Dawn's Reading Blog

After reading the latest “in Death” installment, I remembered that I did used to enjoy these books and decided to re-read a couple of the originals to recapture that feeling. I read the first, Naked in Death, all the way through and did really enjoy it. It’s an excellent romance. You can’t help wishing that you’d meet Roarke and get to marry a fantastically rich man who’s also handsome, smart, suave, and devoted to you for no clear reason. Glory in Death, the second book, wasn’t quite as good. Already the sex scenes seem repetitious. I guess woman like variety as much as men. After those two, it felt like enough.

I haven’t been keeping up with the “in Death” series by J.D. Robb (aka Nora Roberts) but I was traveling and finished the book I was reading so Promises in Death was an easy choice of what to grab at the airport. I had expected there to be a baby by now, or at least a pregnancy, but Eve and Roarke are still married, still childless, still rich, and she’s still fighting crime–all of which crimes, it seems, still somehow relate to her, her husband, or her friends. Makes you wonder if they could end crime in New York City simply by eliminating Eve Dallas and her circle.

Some of Jodi Picault’s stories really speak to me but Perfect Match wasn’t one of them. Interesting that she chose to make a sequel based on this book’s characters who all seemed unsympathetic. The plot is contrived. A prosecutor who handles cases of sexual assault against children learns that her own son has been molested. She then proceeds through a series of quick judgements and assumptions, apparently never learning her lesson and stopping to let justice do its job. I guess the point of the story is that as a prosecutor she doesn’t trust justice to do its job, at least in these cases.

Well, that’s a sad fact, if true. It would be nice to suggest that there are better ways to handle the incident that empower and heal the child than to say that there are only horrible and worse options for the child. I don’t know if Picault spoke to actual prosecutors or if this (blind retribution) is just what sells books. I particularly disliked the twist at the end. The prosecutor’s husband is one of the less well drawn characters in a book where all the characters seem like stereotypes (can you guess that the molester is a priest?). When you need to have a character surprise you at the end, it’s always easiest to make them murky right from the beginning.

I was a little surprised by how unimportant the lobotomy in My Lobotomy seemed to be. Howard Dully’s story is a sad one of a boy who may always have been difficult being raised by a stepmother who didn’t want a difficult stepson. So there wasn’t much sympathy for little Howard, which probably made his behavior even worse. At some point the stepmother decided that he’d best be helped by a lobotomy. At the time, lobotomies were somewhat in vogue, being trumpeted by a doctor who’d invented the procedure and traveled around the country performing them.

Apparently the results were unpredictable. In Howard’s case, it’s hard to say whether or not there were results. He goes on to have an even more troubled teenage and young adult life with a lot of drugs and alcohol involved. Eventually he gets himself into recovery. Part of that is facing up to what his stepmother had done to him, which he didn’t understand at the time it happened. He becomes something of a poster boy for people who underwent unnecessary lobotomies at the hands of this doctor, having a documentary made about him and giving talks on the radio and to audiences.

I can understand how cathartic both the original procedure and the later exploration of all its ramifications must have been to the author, but to the reader, it’s hard to be sure the lobotomy influenced his life that much. His story is not unlike other stories of youngsters who didn’t get much love at home (and even those who did) and discover drugs and alcohol at an early age. That doesn’t diminish the complete irresponsibility of his stepmother (and more so father) in having this procedure done on him, of course.

Holidays on Ice is the second book of humorous essays I’ve read by David Sedaris. The first book was all biographical non-fiction. This one also included some purely fictional essays, which weren’t anywhere near as good. When he’s writing about himself as a homosexual man, I can relate to what he’s saying because he’s being real and down deep we’re all people with the same feelings and failings. But when he tries to write as a heterosexual woman, it’s just stereotypical silliness. It’s not funny because it’s no longer true.

As with the Harry Potter series, the books in the Twilight series kept getting longer and more adult, so it was no surprise that Breaking Dawn weighed almost enough to break your wrists. Although this was the book where the characters finally got down and dirty (very off-stage), it was ironically the least sexy of them. There was a lot of plot to get through.

Being personally more about passion and adventure than motherhood and family, I didn’t initially care for the direction the plot was taking, but I got caught up in it and the story arc is brought to a satisfying close. Bella is much less irritatingly helpless and clingy than she’d been in the first three books, which was a refreshing change. Jacob gets a chance at center stage and that was also a refreshing change. Edward is still Edward only not quite so protective (thankfully).

I didn’t find myself re-reading this one over and over but I did enjoy it and the series as a whole.

When I got Eclipse, the third book in the Twilight series, in the mail I was in the middle of reading various other things. I tried to hold off. I really did. But after it sat there calling to me for about a week I gave in and devoured it in two days, then spent the usual next two days re-reading parts of it. I’ve stowed it away on the bookshelf now in an attempt to stop re-reading it before I have it memorized.

This one started slowly and I thought perhaps the series was losing steam, but it got plenty steamy. I regretted the lack of Edward in the last book but it was worth it to set up the Edward/Bella/Jacob triangle which is so deliciously drawn in this book. I anticipate even better things to come in the fourth book, which is already on the way.

The Twilight series is compelling. When I’m reading one of these books, I’m actively reading it. It doesn’t sit on the end table next to me night after night while I watch TV or do crossword puzzles or go for a walk. It floats into my hands as soon as I get within gravitational pull.

“Good for you” books can be compelling too. They can also be good without being compelling by being interesting, thought provoking, beautiful, informative, or revolutionary Unfortunately, many of them aren’t any of those things. Not everything with footnotes or an introduction by some literary critic I’ve never heard of is actually worth reading. For that matter, not every trashy novel is even minimally entertaining.

To wit:

The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens: OK, this isn’t horrible and I’ll finish it, but I’ve seen it ballyhooed as Dickens’ best work and it’s nothing but silliness. A Tale of Two Cities, now that’s good stuff: moving, compelling, interesting, heart-breaking. The Pickwick Papers are a disjointed series of humorous sketches sometimes connected by a plot string no thicker than “let me tell you a story.” It was originally published serially, which is exactly how it reads. This was the sitcom of its day. Not that The Simpsons can’t be genius, but will it ever become the sort of “classic” that gets taught in school?

The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books: Guess I thought I’d get some insight from this one, either about what might be interesting to read or what might inspire me to do some good writing. I didn’t get either. I got lists. Literally, lists. This book is interesting only if . . . never mind. It’s not.

The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights: This is one of those classics that’s best not read at all. We have a cultural understanding of what it entails: Aladdin and the lamp, genies, flying carpets, Scheherazade telling stories to stay alive. The reality is a misogynistic, racist cesspool of hate and stereotypes. Women can’t be trusted and will cheat if left alone for five minutes. (Men get to have unlimited numbers of wives and concubines, so their faithlessness doesn’t come up.) Not only that, but given half a chance they’ll have sex with a black man, and apparently having one of your hundreds of wives cheat on you with a black man is so unimaginably horrible (despite the fact that it seems to happen almost constantly), that it entitles you to lay mayhem on him, her, and all the women and black men you can reach. This is a thoroughly disgusting, unreadable compendium of vaguely familiar stories.

Imperial Ascent: Mountaineering, Masculinity, and Empire: Although I don’t climb mountains, most of the climbing literature I read is about mountain climbing. Rock climbing doesn’t seem to make for good stories. Too short for one thing, and we don’t die nearly as often for another. The focus of this book is on the amazing adventures white men have had in conquering the mountains and far off reaches of the world. This being 2009 and not 1909, I’ll assume there was some deeper purpose to focusing so excessively on what white men were doing and why. I couldn’t make myself read the overly scholarly text closely enough to figure out what that purpose was. All I know is that the word “masculinity” appeared approximately once per paragraph in the introduction. So I skipped forward to where I hoped the real stories would begin and found a continuation of overly quoted and footnoted text and yes, the word “masculinity.” So I quit. You don’t need to read this book. In case you’ve been wondering, I’m going to explain why our early adventurers are all white men: they were the ones with the freedom to go climb mountains. Give women and minorities permission to leave the house and the time and money to do it and guess what? We like to climb mountains too. I’ll bet we like to do it in exactly the same proportions as white men. Mystery solved. 200 pages saved.

Ten Thousand Islands: So I’m leaving on a jet plane and I ask my friend Sheila for something to take with me. She has more books than can fit in a single room if you stack that room from floor to ceiling all the way around, and I mean that literally. So she picked out a good beach book (well, forest book in my case but it seems like the same thing), only I couldn’t get more than a few chapters in before I started just not giving a damn. It’s supposed to be a mystery but things weren’t moving along and the characters were supposed to be endearingly quirky but they just seemed overdrawn and the setting was supposed to be exotic but it’s only exotic to people in their living rooms. Perhaps I’d have done better with this on the beach. Somehow having people screaming “Bear!” outside your tent while you’re reading undermines the suspense of how the intrepid PI’s fist fight is going to come out.

I say all of this because my blog would suggest that I’ve been reading nothing but vampire porn lately, which isn’t true. I just haven’t been enjoying anything but vampire porn lately.

I bought this book after reading a review somewhere that promised laugh-out-loud funny from this collection of essays. I’d never read anything by Sedaris before but When You Are Engulfed in Flames delivered on the reviewer’s promise. Sedaris is a gay man living abroad, so we don’t have much in common, but funny is still funny.

Not as good as Twilight, though it was an even faster read if such a thing is possible. I did 500+ pages in under 24 hours. Not much brain chewing going on. The trouble with New Moon is that it didn’t have enough Edward. I don’t have the antipathy for the protagonist that some people have, but she is a teenaged girl. In other words: the least interesting thing on earth. The backup love–werewolf Jake–is pretty hot too, but she’s not biting (ha ha). Overall this book has the feeling of a setup for books to come. The plot must advance.

I wonder, and perhaps Meyer will get to this, if Edward will still love Bella when she stops smelling so good, i.e. becomes a vampire too. Why doesn’t Bella worry about this?

The Conde Nast Traveler Book of Unforgettable Journeys is a collection of travel essays from the magazine. I don’t think I’d like this magazine. Although some of the places are interesting, and some of the writing was approachable, the overall style seems to be to cram as many facts, names, dates, and titles into each sentence. Sort of like this:

The arch, 112 feet at its apex and made of grey granite harvested from the coal mines of Goldospato, Austria, was constructed in January 1942, at the height of World War II and before General Schwartkopf was born, to commemorate the fall of Napolean, who is pictured wearing the regional coat of arms common to all first born sons of potatoe farmers during the Crimean War when termites overcame the elephants by eating their feed, much as they did in Atilla’s day.

Or something.