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Friday, January 08, 2010

What I've been reading, by special request

Kat asked me to blog about what I've been reading while I've been out of school. Good idea! I might be inclined to put this off and do a "Books for ______" post like I used to do, but let's face it: if I wait until a more round-number time to do it -- the end of the month, say, or even the end of my semester break -- it'll never get done, so I'll do it now.

Honestly, I know I'm going to forget some stuff. I have come to accept this about myself, this Swiss-cheesy nature of my brain. If I later remember the ones I've forgotten, I'll add them.

• Certain Girls -- Jennifer Weiner -- 4
  • This was a fun, lightish read. If you've read her previous book about Cannie, which has the brown-paper-coverable title of Good In Bed but is really quite enjoyable and is much deeper than its title implies, you'll enjoy it more than if you haven't, I think. It's the story of a mom and her young teen daughter, which, OK, if you want to sell a book to me you should always start out with that premise, I guess, based on my reactions to some of the Traveling Pants series and this book and basically every other book that involves girls growing away from their mothers and maybe I don't want to think about what this says about me so I'll move on. Jennifer Weiner writes cracklingly funny prose interspersed with thought-provoking Issues and Sad Things in almost every book I've ever read of hers -- Goodnight Nobody, I am looking at you -- and this is not an exception. Highlight: I learned more about bar and bat mitzvahs than I ever knew before. I actually had to look them up on the Internet to see if there are parents who really go as overboard-crazy with them as they do in this book and, um, there are. It's a whole cultural phenomenon that I've never even heard of, and that always makes for an interesting read if it's handled right. And it is, here.
• Prairie Tale: A Memoir -- Melissa Gilbert -- 2
  • There were aspects of this autobiography that I found very interesting. Most of those aspects were over and done in the first third of the book, during the parts that talked about making the Little House series. But maybe I'm just not cut out for celebrity bios, because the entire rest of the book just seemed like too much information mixed with a heavy dose of name dropping and self-justification. Generally, I was left with the feeling that Melissa wants us to know that she's really very different from all the other cosmetically-altered drug-addled Lifetime-Channel-staple former child stars in The Industry. Whereas by the end of the book I just didn't care. I had lost interest, It's sad, really, because I am all in favor of realizing that everyone in the world is a unique individual and that tossing people into categories without getting to know them is foolish, wasteful, and hurtful, but by the end of the book, I couldn't get the shallow, airbrushed, surgically altered, air-so-rarified-they're-completely-disconnected-from-real-life Hollywood stereotype out of my head, because this book presented a woman who fit it so well. It was well-written, I suppose, but I wish I hadn't read it. Again, this probably means that celebrity memoir isn't my best genre.
• And There I Stood With My Piccolo
  Eggs I Have Laid
  "But He Doesn't Know the Territory!" -- Meredith Willson -- 5 each
  
  • What was that about celebrity memoir? ;-) But SERIOUSLY, you GUYS, these books are WONDERFUL. Very 1950's, very witty, very lively and interesting and just... WONDERFUL. Meredith Willson, who wrote a lot of music and lyrics and was quite well-known in mid-20th-century radio and television, but is most famous for his musicals The Music Man and The Unsinkable Molly Brown, also, it turns out, wrote wonderfully readable memoirs. I couldn't put this down. Maybe it's because juicy tell-all memoirs weren't the style then (you never hear, for example, about Willson's first wife whom he divorced, and the most drug-addled scenes involve the Willsons' joint efforts to... quit smoking [because it made them cough]), or maybe it's that small-town guys who happen to gradually make it big in music and radio and Broadway stay more down-to-earth than child-acting children of Hollywood personalities could ever think of being, or maybe it's that Willson was a writer by trade, but I loved these books even more than I loathed Melissa GIlbert's. If you like humor, the Midwest, show business, small towns, Americana, John Phillip Sousa, the New York Philharmonic, and/or charming, witty, clever, hilarious, nostalgic prose about any or all of the above, look for these.

• Slam -- Nick Hornby -- 3.5
  
  • I had no idea that Hornby had written a young-adult novel, so when it showed up WebCat I thought I'd give it a try. It turned out to be about teen pregnancy, from the boy/father's point of view, which is a bit of a stroke of genius. The protagonist is a 16-year old skater (skateboarder, except you never use that word, see), son of teenage parents himself, who lives in London and who has his life turned completely upside-down when he becomes sexually active and his girlfriend becomes pregnant. The story is quirky -- the boy (whose name I can't remember and the book's in the first person so it's hard to find it on a quick glance-through) is obsessed with Tony Hawk and his favorite form of therapy is to talk to the Tony Hawk poster that hangs in his room; Tony Hawk, through the poster, manages to mysteriously "whizz" the boy into the future a couple of times -- but accessible, and should be a cautionary tale to young men who would take it the right way and who would actually sit through reading it. (I do wonder how effective it would be, though, because teenagers tend to be notoriously unwilling to listen to cautionary tales.)

• How to be Good -- Nick Hornby -- 3.5
  
  • This book, about a couple whose marriage is already on the rocks when the husband undergoes a complete personality alteration and turns from a Cynical Angry Guy to an illogical do-gooder, had so much potential. At times while I was reading it, I thought it was just on the verge of being everything that it could be -- which is to say, wonderful. But it never quite makes it. It's a parable, and it does make you think about a lot of things, such as: What's the use of really caring about the world's problems if you don't do anything about them? Is it any less caring to not care and not do anything than it is to care and not do anything? And if you really do decide to do something, will that even work? But then these thoughts never really go anywhere. It's told from the point of view of the woman in the marriage, and frankly by the end of the book I loathed her, not only because of her choices and her reactions to her (granted, rather insufferable) husband, but because Hornby wrote her rather muddily; she would seem to be one kind of person and then do something out of character and before long she seemed to be an entirely different kind of person, until you lost any sense you had ever had of whatever personality the author may have intended to give her. Maybe this was intentional. Since Hornby is a genius, it probably was. But the whole novel came across, in the end, like some kind of bastard offspring of the kind of seriocomic writing at which Hornby usually excels, and the kind of literary-fiction novel that turns up its nose at those pointless books that have, you know, plots and characterization and bourgeois stuff like that. Still worth a read, even if only for the way it makes you think -- and, yeah, for more than that -- but it's not as dead-on as the name on the spine led me to expect it would be.

Comments

Posted by: Kat with a K at January 8, 2010 06:05 PM

Posted by: mary at January 18, 2010 10:27 AM

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