home.

The book is absolutely fascinating, a story of loss and redemption, pain and rebirth. It’s hard to not fall in love with our hapless narrator as she journeys through the frozen tundra of Lapland, a place that seems to have as much mystery as the main character. I’ve been fascinated with Lapland since I read Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials series. The names in his books correspond to those in Northern Lights and every time I saw the brief mention of some town I knew I would grow faint with the warming of my heart.

I couldn’t put this book down. I sped through at an accelerated pace, taking only one small break in the middle, to find the inevitable conclusion. Vida strings out the story in such a way that you are hanging on with each movement the characters make. You love her and you hate her. And then with a clap of a thunderbolt, the story is over. In a matter of pages it comes shuttering to a close, every loose end tied up.

I think normally I would hate that sort of ending. The story has all the natural parts that a story should have but it’s amazing how quickly after the denouement the character ends her path. I loved it. I loved that you got to hear everything after the story. The story is so broken that it needs a complete ending. It’s not a happy ending, not a sad one. It just is. A perfect way to find the end of the story when you go on a journey that changes everything you have ever thought about yourself.

For women, I think this story is a must read. Men will enjoy it too. But there’s something harsh and brittle about the story that I think only a woman could truly understand. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m not. All I know is that my life would be the worse for not having read this book. It will soon be resting on new bookshelf with its other brothers and sisters, happy to be loved.

 

Silliness or why I love young adult fiction

Call me crazy. No really, you can. I totally accept the fact that reading books that would normally be reserved for fifteen year old girls crazy. But I love them.

Lately I’ve been captivated (or re-captivated as I read all these books before when I was actually fifteen) by Louise Rennison’s series of books on a mad British teenager named Georgia Nicholson. What I love so much about the books is that they’re very well written (not high literature or anything) and they actually resemble a real life. If I wanted to watch oversexed teenagers romp around I could turn on Gossip Girls or pretty much anything on MTV. Frankly, eh.

The Georgia Nicholson books resemble most closely to me my love of Gilmore Girls. I loved that show. Aside from the witty dialogue, it was a show about a smart and fairly normal teenage girl trying to figure her way through a rather bizarre thing called your teenage years. It made you feel like a normal person. Hell! She didn’t even contemplate sex till college and her best friend waited to get married before she had sex. And this is all supposed to take place in current times! And it was believable! (Well, most of the time.)

Anyway, I’m hooked. I’m working my way through the series at a feverish pace (another perk of YA – it flies by) and before you know it I’ll be back to reading about women who travel to Lapland to find their long-lost fathers (who they didn’t know existed) only to find out that they’re the product of a rape. You know, adult stuff. (I’m reading Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name which I absolutely adore, don’t get me wrong, and I will post on in a few days.) For now though I exist in the land of the fabbity fab! Which if you think about the depressing stuff that goes on most days, is kind of preferable.

 

Finding my way…

Sometimes I lose my way when it comes to reading. For me, reading is like swimming is for Michael Phelps. I hate to go a day without it. It feels natural to have my nose in a book (so much so that I sometimes run into things on the sidewalk because I can’t help but read and talk at the same time). There’s no other thing I enjoy more. It’s not hard, it’s not work. It’s just the simple act of being transported to a different place.

Every once in a while though, something goes wrong. I lose my way. I pick up a book, dig in, and then lose steam. I figure it’s the book. I start another. The same thing happens. It’s like I’m stuck in some parallel universe where reading is hard and I’ve got to fight to finish a book. Normally I try to make myself read slower so that I don’t finish the book too quickly. The past few weeks have been like that for me. I haven’t been totally lost but I have been unable to stick with one book long enough to finish. I’ve been jumping back and forth like the book will start to lose it’s brilliance if I read it for too long.

I was at a loss. And so, ever so typically, I went back to my roots and I found out why I loved reading so much in the first place. I have a deep love of the cheesy sort of high school teen dramas written by women like Meg Cabot and Anne Brashares. It’s slightly an offshoot of my love for chick lit (which has waned in the past year) but I think it’s also an outlet for me. I never really had the typical teenage life so I need to immerse myself in them whatever way I can. I don’t want to feel like I’ve missed and if reading is the closest I am going to get then I’d rather have at least that.

So for the past week I’ve been on a tear trying to read as much of those books of my teen years as I can. And here’s the amazing part. It’s brought me back to the stories I love now for their maturity and complexity. Somehow, these books about frivolous things have made me love the books about important things. I’m always constantly surprised when that happens. I fall in love with reading all over again.

 

In the Pages of the Book

I’m rereading A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius at the moment. It’s such an absolutely wonderful and powerful memoir. It’s not the first memoir I ever read but it is the most chaotic, I think. (Sean Wilsey’s Oh the Glory of It All may have it beat but not by much…I haven’t finished it yet.) I can’t quite tell if I love the book madly or if it freaks the hell out of me. Eggers is so intense in the book, sprawling through life with little to no supervision, all the while trying to live the best years of his life and be a full-time parent to his younger brother. I don’t know what I would do in the same situation.

The first 30-odd pages of the book (before the story even starts) are some of the most inventive and crazy I’ve ever been privilege to read. They’re almost a mini-story in advance of the novel, easing you into the wackiness in a more subtle way than the harshness of his true story can. I absolutely love this book. It makes sense of things that have no sound or sense. I am lost in the words that are laid down on the page.