Book Nine: The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

Book Nine: The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox
Finished: January 17
Pages: 256

This book was a wonderful example of good storytelling about messed up families. It seems that all the good books that I have read recently in this genre involve a secret, and much lying and deception to cover up said secret. The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox is told through three pairs of eyes: the titular Esme, the dementia ridden Kitty, and the young Iris. I often found the flashbacks of Esme to be confusing and difficult to understand, but upon finishing the book I discovered that this was all to a purpose that would have been ruined otherwise. The same is true of several of the flashbacks told from Kitty’s point of view: often confusing, sometimes difficult to even know who is narrating, but purposeful.
The hidden history of women sent to mental hospitals is one that I could only imagine to be a wealth of story ideas, and I think that O’Farrell did a very good job of finding an interesting story to tell. I was reminded a little of The Thirteenth Tale, which I also liked very much. I guess I’m just into the whole gothic mystery with familial twist type story.

Here’s a nice quote that I really like (as did the person I borrowed the book from) reflective of the language in the novel:

“We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents” (118).

I like the focus of the story: what is the real meaning and importance of family, and love? What are the lies you are willing to tell, and the lengths you are willing to go to for love, or even the possibility of love? What responsibilities do you have to your family?

The layers of relationships, from the relationship of relative to estranged relative, the deeper relationship of brother and sister, even the superficial ones like that Iris shares with her married lover, Luke, are interesting to watch come unraveled. It is always interesting to watch other people’s lives and assumptions about their world come crashing around their feet. The ending was moderately predictable, but nonetheless satisfying.

Good Reading,
Caitlin

Books Seven and Eight

Book Seven: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Pages: 652
Finished: January 13

I made myself a promise that I would list every book that I read, regardless of how embarrassing it is or if I have already read the book once, or twice, or twelve times. Books seven and eight are like that, because I have read these books at least 4 times each, but couldn't stop myself from reading Half-Blood Prince again after getting the movie for Christmas. I hate watching a movie after you read a book just long enough ago that you don't really remember all the details of what differs and makes the book so much better than any movie ever.
I'm not going to lie; J.K. Rowling is a Genius. Yes, that's right, capital letter G. The way that the world that she created envelops the reader, and for a moment even a 25 year old can secretly wish that she was on the train to Hogwarts, is something that I can only hope to someday aspire to. I love this book. Specifically I love the end of this book, and I cry every time that I read it. The betrayal of Snape, the pain and suffering of Malfoy, and obviously the death of one of my favorite wizards is just heart rending.
Of course, the understanding and appreciation of this book is only magnified and made more tragic by the book that I cannot but help read as soon as I put down Half-Blood Prince:

Book Eight: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Pages: 759
Finished: January 15

Okay, I'm not going to lie about this: I love Severus Snape. I love him, with all his tragedy, and his snarky meanness, and I love the memories that he gives Harry at the end of Deathly Hallows. I can remember exactly where I was when I read that Snape killed Dumbledore and I still remember staying up all night after getting the Deathly Hallows to finish it before I had to go to work at 7 that morning. The funniest part was that there were six of us reading at various speeds that night and I was on a mission, and it was SO HARD to not say anything at all the different places where you can't help but gasp out loud. Yes, I am glad to see this book as two movies, because one would just make everything very vague or cut out half the action. I am also interested to see what happens since they have left out several side characters, and so I wonder what will be deemed important enough to make it in the movie. (No, I never really got over Remus not telling Harry about the Marauders) Although my favorite part will certainly be in the last movie, I am hard pressed to find another specific portion of the book that I love the most. Maybe when McGonnagal is particularly brilliant in the final defense of the castle, or when Mrs. Weasley gets back at Bellatrix ("Not my daughter you bitch!" is a great line), or maybe the redemption of Percy "I'm a prat" Weasley. It definitely isn't the epilogue, which only created more questions while giving answers to the questions I didn't have. Seriously, it was the only part of the book that I didn't like.
It will be interesting to see if any book ever makes as big of a stir in the world as these books did, and no, I don't think that Twilight counts because it isn't good literature.
I will never be ashamed of loving these books. Even the ones where Harry is an insufferable teenager, because damn if she didn't get exactly what teenagers are like: insufferable.

Good Reading,
Caitlin

Books Five and Six

Book Five: Wuthering High
Date Finished: January 7
Pages: 272

I think that I must be on some kind of subconscious Virginia Woolf kick. The premise behind this book is pretty entertaining: authors are stuck in the Purgatory of Bard Academy for dying before their time and are forced to teach miscreant high school students how to behave. Various authors include Virginia Woolf as the constantly dripping English teacher, Hunter S. Thompson, the maniac school bus driver, and Ernest Hemingway as the gym teacher. Since they call the teachers Ms. W and Coach H, I suppose high school students who haven't heard of these authors might have a difficult time picking up on the various hints dropped about who these authors are. Certainly my students, who just asked me if Ernest Hemingway wrote the Dr. Seuss books, might have a hard time figuring out what was going on.
As far as the plot goes, it was a pretty basic teen fiction novel. It was predictable, but not annoyingly predictable. It was entertaining, and certainly more entertaining as an English teacher than maybe it would be otherwise. I don't believe that you would really need a basic understanding of the plot of Wuthering Heights to understand this book because the plot of the novel is discussed and the characters are adequately explained. My hope would be that teens who read this book might be interested in then finding and reading Wuthering Heights for themselves.
Wuthering High reminded me of a teen fiction version of The Eyre Affair, certainly not as well written or nerdy as The Eyre Affair but still Wuthering High is a decent read.

Book Six: Graceling
Finished: January 8
Pages: 471

Apparently the theme of this day's reading was young adult lit. While my students were picking out their library books, I decided to pick up a couple of young adult books that I have seen around that looked interesting. I read about this novel in a random blog I came across last week, and decided to pick it up.
A first novel by a seemingly young author, I thought the fantasy world to be pretty well developed, and certainly the idea of "Graced" individuals was an interesting way of giving people supernatural powers without making it too trite. I am tired of reading the fantasy novels where the main character develops amazing powers with untold limits that allow him/her to do anything, even these completely unrealistic feats of strength/bravery/endurance that completely change the world. This book certainly had a smattering of this problem, but it didn't annoy me to the extent of some of the books that I have read in the past. Some of her characterization was too one-dimensional for me to really appreciate, certainly the main bad guy was too flat to be scary at all, but the development of her main character was interesting and often unexpected. I can appreciate that the story kept me guessing in the middle, even if the ending was not surprising at all.
Certainly I would recommend this book to students who like fantasy, I think that the book would interest them. I am not so sure that I would recommend this book to someone my age, just because it was often too adolescent to ignore.

Good Reading,
Caitlin

Book Four: The Year of Fog

Book Four: The Year of Fog
Finished: January 5th
Pages: 466

Photographer and soon-to-be stepmom takes girl to the beach, loses sight of her, and spends a year trying to find her again.
I'm not particularly sure what I feel about this book. I didn't particularly like it, but I couldn't stop reading. What does that mean? I had to find out what happened to Emma, the little girl, but at the same time wanted to punch everyone: the narrator, the predictable police officer, the angry dad, the stereotypical helpful neighbor, the random surfer girl.
I can understand, objectively, the feeling of guilt that drove Abby to search endlessly for Emma. I can even understand that the guilt of losing someone's child would change you into an obsessive crazy person. But I just don't understand why this book had to be 466 pages long. I think that the idea was a good one, but execution was not what I would have done at all.
I enjoyed the chapters devoted to how memory works, and would have liked to see more of those. As a photographer, I found the discussion of photography to be lacking in sincerity and overly technical, and the details given too specific for most non-photographers to have any clue what she was talking about.
If I had written the book, I probably would have numbered the chapters after the number of days that Emma was missing, while not numbering the chapters about photography, or memory, or the chapters that repeat the day that she disappeared without really adding anything else to the narrative.
Certainly, after reading The Gathering, and even The Hours, there are so many ways to make a story more emotionally impactful than simply repeating the same action over and over. I think that there were risks that the author was not willing to take.

Do I need to put spoiler alert here? Haha, no, I love ruining things for other people.

The ending was safe. The ending was trite. It was as if the author was afraid of taking the step that would have been braver: to let Emma die. It seemed almost convenient, "everyone has given up except for me! I will find her! Let's go to Costa Rica?" What makes Abby so smart, so willing to take risks, and then to simply find her on a beach? It felt like Richmond wanted a happy ending more than she wanted a realistic ending. Did I appreciate that Jake and Abby's relationship fell apart? Yes. That was necessary, that was real. Do I understand why he wouldn't let Abby see her even after she went to all those lengths to find her and save her? Not really, but I suppose if someone lost my child I would probably never want to see them again either, and certainly if someone else found my child for me, after I believed that they were dead, I wouldn't want to see them either, because the sight of them would have me feeling guilty that someone else had the strength to go on believing when I didn't.

I'm not going to say that this was the worst book I've ever read, or even the worst book that I had to read for book club, I mean, The Dante Club and Firefly Lane are both much worse, but I don't think that I would recommend this book to anyone, and that's certainly saying something.

Good Reading,
Caitlin

Books Two and Three: The Twelve Houses Series

Book Two: Dark Moon Defender
Book Three: Reader and Raelynx
Date Finished: January 3rd
Pages: 448+432=880

This series is something that I picked up at the public library when I was looking for easy but interesting pool reading. Unlike many of my friends, I am not a big fan of chick lit in the summer, I'd rather read science fiction and fantasy. I think I read the first two books in this series in two days, then waited six months before I got the third and fourth books in the series.
It's an interesting idea, with a well developed world and a new spin on the whole "humans with special powers" thing.
I haven't read anything else by Sharon Shinn, but if her other series is as good and fun to read as this one, I'm sure I will be seen with those books at the pool this summer as well.
I was surprised by the quick way that I read two books in as many days. I think that I have been trying for a while to get away from this type of easy literature as my personal reading, but I don't think that I will ever be able to deny my love of decent fantasy and sci-fi.

Good reading,
Caitlin

Book One: The Hours

Book One: The Hours
Finished January 1, 2010
Pages: 240

I had put off reading this book for what seems like years. It seemed like years because it has been about seven years since the first person told me to read it. Several of my friends read it when the movie came out in 2002, but at the time it seemed so depressing that I didn't want to see the movie, much less try to read the book.
I read Mrs. Dalloway my sophomore year of college, I think. It might have been my junior year, it's hard to remember. I really can’t say that at the time I liked Mrs. Dalloway very much at all. Although my dislike for the book probably had more to do with my dislike of the teacher (an overbearing woman from Minnesota who spoke with a fake Irish accent) than anything against the book itself. Considering my background with Mrs. Dalloway and Virginia Woolf, it was amazing how much of the story came back to me as I was reading The Hours, which is the obvious point that Michael Cunningham was going for. Although there are many parts of the story that I no longer remember, some parts are very clear to me. I’m sure that if I were to re-read Mrs. Dalloway I would find even more of these parallels that escaped me. I will say this about Mrs. Dalloway: unlike many nerdy English major-types, I don’t usually remember famous first lines, but I have always enjoyed “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”
I enjoyed the parallels that Mr. Cunningham developed between the three seemingly unrelated stories. I particularly enjoyed the eventual connections shown between the story in the 1950's and the present day; it was surprising that it took me so long to figure out that Ritchie was Richard, but I liked that it took a long time to get to that point. I'm not sure what my reaction would have been if they had made the connection sooner. It certainly would have taken the surprise out of the fact that Laura didn't kill herself after all.
The quiet desperation in these lives is something that I think many people can identify with, although I found the parts where Virginia Woolf discussed the voices in her head harder to take simply due to my lack of personal experience with true mental illness. She certainly had the stereotypical British reserve, for I don’t know if I was hearing voices if I would have a similar reaction of resignation.
The language of the novel particularly struck me. I would have to re-read it to pick out the particular phrases that appealed the most to me, but I can certainly remember times when I thought to myself 'how lovely that was'. I enjoy a well-written sentence as much as the next English teacher.
For example, I enjoyed, rather morbidly:
“The body of the thrush is still there (odd, how the neighborhood cats and dogs are not interested), tiny even for a bird, so utterly unalive, here in the dark, like a lost glove, this little empty handful of death. […] She thinks of how much more space a being occupies in life than it does in death; how much illusion of size is contained in gestures and movements, in breathing. Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest” (165).
The problem with reading books that belong to other people is that I feel bad to dog-ear pages like I do with my own. As I was reading, I thought of many other passages that I wanted to talk about, but I don’t want to re-read the entire book to find them.
Overall, I found this a deeply moving and well-written novel, with beautiful symmetry and language. In the future, if enough people tell me to read a book, I won't wait seven years to read it.

Good reading,
Caitlin

Post One

Most people start a new blog on January 1st. My problem with procrastination is so bad that I didn't get around to mine until the 3rd.

Isn't that embarrassing.

I just wanted someplace to keep record of all the books that I read this year. I know that I will read 12 for book club, and probably 30 or 40 more that I will choose for myself. Last year I tried to just keep a journal of books, but I quit after only 3 books.

I would like to say that my goal is to read 100 books in a year, or even just 50. My real goal in this situation is not to have a goal of numbers but rather have a goal of information: What did I think about these books? What did I like the most? What were my favorite quotes, if any?

I have a profile on Goodreads, but I like blogger better for writing my impressions. I know, I know, there is a place on my profile there to write my reviews, but I like the idea of a separate space for my thoughts.

So, here we go.

Good Reading,

Caitlin