21. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

Yesterday I read a New York Times editorial in which a middle school teacher, Claire Needel Hollander, discussed summer reading. She said how she usually told parents that "Any reading is good reading" but that this wasn't true. Sh e argued that while the poorest readers could gain skills from anything, more advanced readers didn't have that much to gain from The Hunger Games: 

"While “The Hunger Games” may entrance readers, what does a 13-year-old gain in verbal and world knowledge from the series? A student may encounter a handful of unfamiliar words, while contemplating human dynamics that are cartoonish, with violent revolution serving as the backdrop for teen romance."

And well, I just have to disagree. I mean, she's correct with regards to the vocabulary, but the plot? Pshh. I'm still thinking about it months later. Anyway there's this one line that seems particularly relevant. Before Katniss and Peeta enter the arena, he says to her that night:

"I just keep wishing I could think of a way to show them that they don't own me. If I'm gonna die, I wanna still be me."

Isn't that the quintessential human struggle, especially under the pressures of totalitarianism and tyranny? It's what Winston and Julia struggled for in Nineteen Eighty-Four, it's was the reason why the book club was started in Reading Lolita in Tehran, it's what Lenny and Eunice try for in a destroyed American in Super Sad True Love Story. And, it's what gives Laila and Mariam (and other characters) strength in A Thousand Splendid Suns in the face of the tyrants they encounter — the Soviets, the Mujahideen, the Taliban, their husbands.

Each woman clings to herself and each other in order to survive, in order to retain their humanity and dignity in the midst of a society that wants to make them literally inconsequential.

I bought this book two years ago, and I know I started it at least once before, but it never stuck. I guess I didn't like it. That amazes me in retrospect because I loved this book. I'm in awe of it — its beautiful words and characters, its tragic wonder.

But I hate the cover.

20. Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire

I was very hesitant about reading this book because I didn't like his best known book, Wicked, which was the inspiration for the musical of the same name. That book was weird -- political, sexual, magical. I honestly think the fluffy musical is a drastic improvement on that plot.

But Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister was extremely enjoyable (I'm going to assume that you're probably not going to read it, so light spoilers lie ahead).

The central conceit of the plot is that it's the truth behind the Cinderella story -- a story that was warped by rumors and children's imagination into the beloved fairytale.

Iris and Ruth, the ugly stepsisters, are half British and half Dutch. Their Dutch mother brings them back to the village she grew up in after disaster strikes their family abroad, and then she wheedles their way into some higher positions. She sucks.

Clara is Cinderella, the most beautiful girl in the village who rarely leaves her house after some childhood trauma. She's spoiled and aloof, and eventually just depressed. But she and her stepsisters have a strange bond that borders on love.

But Iris is the focus of the book, including Iris's dealing with unrequited love. Obviously I've never written about that before, and I couldn't identify with that plot at all. #storyofmylife


Iris is super plain looking. It's mentioned about every other chapter, which gets a little old. But the whole unrequited thing is done pretty well.


Anyway, I'd like to talk about something that's in this book but isn't specific to it -- a "Reader's Group Guide." It seems that all contemporary, popular novels have one, and I hate them. It's like the English teacher you hated in sixth grade came up with the dumbest, most obvious questions possible (but, to be honest, I loved all my middle school English teachers). But really? "What lesson can be learned from the story?" ARE WE FIVE? Do real people have real book discussion where they ask these obnoxious questions? "Do you think her beauty is a curse or a blessing?" Yawn. 


My friends and I tried to have a book club (which failed) but I'm sure we wouldn't have talked about anything that stupid. Probably would have done something more like this. 


But really, who are these people who look at these guides because they don't know what else to discuss? Do they actually start invigorating conversations? Probably not. I'd much rather talk about my feelings about the book -- but I always want to talk about my feelings. I guess other people would rather be less personal in their literary discussions, but I think that was part of the point of Reading Lolita in Tehran -- literature, especially that of any worth, is going to be personal. Also, that whole lesson question really got on my nerves. Stories don't need to have lessons, even ones based on fairy tales. Then they're just moral tracts. I love moral ambiguity (have you noticed?), and this book was full of it.


So let's all boycott "Reading Group Guides." Cool? Cool.


Next up: Maybe Grapes of Wrath? Or Jane Eyre. Or The Great Gatsby. Hrmph.

19. Nine Stories by JD Salinger

Maybe after my last post, you expected me to read The Great Gatsby. Nope. Instead I read this short story collection that I've been dying to get my hands on.

When I read The Catcher in the Rye, I honestly hated it. I remember going to school the next day and complaining to my English teacher that I didn't get the point. He asked if everything had to have a point, and I said no, but I expected that a book that everyone else liked so much would have a point.

Then, one of my friends told me to read Franny and Zooey, which is actually two shorts stories, "Franny" and Zooey." I bought the book, but then I think it languished on my shelf for a good two years. Then one day I picked it up and loved it. Franny and Zooey are members of the Glass family -- a cast of characters that appear throughout Salinger's works. I eventually read Raise High the Roofbeams Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction last summer, two more stories about the Glass family. This book was the missing piece.

Only two stories are about Glass family members, but in "Seymour: a Introduction" another Glass -- Buddy -- takes credit for two more of the stories.

Salinger's stories are usually about rich, young people from the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and I love them all so much. They're all ambiguous, unhappy and unresolved (I just realized that the antecedent of that pronoun is unclear, but the sentence works with both the stories and the characters being represented by "they," so I'm leaving it).

They're all random and frivolous -- stories of unhappy girls who drown their sorrows in booze, men who were messed up by "the war" -- be it WWII or Korea and children much smarter and sadder than they should be. It's real life. It's awesome.

If I ever wrote a book I'd want to be like Salinger and write messy characters who make bad, irrational decisions. I'd write stories whose endings were unclear, where ramblings were not only allowed but encouraged and women are just as useful as men (Salinger likes female characters, which makes me happy).

"The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid."

18. Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

Lately, I've wondered if I should reread The Great Gatsby. I'd count it as one of my favorite books, but I've only read it once, practically four years ago. After reading this book, I know I have to.

Nafisi talks about Gatsby in her memoir, saying, "I told them this novel" -- Gatsby -- "was an American classic, in many ways the quintessential American novel. There were other contenders: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter. Some cite its subject matter, the American dream, to justify this distinction. We in ancient countries have our past -- we obsess over the past. They, the American, have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the promise of the future."

I was just startled to read such a pertinent description of America.

But, it would be a disservice to the book if I just talked about America. That's not the point of the memoir, though America's presence plays a role in the lives of Nafisi, her students, and --arguably -- the whole Iranian people.

The book tells of Nafisi's time in Tehran. She teaches at the University of Tehran before the revolution. She briefly quits, refusing to teach with a mandatory veil, but decides to become a professor again. She eventually resigns for a final time, but not before hand-selecting a few students for a private class in her home, where they read the forbidden books: Lolita, Jane Austen.

The memoir's stars are not just the women and men whose lives combine to give a complex portrait of Iran, but the novels they read shine as well. Somewhere around the middle Nafisi apologizes, blaming the extensive amounts of time she'd spent writing critical articles as the reason why she sometimes launches into extensive analysis of the books. But I think a quote on the very first page colors the whole book: "Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth." It's such a true statement, getting at a temptation I've definitely felt, and a temptation Nafisi flirts with but successfully avoids.

It seems a strange coincidence that I picked this book up right after reading Nineteen Eighty-Four. It wasn't premeditated, but the two books played off each other in great (by which I mean horrid) ways -- Nafisi even mentions Orwell's book in her first few pages.

The Islamic Republic of Iran isn't Oceania, but boy does it have similarities. In light of this book, this true history of a real country, Orwell's book seems prescient. Two things stick out: both books talk about small actions as forms of rebellion, actions that are taken for granted in other circumstances -- holding hands, forming relationships, showing the back of your neck. And, both are concerned with the relationship between the present, the past and the future. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Party constantly rewrites the past because it's the only way they can control the present and future. In Reading Lolita in Tehran, Nafisi remarks how the regime desperately tries to turn back the clock.

But still I haven't gotten to the point. The blurb from The New York Times on the front cover calls it "an eloquent brief on the transformative power of fiction," and that gets closer to hitting the nail on the head, though I think defining it in only that one way misses lots of the intricacies. But in the end, Nafisi is a woman drawn to the mysterious ways of fiction who tries to share it with her students in the darkest times. Sometimes it's a refuge. Sometimes it's something to identify with. It's about the most obscene evils and the sneakiest, most subtle evils, obscene in their own ways.

This book just makes me want to go and read all the books in the world, as a sign of rebellion -- even if I don't have much to rebel against. It makes me want to cherish pink socks and laughter and hugs and red nail polish and cable television, though that wasn't the point either.

I have lots more to say about this book, but I doubt most of you are still reading. I suppose I'm glad I read it because it's strengthened my conviction to keep reading.

Next up: Nine Stories, Grapes of Wrath and The Great Gatsby are all calling my name. TBD which I'll pick up first. Promise I'll try to be more humorous and less sanctimonious next time.

17. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

I'm pretty sure I've mentioned by love of dystopian novels in at least one previous post. Knowing that, it may surprise you to know that until my little brother was assigned it as his summer reading, I had never read Nineteen Eighty-Four. It's a good book. Sometimes when I read, everyone once in a while I look to see if I'm halfway through yet. With Nineteen Eighty-Four, I thought I'd read ten pages when I'd read fifty. It was pretty awesome.

For the five people out there who have never read the book, it's about Winston, the typical every man, who lives in Oceania, a distorted English-American version of Leninism -- Leninism perfected by technology, if you will. Big Brother is the leader, douplespeak reigns and the government changes the vocabulary to prevent thoughtcrime. I don't feel the need to explain these concepts, since they've become so deeply ingrained in our own vocabulary they even have their own Wikipedia pages (in that same vein, while I usually avoid spoilers, I won't in this case, though I'll try to not give away the end).

I'd much rather talk about Julia and, in a more abstract way, how Orwell deals with women. Julia is young and sensual, but not beautiful. A member of the Junior Anti-Sex League, (pleasurable relations are forbidden by the Party, since it can't regulate the bonds it forms) Julia is despised by Winston until, seemingly out of the blue, she leaves a note in his hand with a simple "I love you." They begin a sexual, then emotional and intellectual affair.

My problem is that Julia -- who could be a very deep, interesting character -- is flat, shallow and quite irrational. Why does she give Winston that note? Maybe love isn't as loaded of a word as it is in the real world -- maybe love just means "let's have sex." Julia immediately tells Winston of the many affairs she's had, but it seems that there's something more to their relationship, some deeper meaning, than the others had.

Julia, it seems, is so much more of a rebel than Winston. At the same time, Orwell portrays her as dumb. She doesn't care about ideology, only survival. This could be interesting, but instead it's used to dismiss her. She only exists as a tool, a way for Winston to feel smarter but also as someone for him to love. Her thoughts and desires are never given any credit -- like I said, she doesn't care about ideology, but when Winston signs them up for the resistance movement, she's completely committed to the cause. Is that just because she loves Winston so much? Doubtful.

I just hated that she was merely a character in his story. Her own life didn't matter -- her family, her desires. She mattered only in that she was the object of his love and sexual desires. It sucks because historically that's the way women have been viewed for generations. Sigh.

Next up: Unsure. Tempted to reread The Perks of Being a Wallflower, but I might head into some nonfiction. or Jane Eyre.

16. The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

I'd been dying to read this book ever since I first heard about it. A critically acclaimed novel about baseball? Awesome. A quick skimming of the reviews on Amazon showed that I liked it more than others, but that's often inevitable.

I wonder if someone who didn't love baseball -- love, not simply like -- could enjoy this book. I don't think they could. On the one hand, baseball is just a device in the novel, the backdrop for more human drama, but, on the other hand, Harbach's text is so deeply ingrained with a deep appreciation for America's pastime.

The main character, Henry, is a baseball phenom. His defense is impeccable, his love for the sport consuming. When things turn a little rotten for him, no one wonders if maybe he'd be ... in a better place if he had other things in his life besides baseball and his best friend, the catcher Mike Schwartz.

The book isn't without problems -- it's slightly unrealistic, and characters are often introduced and then forgotten. But I still really enjoyed it. It's not only an ode to baseball, but an ode to college life, where friendships can become consuming, girls are always walking around in miniskirted mobs, books change lives, bad days can turn into bad weeks and thinking about life post-graduation is an exercise in fear and self-loathing. It's wonderful and horrible, often at the same time.

There's the cliché that the time you spend in college should be the best years of your life, but most people, I think, would reject that idea. Mike Schwartz does: "Life was long, unless you died, and he didn't intend to spend the next sixty year talking about the last twenty-two."

The book also has a lot of meta stuff about literature and the way it affects us; the president of the university's life changed when as an undergrad he discovered an obscure lecture of Herman Melville, and he, his daughter and his lover spend a lot of time talking about books and the role of characters -- how sometimes we just view other people as characters in our stories as opposed to beings unto themselves. It reminds me of a line from The Elegance of the Hedgehog, to be honest. Common literary theme I guess.

Anyway, almost done with Nineteen Eighty-Four. Get pumped. Feminist Victoria is coming.

15. Saturday by Ian McEwan

I read this book hoping that it would get better, or, rather, that the sluggish pace of ordinary events would pick up. But, having finished the book a few hours ago and looking back, I enjoyed the long, lazing moments of the main character, the British neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, as he tries to have a wonderful Saturday. Things fall apart, in both little ways and small ones, and then things fall together again.

One of the more interesting facets of the book, for me at least, is the moment in time. It's London, February 2003, and the characters spend a lot of time discussing the prospects of the impending Iraq War. McEwan published the book in 2005, so he has some hindsight, but not as much as we do now, making it interesting just to see how conflicted the characters are about it. I suppose I found it even more interesting because I was so young at the time and thus locked out of the debate. I'm glad to know that it happened.

There was one moment where I felt kind of awesome: Henry's daughter Daisy is a poet, and at one point she read aloud one of her poems from her book. He describes it in a very hazy way -- he's a man of science and has spent a lot of time reflecting on how he doesn't "get" poetry. Anyway, in his hazy description, I thought to myself, "Wow that almost sounds like that one poem about the cliffs of Dover." Anyway, it turns out that she wasn't reading her own poem, but reciting the memorized "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold, the poem I'd been thinking of. It's worth a read, and McEwan includes it at the books end. It's fitting, because the book's themes reflect those of the poem -- the cruelty of the world, but the solace found in those you love.

All the quotes that adorned the front and back cover seemed to be about a different book thought -- it was an okay book, but not great. It was interesting, but not at all a page turner. I didn't exactly "need to know" how it ended, but I'm glad I stuck through the whole thing -- it gets better as it goes.

Next up: The Art of Fielding, which I'd started before I started this one, but my little brother wanted my mom's Kindle so he could read Catching Fire.