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Monday, April 30, 2007

books for April

Ratings out of five; if it's not bold it's a re-read.

1. Persuasion -- Jane Austen, bien sûr -- 5
   • My favorite Austen. Which may make this my favorite book, but that's a phrase I try to avoid because it is inevitably followed by a list. Poor books, they feel bad if they get left out. Seriously, though, Persuasion is biting and romantic and funny and sad and just blissful. I still catch my breath for the letter-reading scene at the end.

2. Villette -- Charlotte Brontë -- 4
   
   • I listened to the Librivox audio version of this (to which I contributed I think three chapters). This is an at-times-heartbreaking book about a young British woman who is essentially orphaned as she reaches adulthood, and as a result travels to the Continent to earn a living in a girl's school. It's beautiful, and especially this time around I really like Lucy -- she's a quiet, unobtrusive woman but she's nobody's doormat either -- but augh the pain. I stop reading it halfway through the last chapter so that I can make believe it ends the way I want it to end.

3. Helpless -- Barbara Gowdy -- 3.5
   
   • This was a truly disturbing and painful book to read, about a girl who's abducted by a, um, very troubled man. The family's pathos, the man's girlfriend's doubts, and most especially the insight into what the man himself and the little girl were thinking and feeling are adeptly handled. I know these people now, and I have a good sense of their surroundings. I enjoyed the author's style (she's new to me). Overall, disturbing and all, this was a good read until right up near the end, when I got the feeling the author took the easy way out.

4. Ten Days in the Hills -- Jane Smiley -- 1
   
   • Well, there it is. My first 1 rating, I think. I really, really tried to get into this book. I did. I gave it pages and pages and pages' worth of my attention, but I couldn't care about the characters or the situation they found themselves in; I couldn't identify with even one facet of anyone's life and I got so, so tired of the long paragraphs and boring dialogue. I really don't care about the angsty lives of wealthy celebrities. I don't. And even if I did, I still don't think this book would have done anything for me. I'm sorry. Maybe in eighty years this will be a classic along the lines of The Age of Innocence, a commentary on the vapid emptiness of the lives of the ruling celebrity class. I will never know, since by that time I will be in a place where I won't care how bad this book was. But I doubt it.

5. Family Tree -- Barbara Delinsky -- 2
   
   • I had never read anything by Barbara Delinsky, but not being a literary snob (well, not TOO much of a literary snob), and finding the premise and cover of this particular book to be interesting when I saw it on the New Books display at the library, and also being short on books for this post for this month, I decided to give this a try.
     
     I agonized over how I would score this book, because the thing is, it's not a bad premise. A white couple -- he a lawyer from an aristocratic New England family, she a nobody who helps run her grandmother's knitting store when she's not doing interior design -- gives birth to a child who shows definite signs of African ancestry. Family issues ensue. It would have made a good short story in the right hands, but as a 400-page novel, it just doesn't do it for me. It's largely the fault of the really... messy storytelling. I didn't like the narrative voice at all; it seems to have been written either by or for fifteen-year-olds in many places. Worst of all, though, was the handling of the race issue. Not politically -- I don't have any problem with that, really. Even when I disagree with an author's main point about the issues s/he presents, as long as they're handled well, I enjoy thinking about things from a different perspective and I generally come away with a better understanding of myself and the issue(s) than I had when I started reading. But The Issue in this book was clumsily handled. The characters (who, by the way, I otherwise didn't find too badly done) mouthed twenty-first-century platitudes every time they spoke; their dialogue was annoying peppered with stupid things that nobody really says ("Are you a bigot?" -- to one's husband -- for example). I didn't want to give up on the book, at first because I wanted to see if it got better, and then because it was like a freeway accident and I couldn't look away, and then because I wanted to see if my first-chapter predictions about the ending would come to pass (they did), and then because I wondered if the author could go a single page without using the word 'race', 'bigot', or 'African-American' (she couldn't). Characters and incidents were thrown into the story for no other purpose than to rather clumsily and obviously advance the secondary theme of Family Secrets and the Havoc They Wreak.
     
     This story, seriously, as bad as it was, was not completely without good points. I liked a few of the characters, as I mentioned. The baby descriptions were good. I liked the yarn store -- although that is so not my kind of yarn store; any yarn that costs $40 a skein is, um, no, never going to be in my house, I can pretty much guarantee. On the whole, though, I recommend that, unless you're a big fan of the author or her genre, you give this one a miss.

Comments

Posted by: Maria at May 2, 2007 09:11 AM

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