Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again...

Creed was the most underrated character on ‘The...

Sat, 18 May 2013 19:53:00 -0400

Creed was the most underrated character on ‘The Office.’ Everything he said was creepy and/or hilarious. #4 is my favorite face ever.

http://www.funnyordie.com/lists/a22fa5517b/gifs-of-creed-bratton-s-best-moments-on-the-office?playlist=featured_pictures_and_words

Wonklife: My problem with the Great Gatsby

Sun, 12 May 2013 13:18:00 -0400

Wonklife: My problem with the Great Gatsby:

wonklife:

Warning: This post contains spoilers from The Great Gatsby. On the other hand, the book is 88-years-old. Perhaps it’s time to get on that.

I can’t go quite as far as Kathryn Schulz. I don’t “despise” the Great Gatsby. I don’t mind Fitzgerald’s moralism. I’m comfortable with the…

I have to say, I love this.

Sat, 12 May 2012 01:20:39 -0400

I have to say, I love this.

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss!

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 15:12:00 -0500

Yesterday was Dr. Seuss’s birthday, and I feel that I should note it.

The first book I read on my own, at the ripe old age of 4, was Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now!. I must have read it, say, a million times. I read it to my mom when I was sure I could do it. Then I read it to my dad when he got home from work. Then I read it to my sister, who was too young to read or even really understand it at all. She was also too young to escape my reading to her, which my parents gladly took advantage of when they got sick of Marvin.

They were so happy I could read though. Before, I had my parents read those books to me. I think my dad still knows all the words to Old Hat, New Hat by heart, and my mom can still do all the voices she used to do for Are You My Mother?. They read those stories to me hundreds of times. They weren’t all by Dr. Seuss, but all of them were contributed by children’s authors who published at Random House under the umbrella of Beginner Books. Beginner Books was founded by Dr. Seuss, his wife, and Phyllis Cerf.

Even now, I enjoy going back through my Dr. Seuss books when I need a dose of childhood. At Christmas I still visit the Grinch in Whoville. I won’t be going to see the movie, but for the first time in years yesterday I opened The Lorax. My all time favorite Dr. Seuss book, The Sleep Book, is still proudly displayed on a shelf in my room and I read through it every so often before bed when I don’t want to do serious reading or a crossword puzzle to make me drowsy.

But throughout my early years, I read his stories frequently, especially after I could read on my own. I didn’t realize I was reading about racists (The Sneetches), or Hitler (Yertle the Turtle), environmentalism and anti-consumerism (The Lorax) or anything else in this picture:

I suppose I was, and those messages seem quite obvious now, but I didn’t notice them so much when I was young. Not judging people by the color of their skin and growing up to love trees might be a credit to Dr. Seuss, though.

But that stuff is all retrospective. At the time, I had no idea what a racist was, or what a Hitler was. I just liked the books. Yertle the Turtle, especially, amused me endlessly. It really speaks values about my sense of justice and fair play that, even as a kid, I was filled with glee when Yertle became king of the mud. The words in those stories, written mostly in anapestic tetrameter, captivated me as would future words of future stories in future books, but some of the real magic in Dr. Seuss came from the illustrations.

As someone who hasn’t grown up to be an artist or illustrator, I am still floored and awed by the creation of creatures I had never heard of and could never find anywhere else but in my mind’s eye. They helped develop my own imagination.

I used them to bond with my family as well. My family were all brought up on those books…at least everyone under the age of 60. My aunts, uncles, and cousins all read Dr. Seuss’s stories to me while growing up.

When I used to go to my aunts’ huge house in Harrison, 10-15 years before they left for the condo in Somers, I’d go down to the basement and pull out all the books I didn’t have at home and read those. I spent hours and hours curled up on the couch, reading about things like Bartholomew Cubbins’ hats. I have a very specific memory of an evening where everyone was together but sort of doing their own thing, and I was reading about 500 hats. That’s one of several of my early childhood memories of my family – reading with them.

I’m actually missing huge chunks of my childhood. I was literally missing for long periods of time. I must have been. I spent so much time completely engrossed in Dr. Seuss’s works, that while my parents will swear I was sitting in the living rooms of my various relatives, on their various couches, I know that I must have been somewhere else.

I know I was. As a kid, I spent countless hours on Mulberry Street, in Whoville, or with a mischievous cat. 20 years later, and I’m a better person for it. Journeys like that never leave you.

Neither does that cat. He used to visit me quite often when I was young. I don’t see him so much anymore, but sometimes if I glance out the window on a rainy day, I just manage to catch a glimpse of a red and white striped hat zipping out of sight.

Happy birthday, Dr. Seuss, wherever you are.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 19:52:00 -0500

This story by Ernest Hemingway is frequently regarded as his best, but I preferred A Farewell to Arms.

From Amazon:

In 1937 Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the civil war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Three years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge from “the good fight,” For Whom the Bell Tolls. The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain, it tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death of an ideal. In his portrayal of Jordan’s love for the beautiful Maria and his superb account of El Sordo’s last stand, in his brilliant travesty of La Pasionaria and his unwillingness to believe in blind faith, Hemingway surpasses his achievement in The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms to create a work at once rare and beautiful, strong and brutal, compassionate, moving, and wise. “If the function of a writer is to reveal reality,” Maxwell Perkins wrote Hemingway after reading the manuscript, “no one ever so completely performed it.” Greater in power, broader in scope, and more intensely emotional than any of the author’s previous works, it stands as one of the best war novels of all time.

…spoilers ahead!

Throughout this novel, we usually follow the thoughts and experiences of American Robert Jordan, who is a member of an international coalition that opposes the fascist forces of Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War.

Robert ends up working with a guerrilla leader named Pablo who has become reluctant to lead forces into something that would endanger himself and his band. Jordan is behind enemy lines to blow up a bridge and needs their help. In the camp, he meets and falls in love with Maria, a girl whose life has been completely destroyed by the Fascists. Her parents were executed and she was brutally raped. Jordan is suddenly revitalized by Maria. He wants to bring her back to his home and marry her when the war is over.

After another band of guerrillas is killed by the fascist soldiers, the leader of Jordan’s guerrilla band, Pablo, tries to sabotage the operation. After witnessing Jordan’s commitment to his mission, Pablo eventually comes around and the bridge is destroyed, but Jordan is maimed and has no choice but to let the others go on while he lies on the ground, determined to take out as many of the fascists as he can before his inevitable death.

This story took about 175 pages to be interesting, at least to me. I’m a fan of Hemingway’s usual style of simple, sparse prose and short, declarative sentences, but this book wasn’t written that way. The descriptions were long. There wasn’t much dialogue and there was a lot more punctuation than usual. There were big blocks of text that I wasn’t expecting. After that, the story picked up, but then something else happened to me.

Unlike in Hemingway’s other stories, after reading about the death of El Sordo – the leader of the other guerrilla band – I suddenly knew how this book was going to end, with Robert Jordan’s death mirroring that of El Sordo. I hate it when this happens to me. Since I turned 19, I’ve suddenly become rather good at predicting how things are going to go – either I know what events are going to take place, or I figure out the twist early, or whatever. And I can’t un-ring the bell. Once I figure it out, there’s no real way to ignore it, and it takes away some of the enjoyment. I can still enjoy that it’s done well, but the lack of surprise takes a bit of the shine off of the whole thing.

That’s what happened here. So once I knew that Robert Jordan was going to die, I had a lot of trouble getting through the story, partly because I knew what would happen and partly because it wasn’t written in the way I was expecting, which I love.

Death was a huge theme in this book. Robert Jordan knows he will not survive blowing up the bridge, seemingly throughout most of the book, and most of the characters contemplate their own deaths. There’s a lot of friendship in the face of death – it builds camaraderie between the characters in the story, knowing that they could all possibly die at any moment. All the men prepare to make the ultimate sacrifice for the cause.

Suicide is also a theme in this novel. Most of the men would prefer the quick death of suicide to being tortured for information if they were captured. Since they’d be executed eventually anyway, they’d prefer to make it quick. Some of the men carry cyanide tablets with them; it might be something else, but I can’t remember what. Robert Jordan also prefers suicide to torture, but he struggles with it, because his father, who he views as a coward, committed suicide. Consequently, he aims to die in his last ambush against the fascists, which will come after he is maimed and unable to travel.

Suicide recurs a lot in Hemingway’s stories. Obviously, Hemingway committed suicide himself in 1961. His father also committed suicide. In fact, it seems like just about everyone in Hemingway’s family committed suicide. At least three other members of his family besides him and his father took their own lives.

Imagery also plays a role in the novel. Automatic weapons – the way they look and particularly the way they sound – take over and are very prominent. Planes that drop bombs are dreaded more than anything else. The best soldier doesn’t win, the one with the biggest guns and best weapons win. It destroys the romantic notion of war – that it’s a sportsman-like competition with honor and rules. Like in A Farewell to Arms, disillusionment becomes a theme. Maria’s parents were heroes, but were brutally executed against the wall of a slaughterhouse along with a lot of other people in front of her, and she was then gang raped. There is no real glory for the soldiers in the field; it only comes in official dispatches that are disconnected from the people on the ground.

There is also frequent imagery of soil and earth. We leave Robert Jordan with his heart beating against his chest on a bed of pine needles, he sleeps with Maria and they feel the Earth move, etc…

There is some negative critical reaction to the novel, stemming out of Hemingway’s use of the Spanish language in the book. I haven’t taken a Spanish class in quite some time, but I did know some of it wasn’t accurate. Wikipedia lists that Hemingway uses archaisms, transliterations, and false friends to convey what’s being said. Because dialogue seems to be a literal translation from the Spanish language into English (that’s the only explanation I can come up with for some of awkward language), the words thee and thou are used to distinguish the formal Spanish (tú is “you” in the familiar Spanish, usted is the formal “you”). Thee/thou is used to convey the usted form. It’s clunky writing.

There’s also swearing in the novel, and while it is used freely in Spanish, it’s translated due to censorship as “obscenity” or “muck.” As Wikipedia reminded me, me cago en la leche occurs throughout the novel, which is translated by Hemingway as “I obscenity in the milk.” By the way, in my internet wanderings learning about this story, I learned that the Wikipedia entry for Spanish profanity is extremely detailed, in case anyone was wondering.

Anyway, in spite of the fact that it could be rather slow and I knew the ending before it happened, and even though I prefer other Hemingway works, I did enjoy For Whom the Bell Tolls. It was a great cultural study of what was going on during the Spanish Civil War (for example, Hemingway, through Jordan, notes that both anarchist and communist factions were both fighting to control the Republican cause implying that this meant it was doomed from the start). I came to love Robert Jordan and experienced real sadness knowing his death was coming. It felt real, and I’d highly recommend it as a moving story about courage, love, and friendship in the face of death.

Finally, for anyone wondering, the title of this story is in reference to a poem by John Donne, an English poet, lawyer, and priest who lived between 1572 and 1631.

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

youranonnews: ACTA in a Nutshell – What is ACTA? ACTA is the...

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:35:09 -0500

youranonnews:

ACTA in a Nutshell –

What is ACTA? ACTA is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. A new intellectual property enforcement treaty being negotiated by the United States, the European Community, Switzerland, and Japan, with Australia, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand, Mexico, Jordan, Morocco, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, and Canada recently announcing that they will join in as well.

Why should you care about ACTA? Initial reports indicate that the treaty will have a very broad scope and will involve new tools targeting “Internet distribution and information technology.”

What is the goal of ACTA? Reportedly the goal is to create new legal standards of intellectual property enforcement, as well as increased international cooperation, an example of which would be an increase in information sharing between signatory countries’ law enforcement agencies.

Essential ACTA Resources -

Read more about ACTA here: ACTA Fact Sheet

Read the authentic version of the ACTA text as of 15 April 2011, as finalized by participating countries here: ACTA Finalized Text

Follow the history of the treaty’s formation here: ACTA history

Read letters from U.S. Senator Ron Wyden wherein he challenges the constitutionality of ACTA: Letter 1 | Letter 2 | Read the Administration’s Response to Wyden’s First Letter here: Response

Watch a short informative video on ACTA: ACTA Video

Watch a lulzy video on ACTA: Lulzy Video

Say NO to ACTA. It is essential to spread awareness and get the word out on ACTA.

The Haunting of Hill House

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 00:17:00 -0500

Shirley Jackson’s thriller is one of the scarier books I’ve ever read. I read it back in October, as a Halloween “I should read something scary” book.

Originally, I was leaning towards something Stephen King, or rereading Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (which scared me like no other book ever), but I wanted to read something new. My mom had recommended this one to me ages ago, and I happened to find it in our library.

I was hooked after one paragraph.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

I also like the book’s tagline (as stated on Amazon):

The four visitors at Hill House— some there for knowledge, others for adventure— are unaware that the old mansion will soon choose one of them to make its own.

This one was so good that I’m going to my absolute best not to spoil it.

The Haunting of Hill House tells the story of a woman named Eleanor, who is living a very claustrophobic life. She answers the ad of a Dr. Montague, who studying paranormal phenomena and is looking for companions/test subjects to stay in the haunted “Hill House” with him. Those who end up in the house are Dr. Montague, Eleanor, Theodora, and Luke (the nephew of the house’s owner, who doesn’t live in or near the house).

Nobody in the village where Hill House is located will go near the house, except for the caretakers, Mr. and Mrs. Dudley, who make sure to clear out well before dark.

Almost immediately, the group starts experiencing supernatural happenings within the house, which intensify and grow over the following few days.

Jackson relies on terror, rather than horror, to elicit reaction from the reader. Terror is fear what you don’t see, and horror is fear of what you do see. There’s lots of terror going on in this book – the main character, Eleanor, rarely actually sees anything going awry in the house.

There is one episode where Eleanor and Theodora are being chased, and Theodora looks back and screams for Eleanor to run, but the book never explains what Theodora saw. In fact, at the end of the book, the reader is left wondering if the house is actually haunted or if everything that actually occurred was in the imaginations of its occupants. Each explanation is reasonable – while Eleanor, Theodora, Dr. Montague, and Luke all experience supernatural phenomena, Mrs. Montague and Arthur (her…butler? Friend? Assistant?) come into the house and don’t experience anything even close to supernatural.

I can’t get hugely into this book without spoiling it, but I really don’t want to spoil it because it was just so good. If you have read it, I recommend reading this bit commentary on it, which provides some good insight. There are spoilers.

The best part about this book is that it leaves you with more questions than answers. Was the haunting of Hill House real, or was it all inside the occupants’ heads?

Of all the books I’ve read/reviewed/not reviewed on this blog, this is the one I’d recommend most highly. It’s pretty short, guys, seriously, read it.

This Side of Paradise

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 02:30:00 -0500

I loved This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald as much as I hated The Beautiful and Damned (also by Fitzgerald).

From Amazon…

Fitzgerald’s first novel…uses numerous formal experiments to tell the story of Amory Blaine, as he grows up during the crazy years following the First World War.

…beware, spoilers ahead!

We follow the life of Amory Blaine from childhood until just after college. He spends a lot of time trying to discover himself and we spend a lot of time examining this kid’s ego. Amory’s ego is a running theme throughout the story. He is convinced he has exceptional promise and is an exceptional person. He’s entitled, boastful, and quite conceited throughout the story.

Amory has a strange relationship with his mother – he calls her Beatrice – but she sends him to expensive schools and he befriends a former lover of hers, Darcy, who is now a monsignor in the church. Amory has long conversations with him, mostly about how alike and special they each are. It’s almost as if he’s actually Beatrice’s baby-daddy, rather than Amory’s father.

Mostly, we follow Amory’s romantic and intellectual pursuits as he discovers and makes peace with his place in the world. From his manipulating his way into a first kiss as a thirteen-ish year old at a birthday party through to his failed college relationships, Amory’s focus is always on Amory unless it’s on his latest beloved. He attends Princeton University, and on vacation kindles a romance with the beautiful Isabelle (who reminded me of The Beautiful and Damned’s Gloria). He quickly becomes disillusioned with her, and he goes back to Princeton. From early on in the novel, it’s clear that Amory is both attracted and repulsed by romance with women.

Amory is then shipped out to serve during World War I. One of his friends dies in combat or something, but Amory doesn’t seem particularly bothered by this. In fact, throughout the entire book, Amory doesn’t seem to care when people die much at all. This includes his father, as he’s completely unemotional when his father passes away, and is more interested in the state of his family’s finances and how they will affect him. He’s completely self-involved to the point where it’s actually kind of disgusting, and he only seems affected by having to look at dead bodies, but he never really seems bothered by death. He watches one of his friends die in a car accident, and only really seems bothered that he had to look at the body.

The only time he seems affected by the death of a person is when Monsignor Darcy dies, and that mostly seems like it’s because he and Darcy would sit together and talk about how exceptional they were, and now he can’t do that anymore.

Anyway, the real turning point in his life is meeting Rosalind Connage, a New York debutant. The pair of them are madly in love, but because he is now poor (his parents, mostly his father, irresponsibly lost their fortune), Rosalind chooses to marry a rich man, which devastates Amory.

There’s also a scene where Amory and a different girlfriend play a game of chicken on horses towards a cliff – she leaps off her horse and the horse goes over. Actually, I’m not sure it’s a game of chicken as much as she’s crazy and Amory dumps her soon afterwards. But yeah, that kind of upset me a lot. Poor horse, stupid bitch.

Anyway, at the end of all this, when Monsignor Darcy dies, Amory makes his most iconic statement, after forming an opinion on everything and then un-forming his opinions on everything, he says, “I know myself, but that is all.”

In spite of the fact that Amory is arrogant, self-centered, and kind of smug most of the novel, I do really like him. As he grows up, he realizes more and more that he doesn’t really know anything very well at all. He does fall in love, even if it is a superficial, shallow kind of love a lot of the time (like with Gloria and Anthony in The Beautiful and Damned), and he does think a lot. A lot of the book is his conversations with his good friends about philosophy, art, life, etc…

This novel was particularly interesting because it blends a bunch of different types of writing. Sometimes it’s a fictional narrative, there are poems and things that Amory writes, sometimes written as a play, sometimes free verse, etc… Actually, it was interesting but I did find it a bit irritating. Pick what you want to write and stick with it; none of this switching over from one thing to another.

The whole story is semi-autobiographical – Fitzgerald needed to publish a novel in order to win over his socialite love who wouldn’t marry him unless he made some money (like Rosalind and Amory). A bunch of the characters, including Amory’s best friend, Thomas Parke D’Invilliers, who is the fictional writer of the poem at the start of The Great Gatsby (I looked it up because I remembered the name), are based on actual people that Fitzgerald knew. Beatrice was based on a friend’s mother, and Rosalind was based on Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda.

Amory’s final lament, “I know myself, but that is all,” is the culmination of what has gone on throughout the book. After trying to figure out what has interested him, and formed him, from his mother to losing or discarding love (and abandoning the idea of finding inspiration or love in women after Rosalind), after shunning convention (which he finds he despises), and losing all his money, Amory has finally solved the quest of the book, which is to discover himself.

This book is a bit disjointed. It makes odd jumps in both time and style, and can be a bit unclear. There is an episode where Amory is in New York City with friends and believes he is being chased by some sort of supernatural specter (the devil maybe)? All this happens after an evening of heavy drinking. Amory drinks frequently throughout the novel to cope with physical and emotional pain and it can get quite tedious both listening to his self-indulgent whining and his arrogant conversations with friends. His belief in his own exceptionalism is irritating, and watching someone go back and forth from engaged to apathetic with his own life is downright infuriating.

His love affairs are melodramatic and for someone like me, who doesn’t fall in love easily, unbelievable in a lot of ways. Love at first sight? No. Never love again because you got dumped once as a twenty-ish year old? No. More infatuation than actual love? Definitely.

But Amory is a lot like me, a lot like many people I know, a lot like many people who have been forced to grow up, whether early by circumstance or just the passage of time. He’s got more of an ego than a lot of people, but for the most part, he is a kid who experiences the ups and downs of love, both the desire to be normal and the desire to be different, the pressures of school and a social life, and is just trying to figure out who he is and where he fits in the world.

…And then he grows up.

This culminates at the end of the story, with the payoff being that Amory comes to realize his own selfishness, something a lot of Fitzgerald characters never do. And I loved him, and this book, for it.

The Tempest

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 18:07:00 -0400

I read The Tempest by William Shakespeare after reading the Prospero’s Daughter series - the series is based on the play. I’d seen the play live before but never read it.

One of my favorite things about Shakespeare plays is that I get to read literary criticism and history on them before I review them, so I feel extra smart.

I don’t really feel the need to put “SPOILER ALERT” on a 400 year old play, so here we go.

The Tempest is thought to be written between 1610 and 1611, and is thought to be the last play Shakespeare wrote by himself. But, like everything else we know about Shakespeare, we don’t really “know” it at all, and scholars contest both these claims.

For a long time, this wasn’t one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays. It didn’t meet much acclaim before the “closing of the theaters” (which was when, basically, the Puritans sucked the fun out of life) and after the Restoration (when English, Scottish, and Irish monarchies were “restored” under Charles II - it’s way easier to read the Wikipedia than explain) only adaptations of it were popular. It wasn’t until later on, during the 1800s, did people begin using the original work rather than an adaptation, and it was even later than that, in the 20th century, that the play was re-evaluated by critics and scholars. It’s now considered one of Shakespeare’s greatest works.

Either way, this particular play was written very late, and like some of Shakespeare’s other later plays, is not a strict comedy although it is classified as one. This play, along with Cymbeline, The Two Noble Kinsmen, The Winter’s Tale, and Pericles, Prince of Tyre were classified by Edward Dowden as “romances” or “tragicomedies” in his 1875 work Shakespeare: A Critical Study of his Mind and Art. (I have to get a copy of this.)

Romances tend to have certain things in common.

+ A redemptive plotline with a happy ending involving the re-uniting of long-separated family members

+ Magic and other fantastical elements

…as well as some other things you can read on the Wikipedia page. But these two stood out particularly me.

There were a couple of other themes mentioned in critical essays I’ve read about The Tempest, one of which is that the play is very concerned with the fact that it’s a play. Remember that this is believed to be one of the last plays Shakespeare wrote on his own - one theory is that the “dread magician Prospero” is Shakespeare inserting himself into the story. As Prospero brings about all the events in the story through his magic, Shakespeare brought about all the events in the theater as a playwright. As Prospero decides to give up his magic and return to normal life, Shakespeare decides to give up his role as a playwright.

I rather like this theory, and it’s supported by some textual evidence. The shipwreck was a “spectacle” that Ariel “performed.” There is a connection between Prospero’s “art” and theatrical tricks/illusions, and two of the characters - Antonio and either the Alonso or Sebastian - are “cast” in a “troop” to “act.” The Globe Theatre itself may have been reference by Prospero:

“Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And—like the baseless fabric of this vision —
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. …”

The other theme that seems to run through is magic. Now, from what I remember of my high school history and English classes, in Shakespeare’s day, you could get away with being interested in the supernatural by wanting to study it and understand its causes. If you were interested in conjuring spirits and other occult things, then you could be executed for it. That was going on at that point, particularly close to the Catholic Church, in Italy.

Anyway, Shakespeare very carefully paints Prospero as a “white” magician (furthering the self-insert theory). Most of Prospero’s magic is based on late 16th and early 17th science, and Prospero is carefully juxtaposed with Sycorax, who worships the devil and traps Ariel in a tree when he’s too gentle to perform her dark tasks. Prospero’s magic is described as wonderful and constructive; Sycorax’s magic is supposed to be destructive and dangerous. Prospero uses his magic to set things right and once he does, he gives it all up and frees Ariel.

Usually I love to look carefully at how Shakespeare’s female characters are written and perceived, but in this case it’s almost pointless. Miranda is the only female character, she falls in love with Ferdinand, he loves her, they plan to marry, game over. Miranda seems to have accepted the patriarchal society she would have been in - she is subordinate to her father. Her only duty to him seems to be to remain a virgin until marriage. The other women mentioned in the play - Claribel, Alonso’s daughter, and Sycorax - don’t appear, they’re only mentioned.

We learn everything of Sycorax from Prospero, but he’s never met her. He only knows what he knows from Ariel. There’s one theory from Stephen Orgel, a Shakespearean scholar who teaches English at Stamford University, that says Prospero is suspicious of women and their virtue because he makes and ambiguous remark about his wife’s fidelity. This makes him an unreliable source.

Caliban is one of the more interesting characters in the play. Some scholars think that he’s based on a Caribbean native, called Caribans, by members of Shakespeare’s society. He is more in touch with the natural world but is, in many ways, a brute. He does eventually come to see that the shipwrecked men he meets on the islands are not virtuous or noble masters and he kind of comes around. There’s some post-colonial theories on this that I didn’t read much about, but in the post-colonial view of the colonizer’s (Prospero’s) effect on the colonized (Caliban and Ariel), you could almost say that Prospero “civilized” them, which was a goal of the colonizers back in Shakespeare’s day. As everyone knows from history class, natives of the West Indies were viewed as cannibals and savages who needed to be civilized by white men.

Since I am two book reviews behind at this point, I’m going to end my research here. Overall, I have to say that I truly enjoyed The Tempest, both reading it and watching it performed a couple of years ago.

Prospero Regained

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 00:08:00 -0400

This was the final book of the Prospero’s Daughter trilogy by L. Jagi Lamplighter.

From Amazon:

Prospero, the sorcerer on whose island of exile William Shakespeare set his play, The Tempest, has endured these past many centuries. His daughter Miranda runs the family business, Prospero, Inc. so smoothly that the vast majority of humanity has no idea that the Prosperos’ magic has protected Earth from numerous disasters. But Prospero himself has been kidnapped by demons from Hell, and Miranda, aided by her siblings, has followed her father into Hell to save him from a certain doom at the hands of vengeful demons. Time is running out for Miranda, and for the great magician himself. Their battle against the most terrifying forces of the Pit is a great fantasy adventure.

…beware, spoilers ahead!

These books got progressively better as the series went on. Half way through the first book, Prospero Lost, I wasn’t sure I was going to continue reading the series, but by the end of it, I had to order the next one, Prospero in Hell, right away. By the time I was done with that one, I was disappointed I had to wait six months for the final book’s release date.

These have become some of my favorite books.

This is obviously a quest story, with the ultimate goal of Miranda and her siblings being to rescue their father from Hell. What they learn about themselves and each other along the way makes the whole story really interesting. That said, the whole thing could have been really dull if the characters weren’t so much fun. It was really the characters that made this story worth reading.

Lamplighter did a great job with the Prospero family - their family dynamic, their struggle to figure out their father’s secrets, their witty back and forth, their magic and their own secrets are really what made this series compelling.

I was also happy that Lamplighter answered all the questions posed throughout the series. I hate it when any book leaves you to wonder/infer what had gone on without giving any concrete answers. At the end of Prospero Lost, I was sort of upset that no questions had been answered and I was really afraid a lot of questions would go unanswered. Besides that, there were so many characters, I thought it would be odd if nobody knew the answers to at least most of the questions raised. There are ten Prospero children (Caliban ends up being family), plus their father, plus Mab, plus Astreus, plus all the baddies they meet in Hell. Surely SOMEONE would know the answers.

I also liked the happy endings for everyone…except for poor Cornelius, whose ending was more bittersweet than sweet. I wish the Epilogue had jumped a little bit further ahead, where we’d see how everyone was doing later and if Cornelius was doing better, but it was still a satisfying ending.

There was only one thing I didn’t entirely understand - when the angel Muriel Sophia reveals who is guarding the entrance to Hell from Limbo, Miranda assumes it is Hades, but the angel tells her Hades stepped down long ago and now, the guard was the person who received forgiveness at Calvary and was now looking to make up for past misdeeds. Miranda immediately realizes who the new guard was, but I had no idea.

I thought I was missing some key piece of theology about who was forgiven at Calvary, but after checking with my friend George and my mom, who are two of the smartest, most knowledgeable people I know, I wasn’t missing anything. The other two people who were crucified with Jesus at Calvary received forgiveness from Jesus - one accepted, the other didn’t - but they weren’t exceptionally notable people. I didn’t understand why Miranda would know who it was immediately. Which of those two was it? Later, when the guard saves the Prosperos from The Queen of Air and Darkness, he tells Miranda not to let anyone know who he is, including her family. She doesn’t.

I still don’t know who the guard is. I thought it was a weird thing to not further explain, and that’s why I figured I was missing something. Why would it be a secret to the other characters if it was incredibly obvious to Miranda? And since Miranda is the narrator, shouldn’t it be incredibly obvious to the readers as well?

If anyone knows something about what went on at Calvary that I don’t, I’d love to be filled in.

The baddies in this series were really great too. I liked all the demons and minions and underlords of Hell. Another friend of mine has a complaint that in some ways, we over psycho-analyze villains and that sometimes its more fun when the villains don’t have any motivation except, mostly, that they want what they want. That was pretty great here. The servants of Hell wanted to destroy the Prospero family because the Prospero family kept them from doing whatever they felt like and forced them back into Hell. Simple and fun! Sure, they also want humans to never get to Heaven so that they can be miserable too, but that isn’t as lame as other villains, like Anakin Skywalker.

There was only one part of the book I didn’t particularly like. The part where Lilith was basically saying Hell was responsible for people being lazy, marriage being weakened, abortion, etc… It got just a little too Christian preachy for me. I know Lamplighter is a Christian, and there’s a lot of theology in the books, but none of it had been too in-your-face up until that point. Lamplighter did herself a credit when Mab said, “Demons lie,” and Miranda said Lilith’s words could be a gross exaggeration of the way things really were. Still, it came off as if things would be better if people spent more time on their knees observing and following Christian morals, particularly those handed down by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church.

This wasn’t enough to ruin my love of the books, it was just a little bit too…this is right/this is wrong my liking. I get that it’s a story and it’s very much a book about a family following orders from Heaven, but up until that point it wasn’t so VoiceOfThePulpit-y. It was more about the family protecting mankind against the powers of Hell (them trying to kill us/destroy us/force us into their service) than it was a vehicle for preaching moral values. I mean, they were wandering through Dante’s Hell, so it’s not like the reader is taking this to be what Hell is really like (assuming it exists and all that).

The story does kind of redeem itself when actual Hell is empty and everyone in “Hell” is actually dreaming and when they wake up and realize they love God and all that. But I admit, I skipped the part with Lilith’s speech when I quickly re-read/skimmed the book.

I liked the trek through Dante’s Hell. I’ve never read The Inferno or anything, but I’ve read summaries, so it was nice to be in depth in that without having to know too much about it, as it was all explained through the characters. The whole series was filled with references to history and literature so that was fun for me. I’m a loser that way.

But I greatly enjoyed this series overall, and Prospero Regained was a great conclusion to the series. We got all the answers and happy endings. It was kind of nice not to walk away from a series being unhappy with how it ended (the most notable series I’ve read in the last year that ended this way was the Hunger Games trilogy).

If this series is ever extended, I’ll be delighted. Given the opportunity, I’d be happy to revisit the Prospero family again.

Indigo Springs

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 21:34:00 -0400

Indigo Springs by A.M. Dellamonica was the August book for the Women of Fantasy book club.

From Amazon:

Dellamonica’s debut suburban fantasy opens with Astrid Lethewood in custody, charged with kidnapping and murder and being interrogated by hostage negotiator Will Forest. Astrid and her friends, Sahara Knax and Jackson, are central to a bizarre uprising against the government, but most of the novel is Astrid’s narrative of her discovery of a source of magical blue ooze in the house she inherited from her father. The depiction of magic is original and consistent, and Astrid’s exploration of her magical ability coincides with growth in her relationships and the unveiling of her town’s dark history. Dellamonica never goes into detail about either the ooze or the uprising, perhaps saving those for the promised sequel, but Astrid’s somewhat deranged conversations with Will give indications of what happened, and sympathetic characters go a long way toward making up for the vagueness.

…beware, spoilers ahead!

I wanted to like this book, and I was disappointed that I only kind-of did. As the blurb mentions, the conversations with Astrid in the present are a bit difficult to follow, although I was never confused, really, as to what was going on.

The book is mostly slow, although we do find out a great deal about Astrid’s background and relationships with the two main people in her life - Sahara, her friend that Astrid made out with once, and Jackson, her step-brother who loves her deeply and who she eventually sleeps with.

We find out a lot about Astrid’s relationship with her mother (who is mentally slipping), her father (who is thought by the entire town to be a drunk and a pack rat), and her and her father’s relationship with the magic (blue-goo) from under their home. Astrid inherits the house (and the blue-goo) from her father when he passes away.

Astrid spends most of her time using the mutual secret of the magic to hold her friends together, and you know early on that it isn’t going to work, because early on you know from the beginning that Astrid is being held in custody by the authorities and interrogated by Will, because Sahara has formed an eco-terrorist group with the power Astrid is able to give her.

But that’s the thing, nothing really happens here. Most of the book is Astrid explaining to Will how she got to this point and how she was desperately trying to keep her two friends close to her. Astrid and Sahara and Jackson are all interesting, but they don’t do much. Sahara’s selfish and self-absorbed and self-centered and self-involved and every other variation on “self” you can think of, with an ex-boyfriend she’s furious at and who is furious at her. Jackson is forever trying to piss of his father, the fire chief. He believes his family is responsible for a massive fire and cover up that killed a bunch of Native Americans in order to get their land a generation or two earlier.

You don’t realize for most of the book - there are a few clues, but not many - that there’s a weird love triangle going on between the three of them. None of them seem to really know they’re involved in one. Eventually, Astrid realizes Sahara doesn’t love her the way she wants Sahara to love her, and Jackson does love her and has since their parents got married.

The climax of the book is the best part, but it’s at the very end. Sahara is being changed by the magic and has become addicted to it, her ex-boyfriend is there, their elderly neighbor is there, Astrid and Sahara are forced to kill Jackson’s father, Jackson gets killed by someone (one of the people who sought to destroy magic) who was frozen in the magic world and Sahara puts Jackson in the magic world so she can eventually bring him back, and then Sahara leaves when Astrid doesn’t want to help her take over the world, and Astrid is arrested.

After that, the sequel is set up, with Astrid escaping custody, draining Sahara of her power and getting Sahara arrested. There was some other interesting background about magic and where it came from and where it went, but beyond that, not much. Will, the hostage negotiator is talking to Astrid throughout the story, is trying to get his wife and kids back - his kids, if not his wife. His wife has joined Sahara’s cult.

I did like the characters in Indigo Springs enough to read the next book, which I think is coming out next spring, but I’m in no real rush to read it. The character I liked most was Jackson, and I felt he was under-utilized, but hopefully he will play a bigger part in the next installment of the story. I also enjoyed Dellamonica’s writing style, even though the pacing and actual events in the book could use a bit of work. The book isn’t too long though, as previous books this summer for the book club have been, so that also works in its favor.

All the Windwracked Stars

Sat, 20 Aug 2011 22:02:00 -0400

All the Windwracked Stars by Elizabeth Bear was the July book for the Women of Fantasy book club I joined.

From Amazon:

It all began with Ragnarok, with the Children of the Light and the Tarnished ones battling to the death in the ice and the dark. At the end of the long battle, one Valkyrie survived, wounded, and one valraven – the steeds of the valkyrie.

Because they lived, Valdyrgard was not wholly destroyed. Because the valraven was transformed in the last miracle offered to a Child of the Light, Valdyrgard was changed to a world where magic and technology worked hand in hand.

2500 years later, Muire is in the last city on the dying planet, where the Technomancer rules what’s left of humanity. She’s caught sight of someone she has not seen since the Last Battle: Mingan the Wolf is hunting in her city.

…beware, spoilers ahead!

I was really excited about this book going in, but I got to about page 230, put it down and don’t intend to finish it, even though there’s only about 130 pages left. The same thing happened with the June book, but I was so disinterested in that one that when I went to do one of these posts, I hardly remembered anything.

The description of this book, like the one on Amazon and the one on the back cover, made it sound like this was going to be a really interesting story. But sadly, I just found it tedious. I’m about 230 pages in and almost nothing has happened. There was a battle, a miracle, and now everything’s gone to hell. In fact, the description from Amazon is more or less everything that’s happened but with less detail.

Muire isn’t a very compelling protagonist. It’s hard to like someone who openly admits she’s a coward, but that isn’t really my issue with her. I liked that she was a historian, but beyond that, she’s just not very interesting. In any way. She puts on her armor, obsesses about her sword, thinks about her fall from grace, and doesn’t do much else. She’s realized that her fallen angel family is being reincarnated. And now she’s hunting the Gray Wolf, who betrayed her family in the last battle, but he’s not a very compelling antagonist. He kills people. They finally had a scene together where he kissed her and (I think) transferred some of his power to her, but it read way more like a rape scene than I would have liked and I found it rather distasteful.

There’s a two headed deer steed thing - a valraven. His name is Kasimir and I like him but he doesn’t appear frequently. He seems to be there to help Muire, but Muire is too stubborn to ask for help most of the time.

Then there’s the technomancer, who has strong magic and is holding the world together with both magic and technology, but there is something sinister about her too, and I’m sure if I’d read to the end I’d find out what it was, but that’s just not going to happen.

Maybe it’s because I started skimming about 50 pages ago, but nothing is very clear. There’s a lot of Norse mythology in here, and I don’t know very much about Norse mythology, and Bear never really seems to get around to explaining very much in the 230 pages I read.

I didn’t particularly enjoy Bear’s writing style either. There’s a lot of fancy description that doesn’t particularly matter to me all that much. Okay, we get it, as a “Child of the Light” (angel?) Muire isn’t used to feeling cold. I know what cold feels like, move on, you don’t have to continuously describe it.

The only character that’s sort of interesting, besides Kasimir, is Cahey, who is a male boxer/hooker. But he’s not around enough to save the story. This is mostly about Muire and her possible redemption (if the story went where I thought it was going to be going). And I think that’s the problem.

As I said, Muire is fundamentally dull. And so is the story.

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 19:43:00 -0400

…that’s the full name of the play. I’ll just call it Hamlet here. I started (re)reading Hamlet because I was going to see it performed at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, and I have to say, it translates much better as a performance. So I re-read it. Nothing I put here is a criticism of the performance I saw, because that was quite good.

So, when I read Shakespeare, I always read the Folger Shakespeare Library editions of plays, because they explain word meanings and have pictures of certain things, etc…

Reading the play, not seeing it performed, the character Hamlet is really whiny. Or at least it feels that way. An actor makes the play much more worth while, but there really isn’t much room for comic relief in Hamlet, and that really, really shows when just reading the play.

Anyway, I’d love to write some kind of wacky literary criticism of Hamlet that insists the character Hamlet is mentally ill and brings about his own downfall. If it isn’t for his father’s ghost being seen by Horatio and some of the guards, the entire plot is driven by a ghost’s instructions and what is already in Hamlet’s own mind (that his uncle’s marriage to his mother - a month after his father died, no less - is gross). I kind of see Hamlet’s point, because it strikes me as gross, but Hamlet’s actions aren’t justified until at least Act III, where his uncle admits to the audience that he totally murdered his brother for the throne. Marrying his brother’s hot wife is just gravy, apparently. But up until that point, this is all speculation and Hamlet taking instructions from a GHOST. What person of sound mind and body DOES that?

There’s a lot of excessive speech making in Hamlet, which makes it rather boring to read. As I said, I’d read this already (about three years ago now), but I feel as though it really sunk in this time. One of my Facebook statuses about this play while I was reading it was, “The real tragedy of Hamlet is all the whining he does. Man up and kill your uncle already.”

I’ve read that the play is a great literary statement on the blurry lines of right and wrong, justice and revenge, and human sanity. I call BS on that, because while whether it was right or wrong for Hamlet to avenge his father by murdering his uncle is debatable, it is most definitely revenge and only barely justice if justice at all.

Then the whole sanity thing? Infuriating. Hamlet was faking his madness. Ophelia was the only one who went mad…and for no apparent reason, except that she was a delicate flower who wilted under Hamlet’s rapier wit. There have been a large number of essays and criticisms about Ophelia, and I have to admit, she got a pretty raw deal, even for a Shakespeare play. Some of Shakespeare’s works are less than flattering toward women (Lady Macbeth might be one of the most plainly conniving females in all of literature). Some portray women really well (Viola in Twelfth Night), but this is the only one I’ve read thus far that makes a female character look really pathetic.

First, Ophelia was conspiring with Claudius (Hamlet’s uncle) and her father to try to find out why Hamlet was being such an emo kid, so she was strong enough to do that (they decided he was lovesick). Then she and Hamlet have some more interaction, and they decide Hamlet is not lovesick but legit nuts. Then there’s a little more interaction between them, Hamlet says some mean stuff, and she goes mad. Really? Hamlet says, “Get thee to a nunnery” and Ophelia can’t take it and loses her mind?

Some argue that Hamlet and Ophelia have actually already slept together, even though that is not clearly stated in the text, and this lends credit to why she lost her mind. He says he won’t marry her unless she’ll sleep with him and then when she does, he calls her a whore and won’t marry her. I even read one article where one of the sources the author cites says Shakespeare intentionally left this vague because he couldn’t make up his mind whether they should or shouldn’t have done it. Even if they did sleep together, and in Hamlet’s quest to get back at his uncle he was cruel to Ophelia, this doesn’t justify the madness described. The human mind in question would have to be particularly frail, and Ophelia does not come across as frail early on.

To add insult to injury, then she vaguely dies - it’s unclear whether it’s a suicide or an accident. It’s only at her funeral we learn that Hamlet really did love her (which is annoying anyway). It all makes me almost root for suicide. That, at least, would be a conscious decision that shows some strength of will and control. But really? The situation overall doesn’t say anything about madness, it just says women are weak.

Next, there’s Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude. It’s never stated whether she’s in it with Claudius to kill Hamlet’s dad. The ghost of Hamlet’s father never says if she is, and even directs Hamlet be gentle with his mother, but I have to assume that she was in on the murder plot. Why else would you marry your husband’s brother merely a month after your husband dies?

The Folger Shakespeare Library edition of the play explains that whether it was kosher to marry your dead spouse’s sibling was an actual debate at the time (in Denmark or in Shakespeare’s England, I don’t remember which) with some people deciding it was okay and others finding it incestuous. I suppose it could just be a plot device used to advance Hamlet’s grievances and sense of disgust, but at the same time, because it’s never stated and because Hamlet reacts so badly to it, it almost makes sense that she was in on the murder plot. She refuses Claudius in bed because Hamlet asks her not to sleep with him, but I’m not sure if that was just the performance I saw or whether that was in the actual play. I lent the play to my friend after we saw the show, so I can’t currently check. But given the circumstances, and I admit I’m not really a scholar, I have to conclude she was in on it. So she looks awful as well. And her death was stupid too, by the way.

THEN. Yes, there’s more. There’s Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle. He isn’t a well defined villain. The reader kind of assumes he’s jealous and sees an opportunity and gets carried away. He’s regretful later. And then he realizes he’s in too deep and the only way to survive is to kill Hamlet as well. But Claudius is a weak villain. In Othello, Iago is jealous and evil and has no remorse for the lives he destroys. He’s a villain. In Macbeth, Macbeth is power hungry and misguided. He’s a villain. They’re clearly defined with definitive destructive traits. Claudius is too wishy-washy to be someone to really root against for most of the play.

And when Act V, Scene II comes to a close, everyone but Horatio is dead. Curtain.

Yet, in spite of all this, Hamlet remains one of Shakespeare’s most beloved works. After careful consideration, I’ve concluded that it’s the beauty of the language that makes this play one of the most enduring, admired plays ever written. Macbeth is a better story, but Hamlet is more beautiful. The speeches in Hamlet, the speeches that are so long to read, are some of the most compelling I’ve ever seen when brought to life by a gifted actor. The words and the phrasing lift the play above so many others, even among Shakespeare’s other works. So while I might not re-read Hamlet often, I will see it performed over and over again. The command of language demonstrated in Hamlet is what makes it the crowning achievement of Shakespeare’s collection and one of the brightest jewels of composition and expression in the English language.

Harvest Home

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 22:19:33 -0400

I bought this book by Thomas Tryon at around the same time I bought his another of his books, called The Other. While the other book was more suspense, this one was horror. Flat out, gory horror.

This book doesn’t even have details on Amazon. It was originally published in 1973 and I think is out of print. I got it on half.com.

…spoilers ahead.

I skimmed this book, because I had read the synopsis on Wikipedia before deciding to buy it, but I have to say, this is far and away one of the scarier books I’ve read. It reminded me of a season one episode of Supernatural, called ‘Scarecrow’ which scared the crap out of me. In that episode, the residents of of a rural town are sacrificing one unfortunate man and woman that come through town to some pagan spirit for a good crop every year. The episode scared the crap out of me when I first saw it. I was about 17 or 18 when the episode first aired.

Some things never stop scaring you.

In this book, a man from New York City brings his wife and daughter to the little New England town of Cornwall Coombe. At first, Ned thinks they’re living the ideal “small town” life. People in the town are very “set in their ways” and their customs, and the family thinks they’re weird, but overlooks the weirdness in the effort to fit in and enjoy their lives and make friends.

Well, odd things start happening. At first Ned doesn’t think much of them, but as things get weirder and weirder, he begins to realize something is going on, and a lot of it has to do with a woman who was buried on unconsecrated ground.

While the town practices some form of Christianity openly, it turns out there all these pagan rituals the women of the town conduct in order to ensure a good harvest. Anyone who speaks out against the ritual is maimed or killed, as well as men who witness the major ritual, where the corn maiden and the harvest lord have sex and then when they’re done the corn maiden slashes the harvest lord’s throat. Yeah, it’s lovely.

The original corn maiden chosen commits suicide so she won’t have to slash the harvest lord’s throat, who is her new husband. Ned is determined to solve the mysteries in the town, goes out to see the ritual, but gets caught. They let him watch. It turns out his wife is now corn maiden, and she has sex with the guy, and then kills him.

As the book ends, Ned realizes that the people in Cornwall Coombe only allowed his family to move in to gain the new blood of his wife (who is now pregnant - it was one of their “settled” marital problems that Ned was shooting blanks and they couldn’t have more kids) and his daughter, whose relationship with one of the prominent local boys leads to speculation she’ll be the next corn maiden. Ned has been blinded by the women, and his tongue had been cut out.

Still scares me. The book was a little slow to start, but you have the sense from the beginning that something is off, even though Ned is completely blind to it. Once it got going though, it was great. Like an old horror movie in book form. Unlike Tryon’s other book, The Other, I didn’t guess the ending. I had a sneaky suspicion about the pagan rituals, but I’d had faith that the family would somehow get out of the situation in one piece. I suppose they kind of do, but it just leaves you feeling eerie. This is the kind of book that should be adapted into a film.

Like I said, I enjoyed the mystery here. I didn’t guess the end but I did have the feeling that something was wrong the whole time, even when nothing seemed wrong, which I really enjoyed.

Tryon’s writing style can sometimes be overbearingly descriptive, which I found true in both The Other and Harvest Home. While I do love rich prose, some times you don’t have to describe every detail of the rundown house. The story more than makes up for this though. It’s one gory surprise after the next, and I really enjoyed it.

I’d recommend this book to anyone who likes a nice terror & horror/suspense mystery. It was published in the 1970s and is a bit dated, but that somehow adds to the atmosphere of the book. No computers, no cell phones, it just makes the fictional town that much more isolated from the outside world, and that much more scary. The “no one can hear you scream” scary.

The Beautiful and Damned

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 23:45:00 -0400

This book was free on Kindle, and I’m glad I didn’t spend any money on it, because, frankly, it pissed me off. Tremendously pissed me off.

From Amazon:

“The Beautiful and Damned”, first published in 1922, was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s second novel. It tells the story of Anthony Patch (a 1920s socialite and presumptive heir to a tycoon’s fortune), his relationship with his wife Gloria, his service in the army, and alcoholism. The novel provides an excellent portrait of the Eastern elite as the Jazz Age begins its ascent, engulfing all classes into what will soon be known as Café Society. As with all of his other novels, it is a brilliant character study and is also an early account of the complexities of marriage and intimacy that were further explored in “Tender Is the Night.” The book is believed to be largely based on Fitzgerald’s relationship and marriage with Zelda Fitzgerald.

I also read this in the Bahamas. It took me a long time to get through it, even though it was only 400-ish pages.

…spoilers ahead.

I picked this up for a stupid reason - it was on the season finale of Gossip Girl, and by a classic author of whose work I’d always intended to read more. F. Scott Fitzgerald, for those who don’t know. But I should have known that if Serena van der Woodsen loved it and related to it, it would hugely infuriate me. But I enjoyed The Great Gatsby in high school, so I figured, “What the hell, why not?”

The Beautiful and Damned might be hailed as a spectacular character study in marriage and intimacy and blah blah blah but you know what? This was a not-so-compelling story about two spoiled rich kids who are infatuated with each other, get married, waste money on extravagant triviality, and then don’t know what to do when their money runs out.

There was so much to dislike about this book. First, there were the characters.

At the start of the book, I found Gloria incredibly irritating. Yes, she was devastatingly beautiful, but she was nothing of substance. She was a self-centered, self-absorbed rather callous wanna-be socialite who led men on and whose opinions were shallow, uninteresting, and unsubstantial. Her only goal was to catch a husband. I found Anthony less annoying, although he was older than Gloria.

By the end, I liked Gloria better than Anthony. She might have been shallow, and whiny, and still self-centered, but at least she was strong enough not to descend into alcoholic despair, which is what happens to Anthony. Gloria has a touch of “the alcoholism” as well, although she’s much less whiny so I’m willing to forgive her.

The turning point of the book, some time in the middle, is when Anthony’s uber!conseravative grandfather walked in on an out-of-control party at Anthony’s & Gloria’s summer home, and then disinherits them, leaving them with no future inheritance, which is what they were relying on to get by.

They contest the will, but that takes a long time. Anthony joins the army. He has an affair. He never goes over for World War I, the war ends before he’s deployed, but he goes through the training. Gloria never has an affair, although her friends urge her to have one, and disapprove when she doesn’t. He’s FURIOUS with the idea that she might have had one though, and rushes back as soon as he has the opportunity when the war is over. So he’s a hypocritical bastard as well.

Then there’s some more huge parties and nights out they can’t afford, and they’ve moved into a terrible apartment, and on and on. They’ve lost their friends, their status, their money, and while Gloria is aware of this but trying to get by, Anthony becomes temperamental and falls victim to alcoholism.

Finally, they win their settlement in court - they’re worth $30 million. But that same day, Anthony’s gone completely mental and the book ends with Gloria with a mentally regressed Anthony with all their money but still unhappy.

Looking for a credible analysis of the book (SparkNotes has become a completely useless website and this book wasn’t even on there), I first went to Wikipedia, which is ideal for stuff like this. The footnotes are priceless. Anyway, someone theorizes that this book is about vocation - “What do you do when you have nothing to do?” and I think that, at the heart of it all, is what made me so.damn.angry.

The answer to all the problems of Anthony and Gloria Patch is that Anthony GETS A JOB. Gloria would have had a more difficult time getting a job, I think, during that time, but the bottom line is that Anthony decided work was beneath him. Seriously. Someone he knew (his grandfather?) even got him a job at one point, which he quit after a couple of weeks because he “didn’t like it.” He tried writing, he sucked at it, still no job. Things just got worse. And worse. And worse. And getting a JOB didn’t cross Anthony’s mind. He’d rather regress to being a mental 12 year old staring at his stamp collection than get a job.

Their sense of entitlement is matched only by their arrogance and neither of them have any really redeeming qualities. No wonder Anthony’s grandfather disowned them, I’d try to as well. They were so obnoxious I just wanted the book to be over, although I hated Anthony so much more than Gloria by the end.

Next, there’s the issue of how nothing really happens, but this is so hugely dwarfed by how much I hated the characters that it almost doesn’t matter. But, yeah, there’s literally almost no plot. The plot progresses, I’d say from about page 150 or so, as such: Anthony and Gloria spend too much money. Anthony and Gloria say they’re not going to spend too much money. Anthony and Gloria pretend they’re going to do something serious about their money problem. Anthony and Gloria then go and immediately spend too much money. Rinse. Repeat. There’s also some pseudo-intellectualism in there, but mostly, it’s all about the Benjamins.

The first 150 pages is devoted mostly to pseudo-intellectualism and Anthony and Gloria “courting,” which is, more or less, as boring as it sounds. He wants to have sex with her - er, he falls in love with her, I mean - because she is SO BEAUTIFUL, OMFG. Then he’s wearing her down, and after putting him off, she consents to marry him completely out of the blue.

There were a lot of lines in this book that I found particularly insightful. The line about Gloria’s father crushing all moral courage out of Gloria’s mother and her mother mistaking it for tolerance struck me especially deeply. There was another line that I liked but can’t remember it, so I guess I didn’t like it that much. But certain lines do not justify the mostly unimpressive experience of an entire book.

I don’t recommend this book unless you are doing some kind of study or particularly love Fitzgerald. I was just not impressed with the book. At all.

I'll Mature When I'm Dead: Dave Barry's Amazing Tales of Adulthood

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 01:39:10 -0400

This was the first book I read on my new Kindle!

From Amazon:

Some people may wonder what this subject has to do with Dave Barry, since Dave’s struggled hard against growing up his entire life-but the result is one of the funniest, warmest, most pitch-perfect books ever on that mystifying territory we call “adulthood”.

In hilarious, brand-new pieces, Dave tackles everything from fatherhood, new fatherhood (“Over the next five years, you will spend roughly 45 minutes, total, listening to songs you like, and roughly 127,000 hours to songs exploring topics such as how the horn on the bus goes* [*It goes: ‘Beep! Beep! Beep!’]”), self-image, the battle of the sexes, celebrityhood, technology, parenting styles, certain unmentionable medical procedures (“There is absolutely no reason to be afraid of a vasectomy, except that: THEY CUT A HOLE IN YOUR SCROTUM.”), and much more.

Going to the Bahamas, I had a $20 giftcard to use to buy a new book with my Kindle, which I’d take with me instead of the actual books. And I chose to buy this book, for one reason and one reason only: when I first picked up in Barnes & Noble (pre-buying it for the Kindle) I saw there was a made up 24 script that he wrote.

When 24 was on the air, Dave Barry would live blog it. Hilariously. So I decided I would add it to my Amazon wishlist, and when I got the Kindle, and was going to be spending a week at the beach, I decided this would be a great beach book.

It was. I blew through it (way faster than my other title). And it was really funny. But it wasn’t my favorite Dave Barry book ever, even with the hilarious 24 plot. My favorite Dave Barry books remain Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of the United States and Dave Barry’s Book of Bad Songs.

The essay I enjoyed most was his essay about being 50 and having to endure a colonoscopy - which is, he says, one of the few times he’s tried to make a serious point with one of his essays. I got the point. It was a good point. I’m glad I’m still 28 years away from my first “required” colonoscopy.

There was an essay on healthcare, which was amusing, but because of the current situation with it I found it kind of sad. And then, of course, my favorite essays were the 24 script and the Twilight parody chapter he did. It was pretty funny - I also got the impression that he read actually read Twilight in order to write said parody, which I appreciated.

I think I missed the more touching moments of parenthood essays. I’m not much into parenthood. I haven’t experienced it, I don’t really want to experience it, etc…

There was an essay on being a minor celebrity which was pretty priceless, where he described that they made up their own VIP platform after not making it to the second level of VIP-ness. Cracked me up.

Overall, I enjoyed this book enough to recommend it. I was laughing in public enough to get asked what I was reading on a number of occasions. Great, fast beach book.

Bobby and Jackie: A Love Story

Wed, 18 May 2011 18:13:00 -0400

I should premise this by saying I’ve been fascinated with the Kennedy family since my freshman year of college when, while working in the library, more or less managed to read an entire book on them while I should have been “working” putting books back on the shelves.

That said, I haven’t read many books on the Kennedys besides that one from college, partially because a lot of the books on the Kennedys are a) more expensive than I’d like b) in many ways, the same.

But I’d been interested in this particular book since it came out in 2009 - Bobby and Jackie: A Love Story by C. David Heymann.

From Amazon:

Pulitzer-nominated biographer Heymann delivers a gawk-worthy beach read with this fascinating look at Jackie and the Kennedy clan in the aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Life for JFK and Jackie was less than perfect; one story finds him cheating on Jackie during their 1953 Acapulco honeymoon, leaving the new Mrs. Kennedy “by herself on the verandah.” Still, Jackie’s devastation was real; afterward, her love for his brother Bobby was equally genuine. Unable to find peace (her Georgetown home had become a stop for all D.C. tour buses), Bobby gladly volunteered to play surrogate father to her kids; before long, an affair began. According to Truman Capote, it was “perhaps the most normal relationship either one ever had.” It was not necessarily simple, however; both saw a number of people while together. Promiscuity aside, the Kennedys were also notoriously “chintzy” in their personal lives-they didn’t tip and employed undocumented workers at home- though Jackie fares marginally better. It’s anyone’s guess how the affair would have ended if Bobby hadn’t been killed; just four months later, she married Aristotle Onassis. Heymann’s research is top notch, with plentiful attributions, making this train-wreck love story a substantial guilty pleasure and a sizzling reminder of how the rich are different.

Price is the reason I’d avoided this book for so long (who wants to pay $25+ on something like this?) but I got it at Barnes & Noble on sale for $7, and decided this was a reasonable investment.

The book takes a detailed look into the time between Jacqueline Bouvier’s marriage to John Kennedy in 1957 through Robert Kennedy’s assassination in 1968. It chronicles JFK’s serial infidelities (as well as RFK’s), the women they “shared” including Marilyn Monroe, and Jackie’s “revenge” affairs.

When I first heard of this book, I thought maybe the affair between RFK and Jackie may have occurred while Jack was still alive, which would have been WAY more scandalous, but (alas) that was not the case.

JFK was assassinated, Jackie was losing her mind from the trauma and the public attention, RFK was sick with grief, he stepped in to help raise her kids (never mind the 200 or so he had of his own) and at some point or another, they started an affair due to shared grief and mutual adoration - they had been close friends even before the assassination. Bobby and Jackie “got” each other, so to speak.

The book paints Bobby Kennedy, not John Kennedy, as the love of Jackie’s life. She turns to him for everything, and uses numerous other relationships to make him jealous, including one with Aristotle Onassis, who the entire Kennedy family disliked and who Jackie married only after Bobby’s death when she decided Onassis was the only one who could afford the protection she and her children needed.

It’s a fairly in depth look at the affair, with 183 pages of text and then another 30 pages of references and footnotes and sources and such.

The Kennedy men thought nothing of cheating on their wives - repeatedly and with a multitude of different women - and their wives more or less turned a blind eye, and you felt for them, but they responded with humor. Jackie Kennedy, who’d been cheated on on her honeymoon, sat her husband between two of his lovers at a dinner party. Ethel Skakel Kennedy, Bobby’s wife, had a dinner party where she sat 25 women at one table and 25 men plus herself at another. Bobby got the message loud and clear.

But in spite of this, the one I felt sorriest for was Ethel, who had 11 children and a husband who cheated on her long term with her far more glamorous sister-in-law. While Ethel could be rude to Jackie, and wasn’t as universally beloved by everyone around her (or even necessarily liked at all) and never openly confronted Jackie about the affair, she showed a lot of grace when Jackie showed up at the hospital after Bobby had been shot.

Jackie was the one who ordered the doctors to take Bobby off life support and was later thanked by Ethel and Ted Kennedy for doing what they couldn’t bring themselves to do.

In spite of these affairs, Bobby Kennedy was sincerely devoted to his wife in other ways and never considered divorcing her. He always, eventually, went home to her and the two of them taught each other a lot of things. I don’t think this really excuses his behavior, but I do think it’s possible to love two people at the same time, which Bobby certainly did with Ethel and Jackie.

While Bobby comes off as a pig, my view of Jackie is very different. She had gone into her marriage with an open mind but realized she couldn’t change JFK. She mostly just asked that his depravity stay out of her sight. Her affairs were mostly for revenge and the attention of her husband. While she probably should have told RFK to go home to his wife, she wasn’t the married one and she really did love him. She was more devoted to Bobby and his ambitions than she was to John and his ambitions.

Jackie also comes off as a very strong, formidable woman. With the exception of the 6 months or so after JFK’s assassination in Dallas, she held it together. She knew how to get what she wanted out of people. She was savvy and charming and smart and well educated. She was an excellent fundraiser and a great lover of the arts and history. She’s the one who saved Grand Central Station from the wrecking ball. She was really an incredible woman with many talents.

What’s truly amazing is how this whole thing was mostly kept from the general public. While high society and the press certainly knew, most people had no idea. These people were considered hugely sophisticated and yet the notion that nobody would ever find out about the affair is so quaint its charming. In this day and age, this would never be a secret. Ever. And, according to the author, most people were unwilling to talk about it until after Jackie Kennedy passed away in 1994. As a sidenote, I thought it was nice that Ted Kennedy never talked about it publicly out of sensitivity to Ethel’s feelings. Yes, Bobby Kennedy’s widow is still living.

All this being said, I don’t know how accurate the book is. I greatly enjoyed it, because I guess, in my heart of hearts, I love a good gossipy scandal. Sure, this one is 40 years after the fact, but so what? There’s something still compelling about the Kennedy family, even all these years later and after most of them are dead. But how true this is? I don’t know. Eye witness accounts are shaky right after the fact, let alone decades later. The people most/best able to confirm any of it have long since died. Unless Ethel Kennedy decides to talk about it, or maybe Caroline Kennedy (Jackie’s and JFK’s daughter) decides to talk about it (assuming she knew it was happening at the time), I think this is one of those things where we just have to make a judgment call.

As for me, I think the chances are pretty good that Jacqueline Kennedy and Robert Kennedy did have an affair. I could see how it started, and I could see how it continued, and even if some of the stuff is slightly off or exaggerated, I doubt that many sources are flat out wrong. Plus, the sexual morals of the Kennedy family seem to be more skewed than the sexual morals of regular people. I think John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy were good men, who tried to do what was right for their country, but lousy husbands who rarely did what was right by their wives.

As for Jackie, well, she was something, wasn’t she? She was a real woman with real flaws, but she was strong. I don’t think less of her after reading this book. More women should be that strong.

Bobby and Jackie: A Love Story, though questionable in its facts, is an enjoyable read. It’s a perfect biography for the beach - not to heavy or dense, fairly romantic, and yet somewhat shocking all at the same time.

War for the Oaks

Tue, 17 May 2011 01:32:00 -0400

War for the Oaks by Emma Bull was the May book for my Women of Fantasy book club. I finished it in record time.

From Amazon:

Emma Bull’s debut novel, War for the Oaks, placed her in the top tier of urban fantasists and established a new subgenre. Unlike most of the rock & rollin’ fantasies that have ripped off Ms. Bull’s concept, War for the Oaks is well worth reading. Intelligent and skillfully written, with sharply drawn, sympathetic characters, War for the Oaks is about love and loyalty, life and death, and creativity and sacrifice.

Eddi McCandry has just left her boyfriend and their band when she finds herself running through the Minneapolis night, pursued by a sinister man and a huge, terrifying dog. The two creatures are one and the same: a phouka, a faerie being who has chosen Eddi to be a mortal pawn in the age-old war between the Seelie and Unseelie Courts. Eddi isn’t interested—but she doesn’t have a choice. Now she struggles to build a new life and new band when she might not even survive till the first rehearsal.

I loved this book. Loved it. Loved it.

…mild spoilers ahead!

The only thing I thought was a little bit odd was the way Bull constantly described what everyone was wearing/what they looked like. Beyond this, everything was great.

I liked the writing style even though I didn’t understand why we kept being told what everyone was wearing. It flowed well, and the story was very engaging. I did have to look up quite a bit about British, Celtic, and Scottish folklore - well, I didn’t have to look up too much stuff but I ended up reading a lot about it anyway - and that’s what I liked most about the book. It explained enough for the reader to understand but didn’t treat the reader like an idiot by going into too much explanation.

Considering how I didn’t like the main character for April’s book (Eden in Four and Twenty Blackbirds), I was a little wary when the main character’s name was Eddi. No real reason, except they were similar names, but I was still a little wary.

But I ended up liking Eddi much better than Eden. Eddi reacted the way I felt she should have reacted when chased down by a phouka. She was wary of him and didn’t want to be in the situation she was in - which I thought was NORMAL. I hate it when a completely normal human character gets kidnapped by some supernatural entity and just go along with it without question. Her doubt (and reactions) gave the book realism that sometimes I feel are lacking in urban fantasy books. I thought it was a nice touch that Eddi wasn’t comfortable with Meg slaving away for her, because I wouldn’t be comfortable with it either. I liked the Eddi explained to Meg that she could help save Willy just because it was the right thing and Eddi was asking her to do it. I really, really, really liked Eddi.

I liked that Eddi played guitar - rock and roll - and could sing, but while she did this and made her living off being in a bar band, she wasn’t SUPER!famous and they weren’t constantly talking about how she should be SUPER!famous. I also liked how while there was a lot about music in the book, there wasn’t so much that it got in the way of the story.

I thought the resolution was a little bit weak - the Queen of Air and Darkness’s magic vs. Eddi’s band’s magic, the way mortals sometimes have magic and music amplifies it.

Carla was the best girlfriend I always wished I had. Dan was kind of irrelevant, except to the band, but was there to give Carla more depth. I didn’t quite understand why Hedge was the way he was, and I kind of wish Bull had gotten into Hedge a little deeper because he was really interesting. Willy was…skeevy in a way, but got less so as you realized he was trying to understand what humans were like.

Then, there was the phouka. I really loved him. He was so…I don’t know…great is the best word. The way he talked was totally adorable and not normal, which was good, because he wasn’t normal. He was charming and pleasantly deceptive and overall just super adorable. I loved the way he described his love of Eddi to her. I will say the way the romance aspect of the story progressed a bit predictably; the moment Willy showed up and the phouka looked at him warily I knew that Eddi was going to start with Willy and end up with the phouka. I liked the phouka though, so it wasn’t one of those unbearable march-towards-the-inevitable-hideous-end things. I was rooting for him.

A major positive was that there were people/faeries/characters of color in this book. Dan was black (though he didn’t play a MAJOR role, he was a good supporting character and uber!cute when he was with Carla). The phouka also had dark skin, and he was central to the story. I didn’t like how, in Four and Twenty Blackbirds, Eden was described as a light skinned dark person who could have passed for white or something like that (I can’t remember exactly what the description was and the book is not close by) and there was this very clear distinction of light skinned blacks being the “normal” characters and the dark skinned blacks being the weirdos. Maybe it wasn’t intentional but it came across that way. Here the characters who weren’t white played better roles. I don’t usually get into the racial stuff I sometimes see on the internet, but in these two particular books it seemed kind of obvious to me, so I’m touching on it here.

I felt there could have been a little bit more on the faerie motivations and their desire to have this particular area of land. There were, for all intents and purposes, the good faeries and the bad faeries, and they were fighting over an area of land without really explaining why, except that was “what they did.” I suppose I might have missed the reason, but assuming I didn’t, it was a bit ill-defined.

Last thing - IT WAS SO 80s! I loved it! Eddi wore vintage stuff and they played punk rock and it was just so 80s! There were phone booths and no computers and people could make a living being a bar band! <3

I highly recommend War for the Oaks. It’s engaging and fun - not too long or too dense. I can’t say enough good things about it. There’s so much to love.

The Dragon Book

Tue, 10 May 2011 01:13:00 -0400

The Dragon Book is comprised of short stories by modern fantasy authors and is edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. Since it’s a short story collection, that’s the premise.

I was so excited when I got this book. I love dragons. Everything about them. The stories, the art, the statuettes (I have 3 on my own). Plus, I got the hardcover book for uber!cheap. About $6.

…and I was so excited! And I was severely let down by the book. I couldn’t even finish it (there are three stories that I haven’t completed) because most of the stories were just so completely…not good. There are 19 stories in this book. 19! NINETEEN! And I really loved 04 of them. 04! FOUR!

…have no fear, no real spoilers in this one!

There were some others that were okay. But there was a bunch of stories that I didn’t like and a couple I hated. The ones I thought were okay weren’t good enough to really make me glad I bought the book. The story that turned me off for good was one I was looking forward to was called The War That Winter Is by Tanith Lee, which I’d been looking forward because the title was pretty awesome. It.was.so.boring. It was a 30 page story where nothing happened.

I used a pretty unofficial scale to rate the stories. It was stories I loved, thought were okay, didn’t like, and really hated.

Stories I really loved: Dragon’s Deep by Cecilia Holland, The Dragon of Direfell by Liz Williams, Oakland Dragon Blues by Peter S. Beagle, and After the Third Kiss by Bruce Coville. Total: 04

Stories I thought were okay: Vici by Naomi Novik, Are You Afflicted with Dragons? by Kage Baker, Humane Killer by Diana Gabaldon and Samuel Sykes, Ungentle Fire by Sean Williams, JoBoy by Diana Wynne Jones, and Puz_le by Gregory Maguire [yes, the Gregory Maguire of AU Wizard of Oz fame]. Total: 06

Stories I didn’t like: The Tsar’s Dragons by Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple [this story was incredibly anti-semitic in the context of Bolshevik Russia, could have still done without it], Stop! by Garth Nix, A Stark and Wormy Knight by Tad Williams, and None So Blind by Harry Turtledove. Total: 04

Stories I hated: Bob Choi’s Last Job by Jonathan Stroud and The War That Winter Is by Tanith Lee [as I said before, a 30 page snoozefest]. Total: 02

Stories Unread: The Dragon’s Tale by Tamora Pierce, Dragon Storm by Mary Rosenblum, and The Dragaman’s Bride by Andy Duncan. Total: 03

Now, I will probably get to those three stories, especially since a lot of people rave about how fabulous Tamora Pierce is an author. But at this point, I’ve wasted enough time (weeks, due to meh!busy!sked with the finals and the papers and the school crap) on this book without enjoying it very much at all. Plus, it takes up a lot of space in my bag. The stories I loved I really did love, particularly Dragon’s Deep, which was the first story in the book and really gave me extra false hope.

It’d be a waste of everyone’s time if I went through the stories one by one, so my opinion is this: if you have the opportunity to read this book, I recommend taking that opportunity and reading something else.

I love dragons, but this just wasn’t worth it. The story collection in here just wasn’t that good.

from The Dragon Book. It perfectly describes how I think of...

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 10:36:36 -0400

from The Dragon Book. It perfectly describes how I think of stories/storytellers.