Everyday I Write the Book

Wednesday Update

I've been scarce here this week, due to two things. One is that I don't love the book I'm reading. I kind of want to ditch it, but I've already invested a few hours and feel like I should finish it. I am greatly enjoying my current audiobook, so that's progressing nicely. But the paper one - not so much. I have a bunch of good books just waiting for me when I finish this one, so I will try to power through this weekend.

The second reason is that I lost my dog this week. She was 15, and had been sick for a while. I've not been able to focus on reading, though a really good book would be a welcome escape from my sadness right now. One of my favorite things to do was read on the couch while petting her as she curled up next to me.

Missing my pup very much.

"In Other Rooms, Other Wonders" by Daniyal Mueenuddin

Vacation read #4 was story collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, by Daniyal Mueenuddin. My friend Sarah raved about this book last year, so I grabbed it when I recently saw it at a library book sale.

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is a collection of interrelated stories that take place in modern Pakistan. The characters in Mueenuddin's stories range from wealthy landowners and Pakistanis educated in America to servants and farm workers. This isn't a particularly uplifting collection; the author paints Pakistan as a pretty grim place. The wealthy constantly face the siphoning of their assets by unscrupulous employees and the threat of loss of status and power. The poor are mostly at the mercy of their employers, who control their income and offer little job security. Women are either treated poorly - or are temporarily revered, and then discarded - and are forced to resort to selling their bodies at times to achieve security.

Mueenuddin's writing is spare and powerful, and his stories are understated. He is skillful at getting inside the heads of his characters - especially, surprisingly, the women - and conveying their inner thoughts and desires. I finished the book a week ago, and while some of the stories bled into each other and are a bit amorphous in my memory, the overall impact of In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is a powerful one. What a sad country Pakistan is, in so many ways, yet with a culture with its own distinct joys and hopes.

I liked that the stories were linked; some later stories in the collection address unresolved questions from earlier ones. Also, by offering multiple perspectives of the same characters across different chapters, Mueenuddin gives them added depth and provides a more textured, richer picture of Pakistani society.

I recommend this collection and am glad that I read it. I found myself comparing it to Khaled Hosseini's books (which took place in Afghanistan) and really appreciating the more skillful writing, richer characters, and greater complexity in Mueenuddin's stories.

"Before I Go To Sleep" by S.J. Watson

Vacation read #3 was Before I Go To Sleep by S.J. Watson. This is a psychological thriller - not the type of book I usually read, but I had heard good things about it.

Before I Go To Sleep is about Christine, a 47 year-old amnesiac woman who wakes up every morning with no long- or short-term memory due to something that happened to her when she was 29. Whenever she wakes up, she is shocked to learn that she is no longer in her 20s and that there is a strange man sleeping next to her. And every day, that man explains to her that she was in an accident, that she lost her memory, and that they have been married for years. Every day she begins anew the process of coming to terms with the loss of 18 years of her life, and every day she tries to accept that she is married to a man she doesn't know.

When the book opens, Christine has been seeing a doctor who has encouraged her to keep a daily journal as a way of triggering her memory and helping her to retain memory from one day to the next. Through her journal, the reader gets to follow along as Christine slowly starts to improve, and as her journal causes her to question what others tell her, including her husband. Who can she trust - the words she has written the day before, which she cannot even remember writing - or the one person who has stood by her during her forgotten years?

It's a fascinating premise, and the book is taut with suspense and tension. I don't want to say more about the plot, because doing so would ruin the pleasure of peeling the onion-skin plot of Before I Go To Sleep. It's a rollercoaster ride of a book, one that someday will translate beautifully to to the big screen.

Upon finishing it, I found a lot of holes in the plot (of course the book is unrealistic to start), and a major twist toward the end somehow felt anticlimactic to me. But I still appreciate the book as a great piece of escapist fiction, one that had my heart racing and my eyes flying over the pages just so that I could get further along and closer to the resolution.

Before I Go To Sleep was a great vacation read. Just don't read it right before bed, or you may find yourself not getting much sleep.

Thanks to HarperCollins for the review copy. 

"Happens Every Day: An-All-Too True Story" by Isabel Gillies

Vacation read #2 was Happens Every Day: An-All-Too-True Story by Isabel Gillies. I am not sure what drew me to this non-fiction book, which I bought at a used book sale before my vacation. It's about Gillies, a former TV actress who has moved to Ohio with her husband and two small boys when he tells her that he is leaving the marriage (ultimately for one of his colleagues). Happens Every Day talks about the history of her relationship with her husband Josiah, and then goes into great detail about the break-up and the days and weeks that followed.

There's definitely a voyeuristic element about reading this book. It's like roadkill - you just can't look away. The writing isn't particularly good. Gillies jumps around, inserting random passages about her family throughout that don't really belong where they are. She also repeats herself a lot. Yet, it's a tough book to put down. I found this in a review of the book on Goodreads: "I read a couple of reviews of this that basically described it as 'prom queen chats with you at the high-school reunion, has one too many margaritas, and reveals that her life has gone to shit.'" That's totally true.

Someone else on Goodreads called the book "surprisingly moving, a very interesting portrait of academic life, and when you put it down, the realization of a very subtle revenge." Also true. It is moving, because even when Gillies acts self-destructively, which she does often, I still felt for her. The portrait she draws of Oberlin, where her husband is a poetry professor, is also interesting. And the revenge element is also there. Although Gillies writes that she and Josiah are now on good terms, it's hard not to see the book as a very successful way of exposing her ex-husband's duplicity and betrayals. (Though at the same time, she is shockingly generous toward Josiah.)

Happens Every Day was a good, fast vacation read, and I don't regret picking it up. Gillies has a sequel out, which is about the months after the breakup, moving in with her parents, and meeting her current husband and the happy ending she is now enjoying, which I have to confess sounds a bit boring to me. I guess I enjoyed the drama and the selfish pleasure of hearing about someone else's problems.

New Life for Independent Bookstores

There's an encouraging article in The Washington Post today about the (albeit modest) resurgence of independent bookstores. Glad to hear it! Please support your local indie!

"City of Thieves" by David Benioff

Finally, free wi-fi. Thank you, Radisson Hotel St. Petersburg!

Speaking of St. Petersburg (where I am writing from), my first vacation read was City of Thieves, by David Benioff. It's the story of two men who get caught by the Russian army during the Siege of Leningrad (the Germans' attempt to take St. Petersburg during WWII) and taken to prison. Lev, a Jewish teenager who had been helping with the Russian resistance, was caught looting a dead German officer's body, and Kolya, a member of the Russian army, was accused of deserting his division. Lev and Kolya are spared certain death, however, by a Russian commander who tells them that they can buy their freedom if they return a week later with a dozen eggs for his daughter's wedding cake - an impossibility during the extreme rationing and deprivation the Russians suffered during the siege.

City of Thieves is many things - action-packed, suspenseful, sad, violent, touching, and even funny at times. Lev and Kolya, like many unlikely duos from buddy movies, form a tight bond over the course of the week and the intense (near-death) experiences they share while in search of the eggs that will save their lives. The book sort of reads like a screenplay, which isn't surprising given that Benioff is a screenwriter in addition to a novelist. (He wrote the screenplay for the movie version of the The Kite Runner, as well as a few other popular movies.) I could definitely see this being made as a movie... but not a movie that I would go to see. Way too violent for me. There are many graphic scenes throughout the book depicting violence and brutality at the hands of the Germans and the Russians alike. I had trouble reading the book because of the disturbing scenes throughout.

But I am very glad I made it through City of Thieves. It is beautifully written, and the characters are memorable and have stayed with me for days after I finished. (Especially Kolya.) Plus, for me, it was an important lesson in Russian history that I was glad to learn en route to St. Petersburg. I keep imagining this huge, bustling city being cut off by the Germans, and trying to picture the devastation and terrible quality of life that the residents of St. Petersburg suffered during those 900 days. It's hard to believe that was only 70 years ago.

City of Thieves has been widely and very favorably reviewed. I remember someone once described it as "the perfect novel", and I can see why. Benioff is a very skilled writer and the book is very good. There's a Hollywood ending - again, the screenwriter shows through - but it's still a satisfying one. I'd recommend this book highly to anyone who is interested in the time period, or who enjoys a good action-packed-wartime-buddy-story. Just be sure you're prepared for the violent parts.

City of Thieves opens with the "author" - supposedly Benioff - interviewing his grandfather  - who turns out to be Lev - in Florida in the 2000s. I read the book thinking that this was a true story - that Benioff had embellished and filled in where necessary, but that this story had actually happened to Benioff's grandfather. Turns out that's not true - the book is entirely fiction. All four of Benioff's grandparents were born in the U.S. Here's an exclusive Borders interview with Benioff (you can find part 2 here) that I found pretty interesting.

Hi FTC - you're wondering if the publisher gave me a free copy of the book in exchange for this positive review?  Nyet! I got this one on my own. (And besides, I can't be bought that easily.)

Vacation Update

Wifi is so expensive here in Europe that I am not going to stay on the computer long at all. I will have to post reviews when I return, which I hate doing because I like to write reviews when the books are fresh in my mind. (Maybe I will write them here and post them when I get back.) So far, I have finished City of Thieves, and read Happens Every Day, and started Before I Go To Sleep. I love long train and plane rides!

More when I return...

"I Think I Love You" by Allison Pearson

I’ve had I Think I Love You by Allison Pearson on my TBR list for a while, but for some reason kept passing it over. I picked up the audio version a few weeks ago and decided to tackle it on CD, and finished it last week (via a combo of audio and paper) en route to BlogHer. I’m glad I did.

I Think I Love You follows Allison Pearson’s debut novel I Don’t Know How She Does It (which I reviewed here), and is told in two sections. In section 1, Petra is 13, living in Wales, and suffering through the slings and arrows of adolescence. There’s a manipulative Queen Bee friend, an overbearing, judgmental mother, the physical awkwardness of being lanky and flat, and, of course, the requisite teen idol crush. In this case, the object of Petra’s (and all of her friends’) attention is David Cassidy, the American pop singer and star of The Partridge Family. (An aside – I am a little too young to remember David Cassidy – I was only 5 when the book opens – but certainly remember the longing, idealizing, and fervor that Petra and her friends directed at Cassidy. My targets were different but the feelings were the same.) Cassidy is Petra’s escape, the person who will overlook and even celebrate her shortcomings, who will rescue her from her dreary existence and usher her into adulthood. The first half of the book culminates in a London stop on Cassidy’s farewell tour, which Petra attends with her friends (including her best friend Sharon and her nemesis Gillian), and during which unexpected events both physical and emotional leave a lasting mark on Petra.

When the second half of the book opens, Petra’s mother has just died (no spoilers here – this is mentioned in the prologue), and as Petra is going through her mother’s closet, she learns that she and Sharon had actually won a fan contest they’d entered in 1974, which awarded them a trip to LA and a visit to meet David Cassidy. 25 years later, Petra, whose marriage has fallen apart and who is grieving the loss of her difficult mother, is propelled into a wave of nostalgia and that allows her to reconnect with her younger self (and with Sharon).

I liked I Think I Love You, which is smart and beautifully written. To me, it was about our two lives – the lives we think we’re going to lead when we’re young and hopeful and projecting, and the lives we ultimately lead - and how they often diverge. Petra articulates her disappointments - with her husband, her aborted career, and her inability to stand up to her mother – and takes stock, at age 40, of how to both accept and move past them.

I also liked the depiction of the teen idol phenomenon, which is alive and well in 2011. Coincidentally, I saw Justin Bieber: Never Say Never while I was in the midst of reading I Think I Love You, and was struck by the parallels between the tween Cassidy fans of the 80s and the Bieber fans of today. The tears, the adoration, the sense of owning the object of their affection – these fans are the same.

I love the way Pearson writes. Here is a passage I especially liked, about the way that a name can be ruined:

The years had dimmed and soothed many hurts, but the name Gillian - even when it came attached to a perfectly nice woman - still caused her stomach to curdle with dislike. It was unfair the way that a name could never entirely be rinsed clean of the stain of an early hatred. All her life, Petra would approach any new Gillian like a bomb-disposal expert, primed for devastation.

(I have one of those names in my life - and suspect many people do.)

A word on the audio version – the narrator is amazing in her ability to take on many accents. She fully tranformed herself into many different people as the pages turned. It was a little hard to follow her at times, especially when she used a strong Welsh accent, and I found that I needed to read those passages in the paper version to make sure that I had caught everything. Even though the quality of the audio was quite high, I found it easier to read I Think I Love You than listen to it. 

Hello there, FTC! I received the paper version of I Think I Love You as a review copy, and bought the audio version at a library sale.

Book Blogger Appreciation Week!

I almost forgot - Book Blogger Appreciation Week 2011 is coming up in a few weeks! The last day to nominate your favorite book blogs for BBAW awards is August 13 - so if you have blogs you want to nominate (there are many categories), head on over today. You'll need a Twitter or Google account to log in.

Vacation Reads

Hi everyone! I am headed out for vacation today in Oslo, Copenhagen and St. Petersburg, so I will be scarce here for the next 10 days or so. I have a scheduled review going up on Friday, but otherwise I may not be able to post at all until I get back.

I am looking forward to some reading time on the trip. Here's what I am bringing:

• City of Thieves, by David Benioff (set in St. Petersburg!)
• Happens Every Day, by Isabel Gillies
• The Orphan Sister, by Gwendolyn Gross
• Before I Go To Sleep, by S.J. Watson
• In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, by Daniyal Mueenuddin

My husband doesn't know how many books I am taking. (We are trying to pack light.) Oh well! He won't read this until we are already there. I know, I know, get a Kindle.

Happy reading, everyone! See you when I get back.