Brooklyn by Colm Toibin

I'm not a big fan of the "literary novel." In fact, with few exceptions, I tend to steer clear of them. My taste in literature trends toward the more...inane.

I stumbled across Colm Toibin's Brooklyn, the story of Eilis Lacey's journey from Ireland to Brooklyn and the new life she makes for herself there, quite by accident. And for the first 50 or so pages, I wasn't sure I was going to stick with it.

But somewhere along the way, Eilis' story captivated me in a way that I wasn't entirely prepared for.

Eilis' prospects in her hometown of Enniscorthy are few and far between. So when her older sister, Rose, meets Father Flood, a Brooklyn-based priest visiting home, at the golf club, a plan is put into motion for Eilis to move to Brooklyn. Once there, her life begins to flourish in unexpected ways. A job, an education, and a romance all begin to transform Eilis from a meek girl into a capable young lady.

Toibin captures not only the essence of the Irish immigrant experience, but also the development of our young heroine from girl to woman. I'm not a big fan of male authors writing female characters, but Toibin does so with great skill.

A short read at only 262 pages, Brooklyn is well worth the investment of time it would take to read it.

Perfect fifths by Megan McCafferty: a review in verse

Marcus Flutie's Lloyd
Dobbler-esque charm is
Not enough, sadly.

Which is not to say
that I didn't enjoy his turn
at speaking his peace.

But that stories left
untold are often the best
gift an author gives.

A tale of two novels

I was sick over the weekend, so I had the rare opportunity to just read. Though both books I finished were the second book in a series, they couldn't have been more different.

Knit Two, the second in Kate Jacobs' Friday Night Knitting Club series, was heavy and slow moving. Jacobs spends a good part of the novel reminding us about the characters in the Club. This choice seemed puzzling to me as I'm not sure that Knit Two could stand on its own. The characters seemed stiffer than in Friday Night Knitting Club. It was as if Jacobs was conscious of her writing process in order to have another blockbuster. The novel found its stride midway through, but by then I was only reading out of obligation to the characters I loved so much from Jacobs' first novel.

Living Dead in Dallas, the second of Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse novels, was light and whimsical while also being otherworldly. I liked, but didn't love, Harris' first Stackhouse novel, but I know a lot of people who dig them. LDiD was fast-moving and fun. Harris doesn't spend a lot of time reminding readers about what they already know. Instead, she relies on the reader to remember characters and realtionships. I think that makes it easy to either read the Stackhouse novels as a series or pick up any individual title. Sookie is likeable--spunky and funny in a way that she wasn't in Dead Until Dark, the first book. It feels like Harris made strides as a novelist between the two books and Sookie is well-served by her creator's newfound comfort. A quick read, I read LDiD in about 3 hours.

In short, skip Knit Two but pick up Living Dead in Dallas.

I'm picking up Perfect Fifths from the library tonight. I am equal parts excited and terrified. I really hope this is the last Marcus Flutie/Jessica Darling book. For reals.

Two books I read recently, or, Mrs. Dude is lazy

I could write a separate post about each of these books. But I won't. And you can't make me.

1. Animal vegetable, miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

It took me all of May to read this book. I'm not sure if that speaks well of Kingsolver's ability to draw me into her story or poorly of her inability to keep me hooked. I enjoyed Kingsolver's story of moving her family from Tuscon to Virginia and, in the process, deciding to spend a year growing as much of their own food as possible and supplementing what they couldn't grow with locally produced food. Each chapter documents a month in her family's life, as each month presents different challenges for the family. Additionally, each chapter contains a short piece by Kingsolver's husband, a biologist, and her eldest daughter, a college student.

I enjoyed the book, but sometimes felt like Kingsolver was nagging me to make better decisions about my food consumption. If you enjoy the book, though, be sure to visit Kingsolver's website for more recipes and information.

2. Lock and key by Sarah Dessen

I love Dessen's writing, and this book is no exception. I will say, though, that it's not the best jumping-off point for those who have never read anything by her. What I love about Dessen's style is its lightness. She is more interested, it seems to me, in exploring the connections that people have rather than the issues they face. In this case, Dessen tries to do both and it doesn't work as smoothly as it could. Still, I found Ruby and her family to be engaging characters. And I was sad when the book ended. I did end up wishing that she'd spent more time working through the plot from the beginning instead of including so much exposition and then racing to finish the story. Overall, though, it was everything I'd anticipated it to be.

Watermelon by Marian Keyes

I am a confessed "chick lit" addict.

I love reading stories about women who start out whiny women who are sad about being single or being dumped and end up living happily ever after, usually with a handsome fellow by their sides.

I know what you're probably going to say--it's unrealistic, it's not very feminist, it's boring, it's not quality writing--and I could care less.

It's fluff and I love it.

When I read Marian Keyes' book Watermelon, I was expecting more of the same. I've read Keyes' writing before, and while I often find her kind of long-winded, I always find her to be an engaging storyteller.

What I got, though, was a lovely story about a woman who ended up being more than she ever thought possible.

Claire, a 29-year-old Dubliner living in London, finds herself a single woman on the day she gives birth to her first child. James, her estranged husband, tells her he's been having an affair with another woman and that he'll "be in touch."

Claire doesn't know what to do or where to go, so she does the only think she can think of. She goes home to Dublin. She lives with her parents and her two sisters, wallowing in the sorrow of being a single woman and a woman dumped for someone else. Slowly, but surely, Claire surrenders to the calm that comes from realizing that life after great tragedy does go on.

I thought, per usual, that Keyes did a great job of assembling an interesting cast of characters. Each of the sisters is different from the others, but Keyes draws them as "real" people instead of just caricatures. Her writing breathes life into what could be a set of stereotypes--the recently dumped woman, the flighty narcissist, the hippie.

The plot doesn't seem to drag in this story as it sometimes does in Keyes' work. The book didn't feel too long, and the action didn't seem contrived or rushed in any way.

Overall, it was a good read that I enjoyed and would heartily recommend.

Angels all over town by Luanne Rice

I read a lot of books by Maeve Binchy when I was younger. I was always transfixed on the way that she made everyday things seem charmed.

Wikipedia says that she is a "modern women's writer in the Jane Austen sense."

Nice one, Wikipedia.

I might not have understood what that meant is it weren't for LibriVox. But I already discussed LibriVox, and I feel like I'm already off-track.

I love how quaint and cozy Binchy's work always seemed, even when it was portraying the ugliness of modern life.

Reading Angels all over town was kind of like that. This novel was Rice's first, and I liked it better than the other one I read by her. After reading the reviews on Amazon, though, I realize that there are many who disagree with me.

In Angels all over town, we meet Una Cavan and her sisters. The Sisters Cavan have a close bond, though there relationship begins to change when Una's sister, Lily, marries a man who doesn't care much about the bond between sisters. Lily's husband thinks that the bond between husband and wife should trump the bond between family relations. And, since Lily is enamored with her husband's wealth and social status, she agrees.

Una, an actress, has struggles of her own that are unrelated to her relationship with her sisters. She has an inferiority complex about the fact that she's a soap opera actress. Throw in her insecurities about love and her propensity for seeing the undead and you've got more than Rice seems to be able to resolve in the 352 pages she has.

I liked this novel and was able to forgive the way in which everything seems to happen in a filmy mist. It's as if Una, our narrator, is standing outside of her life doing play-by-play. The characters end up feeling pretty flat, and the novel relies as much on ambiance as it does on content.

I think that if you're a fan of Rice's work that you might want to skip this one. It falls short of what you might be expecting. She's greener here than in later works (or at least I assume she is since I've only read one other book by her). She's heavy on atmosphere and theme and light on description. You know how writing teachers tell you to 'show, not tell'? Rice seems to break that Golden Rule, so it ends up feeling less like you're a part of the story and more like you're watching the story from the sidelines. Given Una's feelings, though, it works as a plot device.

I would heartily recommend this title to anyone looking to read a "women's fiction" story that isn't a full-blown Romance novel. There are certainly romantic elements, but romance isn't on Rice's plate just yet.

Spook Country by William Gibson

One of the reasons that I love reading Gibson's work is that he creates worlds that I don't entirely understand but he presents them to me in ways that totally make sense.

I fell in love with Gibson's writing in my undergraduate Postmodern American Fiction class. I read Idoru and it was, I'm pretty certain, the only book in that class that I finished. On my own time, I devoured the rest of his writing and have squealed with delight every time that he puts out a new book.

Amazon.com's page on Spook Country points out that as time has caught up with Gibson's version of the future, he has taken to writing about the here-and-now. This is something that had been rolling around in my brain, but not something I'd pieced together into an actual theory. It was nice to have my hunch validated.

Spook Country serves as a sequel of sorts to Gibson's previous novel, Pattern Recognition, in that one of the main characters shows up.Hubertus Bigend, founder of Big Ant, makes an appearance in this novel as the publisher of a yet-to-be-founded magazine.

Gibson attempts, in this novel, to weave together three separate narratives. Sometimes this device works, bringing the characters in each story closer together and then pulling them apart again. I think it's a fascinating narrative technique, but one that can fall apart quite easily. The problem with having three stories and three story's worth of characters is that no one really gets fleshed out into a "real" character. Gibson is guilty of this, but I can't help but think this is on purpose. I kept thinking that Gibson wants you to see these characters' outlines, but never really see them completely.

Overall, I thought that Gibson gave his audience a good (and suspenseful) story about what it means to live in our modern world with it's push and pull from reality to virtuality and back again.

It's not Gibson's best work, especially as a companion to Pattern Recognition, but it does offer some interesting ideas and it stuck with me long after I finished it.

Love is mix tape by Rob Sheffield

I've seen Rob Sheffield on many of those VH1 shows where they count down the top 100 or 50 of some genre of song. My favorite of those, of course, is the Top Soft Rock songs. But I digress...

Sheffield wrote and amazing book called Love is a mix tape: life and loss, one song at a time. It's this book about about falling in love and learning to lose love the most graceful way one can. It's about music and how music colors memories. It's about mix tapes and the 90s. Mostly, it's achingly perfect in tone and in execution.

It reminded me of Nick Hornby's High Fidelty for all of the right reasons. I fell in love with Renee and Rob and their relationship in much the same way that I fell in love with Hornby's Rob. And when I finished reading Sheffield's book, I handed it to my husband. I can only hope he enjoys it as much as I did.

Things I didn't like at all and urge you to avoid at all costs: Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld

About two years ago, I read the book I am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe.

It was awful.

I knew it was going to be awful when I started it, based on all of the terrible reviews it got.

I read it anyway.

It was amazing how terribly wrong an 80-something year old man got the college experiences of a teenage girl.

I chalked Wolfe's inability to encapsulate the "college girl" experience to the fact that it was too far out of his realm of experience.

You'd think, then, that Curtis Sittenfeld, a twenty-something year old woman, could do a better job of relating to a teenage girl's prep school experience.

You'd be wrong, though. Really, really wrong.

Prep tells Lee Fiora's prep school experience, giving us 4 years in 403 pages.

Lee, the child of middle class working people, has a hard time fitting in at a school where most of the students are the children of wealth and privilege.

Well, duh.

It's hard to tell, though, if Lee has a hard time fitting in because she's "poor" or because she's so unbelievably self-conscious and socially stunted.

In the end, I'm not sure it matters.

Throw in a couple of storylines that don't make any sense and you've got a recipe for disaster.

I didn't like anyone in this book, not even Lee's likable friend Martha.

It took me about a week to read this book and I want all of that time back.

Ah well, I'd probably just waste it anyway.

Stardust by Neil Gaiman (the book. not the movie)

I don't like fantasy, but I think I've talked about that already. I don't like dragons and fairies and elven folk.

I know that a lot of people do, but it's just not my thing.

I have this large contingent of friends who love Neil Gaiman. They think he is a brilliant writer and that his stories are fantastic. I ended up with a copy of Stardust and, with the movie out right now, I decided to read it.

It was fabulous. I cried.

Gaiman's tale isn't so much about magic as it is the relationship between the characters. Magic is certainly involved, obviously, but it isn't what makes Stardust special.

Tristran Thorn lives in Wall and falls in love with Victoria Forester. When the two see a star fall, Tristran vows to retrieve the star for her. True to his word, Tristran leaves Wall to find the star. It turns out, though, that he isn't the only one after the star. There is much excitement, adventure, and danger in the story and, in the end, Tristran is forever changed.

Gaiman's prose is, for lack of a better word, lovely. I read the book quickly, feeling transported to another world.

It turns out that my friends were right about Gaiman and his writing. I intend to read something else by him.

The long tail by Christopher Anderson

There are people that need to know the "why" of every phenomenon, and that's cool. There are a lot of people writing books that explain the "why" of every phenomenon, so eventually the two groups meet up somewhere and congratulate each other for their intellectual curiosity.

There are also a lot of people who write business books. You know the books: the ones that will teach you how to run your business bigger, faster, stronger, better? And, there are people looking to run their businesses bigger, faster, strong, and better and who look for any competitive edge they can get.

The Long Tail by Christopher Anderson explains, at great length, the ways in which the internet has democratized retail. In brick-and-mortar stores, he explains, 20 percent of the items provide 80 percent of sales. It is for this reason that most brick-and-mortar stores only stock things that will appeal to the mainest of mainstream consumers. In an online environment, retailers can provide more options. And, even if a small number of people chose any one of those options, they can provide a lot of revenue. The infinite number of choices is what creates "the long tail" from which this book receives its name.

I don't dispute Anderson's claim in the least. As anecdotal evidence, I have almost completely stopped buying CDs from brick-and-mortar stores and buy almost exclusively from iTunes. Why? Because I can't find the titles I'm looking for at Target. And, at $0.99 a song or $9.99 an album, my dollars go a lot farther.

What interested me most about Anderson's book, though, was the idea that online retailers have a distinct advantage over brick-and-mortar retailers in the way in which they can re-arrange their products based on a consumer's needs. If you're looking for an album at Amazon.com, you can find it by genre, by artist, by record label, or by recording date and any way you choose to search for it is "right. And, when you find what you're looking for, Amazon.com will recommend 5 similar artists that you might like. If you walk into Best Buy, you have to figure out Best Buy's organizational scheme or you have to ask someone for help. And, you're probably not going to get recommendations tailored to your specific interests.

I think this book was an interesting intellectual exercise, but I'm not sure how it would change the business model of a corporation. Most large brick-and-mortar retailers have an online face that can offer consumers an alternative shopping experience and some smaller brick-and-mortar retailers can't afford an online presence. Still, in the age where people are looking for an edge, this book might offer them hope.

Hot stuff by Carly Phillips

There's this bookstore near my house. Most of what it sells is mass-market paperbacks. Yes, there are a few hardcovers and a few nicer paperbacks. But mostly, the shelves are full of mass-market paperbacks. Most of these paperbacks are romance novels. What I have learned about romance novels is that they are fun and easy to read. I sometimes feel a sense of shame that I enjoy romance novels so much. I know, as a librarian, that this is stupid; people should read what makes them happy. I like reading books with happy endings. And nothing gives you a happy ending like a romance novel.

I picked up the title "Hot stuff" in this bookstore. It is the first title in the "Hot Zone" series. I hadn't ever read anything by Carly Phillips, so this was uncharted territory for me.

Hot stuff centers around the eldest of three sisters who were orphaned when their parents died and who were sent to live with their Uncle Yank. Yank Morgan owns and operates a PR firm that specializes in athletes and his three nieces joined the family business after finishing their education.

In this title, Annabelle is paired with former pro-football player Brandon Vaughn. Vaughn was a former client of Yank's until his money-grubbing ex-wife chose a different PR firm for Vaughn while he was recovering from surgery and loopy on meds.

Vaughn comes crawling back to Hot Zone (and Yank) with his tail between his legs needing their services. See, he's trying to build a lodge in his hometown. He wants to build a resort for the wealthy and he wants to use the profits to fund his real dream--a camp for kids with learning disabilities. The problem is that someone doesn't want Vaughn to succeed.

Lovesick Annabelle is the victim of some not-so-subtle matchmaking from her family and reluctantly takes the assignment to work with Vaughn. Hilarity and romance ensues . And, at the end of the story, everyone gets to live happily ever after.

I enjoyed this title. It was fairly well written and had just enough intrigue to get me through the graphic sex scenes. Now, I don't consider myself a prude, but I did find myself blushing a little when Phillips talked about various characters and their sexual activities.

Overall, though, it was a fun and fluffy read.

Book review #1

Title: Angus, thongs, and full-frontal snogging: confessions of Georgia Nicolson
Author: Louise Rennison
Pages:247
Rating: 2.5/5

Synopsis: Georgia Nicolson is 14 (and British) and her world couldn't be any more complicated. She goes to an all-girl's school, the boy of her dreams is dating someone far beneath him, and her father goes to Kiwi-a-go-go land to find a new job. Oh, and she has a little sister and crazy cat who both, while lovable, have their quirks. It's hard being Georgia and her diary takes us into her life for a year.

Review: I loved Bridget Jones. I felt like I could identify, somewhat, with Bridget's struggle for inner peace. Georgia Nicolson is the teenage version of Bridget Jones, complete with diary. But, somehow, where Bridget comes off as sweet and quirky, Georgia is just annoying. The diary format makes Georgia unlikeable for the most part. It also doesn't allow Georgia or her supporting cast to develop very fully. I applaud Nicolson for trying to use the format to entice teenage readers, but in the end it falls flat. I will say this, though, I ended up wanting to read the next book in the series, so I guess she might be doing something right.

Final verdict: Light and fluffy chicklit jr. falls short.