A Bride’s Veil
Title: All Our Worldly Goods
Author: Irene Nemirovsky
Publisher: Vintage International
Length: 264 pages
Sometimes you pick up a book with too much expectation. I find I do that with all Irene Nemirovsky’s books. The whimsical 1940’s images, the promise of a love story and a certain level of French-ness, the heartbreaking knowledge that the author didn’t survive the holocaust… of course all her work immediately sounds enticing. You get a warm fuzzy and desperate feeling just looking at the cover (kudos to the marketing department), but those warm fuzzies are so intense, how could an author possibly live up to that? (Unless you’re Audrey Niffenegger, who lives up to all her book covers.)
I had a hard time getting into Suite Francaise, but its saving grace was listening to the symphony the novel was modeled after. In that light, the work became amazing, but only for the writing itself not because of the story. I say this years after reading the book with certainty because I cannot remember the story or any of the characters. If I can’t remember them, they surely could not have moved me that much.
I got the overwhelming desperate sensation to read All Our Worldly Goods at the library a few weeks ago, but like Suite Francaise, I picked it up to read and was only moderately interested. The characters seem riveting in theory, but a few paragraphs into chapter five I realize that I kind of want to know what happens but am not that moved by the people. It doesn’t help that I don’t feel well and Nemirovsky is NOT good home with the flu reading. To be fair with her work, I feel as though I need to be at a coffee shop tucked away in a dark corner without the presence of my two-year old. Maybe it’s because of sentences like: “It was a November day; the skies wept softly; the wind danced in a bride’s veil; the carriage crushed the last reddish leaves.”
I probably won’t be finishing this particular book. I have to turn it into the library tomorrow or face fines and I cannot renew it because it’s on a waiting list. I’m not disappointed about not being able to finish it, though, and I have no desire to rush to the store and find a copy for myself. Instead, I want to find out who that person is and have a conversation with them once they hit chapter five. How do you feel? Is it living up to your expectations? Or does her work leave you a little bit depressed and unsatisfied?
Funny that the sentence, of all sentences, that I plucked off the page to use in this post as I was writing it was one metaphorically using a bride’s veil. My husband and I were just talking about bride’s veils – and their purpose – the other day. I didn’t wear a veil. I’m not too keen on veils. “Veils were for arranged marriages when the groom had never seen the bride before and was restricted from seeing how ugly she was until after he was stuck,” my husband laughed. We can’t remember why this topic came up: a commercial? a Doctor Who episode? Pinterest images? Who knows? The point is, that’s how I feel about Nemirovsky’s work. The book is laced in the most beautiful veil ever to be seen, intricate and finely placed descriptions and pictures on the dust jacket. Then you start reading the book and realize, the bride is not ugly per se, but she’s just not as beautiful as I was led to believe. She’s nice, she’s alright, but she’s no super model. And I’m a groom who feels stuck with something of little interest when I expected and wanted something amazing.
HPB Humble Spring Book Club Picks!
The Series I Couldn’t Finish
I genuinely enjoyed Wicked. I read it a few years ago when there were about a hundred copies floating around in the fiction section I was running. As a bookseller, if I see a dozen of something, I take it home and read it so I can tell my customers about it. You can’t sell a book you know nothing about, right? And Wicked was neat. I thought it was so neat, I added it to the list of things to do with my daughter when she’s older… a month of Oz: Read the original Wizard of Oz, watch Judy Garland sing and be awesome in the old movie, read Wicked together, go see the musical, and so on.
I pumped the series during an Earth Day event too: Go Green with the Wicked Witch of the West! I thought I was being cute, most of my co-workers just thought I was being weird. I’m ok with that.
Then, I read book two: Son of a Witch. I struggled, plodded, and pulled hair through it. Three quarters of the way through the book I realized that I didn’t really care for the story, Maguire’s intricate world no longer resembled Oz in any way except in name, and frankly I was bored. I was reading for the sake of the series.
I bought Lion Among Men off a clearance table at Barnes & Noble when it was still a current publication. I had the first two in hardback, it only seemed appropriate to be complete. Besides, a lot of series have a saggy middle and then perk up quite nicely in the end. I was under the false impression that this was going to be a nice little wrap up for a trilogy. Still, I was unmotivated to read it. It sat on my shelf for a couple of years, all crisp, shiny, and new. I read the first 5 pages about a half-dozen times and put it back.
At the beginning of 2012 I set some reading goals for myself. I do this every year. I typically decide that I should read anywhere between 60 and 80 books a year, but steadily hit in the 70 to 75 range (except for the year I was pregnant). This year, I was overzealous and was shooting for 80 or more, I am currently reading my 70th title if you don’t include children’s picture books, which I don’t, and clearly not going to read 10 books by the end of the month. With these goals, come little notes to read through x amount of already owned titles, or to finish such and such series. Lion Among Men fell into both of these notes, so creeping on December I gave myself the final push and said, “It’s now or never.”
I checked it out from the library on audio, thinking it would be an easy thing to listen to while doing chores. Kill multiple birds with one stone and all that.
Despite John McDonough’s excellent reading voice, ah I could die listening to that wonderful voice, I have yet to finish the book. And, I will be turning the audio book back into the library having listened to the first disc in the course of a month.
Sadly, The Wicked Years is just not for me. I don’t feel it in my bones, I am not enraptured in its essence and all those other over the top feelings I get when I am enthralled with a series. Simply put, if I were to ever finish this series (which, by the way, has a 4th book too!), it would be by the sheer force of my insane will to get things done. I don’t care about it that much to be that willful.
This is a series that shall remain unfinished.
Do you have a series of books like that in your life? Talk to me.
What series have you read lately that you simply could not have lived without?
A Review of Michael Grant’s Gone
Title: GONE
Author: Michael Grant
Publisher: HarperTeen
Genre: Young Adult/ Science Fiction
Length: 558 pages
Take the horror of Golding’s Lord of the Flies
My niece handed me this book, she’s in the third volume of the series, and loving it. She’s into the dark and twisty books these days, I remember being into them at that age too. And though I’m hooked on these as an adult as well, I find these a little too dark and twisty from the perspective of a parent.
Kids killing kids, babies starving to death trapped in homes without care, fires, dark demon-like creatures on the hunt, it’s a little too much when I think of it with my own kiddo in mind. It puts my obsessive crazy brain on a mission to ensure my child is a self-sufficient survivor with some mad Kung Fu skills under her belt as soon as possible. It reminds me the value of teaching my kid about God, love, and the makings of good leaders; how to recognize right from wrong and good from bad without having an adult there to tell you. In case of crisis, this is the plan…
When it comes down to it, Grant is a great writer for this genre. He is dark and twisty, but he does limit his descriptions as to leave plenty of room for the imagination. So although there is a dead baby that’s needs taken care of, a twelve-year-old is less likely to visualize the entire process of a baby being alone for eight days and then found dead. Grant addresses the smell of the house, the fact that the main character has to clean it up and take care of the child, and the emotional trauma of the situation, but he doesn’t go into a gross CSI style detail that would move me to guide a twelve-year-old away from the series. That’s what keeps the book so intriguing rather than nauseating.
Well, that and the fact that I’m a sucker for dystopian societies and coming of age stories.
My recommendation if your kid picks this up: Read it WITH them, and be ready to discuss.
Julie & Julia – & JJ
Some people are appalled at this, and some find it wonderfully convenient, but I have friend categories. With me, people always know where they stand, because that is what I appreciate most about my own interpersonal relationships. I have a ‘best friend’, a ‘best friend since kindergarten’, a ‘roomie’ (my college room-mate), a ‘sister-wife’ (a very bad long running joke with my bestie of a cousin, no we are not actually sister-wives), and a ‘favorite friend.’ I can proudly say that JJ Golightly, of the Tidbits from Miss Golightly, is my favorite friend.
Favorite friends are those people you can go lengthy times without seeing, but once you see them again they are like crack to your system and you want them more and more. Favorite friends are those friends that if you ever chose to be lesbians (which we are not) you’d spend your life with them, because they are the ones you call randomly and say in the most superfluous and hyperbolic way possible: “I have a longing for you!” Favorite friends are the ones that you’ll hold hands with in public and not care if people look at you funny or take it the wrong way, because like a surrogate sister, your favorite friend is someone you would love to have literally attached to your hip, or in your back pocket if you could keep a miniature of them. They are also the person you happen to see the least of, and maybe that’s why the magnetism toward them remains forever in tact.
I recently had a wonderful visit from both my Roomie (Coffee Cups in Trees) and my Favorite Friend (Miss Golightly). What happens on these trips is this:
Roomie drinks coffee at the table, Favorite Friend bakes and cooks all sorts of goodies and photographs the results, I scurry back and forth trying to decide which I’d rather do, help cook or be lazy and drink coffee. The coffee usually wins.
Maybe it was because of one of these visits (in which all three of us gain five pounds over night), or maybe it was because Glen at the HPB Humble Book Club meeting brought up Julie Powell in our discussion of The Old Curiosity Shop, or maybe it was because I’d had the book sitting open to page five on my coffee table for about a year, but I finally got around to reading Julie & Julia
Nothing like reading a memoir about a frazzled maniac with a serious obsession for obsessions and sci-fi shows – in the kitchen – writing a blog and book when you too are nearly 29, frazzled, obsessed (but not dedicated), writing a blog, and most recently lost your entire book (again) to a computer virus. It gives hope. It gives motivation.
I will write a book in the next 30 days. Not the one I intended, I’m too crushed right now, but a different, lighter book that is loitering in a journal in my cabinet just waiting to be properly edited and put into a computer. I have 30 days. If Julie Powell can cook 523 recipes in 365 days, get published, and not be a loser by age 30, damn it, so can I. Except I’m not cooking. I’ll be ‘writing’ a nearly already book (from paper to computer) in 30 days and getting it to Smashwords by my 29th birthday. This I do vow.
In the mean time, I will still be reading, writing this blog, eating if I can afford it, and teaching Kung Fu… because that’s who I am, that’s what I do. Funny, that I had to be reminded of that by a memoir about French cooking.
Which is a delightful, by the way, all the way down to her swearing like a sailor, something I wouldn’t have even noticed had she not pointed it out. She may live in Long Island City, but when it comes down to it she’s from Texas, and as a Texan I can say there are two kinds of Texas women… the kind that swear, and the southern belles who don’t.
I appreciate her kitchen woes, I love to eat but have many cooking woes myself. I appreciate her small and outlandish apartment, I have a once lovely home that has just been utterly broken by this recession and a foundation problem. There’s just so much to relate to, and frankly, Julie Powell is down right endearing. She’ll never be my Favorite Friend in real life, as that spot is forever taken and I doubt I’ll ever even meet her, but she is definitely a favorite on my bookshelf.
Old Curiosity Shop – A Curious Book
Title: The Old Curiosity Shop
Author: Charles Dickens
Length: The Reader’s Digest version is 523 pages
Chosen for the Half Price Books Humble Book Club for the December discussion to get in the spirit of winter without the over kill of A Christmas Carol, I was incredibly excited about finally getting to this particular Dickens title. Unfortunately, it didn’t live up to my great expectations (pun intended) and failed to become my new favorite Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby
With a villainous dwarf, a troupe of dancing dogs, and then some, The Old Curiosity Shop was less about a cozy antique shop (which is what I wanted) and more of a Don Quixote style adventure occurs within a Les Miserables themed tale of woes for an old man/ young girl runaway team. Spectacular! Spectacular! from The Moulin Rouge comes to mind: bright colors, forced marriages, evil characters who resemble carnies… it was a bit much for me, but allegorical novels usually are.
Nell was too perfect and met too tragic an end. Quilp was too disturbing, too evil. Who makes their wife stand in a corner all night and not move for the sheer pleasure of mental torment? Not to mention, he’s a dwarf! Give him a good, hard kick and go on your merry way if he’s evil!
Despite my lack of love for this novel, I think it a great selection for a book club. There was so much to talk about, so many things worth speculating. First, the merits of reading it as it was initially released, which was in serial. I think reading Dickens’ work in weekly installments instead of all at once as a novel brings back a level of magic to his stories that was lost after they were printed and bound in one volume. Second, at the book club meeting, we had a lengthy discussion of the use of names and archetypes. Third, the ties to Master Humphrey’s Clock, Dickens’ Wife’s Sister, and a number of other seemingly random connections that bring new light to the book.
The most interesting to me currently is that of Master Humphrey’s Clock, because I own the book and have not yet read it. Master Humphrey’s Clock was a periodical of short stories about the ‘curiosity shop’ I actually wanted to read about when I began the story of Little Nell. Master Humphrey is actually the narrator of the first few chapters of The Old Curiosity Shop and then steps out of the picture.
There aren’t many members in our little book club at Half Price Books, and it seems to be on the verge of becoming a gentleman’s [book] club run by a non-gentleman [I’m a lady], but the meetings are open to anyone and everyone the first Monday on the Month at 8 pm. Snacks are provided and the book discussions so far have been pretty awesome. Up for discussion in January is Molly Wizenberg’s A Homemade Life
I am captivated by the movie trailer for the same reasons I hated the book. The story is so epic and so utterly wrong! Anna is the worst sort of human in my eyes, but everything is so bold and rich, and amazing. I can’t wait.
Sometimes you just can’t ask why about love…..love is a choice but it’s a choice that doesn’t require any qualifications, it simply is.
Fans of the novel Anna Karenina know that there are as many kinds of loves as there are hearts. That perhaps is why the novel is so appealing….it is a story about love and love effects us all.
What kind of loves have you known in your life? Forbidden love? Dutiful love? Romantic love? Enduring love? Passionate love? Maternal love? Scandalous love?
In the novel Anna Karenina, we find all kinds of love and on November 30th (in theaters everywhere) we will see director Joe Wright’s vision of love on the big screen.
I for one have been waiting for the release of this film for months. I have been watching all the Facebook promotions and longing for the release date. The film opened to limited cities on…
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Cyber Monday
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