Toe Tapping

A package from Amazon arrived last night and I got really excited. Of course it had to be the book I ordered last week - Midnight in Manhattan! Except it wasn't. I ripped it open and found a wrapped present inside. Still no alarm bells went off. I thought, "Hmmm, gift wrapped, that's weird. It must be because I used a gift card to purchase my book." But right as I started to tear at a corner of the wrapping paper, I noticed it had a little card with it. Inside the card was a note that read "Jeff, I'm not sure if you have this book already, but I thought of you when I saw it and thought the title would intrigue you. Love, Mom" Or something like that. There was a big sticker over the name on the address, so I just assumed it was for me. When will my book ever come!??

The Myth of You and Me

At my office we have a bookshelf in the kitchen where people leave books that they don't mind sharing. It's sort of a rotating selection. Usually, I bring my own book to work and read it during lunch, but a few weeks ago I forgot my book and decided to grab something off the shared shelf, just for that one day. As a general rule, I an NOT a big fan of reading more than one book at a time; it feels like cheating. The book I grabbed that day was The Myth of You and Me by Leah Stewart. I only read like 10 pages, but I could tell it was good. Then I quickly abandoned it to return to my current book, which I think was The Inheritance of Loss. But when I finished The Samurai's Garden on Monday and my amazon.com purchase still hadn't arrived, I found myself bookless. I decided to pick The Myth of You and Me up again. And it was SO good. I loved this book.

The story is told in first person by Cameron, a 29 year old research assistant to a 92 year old historian. She has no friends and has lived with her boss for 3 years.

Here is the first chapter (don't worry, it's only a page long):

"What if you had never met me?" Sonia says. "What would your life be like?"
Sonia has been my best friend for only a few months, but already life without her is difficult to imagine. All I can muster is an image of myself alone in a room. "Boring," I say, and Sonia laughs.
We are lying on her four-poster bed, staring up at the pink canopy, our feet propped on the wall above her headboard. We are fourteen. When I turn my head to look at Sonia, her hair brushes against the side of my face.
"If you hadn't been standing in the right place in the parking lot," she says, "we might never have spoken."
"We have three classes together," I say.
"If you hadn't come in the gym that day, we might never have become friends."
"Maybe we were destined to be friends," I say. "Maybe we would've been assigned a group project."
She waves her hand in the air above us, dismissing this. "Every decision we make," she says, "affects the rest of our lives."
"Yeah, yeah," I say, because I've heard this from her a million times
"For example," she says, "what if you had to choose between being my best friend forever and having the boy of your dreams?"
"I can't have both?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"That's the game."
"Maybe you'd marry his brother and live next door."
She shakes her head, and the movement shakes the mattress. "You have to choose," she says.
Eight years from now I will abandon Sonia. I'll drive away from a gas station in West Texas, my eyes on the rearview mirror, where I'll see her running after my car, a shocked, desperate expression on her face. Here in Sonia's bedroom it's all still there before us, every decision between that moment and this.
Sonia rolls over onto her elbows so she can look me in the face. "Choose," she demands. "Choose."
******************

You can't tell me that you don't want to read the next chapter! It would be a lie. I'm not spoiling any more than the back jacket description does when I tell you the plot. Basically, her eccentric boss dies and leaves her one last task - to deliver a mystery package to Sonia, her long lost best friend who she hasn't spoken to in 8 years.

Here are the things I loved about this book:
1. I like reading books where the main character is my age. I know every generation probably feels this way, but the late twenties/early thirties seems like a momentous time. Like *this* is finally when we all grow up, when we have to make the big decisions.
2. It so accurately captures childhood friendships. I had 3 best friends from ages 10-14. Every time I would become inseparable with one, she would move. But parts of each of those friendships could be seen in the relationship between Cameron and Sonia in the book.
3. It also accurately captures the end of a friendship and the ongoing feelings of loss associated with that.
4. For some reason I really liked the fact that Cameron was 6'2". This is practically a foot taller than me, and so I couldn't relate at all, but I still loved it. The subtle way it wove it's way into the main character's development was interesting. I think many people feel like there was something about them growing up that set them apart and made them feel like an outsider. For me, it was the fact that my voice sounded like Kathleen Turner's at the age of 6, but to have that quality so physically obvious was an interesting choice.
5. This book is chalk full of unrequited love and even some real romance and it reminded me that realism is perhaps better than the corny romances depicted in some of the crap chick lit that I sometimes read.

There are more reasons, but I don't want to spoil the book. Go buy it and read it yourself. Then tell me what *you* think. Except not if you hate it. Because I get pissed when people hate books that I really liked. I'm a bit of a book dictator.

Next I plan to start Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl. This book comes highly recommended by my friend Heidi who loaned it to me and it was voted one of the 10 best books of the year by The New York Times. That said, the one paragraph description on the back is kind of confusing. Hopefully the book isn't too.

I Stand Corrected

I said something about being excited for the new Ann Patchett book on Monday night when I was hanging out with some friends and they said, "Oh! She has a new book already?" to which I replied, "What do you mean already?"

I guess Run came out *last July* not this July. I still want to read it, so it can stay on my To Do List (see my post last week), but I felt I needed to correct myself nonetheless.

On a side note, I started The Myth of You and Me by Leah Stewart this week. So far so good. What book are you currently reading? Is it good?

The Samurai's Garden

I finished The Samurai's Garden by Gail Tsukiyama today. I don't think I ever posted the description, so in case you're interested, here it is:


"On the eve of the Second World War, a young Chinese man is sent to his family's summer home in Japan to recover from tuberculosis. He will rest, swim in the salubrious sea, and paint in the brilliant shoreside light. It will be quiet and solitary.

But he meets four local residents - a beautiful Japanese girl and three older people. What then ensues is a tale that readers will find at once classical yet utterly unique. Young Stephen has his own adventure, but it is the unfolding story of Matsu, Sachi and Kenzo that seizes your attention and will stay with you forever."



While this book was good, I think I should have trusted my first instinct and waited to read it. I just wasn't quite in the right mood for it. I think after the last few books I've read, it might have been smarter to break up the sequence with something a little lighter. Instead, it felt a little too much the same. I didn't love the diary style writing of the book, it seemed unecessary. The sequence of dates associated with each "entry" didn't really add anything to the story. I definitely think her story telling is superb, but if push comes to shove I think I'd choose Amy Tan (author of The Joy Luck Club, The Bonesetters Daughter, The Hundred Secret Senses... there are many others but these are the only ones I've read) the next time I want a novel with a main character that's Chinese with a story that explores Asian culture. That said, I did get sucked into the story of Sachi and Matsu and her style of writing is very polished and beautiful. I think I was just more in the mood for something with a little wit.

My recent amazon.com purchase, Midnight in Manhattan by Francesca Delbanco should be arriving any day now and might be just what I need. I'm hoping that it's out of print because it revealed the secrets of the universe and had to be contained and not because it sucked and no one bought it. I really liked her other book Ask Me Anything, so I have high hopes. I'm not going to lie though, the cover design I saw online is serving as just the tinniest of red flags. But maybe I'm just super sensitive to "red flags" after missing the ones associated with Modoc (quote by Betty White on the back cover, and you may remember this gem: "treasured by animal lovers everywhere" in the description). We shall see. As I just noticed online, it appears that Midnight in Manhattan as two different cover designs. Neither are bad, but one is definitely more in line with my expectations. Perhaps I will view the cover design as an omen. If I get the slightly more classy cover, then the book will be good. If I get the illustrated cover, anything goes. I'll let you know which one it is when it arrives.

To Do List

Here is a list of books that I keep meaning to read but never get around to:

1. The Brothers K - not to be confused with The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky, this book is by David James Duncan. My friend Jessie gave me this book a long time ago and said it was her favorite book. Since then many people have told me that it's really good. The problem is - the first 100 pages or so are all about baseball. This is a problem because I hate baseball. So after about 75 pages of reading about dudes loving baseball, I quit the book. But people keep telling me to try again and to just skim the baseball stuff and that it will be worth it. So I've decided I need to try again.

2. The World Without End - this is the sequel to The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett, which I just finished. I'm worried I'll forget that I want to read this if I don't add it to the list.

3. Run - this is the new Ann Patchett book that will be released July 29th. The whole book takes place over the course of 24 hours and is described as "Suspenseful and stunningly executed, ...ultimately a novel about secrets, duty, responsibility, and the lengths we will go to protect our children."

4. Upside Down Inside Out - I thought I'd read all of Monica McInerney's novels, but it turns out I haven't! She's Australian and her books are perfect vacation reading. I'm thinking I might buy this for our Guatemala trip in August. This will be perfect because we're travelling with our friends Todd and Erin and Erin happens to like Monica McInerney too. This way, maybe we can swap books midway through the trip.

5. This Charming Man - Marian Keyes has a new book! Who knew? Not me. But now I do and I'm very excited. I predict this will take me all of 1 day to read.

6. The Beastiary - this is fairly new book by Nicholas Christopher. At one point, his book A Trip to the Stars was my favorite book. But then I recommended it to a few other people and they didn't really like it. This made me doubt whether it was really that good to begin with. That was 8 years ago, but I think his new book might still be worth a try. It sounds a little "mystical" which I know my friends Maggie and Heidi will not like, but it might be worth the risk.

7. Midnight in Manhattan - A year ago I randomly bought this book called Ask Me Anything by Francesca Delbanco at Half Price Books and ended up really liking it. My expectations were pretty low, I'd bought it in a hurry, but it turned out to be cutting and smart and observant. After I finished it I looked to see if she'd written any other books at Barnes and Noble. The guy at the info table told me that she had another book called Midnight in Manhattan but that it was coming up in their system as "unorderable". He said he'd never seen that status before and that it meant that it was out of print and my best bet was to find it at a used book store. For a day or so I felt spurned, like the world was set against me reading a book that sounded kind of good. I think I may have looked at Half Price Books once but it wasn't there. Then I promptly forgot about it. Well guess what?! Turns out I'm retarded and it was available used on amazon.com for $3.10 all along! And I just happen to have a $10 gift certificate to amazon.com that I got for participating in some random phone survey a month or so ago. Long story longer, I just ordered it online and should have it in the next week. I hope it's not a big let down.

Am I missing anything?

The Namesake

As predicted, I loved The Namesake. I plowed through it, starting it Tuesday night and finishing it today over lunch. It was so sad, but so beautiful. For those not familiar with the book, here is the description off the back jacket:

"Meet the Ganguli family, new arrivals from Calcutta, trying their best to become Americans even as they pine for home. The name they bestow on their firstborn, Gogol, betrays all the conflicts of honoring tradition in the new world -- conflicts that will haunt Gogol on his own winding path through divided loyalties, comic detours and wrenching love affairs."

I particularly liked the way the book explored relationships. Some of the relationship nuances are specific to the emmigrant experience, but many of them seemed universal to me; the guilt that adult children feel about their relationships with their parents, the death of a parent, finding and losing love. For some reason, I had it in my head that the author, Jhumpa Lahiri was a young prodigy and I kept being amazed at the way someone her age understood the depth of emotion involved in things like the end of a marriage or the death of a spouse. Why did I think she was so young? I feel certain that someone told me she was only like 22 when her book of short stories came out in 2002, but then I looked her up online and she's in her 40s. Instead of feeling disappointed, I actually felt reassured by this discovery. I find that the older I get, the less impressed and more annoyed and depressed I am by prodigies. I have officially passed the age of being a prodigy at *anything*. As a result, when a 19 year old gets a novel published I'm forced to remember what I was doing when I was 19. After I wrote that I actually just sat staring at the computer for like 10 minutes trying to remember even *one* productive thing I did when I was 19. Or even one funny thing I did when I was 19. Mostly I just remember eating a lot of Stove Top Stuffing and sleeping in.

Anyways, I really recommend this book if you haven't already read it. I was planning to start The Samurai's Garden next, but something about it feels like the wrong choice. I want to read it, but I think I might need to insert something else first. I have a feeling a visit to the bookstore is in my near future.

The Pillars of the Earth

And the award for longest book ever goes to....drum roll.... The Pillars of the Earth! Actually, that's not quite true. I'm pretty sure I've read 2 books that were longer, or at least *felt* longer. Number one was The Emancipator's Wife by Barbara Hambly, which was a book about Abraham Lincoln's crazy wife, Mary Todd Lincoln. I just checked and that book was apparently only 624 pages, but boy did it feel longer (word to the wise - this book starts out great but do not be fooled because it actually sucks). The second one was Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles by Margaret George. According to Amazon, that book only had 880 pages. So I guess I was right, this really is the longest book ever. The Pillars of the Earth had a whopping 973 pages! And each page is as big as a sheet of 8.5x11 paper. I'm serious.

In better news, it was WAY more interesting than the two runners up. The story and characters were very captivating and it felt more like watching a movie in my head than reading a book. I was right about the plot being vaguely Dan Brownish, but more like a slow-motion, medieval Dan Brown kind of plot. The story is told over the course of 45 years so it couldn't exactly be described as a "thriller", but it did have scandal in the church, romance, and near disasters were definitely averted by the quick thinking main characters. Sadly though, there were no albinos in this story.

While reading, I thought a few different times that the story would make a good movie. But then I had kind of an interesting revelation - I enjoy reading medieval books, but I hate medieval movies. If they actually did make a movie out of this book, I probably wouldn't go. I didn't even see The Other Boleyn Girl when it came to the theatres, even though I loved the book and harbor a secret obsession with Natalie Portman. And this is not because I'm one of those book snobs that goes to movies and then says "The book was soooo much better". Because I don't, I swear! Well, maybe I did for The DaVinci Code, but that was because the book really was sooo much better and I think even Tom Hanks would agree with me on that. Sorry Tom. Weirdly though, as soon as I pictured this book as a movie, I immediately had a flash of Mel Gibson in Braveheart ala 1995 and almost barfed a little bit. And I'm 99% sure that my near barfing was not a result of Mel Gibson being creepy and gross in real life. I just really don't like medieval movies. Then I realized that I feel the same about Sci Fi books. Sometimes I kind of like them. But if you so much as linger for an extra 30 seconds on Star Trek while flipping channels and I will kick the remote out of your hand faster than Ralph Macchio.

Hmmm... I feel that perhaps I have veered off course with my review.

This book was kind of the opposite of the last book I read, The Inheritance of Loss. That book was all about the prose, and The Pillars of the Earth was all about the story. I felt pissed at the evil character of William (why wouldn't he just die?!) and wondered about the other characters when I wasn't reading the book (would Aliena ever get her marriage annulled and marry Jack the master builder?!). Unlike most super long books, I never felt like the book was dragging and I didn't have to talk myself into finishing it at all. I also liked the architectural aspect of the book. It was interesting to read about the construction of churches during this period. Whenever I've seen ancient churches in Europe, I've always marveled at the construction and it's crazy to think about the patience required to build a cathedral that takes 15 years.

I heard that there's a sequel that came out recently called The World Without End. I don't plan to rush out and buy it tomorrow, but I'm definitely keeping it on the back burner. Instead, I plan to start The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri tonight.