Girl Detective

Here’s how I’m reading the book. I read another book Monday through Friday, set aside the weekend for Brothers K, then after I’m finished with the book, check in with the summary at Schoop.com to make sure I got the broad strokes. My fave note this week was from Book 3 Chapter 5 Confession. ‘Heels Up”:

Complicated much?

Book 3, at 71 pages, is our longest so far, and it was a doozy. I was struck by how so much of the book is drunk men shouting at one another. These Russians are certainly not buttoned down and quiet and Victorian like the characters of Dickens and Austen. Dostoevsky is certainly succeeding in his goal of having a characteristically Russian book (though whether it’s a “true” portrait we can’t know.)

Ready for a whirlwind summary?

Book III The Sensualists

chapter 1: In the Servant’s Quarters

Grigory and Marfa have a happy marriage. They had a child with 6 fingers who died. The night of the burial, they heard cries, and found a girl and newborn in their bathhouse.

Chapter 2: Stinking Lizaveta (which this band took the name of)

The birth mother is called Stinking Lizaveta, a beloved town oddity, holy fool, ascetic and mute. When she becomes pregnant, the father is rumored to be Fyodor Pavlovich, and he doesn’t disavow the rumors (though neither does he explicitly confirm them, though we wouldn’t believe him if he did as he’s such a liar). Grigori, the all-father to FP’s sons (or supposed ones) brings him up, calls him Smerdyakov (son of stinking one)

Chapter 3 4 and 5. Alyosha goes to visit Katerina Ivanovna, encounters Dmitri hiding out waiting to ambush Grushenka, and a very long confession by Dmitri begins. KI’s father got into financial trouble, D said he’d bail him out if KI “came to him” She did, he didn’t actually abuse her, but she was shamed by the memory. He did bail them out, the father died. Then D got entangled with Grushenka and spent 3000 roubles that KI had entrusted to him.

Chapter 6: Detour to Smerdyakov, beloved by FP, sullen and mean, and now an epileptic chef.

Chapter 7: Disputation: Argument about denouncing God. Smerkyakov is provocative.

Ch. 8: Over the Cognac: Much drunken shouting. Alyosha begins to have a shrieking fit (still not certain how this is different from epileptic one?) FP says it’s like his mother. Ivan says, she was my mother too. Has FP just forgotten?

Ch 9: The Sensualists. Dmitri beats up FP and exhorts Alyosha (yet again) to go to KI.

Ch 10: The Two Together. Meaning KI and Grushenka. Creepy with intimations of girl-on-girl actions. KI enthuses about how lovely Grushenka is, then G shows herself as the liar/provocateur she is. KI cries, Alyosha leaves, and she gives him an envelope.

Ch 11: One More Ruined Reputation. Dmitri pretends to threaten Alyosha, then runs off saying foreboding words. At the monastery, Alyosha prays humbly, then reads the letter, in which Lise declares her love for him, which she says ruins her reputation, but he seems happy with, not troubled by.

Whew! Book 4 for next week is shorter, at 50 pages. Are we on the verge of FP’s death, foretold on page 1?

What did everyone else think?

I bought Pride and Prejudice and Zombies right when it came out, then it sat on my shelf for years. The idea was amusing, but the slew of horror/classic mashups that followed made me less inclined to begin even the first one. Seeking a light read in between books of The Brothers Karamazov, I picked it up and enjoyed it.

Much of the prose is Austen’s own, which I thought would make for a fast read, given my familiarity with the text. For whatever reason, though, I did not fly through this. I was charmed and amused by the zombie twists that were woven into the text. I especially liked this book’s take on Elizabeth and Darcy’s meeting at the parsonage, and the reason Darcy gave for separating Bingley from Jane.

I was less enchanted with the overt sexual innuendos. It also departed from Austen’s text by doing a lot of ’splaining. What Austen leaves for the reader to infer, Grahame-Smith sometimes spells out. I think he also included some elements from the 1995 P & P miniseries that weren’t Austen’s own. These all made for a slower, less enjoyable romp than it might have been. Still, diverting and entertaining enough.

Book 2 of The Brothers Karamazov is “An Inappropriate Gathering” but would perhaps be better called a deeply uncomfortable one.

A quick summary of the chapters, which have a profusion (overabundance, perhaps?) of characters:

1: “They Arrive at the Monastery.” They are Fyodor Pavlovich (the father), Ivan (2nd of BKs), Pyotr Alexandrovitch (cousin of FPs 1st wife and helped care for all 3 BKs after their mothers’ deaths), and a relative of his, Kalganov. Not Dmitri. They are met by a landowner, Maximov, then invited to dinner.

2. “The Old Buffoon” They are joined by 2 other monks, 2 Fathers (Paissy and the librarian), a seminarian, Alyosha, and Zosima. FP talks and talks, Zosima is very kind to him, tells him to stop lying and better things will follow.

3. “Women of Faith” Zosima blesses women waiting for him, some of whom have traveled far.

4. “A Lady of Little Faith” A lady landholder has also come to thank Zosima for curing her lame daughter, Lise. Lise mocks Alyosha, says she has a message from Katerina Ivanovna to give him for Dmitri, and Zosima tells them that Alyosha will visit them.

5. “So Be It! So Be It!” A long, involved discussion of church, state, Ivan’s article and various arguments. Dmitri arrives.

6. “Why is Such a Man Alive?” Lots of bad behavior, though Dmitri is the first to be respectful to Zosima, who ends up bowing to him and touching his head to the floor, which alarms Dmitri and others.

7. “A Seminarist-Careerist” Zosima tells Alyosha he’ll have to leave the monastery. Alyosha meets Rakitin, another novice. Rakitin has much gossip: Dmitri is engaged to the respectable Katerina Ivanovna, but sleeping with Grushenka. Ivan is interested in KI now that Dmitri is wandering. And FP also likes Grushenka. Rakitin thinks Zosima’s bow to Dmitri presaged a crime.

8. “Scandal” The dinner with the father superior goes badly. FP said he wouldn’t come, he shows up, angers Miusov again and insults the monastery. All leave,with Maximov trying to go with FP and Ivan. Ivan becomes cold to FP.

I found Zosima to be most engaging, and FP most disturbing, as I’m sure the author intended. The talks on ecclesiastical courts, while probably politically timely when published, went on and on. Lots of women introduced, and it’s obviously the groundwork for what will unfold.

What did everyone else think?

My husband recommended Precinct 13 by Tate Halloway to me. He’s friends with the author and liked the book. I was skeptical. The cover features a pretty woman in leather, and it’s billed as a paranormal romance. Then again, these aren’t things my husband usually reads either, so I gave them both the benefit of the doubt. After a slow start, I was completely drawn in to this tale of a young woman coroner in Pierre, South Dakota.

Aside. Did you know that it’s pronounced PEER, not Pee AIR?

Anyhoo. the heroine, Alex, has run away from a bad boyfriend and a bad situation, but seems to have landed right smack in a doozy of a new one. Her new job has some strange aspects, and she can’t quite let go of the old boyfriend, no matter what she promised to a phalanx of shrinks. Magic, dragons, fairies, trolls, and lots more. This was a fast, fun, funny romp of a read. It was meant to be the first in a series which, alas, didn’t get picked up, but on its own its still well worth it.

Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes is an intriguing premise for a graphic memoir. The author, Mary Talbot, was the daughter of a Joycean scholar. She alternates between her coming-of-age story and that of Lucia, James Joyce’s daughter. It’s illustrated by Mary’s husband Bryan, an award winning English comic book creator. Both stories were involving and sad, but I felt the connection between them was strained, and that neither achieved a depth because both were being told.

Last Friends is the third book in Jane Gardam’s Old Filth trilogy, after that book and The Man in the Wooden Hat, both of which I loved. There’s also a related book of stories, The People on Privilege Hill. I have so loved those previous books and the characters in them that I had high expectations for this book. A small English country town has histories and people who are far more complicated than any of them suspect of one another.

I was happy to spend time with the characters again, but the plot seemed meandering instead of layered and complex as in the previous books. I got stuck several times on awkward sentences or plot inconsistencies. And yet, these were minor annoyances, because the world and the people in it that Gardam has created are so rich and real that I still counted myself as privileged to have spent time with them, and was sad to see them go for what is probably their final bow.

I started to write this, then got sucked into Facebook, and well, I’m not sure how much time has passed.

A friend lend me Come Closer by Sara Gran, and said that both she and her husband liked it. Since I know they often disagree significantly, I was intrigued, and then the book itself proved them out. It’s about a young woman who starts having personality problems and wonders if she’s becoming possessed by a demon. It’s a scary, fast but complex read, reminding me of Rosemary’s Baby and other classic horror stories without being overly gory as much modern horror is. Highly recommended.

Then, in a weird burst of synchronicity, I found two related articles online yesterday.

1. How a brain affliction can mimic possessions symptoms

and

2. How a doctor got in trouble for diagnosing possession

Apparently Boston is the crazytown bananapants of possessed/not possessed.

Wow, the descriptive clause in Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking does go on, doesn’t it?

For one of my book groups, Quiet was one I almost abandoned. I didn’t care for the author’s take on Rosa Parks’ story as she focuses more on Rosa as lone superhero than on Rosa as the superhero who inspired everyone else to be heroic. But I pressed on, and as the book goes beyond the sometimes trite stories and gets into some of the science, I found it very interesting. No surprise to learn that brainstorming in groups doesn’t work, or that persuasive talkers are more listened to even if they’re not right. By the end, this book had won me over so completely I kept bringing it up in conversations with friends and family. It’s overly reductive, and she protests for the amazingness of introverts (among which she counts herself) too much, and yet, it’s still a fascinating window into behavior and interaction. Highly recommended, with a grain of salt, if that makes sense.

I meant to read Jess Walter’s Financial Lives of the Poets for one of my book groups last year (or the year before, or the year before that; hard to say), but I couldn’t manage it, and didn’t get around to it by the time this year’s Tournament of Books happened, where Walter’s Beautiful Ruins was a candidate, so I ended up reading (and loving) that before this earlier one that had been sitting on my shelf. I attended a recent reading he did here in town, and that spurred me to have another go.

This is a WMFU novel, an acronym from the comments of this year’s Tournament of Books: White Male F-Up. Kind of like a bildungsroman, just taking place in a man’s thirties or so rather than in his teens. it reminded me a lot of another WMFU novel that I enjoyed, Jonathan Tropper’s This is Where I Leave You.

Here, Matt Prior the protagonist is married but having trouble financially and with his wife. This novel is firmly situated in the wake of the housing crash of last decade, and it explores what happens when balloon payments on shifty mortgages suddenly come due. But it’s a comedy, and so there are many different elements that get tossed in: infidelity, pot smoking, drug dealing, parenting, and more. I will never be able to think of the phrase “make good choices” in quite the same way. It was a fast fun read, with some laugh out loud moments. Recommended, though not as highly as Beautiful Ruins.

I found Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali a wildly uneven book, so my reaction falls between didn’t like (or, often hated) and it was OK. For me, effective memoirs are written by people with self insight and empathy, possibly leavened with humor. She’s writing about a difficult childhood and harsh reality for women abused in the name of Islam, so I’ll give her a pass that this book is humorless. But I find her lack of self-insight, her protestations of innocence in situations of obvious culpability, and her readiness to trot out other people’s horror stories in lieu of aforesaid self insight all pretty damning. The book is often poorly written with stunningly awkward transitions. Few if any other people stand out in the book because she is The Star. I found her disingenuous when claiming non-inflammatory intent when she over and over said incredibly outrageous things. This and other instances in the book led me not to believe her as a reliable narrator. Get thee to a therapist, I hope, to work out your childhood issues, especially with your father, and your inability to own your responsibility for your words and actions.

BUT, and it’s a huge BUT, she’s absolutely right that outrages against women and in general take place in the name of Allah, that this is sometimes (often?) ignored in the name of political correctness. She focuses more on this point at the end, so the book has a stronger finish that it does a beginning or middle.I found it unfortunate that she throws pretty much all of Islam under the bus in order to make this point. She makes an important argument, but one that is easier to dismiss because of the often offensive nonsense she surrounds it with.

This is a complicated book about complicated issues. It spurs me to find out more about Islam, but not by reading more of her writing.

Post-apoca-fic (PAF) is most recognized as a sub-genre of science fiction, but end-time narratives are at least as old as the Epic of Gilgamesh and the story of Noah’s ark. Modern PAF is marked as beginning with Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, written by a woman by featuring a male protagonist.

I recently re-read the PAF classic A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller, Jr. Published in book form in 1959, it collected 3 sections that had previously appeared in a sci-fi magazine. It centers on a monastery in post-nuclear Utah. There the monks seek canonization of the sacred Leibowitz of the title. A man of science instrumental in the nuclear holocaust of the mid 20th century, Leibowitz converted to Catholicism and advocated peace and learning. The book’s first section is set in the mid 21st century:

Brother Francis Gerard of Utah might never have discovered the blessed documents, had it not been for the pilgrim with girded loins who appeared during that young novice’s Lenten fast in the desert.

The subsequent sections jump ahead hundreds of years, though there are through lines for characters and artifacts that are fun and satisfying to recognize. I found the first section with Brother Francis, the most engaging. It’s the most funny, and Francis was my favorite of the many characters in the book. As the novel progresses, though, it shifts from being speculative to more preachy and explicative. The only females are in the third section, and this book fails The Bechdel Test, which identifies gender bias in fiction, in that no female has a conversation with another female.

Since the book is set in a monastery, it could be argued that it wasn’t within the scope. Yet after I read this book, I longed for a female perspective, something like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Since I hadn’t read her most recent post-apocalypse novels, I decided to check out Oryx and Crake, the first of the MaddAddam trilogy, which was followed by The Year of the Flood and completed with MaddAddam, to be published this September.

The events in Oryx and Crake are typical of PAF: a genetically engineered plague has wiped out probably all humans except one man, our narrator:

Snowman wakes before dawn. He lies unmoving, listening to the tide coming in, wave after wve sloshing over the various barricades, wish-wash, wish-wash, the rhythm of heartbeat. He would so like to believe he is still asleep. ..

Out of habit he looks at his watch–stainless steel case, burnished aluminum band, still shiny although it no longer works. He wears it now as his only talisman. A blank face is what it shows him: zero hour. It causes a jolt of terror to run through him, this absence of official time. Nobody nowhere knows what time it is.

Snowman is not alone; he is surrounded by a variety of genetically spliced creatures. The series proceeds ahead then flashes back. Typical Atwood, she breaks every rule of how to write fiction, yet the story unspools seamlessly into a compulsively readable narrative. Although devourable, the book left a bitter aftertaste. The central characters are a love triangle: two men and one woman, who embodies several cliches, and meets a clicheed end. She never converses with another woman, so this book too fails the Bechdel test. And, for anyone expecting closure, remember: you’re reading Atwood.

I continue to puzzle over this book. What does it add to the PAF genre other than a ripping yarn typically devoid of females? Is there a deeper layer of irony that I’m missing? Is Atwood saying a fully realized female is impossible in PAF? Is this an extension of the female-suppressing world of Handmaid? Does the apocalypse somehow preclude women? Certainly, it’s provoking, though what it has provoked is perplexity and anger and disappointment at Atwood, not my usual admiration.

I found a possibly parallel question in Vanessa Veselka’s essay in The American Reader, “Green Screen: The Lack of Female Road Narratives and Why It Matters“:

Siddhartha wants liberation, Dante wants Beatrice, Frodo wants to get to Mount Doom–we all want something. Quest is elemental to the human experience. All road narratives are to some extent built on quest. If you’re a woman, though, this fundamental possibility of quest is denied. You can’t go anywhere if you can’t step out onto a road.

Left to my own devices, I’d go down a rabbit hole and explore PAF with female protagonists. Maureen McHugh has done some excellent stories and her novel Mission Child is one of the few I can think of. Octavia Butler? Sheri Tepper’s Gate to Women’s Country? Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time? YA PAF often has female protagonists, e.g., Katniss Everdeen, only to shackle and domesticate them in the end.

Alas, being part of 3 book groups, one of which I lead (hence Canticle, which sent me down this “road”) means my dance card is limited, so I’m unlikely to read up on these questions soon. If any of you kind readers have any insight, please, please, start a thread in the comments section.

I love most of Hope Larson’s graphic novels, Gray Horses, Chiggers, Salamander Dream, Mercury, with the exception of her adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time. I was interested to see how I’d like the oddly titled Who is AC? which is written by Larson, whose art I really like, but illustrated by manga artist Tintin Pantoja.

Lin is moving to a new town with her family. She’s a writer who puts out her own ‘zine. On the plane she gets a mysterious phone call that somehow results in superpowers, and further shenanigans ensue in creating a villain. There are a handful of strong female characters.

There’s lots going on with a big cast of characters. Good and bad lurk in the cyber-background and while this is clearly the beginning of a series, it is a standalone story. While it worked better for me than Foiled and Curses Foiled Again, this feels more disposable than Larson’s earlier works.

Foiled by Jane Yolen and illustrated by Mike Cavallaro is a middle-grade graphic novel about Aliera, an introverted girl who fences who is ostensibly in high school, though she feels much younger to me. There’s a cute new guy at school who seems a little odd and when she tried to meet him at the train station, things become really odd. Aliera’s only friend is her wheelchair-bound cousin with rheumatoid arthritis. She just got a new practice weapon (NB: not a sword) that her mother picked up cheap from a Chinese woman at a tag sale. (I don’t like the Mystical Asian cliche).

My description of the book won’t flow, because my experience didn’t either. It also ends just as it’s getting good. While I know this is part of what a series does, I do feel that each volume should have a complete story, and I didn’t think this one did. So I had hopes for the sequel, Curses Foiled Again. Alas, this worked even less for me, as a big villain was revealed, whose identity, past actions, and motivations I didn’t buy at all.

The illustrations are strong. Aliera is smart and funny, but as a whole, this didn’t work for me. There’s little subtext, so it’s all on the page, and the story isn’t complex enough to fully engage me. Perhaps because I’m not the target market? My children, 7 and 9, both boys, loved them.

Yay! I thought when I got the weekly pile at the comic shop and it included the 7th graphic novel collection of Peter Gross and Mike Carey’s comic-book series The Unwritten: The Wound, about a Harry Potter-like guy who finds that truth and fiction have a very complicated relationship. The problem with these six-issue collections, though, is that this bunch of 6 issues didn’t tell a complete story. It doesn’t stand alone, and merely leaves me hoping that closure comes in volume 8. So, you should absolutely be reading The Unwritten, as it’s one of the best current series out there. But v7 didn’t satisfy on its own.

Also recommended? Brian K Vaughan’s Saga. I buy that one monthly; can’t wait for the collections.

A few months ago, my husband was reading something on his nook and kept laughing aloud. It was Caitlin (pronounced CAT lin) Moran’s How to Be a Woman, which he’d seen recommended by gonzo author Warren Ellis. Since his copy was an e-book, he got a hard copy for me (I’m a traditionalist, and yes, I’ve tried e-readers. Not my cuppa.)

Starting off, it reminded me a lot of Jenny Lawson’s Let’s Pretend This Never Happened because it’s about growing up poor and weird far from a major city. While Lawson’s is a pretty straightforward memoir, Moran’s is personal stories pinned up around a theme of what she refers to as strident feminism, a term she knows will put some people off. And yet, she has two diagnostics that I thought were useful and to the point.

One, to tell if you’re a feminist:

a. do you have a vagina? and
b. do you want to be in charge of it?

If you said yes to both, then congratulations! You’re a feminist. (p. 75)

Another,

how can you tell when some sexism is happening to you?

Well, in this matter, what ultimately aids us is to simply apply this question to the issue: Is this polite?

The anecdotes come fast and funny, and it’s entertaining and a good reminder of other things that I, at least, sometimes forget. On underwear:

I’m pro big undies. Strident feminisms NEEDS big undies…there is scarcely a woman in Britain wearing a pair of underpants that actually fit her. Instead of having something that sensibly and reassuringly contains both the buttocks–what I would call a good pair of undies–they’re wearing little more than gluteal accessories, or arse-trinkets. (91-2)

On high heels:

“But, bafflingly, we totally accept the uselessness of heels. We accept it limply, shrugging. We are indifferent to the thousands of pounds we spend over a lifetime on shoes we only wear once, and in great pain. (196)

On bras:

“a good bra can be one of the greatest aids a woman will ever know.” (95)

(The only kind of bras she burns are the ones that don’t fit properly.)

There is also a very thoughtful and thought-provoking chapter near the end on a topic so touchy that most wouldn’t touch it, but Moran does, politely, I thought.

BUT. Here come the but’s. Somewhere around the middle of the book, when the childhood anecdotes stopped and the book became more straightforwardly a treatise on feminism, I became less engaged. Moran made huge sweepting statements and didn’t qualify them, e.g., How to Be a Woman, right up front there in the title. Nowhere does she qualify her position as a non-poor white woman. See also:

“Even the most ardent feminist historian, male or female–citing Amazons and tribal matriarchies and Cleopatra–can’t conceal that women have basically done fuck-all for the last 100,000 years. Come on–let’s admit it.” (131)

Um, no. No. I will not admit that.

Also, she draws a polar distinction between burlesque, saying that it lets “the power balance rest with the person taking her clothes off”, as opposed to strip clubs, which she finds indefensible. I don’t quite buy either extreme of her argument.

She offers two chapters: Why You Should Have Children and Why You Shouldn’t Have Children. But while it seems balanced that she included the latter, her romantic waxing on motherhood tip the scales toward the former. Additionally, this was one of many instances in which she used “you” rather than “me” and I found the slippage into second person grating, as when she keeps using “you” in the chapter about naming her vagina and breasts, which is not something I ever did or worried much about. And I was bothered by her use of “you” in the chapter on abortion. She probably did it as a way to draw in the reader and encourage empathy, but it came off to me as distancing herself from her own story.

In the end, the amusing anecdotes and helpful reminders were not enough to win me over. I spent some time reading reviews at Goodreads, and there are almost no three star reviews–they tend to 1/2 hate or 4/5 love. I would give this book 3 stars. Some good stuff, some not good stuff. Context and qualificaiton would have made a huge difference to me. Enough good stuff for a qualified recommendation, but that’s it.

The men of Bravo are not cold. It’s a chilly and windwhipped Thanksgiving Day with sleet and freezing rain forecast for late afternoon, but Bravo is nicely blazed on Jack and Cokes thanks to the epic crawl of game-day traffic and the limo’s minibar. Five drinks in forty minutes is probably pushing it, but Billy needs some refreshment after the hotel lobby, where overcaffeinated tag teams of grateful citizens trampolined right down the middle of his hangover. (1)

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk was a selection for the 2013 Tournament of Books. Though it went down early, the fans of it were ardent enough to make me still want to read it. And oh, I loved this book.

Billy Lynn is one of a handful of soldiers who survived a brutal and famous skirmish in Iraq. They’re brought back to America for a “victory” tour, which ends with the Thanksgiving football game just before they’re supposed to ship back out.

Billy is such a sympathetic narrator, and one who skewers the ironies of war and yet is somehow compassionate. One of the last war books I read I can barely remember. This, though, is going to stay with me.

I am one of the few people who didn’t love Wolf Hall. I found the story boring and the use of ambiguous ‘he’ pronouns annoying. Does this reaction make me a philistine? Perhaps. So I was understandably reluctant to approach the sequel, Bring Up the Bodies. Trusted friends like Amy and Kate assured me it was better than the original. Nonetheless, I put it off over all the other Tournament of Books contenders that I wanted to read. Left it for dead last.

I liked the opening. There’s some gorgeous writing. Henry the VIII’s court should be fascinating. Yet I found this book far too easy to put down. I told myself I’d give it 50 pages, yet when I got to 45, I couldn’t even see the point of forcing down those last five pages. It was non-compelling for me, and still with deliberately awkward use of ‘he.’ I read so many ToB books this year that I just loved and raced through; this one left me cold. I returned it unread, and am on to the next book. Life’s too short.

I finished Bleak House, y’all! Thanks mostly to my friend Amy at New Century Reading, who did a readalong where we did one of the serialized chunks a week, so it took us 20 weeks. I really enjoyed having a longer reading project alongside the books I read one at a time, and looked forward to reading my 40 or so pages of Bleak House every week on Sunday. I think I’m going to try to keep up the habit of one big reading project for books that I continually don’t feel I have the gumption to finish in one sitting. I’ll be doing Brothers Karamazov this summer with one of my book groups, but some other candidates are the short story collections of Alice Munro and Angela Carter, or other Dickens books.

Bleak House is one of the best books I’ve ever read. Sprawling with both funny and sad parts, a huge cast of characters (rather too many of whom die, in my opinion, yet it IS called Bleak House, so not like I wasn’t warned). Esther Summerson is our main character, a young woman told since she was young that she’s tainted with the sin of her illegitimate birth. At first, Esther seems too kind, too nice, but she becomes more complex and interesting over the course of the book, especially as we’re slowly shown that she’s not exactly a reliable narrator.

This book has something for everyone. Romance, mystery, tragedy, lost love, murder, humor, social commentary and I’m sure I’m forgetting some things. I had only a few minor concerns by the end–the over-romantic portrait of the domestic angel accompanied strangely by the condescension of others for Esther in this role, and the lonely end for one of my favorite characters, Mr. George.

Fair warning: do NOT read a character list as you go, or follow links. Spoilers abound, and there are some good ones in here.

I thought Building Stories by Chris Ware was going to be one of the books I skipped in this year’s Tournament of Books. I don’t care for Ware’s precise and ultra-iconic art style, and no matter how many times I tried to read Jimmy Corrigan, I couldn’t get into it. Ware seemed like one of those chilly, distant writers who disdain their subjects. Also, it costs $50 retail. It comes shrink wrapped, and so couldn’t be tried before the buy. When I did finally ask about it at my comic shop, they were out of stock and it was between printings. But then trusted friends like Amy and Kate said it was worthwhile, and I was in a socialist bookstore where they had it back in stock, so I took the leap.

There are 14 elements in the box, in book, strip, newspaper, and other forms. The main character is perhaps a young woman, since most of the stories center on her and her life from childhood to old age. But the conceit is that the brownstone building she lives in as a young woman tells some of the stories, so we also see into the lives of others in the building, and even into some of the local bees. It’s clever and engaging, and its also spookily insightful at times, with the main character sometimes saying things that are true but so ugly that most don’t even write them into journals. There were complex interesting women in this story and their lives were treated with compassion and respect. So while Ware’s style is chilly and distant, his storytelling was not.

Many of the commenters at the ToB advised against ending with the Bee book (NB not the Bee newspaper, but the book; they’re different.) That was good advice. I read it early, and found it amusing. Some readers speculated that there is an advised order of reading printed on the back of the box. I don’t think this is so–there’s a diagram showing where such items appear in the brownstone, but no order, which I think is the point. You can peek into and slip out of these lives, the stories go back and forward in time, there’s no exact beginning and end.

I would have preferred if the contents of the stories would have match the form of the object–like one of the old woman’s letters, the journal of the young woman, a children’s book that told the bee story. As it was, with its seemingly random pairing of story and object, this felt more to me like a “look at me, look at me, look at me now!” trick. And it IS worth looking at, and spending time with. But I was fatigued as I approached the end, and was glad to be done with it. My eyes were burning and tired from the tiny type, even though I have bifocals AND used a magnifying glass. (which would have been a useful addition to the box.) The $50 price tag is steep for a book, though perhaps just a fraction of what such an art object is worth. It does smack of white elitism to me. One of the judges enraged the commenters by belittling the work, but I did like this:

its elaborate packaging allows the thing to double as an oversized merit badge of taste and sensitivity to be displayed on the coffee tables of the McSweeney’s set.

Worthwhile, and I own it, so anyone who wants to borrow it can.

A selection for this year’s Tournament of Books, Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins was so hard to find for free/cheap that I chose to rent it from the library for $.25 a day. Even then it was hard to find a rental copy. But once started, it sucked me in and pulled me along like a riptide till I closed the book, very satisfied.

It’s told in alternating viewpoints and alternating times, yet was easy to follow. There’s a film exec, his young assistant, an aspiring screenwriter, an old Italian man who met a movie star in his youth, and that’s just in the beginning. This is a romance, Hollywood history, and mystery. The relationship between the young woman and the movie exec reminded me a great deal of Sasha and Benny in A Visit from the Goon Squad. It’s well written escapism. Loved it. Not as much as Orphan Master’s Son, but still, a lot.