The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

(#52)

When I first read The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, I was in a high school English class. As a result, I was looking for very specific things: foreshadowing, symbolism, allegory, and so on. When you are programmed to scan for these literary concepts, you become less of a reader and more of a machine. I clearly remember sitting splayed out on the floor of my kitchen, leaning back on the dishwasher, holding the school-issued copy in my hands. Oddly enough, I recall my position amongst the household appliances more than the story itself. In all respects, I had become like the dishwasher when it came to reading for school—focused, narrow, and intent. I searched, I found, I got an A on the assignment. Period.

I’m a lover of English classes in general, but I grudgingly admit that the way they taught us to read took the magic out of the action. If I was too busy looking for symbolism, there was no way I could get lost in a story that survived the 19th century novel mills to become the classic it is today. With this in mind, I set forth into Hawthorne’s Puritan Boston once again.

The Scarlet Letter follows the trials and tribulations of Hester Prynne, a woman accused of adultery and sentenced to wear a red letter A over her heart. With her illegitimate daughter Pearl, she lives on the outskirts of Puritan life, embroidering the garments of the rich and holy about town to scrape together a living. In town, Hester’s supposedly dead husband skulks about trying to locate the necessary partner in her crime.

On my second reading, I was entranced with the mother-daughter relationship between Hester and Pearl. After having it drilled into my in school that Pearl was the embodiment of the literal and spiritual wilds around Puritan civilization, I enjoyed seeing Pearl as less of a symbol and more a child. I pitied Hester for her struggles with single motherhood, unable to consult with more learned women while dealing with a little girl with a singular mind of her own. Pearl controls Hester with sheer force of personality, so different than the controlled top-down nature of other Puritan families. A book that I had previously seen as just a bunch of cogs propelling me towards a grade suddenly turned into a human drama on the second reading.

Ironically, this reading of The Scarlet Letter was spent in similar position as the first, my back propped up against a washing machine in my neighborhood laundromat. Yet, the thrum of the outside machinery coincided more with the life of the book than its individual literary elements. All together, it was a wonderful experience of reliving a story for itself. If you’ve read this before as part of curriculum, give it another chance in the real world. You’ll be surprised and gratified at the result.

Abundance, A Novel of Marie Antoinette by Sena Jeter Naslund

(#51)

I've picked up and put down this book many times over my course of ownership, lured in by the deckled pages and thrown out by the flowery prose. I've finally finished it and it was decent enough for me to be able to finally put it down, last paged turned, after 24 hours.

Abundance, A Novel of Marie Antoinette, by Sena Jeter Naslund, is, as the title suggests, a book about that ill-fated queen from the time she arrive in France until her death at the hands of the French Revolution years later. Naslund does a decent job at portraying Marie Antoinette's growth from blithe little girl thrust into a political marriage to a mature queen and mother who loves the French people, but doesn't truly understand them. Teamed up with an idealistic but weak King Louis XVI, the doomed queen is swept up into political events that she can't possibly control.

One thing I liked about Naslund's novel is that it shows Marie Antoinette's sympathetic, but romanticized view of the peasantry. At her own secluded hamlet away from the intrigue of Versailles, the queen apes the farming life of her subjects and fancies living a simple life. Yet, milkmaids do not strip milk from their cows into porcelain buckets and shepardesses do not employ nannies to accompany their children on afternoon walks. Marie Antoinette wears diamond and pearl jewelry while preaching taxation of the country's nobility. Her life is a farce.

Still, Naslund takes a very generous view of the queen and grants her faults while also giving her charming characteristics. The book itself is much like the character: well-meaning, but flowery and given to flights of fancy. It can be difficult to work through if you don't have patience with purple prose. However, if you take the time to find the meaning behind the babble, it's a book as charming as its subject.

Lush Life by Richard Price

I got to meet another author at work the other day: Richard Price, author of Lush Life. On first glance, I wasn't impressed. Price is an indescript man, neither handsome nor ugly, not someone that would attract any notice, no matter how empty the room. His off-stage demeanor was standoffish, the kind of of attitude that is either brought on by intense shyness or overiding contempt. After leafing through the first two pages of his urban crime novel, the book seemed sure to hold a similarly low place in my esteem. Still, he was a writer for The Wire, so I popped in to hear the end of his lecture.

Lush Life is a lot like the Richard Price that I saw on stage: a gem hidden beneath tightly packed layers of preconceptions. That Price was charming, quick-witted, and a little bit dangerous and so is his book. Set in the Lower East Side, Lush Life is a crime novel that has no mystery. Like The Wire, we know who pulled the trigger; we're just waiting for law enforcement to catch on. The real value in the book is the intense look at shifting environment of that area of Manhattan. It's a neighborhood in constant flux: the Asians replacing Jews, white affluent hipsters replacing immigrants, pioneers replacing natives. The only solids in this twisting mass are the desperately prowling young men, trying to find footing in a society that marginalized them from the day they were born, and the desperately prowling police, grasping at any chance to maintain influence in a sea of crime and political intrigue.

If you liked The Wire, you will devour Lush Life. You've seen some of these characters before: kids buying and selling dope on the street corners, the tough female cope, the male officer who has studiously made a mess of every personal relationship, the go-to snitches. Yet, even though you've seen them a million times, Price still makes them terribly compelling. From a book that I figured would turn into a paperweight in under an hour to a novel that I devoured in two nights, Lush Life is forever as shifting as the neighborhood it portrays.

The Black Death: A Personal History by John Hatcher

(#49)

The Black Death: A Personal History by John Hatcher encompasses an interesting time within a very oddly structured book. I’ve read quite a few historical fiction novels about the plague (see The Year of Wonders) and I’ve skimmed through a few history books about the subject, but I’ve never seen one combined. Clearly, Hatcher was attempting to appeal to those interested in the thoughts and feelings of individuals that rarely get got recorded in the fourteenth century, but also provide a popular history that elucidates the period for those looking for strictly factual content. Unfortunately, the reader ends up with two very different books encased inside the same binding.

Hatcher, a renowned scholar of the Middle Ages, spent several decades researching the period around the onset of the bubonic plague in Europe. It’s clear from the factual parts of the book that the man knows what he’s talking about. Pulling from primary sources, Hatcher presents the reader with statistics, royal and ecclesiastical reactions, and the aftermath that changed the path of feudal Europe. In the book’s fictional parts, he pulls he story from the manor records of the real village of Walsham and imagines the villagers’ feelings and reactions from there. Most of the story comes from the point of view of Master John, a fictional cleric who struggles to hold his congregation together as doubt pulls them apart.

The problem with this writing strategy is that, while Hatcher presents us with both a Europe-wide view and a focused British view of the plague, he tends to repeat his facts in both accounts. As a reader, it becomes very monotonous and repetitive. I understand that Hatcher needed to cite the facts in his historically accurate account to have credibility, but to hear the same facts repeated from the mouths of his characters was a drag. He must be admired for trying to put out a book that two types of people can enjoy, but also critiqued on the execution. Still, if you’re looking for a book that can give you both an insider’s and outsider’s view of the Black Death, this is the one.

Old School by Tobias Wolff

(#48)

I’m a public school kid. I spent my elementary years in an inner city school where the teachers manually cranked out math assignments from the old mimeograph and our school books were donated by richer school districts. From sixth until twelfth grade, I moved into one of those richer school districts and enjoyed the novelty of a Xerox, but watched as our 30 year old natatorium began to collapse in on itself. I finished off my educational career at a state university, where funding was ample enough to begin building two new dorms after I had graduated. What I’m try to say here is that I’ve seen friends in their private school uniforms and met up with old classmates who described garden parties on the greens of Princeton, but have never experienced it myself. It’s a mystery, but an intriguing one.

I suppose that’s why I’m always seeking out books about boarding schools, those elite institutions where the rich make contacts and children are separated from their families for the sake of education. During The Magicians and the Harry Potter novels, the magic didn’t interest me as much as life within those closed circles. The Secret History was a trove of insight into a privileged world. So when I picked up Old School by Tobias Wolff, it was love.

Old School follows the literary exploits of an unnamed narrator in a post-World War II school where writing is a sport with very tangible prizes. Each year, three different writers visit the school and meet with the one boy whose literary work as sufficiently impressed them. Competition to be that one boy is great, driving the students to curl over their typewriters night after night in a flurry of concentration. Winning not only gains a famous author’s attention, but the audible admiration and silent fury from the student body. In other words: nothing like a public school.

Wolff manages to lay out a school that seems ridiculously overblown in theory, but tangible in print. He also has a firm grip on the voices of the authors featured in the story: Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, and Ernest Hemingway. Their conversations with the fictional characters are perfect counterparts to their real-life works. Wolff has a keen ear for voice and has clearly dedicated himself to the Great American Classics.

The book turned into something much more than a look into the foreign world of boarding schools. It inspired me to track down all of those Hemingway novels that I read in high school, to give William Faulkner another try, to continue to avoid finishing The Fountainhead (I’m not perfect, you know). It’s time to bring that public school education back into action. So, thanks, Tobias Wolff.

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

(#47)

From experience, I can say that sometimes a story suffers from uncooperative characters. You begin building your plot from exposition up, placing your carefully crafted characters in situations that they were designed for. It should be perfect. But characters don't always take the road that you lay out before them. It's usually your fault-- you gave them specific personalities and whims, and changing them mid-story to fit your plotline is difficult. When you bash them into different people, the story suffers tremendously.

That was my problem with Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger. She sets up these interesting characters-- two subtly warring twins, an amature ghost, an OCD crossword architect-- then seems panic when their personalities battle with the story. Niffenegger's story is unique, so the contention can be sad to watch. After their estranged Aunt Elspeth dies, mirror twins Julie and Valentina move into her cemetary-side apartment in London and gradually adjust to independence from their parents and each other. They are not alone, however-- Elspeth still haunts the apartment, watching as her two relatives live her life while she floats in limbo.

It's an intriguing storyline, but the characters don't fit the actions that Niffenegger sets out for them. After interacting with the ghostly Elspeth, one twin is warned out of nowhere by her aunt's beau that Elspeth always has an ulterior motive, that she really doesn't have her niece's best interests in mind. This pronouncement doesn't fit with anything that Elspeth has demonstrated so far in the story, yet it foreshadows later events. The OCD crossword puzzle master manages to drive his wife of 25 years away, yet blithely accepts medication from his brand new neighbor girl. It seems like Niffenegger had a goal that the character keep obstructing with traits that she designed, so she shoulder-checks them out of the way for the sake of a pre-planned ending.

I find it strangely upsetting that these characters and the story can't seem to get along. I really want to love this book for the dark, slightly unnerving theme of the transient nature of self, but I can't get over the actions that the characters are supposed to take. I'll end up reading the book again for the descriptions and occasional chills, but it will never be truly great in my eyes.

Medieval People by Eileen Edna Power

(#46, btw)

The problem with owning an e-reader is that you don’t get that closure of money changing hands. You just click through Amazon, pressing the One Click Buy button with impunity while your credit card quietly sobs in your wallet. In an attempt to limit the damage on my bank account, I went through Amazon’s free Kindle books and picked up Eileen Edna Power’s Medieval People.

Power’s book follows six medieval lives based entirely on literature (in this case, wills, poems, and contemporary observations) beginning at the fall of the Roman Empire. Most, if not all, of her information is culled from primary sources, which she cites copiously throughout the book. Based on this information, Power constructs the real life conditions and actions of peasants, housewives, abbesses, merchants, and explorers.

The individual sketches are interesting, but suffer from language that borders of the painfully purple. Power has a tendency to gush, especially over her male subjects. One man, Thomas Betson, is described as perhaps the epitome of romantic manhood based almost entirely on the love letters he wrote to his preteen fiancé. I’m not making a comment on May-December arranged marriages in the Middle Ages, but of Power’s starry-eyed conclusions that surely a man who wrote letters such as these could do no wrong. I don’t want to cast aspersions at Power’s scholarship—she obviously scoured crumbling documents that most regular people have never seen. Instead, I might say that her language and outlook might have something to do with the era in which the book was written. Originally published in 1924, the book may have been trying to evoke a feeling of simpler times, something that people must have longed for in the years between the two World Wars. If this is so, it probably served its purpose.

If you’re still interested in this book, I would suggest finding a hard copy. While the free Kindle version is certainly readable, it’s missing all of the images that probably make the book truly come alive. Though I found parts eye-rollingly painful to read, I will keep this book in my Kindle if only to refer to the primary sources contained within.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Steig Larsson

I finally did it. I finally completed the Millenium Trilogy.

It shouldn't be that difficult-- it's only three books, after all. It's just that it's such a struggle to get to the good parts of all three books that it maked me almost too frustrated to go on. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest sometimes seems more like a treatise on Swedish politics and legal system than any sort of mystery/action/airport novel at all.

After Lisbeth Salander's failed attempt to kill her father, she lands in the hospital with a bullet in her brain. Journalist and apparent lady magnent Mikael Blomkvist once again strides forth into the underbelly of the government to proved Salander's innocence and bring down an insidious government agency. Seems exciting, right? Well, the only things that got me engaged in the novel were Erika Berger's stalker, Salander's hacking skills on a Palm, and the paragraphs on women warriors before each new section of the book. The rest was an exercise in restraint as I tried to keep my thumb from pressing the "Next Page" button on my Kindle at warp speed. I honestly don't care if Blomkvist is some sort of Swedish Don Draper and journalistic savant. Seriously, I never want to hear about it ever again.

Now, I have to be fair here. The novel might have been much better written in its original Swedish and its eccentricities much better understood by a native Swede. The phrase "Knights of the Idiotic Table" might have sounded so much less ridiculous when read the way it was meant to be read. And I also have to tell the truth: if Larsson had lived to write another book, I might have read that too, if only to satisfy my curiousity about Camilla Salander. I'm ashamed.

If you're still interested in reading this book, Amazon has a new thing where you can preview the whole first chapter right on your computer. I'm not shilling for Amazon-- I just thought it was a cool thing.

The Girl Who Played with Fire by Steig Larsson

(Review #44)

It's interesting how mentally sitting on a book for a while can make a difference in your opinion of it. A while ago, I reviewed The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the first entry in Steig Larsson's Millenium Trilogy, and gave it pretty positive treatment. Months later, I've had a chance to think beyond the initial thrill that comes with finishing a book and really think about it. It wasn't a grand addition to Western literature; it wasn't even a masterpiece of airport mystery rags. The story was engaging enough, but it was so strangled by product placement and ridiculously irrelevant details that it's all I can do to remember the plot. But I remember how many Billy Pan Pizzas Salander ate, oh yes, I do.

The Girl Who Played with Fire suffers from similiar issues. I could probably draw up a catelogue of items from Ikea that Salander purchased for her 25 million kronor apartment or the jacket/sweater combination Blomkvist wore on any given day, but the little plot details have been lost. The plot itself can be gripping at times, but it suffers from the kind of coincidences (mostly centering around Salander) that make it incredibly unbelievable. I don't want to take away the "seriously?" factor for new readers, so I won't spoil them here. To give the book its due, I was reading furiously through the last few pages, which is where things climax to a nasty end.

Since I'm a pathological completist, I will be reading the final book in the trilogy. There are a number of plot points that still need to be tied up, so perhaps I might be able to come away with a satisfactory feeling of accomplishment. I'm not going to warn people away from reading this because there are some parts that are suspenseful enough to raise the heartrate. I will, however, caution you that just because all three books spent a bazillion weeks on the bestseller lists doesn't mean that they are any better quality-wise than the box of damp medical mysteries I picked up from the side of the road the other day.

Sacred Hearts by Sarah Dunant

Any reader of my reviews knows that I’m a sucker for historical fiction. If it sucks, I will finish it anyway, bitching all the way. If it’s good, I thank the fiction gods above. Sometimes it’s hard to find that good novel that makes an honest attempt at historical facts and attitudes while also maintaining an engaging writing style. Sarah Dunant’s Sacred Hearts has it nailed.

I’ve read several of Dunant’s novels before, all set in Renaissance Italy. She has a fascination with women, art, and the Counter Reformation. This one is no different. Set in Italian convent of Santa Caterina, it explores the world of high-born nuns who aren’t necessarily in the convent for spiritual reasons. Because the price of dowries skyrocketed in the 16th century, many noble women were placed in nunneries at a far reduced price, imprisoning women who had no desire to enter a marriage with Christ. To alleviate these woes, Dunant’s Santa Caterina convent allows these women to be nominally nuns, but to also pursue the art of music, writing, and conversation. Amidst all of these noble nuns is Zuana, the herbalist in charge of the infirmary. Steady and faithful, she is put in charge of a troublesome, duplicitous, frightened novice. As Zuana struggles with her own beliefs, the structural hierarchy begins to fall around her as the Counter Reformation picks up steam.

Sacred Hearts is so well-written that you feel encased in the walls of the fictional convent, even a little frightened when you get brief glimpses of the outside world. You follow these nuns in their ecstasies, in their hysterias, and in their struggle to preserve their way of life from infiltrating fanaticism. It’s almost a shock when the novel comes to its inevitable end because it’s like leaving otherworldly sisters behind. Maybe it’s because I went to an all girls camp for 10 years, but I was comfortable in that women’s world, their haven from the rules of patriarchy. Whatever it is, I look forward to re-reading this book when I have the time.

My Lobotomy by Howard Dully

Alright, so imagine you're a normal 12 year old boy. You've got all of the standard 12 year old boy issues, but with the added bonus that your beloved mother died when you were young. You've been living at home with your father, stepmother, biological brother, and two stepbrothers. Your stepmother, for some reason, hates you. To her, you're a budding psychopath, a towering inferno of rage and malicious intent.

So she has you lobotomized.

Yep, she and your father pay a man to stick a glorified ice pick in your eye sockets, wiggle it around a little in your gray matter, then send you on your way.

That's what happens to Howard Dully, author of the memoir My Lobotomy. Dully's experience with the actually lobotomy is only half of the story. He spends his life shuttling between half-way houses, institutions, and jails-- wanted by nobody. Finally, he gets the chance to read his medical file and learn the horrifying truth behind his brutal surgery.

I'll admit, I was a little skeptical for the first 100 pages. The evil stepmother story is as old as time-- surely there must have been some medical reason to justify scrambling the brains of a pre-teen. Yet, as I continued reading, Dully presented actual notes from the doctor who performed the surgery, which left me depressed over the lost childhood of an innocent kid. This book is not a work of art, but it's a decent exploration of insanity and family.

The Last Queen by C.W. Gortner

It was the dark of night and the last e-ink page had been turned, leaving me staring anxiously at a list of books that had either already been read or didn't interest me at the moment. I began to tremble, sweat sprang from my forehead with all the vigor of Victoria Falls. I had failed to line up my next book and I was already suffering withdraw, literary DTs. Blindly, I scrambled with my Kindle, flipping frantically through Amazon's Kindle Store. A historical fiction novel lept out at me, though I had sworn to stay away from them for a few days. It was empty calories, a quick fix, a potential shot to the veins. And it was well praised by Amazon reviewer. I pressed "buy" with all the desperation of a back alley junkie.

And I read. When I finished, I put my head down and cried.

Screw you, you foul Amazon review bitches.

I'm not sure what I was expecting from C. W. Gortner's The Last Queen, but I got what I deserved: pap, plain and simple. It's not that it wasn't thoroughly researched, because it seemed to be. It just kills me that I couldn't be more drawn into a book about Juana the Mad, which should have been terribly exciting. Think about it: the daughter of the Catholic Kings of Spain is sent to marry a Flemish archduke, who eventually ends up being a royal douche. She then stands to inherit the the combined kingdoms of Aragon and Castile as all of her older siblings drop dead. Eventually, she stalks her husband's casket all around Spain while trying to hold on to the throne. I ask you, how can this not be interesting?

My answer would be that the fault doesn't lie with Juana's story; it's with the storytelling. Gortner spends an entire novel trying to establish a character that is truly grounded and a fighter against impossible odds-- a woman at the mercy of the machinations of men. This Juana is calculating and shrewd, though a little too trusting when it comes to her family. Then, suddenly, she's insane for about three pages. Then she's back to her old self again, never to relapse. It's a weird, uneven characterization that just doesn't work.

I've got a dozen other petty complaints with which to waste a reader's time, but I'll spare you the details. Instead, I can let you know that I am seeking therapy-- no person should have to suffer from poor reading material, no matter how desperate they are for the warm velvet of literature. Don't do it, guys. It's not worth it.

The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udell

It always amazes when a book is populated with characters that I find annoying or distasteful, yet I'm satisfied with my reading experience by the time I finish. I like a book with colorful characters with a few flaws, but I usually would like to root for at least one of them. In The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udell, I found myself wanting to to line up every character, every single character, and just do a running slap until I ran out of faces. Still, I don't regret a minute of the reading experience.

The novel details the life of Golden, an almost reluctant polygamist, his four wives, and 28 children. He's too meek to really be the patriarch of such a clan, so the children run wild while his wives brood over his continuous, seemingly willful absence. As the story progresses, the reader learns the secret history of the family and each member's struggle for control over their own lives in a world where little individuality is accepted.

As much as I wanted to punch literally everyone in it, the book offers an interesting view into the dynamics of a plural marriage. Imagine Big Love in novel form and you pretty much have it. Polygamy is such an exotic phenomenon, yet it exists in our own backyards. If I met a polygamist family, I would have so many questions that would probably be too rude to say out loud: What keeps it all together? How do the children get the individual attention that they need and deserve? How does the arrangement stay vital? So many questions, but no polygamists to ask.

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

There have been nights when I have stayed up late wondering, pondering, trying to fathom a world where wizards are in fact among us, Hogwarts is in upstate New York, and Harry Potter is an emo alcoholic from Brooklyn who spends way too much time reading Narnia-knock offs. Oh, the sleepless nights; oh, the endless days! But, lo, author Lev Grossman has taken up the torch and set pen to paper with this very idea, making my life that much easier.

The Magicians doesn't claim to stray from the beaten path (forged by seven Harry Potter books, lest we forget), but it has discovered a new way of walking it. Like Rowling's world, this novel gives us a loner main character, a school of magic, and plucky students who stretch their skills in the name of knowledge. They go on wonderous adventures, eventually facing the evil baddy at the end. But J. K. kept her characters on a strict diet of butterbeer and wacky hijinks, whereas Grossman's characters sloshed, hammered and pissed about 90% of the time. When they aren't off their face, they are desperately trying to make a name for themselves in a school full of backstabbing geniuses.

Perhaps the most startling difference between the two works is how disaffected the kids are after they graduate. Rowling tied up all of her loose ends in a sickeningly neat package; Grossman sets his kids in an overwhelming freedom after a very rigid boarding school experience. In a mish-mash of drinking, sex, and unemployment, these kids start tearing themselves, and each other, apart. Judging by the reactions to freedom that I saw in college, I have to believe that all of this behavior is very realistic. It's satisfying to see that even with all the magic in the world, we all are capable of the same self-distructive actions.

I truly do recommend this book, both if you've read the Harry Potter series and if it never piqued your interest. It is a mature, honest portrayal of not always likeable people in extraodinary circumstances.

A Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin

(Ed. Note: #38)

If you’re reading this and you haven’t read A Game of Thrones, stop. Just stop. Before I started reading these books, I had a few things spoiled for me and I’m sad that I didn’t get the full effect of the story. Once I realized that I had to stay away from everything, I had the most amazing reading experience. I urge you to take my advice and read no further.

Are they gone? Good.

Anyway, A Clash of Kings is the second book in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. After the Eddard’s execution and the scattering of the Stark family, Westeros is now in the grips of civil war, a literal clash of kings. The land and smallfolk are besieged by the marauding armies of five kings—Robb Stark, Balon Greyjoy, and Robert Baratheon’s brothers and son—Stannis, Renly, and Joffrey. During all of this, a sixth claimant of the crown, Daenerys Targaryen, wanders the East with her band of followers, caring for her three newborn dragons.

If you’re thinking that sounds like a tough storyline with too many names, you don’t know that half of it. There are so many side stories and characters that typing it up would do more harm than good. Like the previous book, A Clash of Kings demands to be reread several times before you can see the tapestry instead of the individual threads. Everything is connected; it just takes some concentration to figure it out.

A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin

(Ed. note: #37)

I don’t really know how I got peer-pressured into reading A Game of Thrones, the first book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series by George R.R. Martin. I’m not usually into fantasy novels, the exception being the Kushiel books and anything Tamora Pierce has ever written. I enjoy the historical fiction element that is present in many of these novels, but I could do without the dwarves, elves, and whatever fantastical creatures that usually populate these world. I read Lord of the Rings—no need to travel roads that are imperfect in comparison. Still, I Kindled A Game of Thrones and fell in love.

Martin is a beautiful world builder. The fictional Westeros and the surrounding lands are so grounded in reality that I can imagine them as medieval British counties, complete with a working feudal system. The geo-political and family squabbles feel drawn out of history books. And not an elf to be seen. Sure, there is a dwarf, but he’s an actual little person, not a mythical axe-bearing hairy guy.

This book’s plot is based on setting up the following books, but it is not short on action. Through different viewpoints separated by chapter, we follow the House Stark, headed by honorable Lord Eddard Stark, and its relations with the throne and House Lannister, the queen’s family. Historically speaking, the plot reminded me of King Edward VI of England and the Woodvilles. We see a once valiant and fair king run to fat and indolence while his wife’s family worms and grasps its way into higher echelons of power. Still, that’s only part of the story—and it would be cruel to ruin it by telling you more.

Martin is an interesting author in that he loves his characters, yet is utterly brutal to them. Granted, it is necessary to the plot, but he seems to enjoy lulling his readers into a sense of security with a certain character, then ripping the rug out from under the reader’s feet. It’s jarring, but it gives the book a kind of paper-turning mystery, the kind that makes you finish a gigantic novel in two days. I look forward to seeing HBO’s treatment of this book in the upcoming series, though I hardly think that it will be able to capture the heart-pounding joy of reading a well-plotted novel. Doubters, pick up this book—you won’t regret it.

Your Next Door Neighbor is a Dragon by Zack Parsons

(Ed. note: #36)

You know, I’m not going to be ashamed to say that I spent quite a bit of time on the internet. The internet is interesting. There’s a whole world of knowledge and videos and interaction that could not have existed before the advent on the web. Miss a TV show? No worries, it’s on the internet! Need to do some heavy-duty research for a paper? Holy crap, here’s JSTOR! Need to look some up some quick information to settle a bet? Bam, Wikipedia! It’s a glorious thing and I’m thankful that I spent my childhood without it so that I could properly appreciate it now.

But, as every sun casts a shadow, so does the internet. Guys, the internet is weird. Thanks to the most casual of web surfing, I know what degloving is. I’ve been goatse’d more times than I can count. I’ve seen a lady break wind into a cake. I’ve been disturbed and sickened by these series of tubes, and yet, I can’t stay away. It’s an illness.

Still, I know that there are many sunshiney people out there, unjaded by repeated surprise viewings of the inner workings of a man’s colon, who are going to cheerfully jump on the internet and be summarily crushed. That’s where Zack Parsons’s Your Next Door Neighbor is a Dragon comes in. Parsons ventures where none of us truly wish to go, seeking out those who allow their freak flags to fly in the anonymity of the web. He interviews furries, voraphiles, fanfiction writers, Ron Paul fans, and so many more, creating a short encyclopedia of common internet denizens. His interviews are held together with what I hope is a fictional road trip narrative, replete with cult kidnappings and obnoxious literary agents.

Parsons isn’t a journalist, nor does he claim to be. A brief exploration of his normal writing gig, Something Awful, shows a site that usually displays a decidedly negative view of the people interviewed in this book. Parsons, however, does cast a sympathetic eye on many of his subjects, who are even more absurd in the bright light of day than they are as ones and zeros in a world-wide community. It reminded me of Jon Ronson’s Them (which I’ve plugged more than once) in that it showed the real person behind the mask.

This isn’t a book that you use to write a research paper on the sociology of the internet, but it gives the reader a good idea of what lurks beneath the web’s glossy surface. Parsons subjects himself to it so you don’t have to. Be grateful.

Bliss by O.Z. Livaneli

(Ed.-- That number thing on the left side is broken. This is book #35.)

Not that long ago, I purchased a box full of $1.99 books from the internet, several of which I’ve already written entries about. All told, that shipment was lackluster, filled with books that were worth little more than a shrug and a Frisbee toss back into the box. I wasn’t expecting a trove of Penguin Classics or anything, so I’m not offended by a little light reading. I did get lucky, however, to receive the novel Bliss, by Turkish novelist O.Z. Livaneli. A scant 276 pages, Bliss captures the struggles of a country and populace trying to decide their roles in the world.

Turkey is an odd country, geography-wise. While most of it is considered Asia, bits can theoretically be classified as Europe. Stuck between the secular West and religious East, Turkey is still striving to create a solid identity. The nonreligious government dreams of membership within the European Union, which is hindered by the increasing Islamist factions within the country. It’s a strange world where cultures clash in great waves. Livaneli demonstrates these divisions with his characters: Meryem, a teenage villager who is raped by her uncle; Cemal, her cousin sent to take her to Istanbul for a ritual killing; and Irfan, a professor in a mid-life crisis. The three lives collide on a boat in the middle of the Aegean.

Turkey is at a crossroads in its development. Will it continue to throw itself against the wall of Europe, trying to achieve acceptance in its fairly anti-Muslim clique? Or will it roll over to the continuous tide of Islamist factions and institute a religious-based government, an Asia Minor Iran? Turkey has been in the news lately, but the world should keep an eye on this region. Their choices in the near future may affect us all.

The Case Book of Victor Frankenstein by Peter Ackroyd

Have you ever read a book and have just been entirely unsure as to why the author decided to take the time to write it? That’s pretty much how I feel about The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein by Peter Ackroyd. A slightly adjusted retelling of the Frankenstein story by Mary Shelley, the novel does little to improve or grow upon the original story. Essentially, Victor Frankenstein, a young scholar from Switzerland, enrolls in Oxford, where he meets the revolutionary poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Consumed with a drive to test the boundaries of life and the Divine, Frankenstein obtains a series of bodies through London’s resurrection men and creates the famous monster that we all know and love.

While Ackroyd makes use of the different setting to introduce Frankenstein to the likes of the Shelleys and Lord Byron, I still can’t see the point of this book. The original works in so many ways—why even bother to create what is essentially a remake? Granted, it takes a historian like Ackroyd to make London come alive as it does in this novel. The city has so many sides, so many mysteries, that it is a perfect character for any and all period novels. Still, it is a pale imitation of something that has already been perfect for years. I don’t like to say that any work of art is a waste of time, but do yourself a favor and pick up the original Frankenstein. You’ll never get those hours back if you waste them on this one.

A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick

Robert Goolrick’s novel, A Reliable Wife, introduced to me a Wisconsin I never knew existed. Up to this point, my only insight into the great state was that it was cold, residents hate the Minnesota Vikings, and there is always a brisk sale of cheesehead hats. Goolrick portrayal bitch-slaps my theory, showing me a 1900’s Wisconsin that was so desolate and hopeless that it drove people mad.

Not exactly a Midwestern paradise.

A Reliable Wife isn’t really about Wisconsin. Instead, we follow a mail-order bride, who doubles as a con-artist, who struggles with her past and her intention to murder her new husband for his money. The actual story itself is okay, though it is held together by a string of plot holes that makes it difficult to take it seriously. However, whatever Goolrick lacks in storytelling, he makes up for with phrases that I find beautiful and haunting. Every phrase crafts a bleak, blindingly white world, a world more Fargo than jolly Cheesehead. A place where “every day there was some new tragedy, some new and inexplicable failure of the ordinary.” It’s stunning. If you do pick up this book, savor the beauty of the words, even if you have to suffer through a lackluster story to do it.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson

When I used to travel more often, I would bring my own books to the airport. While I made it seem that the thought was to save money on reading material, it was mostly the paranoia that I would finish every book before the end of my trip, stranding me in a foreign airport with nothing to do. Yet, even while I was humping around a small library through the terminal, I would be inescapably drawn to the bookstores. It’s a disease.

Anyway, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by the late author Steig Larsson, would be exactly the kind of book that I would find in an airport bookseller. The bestsellers in such a shop are the kinds that you don’t have to put much thought into, yet exciting enough to get you through a flight with screaming children. This novel is a lot like that. Disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist is invited to a lonely island to solve the disappearance of an industry tycoon’s niece and encounters much more than he had originally bargained for. Assisting him is the hard-as-nails hacker Salander, a girl with a black and white view of right and wrong.

Saying that it’s an airport novel does not mean that I think it’s trash. As soon as Larsson introduced the possibility of a serial killer that uses Bible verses, I was hooked and flipped through my Kindle version with blinding speed. Unfortunately, I really can’t get too excited over corporate naughtiness, which was pretty much the last fourth of the book. It’s just not my thing. I also found the Apple fanboyness distracting—I frankly don’t care that all of the good guys are apparently dedicated to Macs. Just get to the story.

Despite my qualms, the story was definitely good enough for me to snag Larsson’s sequels to this one, if only to find out how it all ends.

The Book of Loss by Julith Jedamus

The Book of Loss is one of those rare novels in which you can absolutely hate the protagonist and everything she stands for, but still like the story. That’s usually a pretty difficult thing—after all, if you’re too busy wanting to slap the shit out of some whiney character, then the tale itself usually falls by the wayside. Yet, author Julith Jedamus has formed a world where every character has some pretty glaring flaws; it’s just a matter of shades of gray.

Jedamus’s novel takes place in Heian Japan, in the muffled halls of the Imperial Court. While the world outside steadily goes to hell by way of plague and mismanagement, the interior of the female quarter is going through a war of its own. The unnamed narrator leaves us a diary that chronicles her rage as her exiled lover, Tachibana no Kanesuke, transfers his affections to her younger, prettier rival, Izumi no Jiju. Our narrator’s jealousy and paranoia grows until it shakes the very heart of the Empire.

Like I mentioned before, the narrator is pitiful and rather unlikeable, not only through her actions, but through her very unreliability as a narrator. We only see within her warped little world and rarely catch a glimpse of the reactions of others in a society where emotions of the sort are taboo. Granted, she was thoroughly wronged by Kanesuke and Izumi, but we never get a firm feeling as to whether they truly deserves the amount of rage the narrator invests in them. Jedamus has used Imperial Japan’s veiled society to create a situation where the reader feels eternally off balanced and, as a result, always on her toes.

Beauty by Sherri S. Tepper

I’ve always liked deconstructed fairy tales, whether it’s through the works of Gregory Maguire or Robin McKinley. Fairy tales are always so distant—you’re not reading a story, you’re reading a lesson. When Cinderella, Snow White, or Sleeping Beauty gets a face and a voice, the tale is personalized. You’re invested. So, Beauty, a novel by Sherri S. Tepper didn’t have to work that hard to snag me. Unfortunately, things then turned weird.

Beauty, the daughter of a duke and a mysterious missing woman, is a loquacious, vain teenager in the 15th century. When she discovers that a curse is to be laid on her when she turns 16, Beauty escapes into the world, leaving her half-sister behind to take the brunt of a sleeping curse that spans a century. Fine, this I can handle. Suddenly, she stumbles upon a film crew from the deep end of twenty-first century sent to film a documentary about the end of magic. Stolen away with the film makers, she explores the terrors of the 21st century, the calm before the storm of the 20th century, and then a world created and abandoned by an ancient writer.

Say what now? This is where I’ll stop because you have to read it for yourself.

Tepper, though an incredibly imaginative author, suffers from something that I think all writers battle: too many ideas. Beauty has so many swirling ideas that it’s difficult to pin them down and analyze. There’s environmentalism, a criticism of organized religion, a rant against those who create ugly works (mostly horror writers, for some reason), and the exploration of the worlds that writers create. Even just picking one of these themes would make for a thoughtful book, one that would allow readers to meditate on the message. Instead, Tepper’s novel doesn’t allow the reader to stop and think before throwing them into a swirling stew of ideas and opinions. If you love books that take you places that you have never been before, then this book is for you; if you want something straight forward, better leave this one in the bowels of Amazon.com.

Kept by D.J. Taylor

Back in high school creative writing class, I had an assignment to write a soap opera script, which would then be read in front of the class. It’s not often that you get assigned to write something so ridiculous, so I went all out. In the span of 10 pages, there was amnesia caused by a tragic ladder accident, rival doctors, scheming exes, secret twins, buried treasure, familial revelations, covert relationships, and dramatic comas. It was a masterpiece. Of course, soap opera conventions are in and of themselves simple; it’s how the writers combine them that makes the whole thing complex. When you take something with already complex conventions and try to shove them into one document, things get a little hairy.

D.J. Taylor’s Kept is a web of Victorian literature tropes that can be mind-boggling to decipher. Here’s a short list of the conventions I was able to identify: deranged woman in the attic, heiress kept against her will, gothic setting, people reaching too far about their station and failing miserably, paid-by-the-letter subscription wordiness and servant/master relations. I am not faulting Taylor for these conventions; indeed, he does well by them. There were some points that I thought I was reading Dickens. However, the combination of all of the little details, instead of creating a Victorian supernovel, just becomes confusing. The connections between a murder in the beginning of the novel, a naturalist, a daring train robber, and the woman in the attic are all drawn by the end, but tenuously. I’ve had a night to marinate the story in my mind and I’m still not entirely sure what happened.

Though the plot is convoluted and the novel itself suffered from Too Many Characters Syndrome (if I’m bored someday, I’m going to count them all), it is in no way a bad book. I think that we have Kept credit for striving for authenticity. I honestly believe that if you had plopped this book in front of me after finished my college Victorian Literature course, I might have mistaken it for some Dickens protégé. If you read this book, you’ll appreciate the level of detail, but, for your own sake, take notes. Then share them with me.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

Ugh, I hate this review. After gaining some perspective on some similar books, I'll be back.
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There’s something about Oryx and Crake, one of Margaret Atwood’s many dystopian novels, which has kept me from writing a review even though I finished the book a little while ago. It’s not that I didn’t like the book—it’s actually right up my alley. Dystopian novels give me a thrill down in my black little heart.

Atwood’s world is one in the near future, where cities are ghettos and the elite live in corporate enclaves with adults working in the owner-company’s complexes while the children go to company schools. The smartest students move forward to work in the growing genetically modified animal business while the less gifted are pushed towards the liberal arts (English major says ouch). Everything is provided for you. It’s a faux-utopia within a greater, stricter dystopian system. When the one-man scientific revolution in the form of the character Crake destroys most of mankind, a utopia appears to be built out of the ashes of the old. Or is it?

Utopias are a curious thing. I seem to remember that, back in high school health class, we studied Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, a pyramid with basic survival needs at its base and self-actualization at its peak. Without the base, the pyramid crumbles and a human being cannot become a well-rounded human being because he is too worried about his own survival to care about things that don’t contribute to his warmth and caloric intake. Yet, it’s when that self-actualization is reached that humans begin branching off into areas of exploration that might be better left unexplored. It also may lead them to lose that sharpness that was so important to survival, making them easily cattle prodded into place. It seems to me that a utopia is a mere breath away from a dystopia.

What I would really love to do is to come back to this when I read Sir Thomas More’s Utopia. I feel that understanding the original definition of the word might coalesce my thoughts about Oryx and Crake into something more than a disjointed, crap-psychology ramble. This is a thought-provoking book and causes the reader to take stock of the shock entertainment that now seems so commonplace, of the scientific discoveries that daily either drive us to our salvation or our ruin.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

I’m a little judgmental—I tend to stay away from books that I see being picked up by middle-aged ladies.

I’m not proud of it, but this habit has rarely steered me wrong. I’ve avoided hauling around books with that Oprah’s Book Club sticker on the front cover for years now and that’s enough for me. So I was pretty sure that I was never going to read The Help by Kathryn Stockett. Too many baby boomers have nabbed it because they have been told to by the television and People magazine. Yet, it somehow ended up on my Kindle and, before I knew it, finished. Now I feel a little ashamed about being so hardheaded—it was an amazing book.

Set in early-1960s Jackson, Mississippi, The Help is narrated in turn by three women: Aibileen, an African-American maid who watched 17 of her white charges grow up and enter a society that she can never enter; Minny, another maid whose personality is ill-suited for the demeaning position; and Skeeter, the white woman who does not fit in with the Southern debutante society. With the help of Aibileen and Minny, Skeeter embarks on a path to give a voice to the pain of Jackson’s black help.

What makes The Help an exceptional book is that there are few clear edges. Yes, there are heroes that the reader is clearly supposed to support, but Stockett does not portray the white homeowner/black maid dichotomy as evil vs. good. The sentiments become mixed as maids raise white children from babyhood and these kids remember their help with more fondness than their distant parents. In her afterword, Stockett reveals that she too was raised by a hired black woman, which triggered her interest in this particularly Southern relationship.

The plot itself is very predictable, which gives it such a mass market appeal. Stockett’s writing, however, imbues all three of the narrators with rich, unique voices that make this book a joy to read. This is definitely a book that I would read again in a year or two, just to listen to the melodious Southern accents in my head one more time. I guess what I’m saying is that I was really, really wrong this time around in avoiding this book. I am suitably ashamed.

Figures in Silk by Vanora Bennett

While I was on the treadmill this afternoon, I watched as Gordon Brown, his wife, and his two children took their leave of 10 Downing Street. Brown stood in front of the hoards of photographers, smiled, then climbed into a car, streaking through London toward Buckingham Palace to give his resignation to the Queen. I’m not British, nor have I paid much attention to British politics since I spent the spring of 2007 in Scotland, but I got a lump in my throat watching his car make his way down the city streets. It’s amazing to me that some of us are lucky enough to live in countries where the our leaders step down after public elections when history has shown us that it’s just as easy to hold your position through battle and murder. Say what you want about politics and politicians, but there are times when the system is beautiful.

I just finished another one of my historical fiction novels, one that shows us what happens when the established system just breaks down. Vanora Bennett’s Figures in Silk— yet another novel based in the Ricardian period—centers around Isabel, a wealthy girl turned silkwoman after the death of her young husband during one of the many skirmishes of the War of the Roses. As she labors to break the Italian stranglehold on the silk market and establish a manufacturing center in London, she enters into a relationship with a secretive man, Dickon. To say any more would be a spoiler, so I’ll let things go here.

What I find so interesting about this period of Plantagenet decline is how people lived with what was essentially the same war through several generations. Yorkists and Lancastrians faced each other on the battlefield time and time again, two sides of a single family warring for the throne at the cost of their country and their people. In this novel, we experience the deaths of three kings (four, depending on whether you’re counting kings that made it to their coronation or not), each time throwing England into a tizzy of changing dynasties and loyalties. Such instability stifles intellectual and industrial growth; I don’t think that I can be faulted in thinking that England’s renaissance happened mainly due to the relative calm of the Tudor period. When our governments are stable, so are we. A good percentage of our politicians know this and graciously remove themselves from a seat of power when called to by the people. Figures in Silk is not a novel that will go will be touted in literature classes ten years from now, but it bears a read if only to appreciate what we have now.

Dune by Frank Herbert

I’m just going to out myself here and say that, for me, Dune is definitely a multi-read book. I knew going in that a science fiction classic wasn’t going something with a half-dressed space lady on the cover, but I didn’t realize that it would have several appendices. That’s Tolkien-level intense.

Dune, the much-beloved masterpiece by Frank Herbert, is not something that you can slam down in a day. It’s not just about the son and concubine of a fallen duke going native on a desert planet and leading a rebellion. Instead, it explores themes of ecology, religion, politics, and force of will. Herbert has created a deep and teeming universe, one that requires post-scripts about history, the ecology of the planet Arrakis, and the establishment of religion by committee. It has to be a monumental task to create a universe so intense that it requires its own dictionary (which can also be found in the back of the book).

Herbert’s novel has left me so off balance that I’m not sure how to review it. It will take me a while—and perhaps a brief look at the Cliff Notes—to pick it back up again, much less move on to the sequels. I’ve directed my little brother, he of the engineering degree, to pick this one up so that we can have a discussion about it. Granted, I’ll have to sit through a lecture about stillsuits, but it will be worth it to hear a different take on a book that requires you to sit down and think.

The Girls from Ames by Jeffrey Zaslow

Exactly what makes a good book a good book? How is it defined? Do we base it on an inspiring writing style? Or something that leaves you with a message sunk deep into your bones? Or is a good book something that has stood up to the passing years, surviving fads and unpopularity? I suspect that critics and lay people have been debating this since the advent of the printing press, but I only bring it up because I am unsure of how to judge this particular work.

I’m referring to The Girls from Ames, a book that follows 11 girls from Iowa during a journey of growth and friendship. Jeffrey Zaslow, the author, has created an odd work. He’s a columnist and it shows in the book, which really can’t be defined as a novel or a collection of stories. It is really just a column that runs 320 pages. This is where my difficulty with the book comes in. Zaslow, though an entertaining and gracious person (he wrote a really nice message in my book, so I’m required to say that), seems out of place writing as a stand-in for a group of women. Unlike his book co-authored by Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture, Zaslow doesn’t disappear into the stories. In fact, it’s incredibly awkward to the reader when he repeatedly uses the word “cute” to describe the women as children or their corresponding actions. Cute is a word that the women may have used in their interviews, but it sounds awkward in prose, especially prose that comes from a man’s pen.

If I just based my judgment of this book on the writing, I would probably end my review here with some curt punctuation. Yet, I have trouble doing that. Zaslow’s book made me think back on my old childhood friendships, ones that formed in day care, high school, camp, and college. I never had a bevy of friends, but I always had one or two from each group that I would consider real “friend.” The rest were just acquaintances. Now, at 24, I find myself in NYC for almost a year and feel terribly alone. It’s my own fault—I neglect my friends terribly. Out of sight, out of mind. If I don’t see them everyday, I forget to make contact, find myself too lazy to return calls, and generally fall off the face of the planet. The Girls from Ames made me feel that loneliness and guilt more than ever. The internet has made friendships easier than ever, yet still I’m lost in a vacuum.

That’s why I can’t decide whether this is a good book or not. Do I keep my opinion totally style-based? Well, then it’s a piece of garbage. Or do I judge it based on its affect on me? That would make it a perfectly reasonable read and a good use of my time. Regardless of my final judgment, I’m going to use this as an impetus to get off my ass and start being a friend again.

I, Claudius by Robert Graves

If, by some quirk in the time-space continuum, I was able to time travel, probably one of the last places I would want to end up would be ancient Rome. It’s not the food, the constant wars, or the public toilets that bother me (derail: sat on one of those at a Roman archeological dig in Israel—I prefer to do my business when I don’t have a neighbor’s butt about five inches from mine). Nope, it’s about the murdering—the constant, constant murdering.

When I set down Robert Graves’s I, Claudius for the final time, I tried to figure out how many of the main and secondary characters had been taken out by poisoning, bludgeoning, or neglect. It’s a pretty staggering number. We have mothers killing daughters by walling them up in a room and listening to them starve to death, grandmothers gradually poisoning grandsons, and emperors getting their jaws hacked off by assassins. Neither rank nor blood can protect you from an inevitable and unnatural death.

Unless, of course, you’re an idiot. Or, at least, you’re perceived as an idiot, like the titular Claudius. Born twisted, small, and with a dreadful stammer, Claudius is immediately discounted by his family, a powerful combination of Claudians and Caesars. When he’s not being the punching bag for his mother, grandmother, sister, or a whole host of other family members, he spends his time learning and observing. It’s this quiet behavior that allows him to watch the goings-on unharmed. Claudius watches as Rome goes through three emperors: Augustus (who you might recognize as Octavian from Rome), Tiberius, and Caligula, the “little boot” who nearly ran Rome into the ground.

Throughout, I had trouble deciding whether Claudius was in fact an idiot or not. True, much of his perceived idiocy comes from his self-imposed dumb show, but the situations that he puts himself in are kind of ludicrous. Maybe it’s the comparison between him and his brother Germanicus that makes Claudius come out looking out of it, cowardly, and unmanly in the Roman sense. Then again, Claudius outlived his brother, so that shows how much I know. I’m sure that I might find the answers to my questions in the sequel, Claudius the God, where Claudius comes up against the challenge of his life as emperor. And I'll also end up hiring someone to taste-test my food as my poison paranoia grows.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

I had mentioned in my post about The White Queen that I occasionally like to avoid more taxing reading material by diving into a world of harmless, mediocre historical fiction. I try not to make it too much of a habit, but I’m not going to beat myself over the head when my job does such a fine job of doing that for me. However, I am often surprised at the number of quality historical fiction authors there are out there. They clearly immerse themselves in research and not only entertain, but elucidate. You can close the novel, pick up a history book, and immediately identify with the time, making history just that much more understandable to the modern mind—all without relying on bodice-ripper tactics and other-worldly influences. Hilary Mantel is one of those authors.

Mantel’s Wolf Hall, the 2009 Man Booker Prize winner, takes a markedly different approach to the turbulent Tudor era than most. Instead of taking place in the cushioned boudoirs of England’s ruling women, the reader spends most of the time in Thomas Cromwell’s odd little world, where a common blacksmith’s son is raised up to the highest political positions in the land. Cromwell is a walking, talking contradiction. A solid man covered in the scars of his many former trades, he blends in with the lily-white delicates of the English court. He is a former soldier and brawler, yet he conducts business with far more subtlety than nobles who have been bred to the position (most notably the bombastic Duke of Norfolk). He understands the machinations of Anne Boleyn, but seems completely mystified by the women in his own home.

Cromwell’s foil is Sir Thomas More (note: the sheer amount of Thomases in this book is ridiculous—so ridiculous that Cromwell wryly comments about it to himself), the world-renowned intellectual with a violent streak. Cromwell has the flexibility of mind to transfer his services from the disgraced Cardinal Wolsey to the king. More, unfortunately for him, sticks firmly to his worldview, one where everyone from the king down follows the True Church. Their wry interactions and respect-bordering-on-contempt for each other are almost touching, considering the two ultimately suffer the same fate.

The book isn’t without its flaws. Mantel’s cast of hundreds makes it difficult to follow without a background in this history or a very thorough viewing of The Tudors. She also uses the convention of referring to Cromwell as “he” constantly, never really mentioning his name unless another character utters it. I can understand her reasoning behind this style, as the reader can be totally immersed in the character, but it is terribly annoying. When Cromwell interacts with other male characters, which is most of the time, it’s crazy complicated keeping everyone straight. Yet, the book is a valiant work of seriously absorbing literature. I hear through the grapevine that Mantel will be coming out with a sequel, so my Kindle and I will wait with bated breath.

The White Queen by Philippa Gregory

I have a confession to make: I’ve been known to read trashy books. Now, this isn’t something that I like to shout from the rooftops, but if you spent your days reading Chaucer, you would unwind with something less cerebral too. I’ve done the romance novel thing, but the formula becomes grating after a while. So, my most turned to brainless literature is mediocre historical fiction.

I don’t think Philippa Gregory started out as a mediocre artist. Her break-out novel, The Other Boleyn Girl, was pretty gripping and presented a side of that worn out Tudor saga that I hadn’t heard before. Unfortunately, her work has started to go down a long, dull hill. She’s now turning her attention to the final years of the Plantagenet reign over English with The White Queen.

The White Queen follows the rise of Elizabeth Woodville, a commoner widow, who captures the eye of the young King Edward IV and rises to be the queen of the penultimate reign of a Plantagenet monarch. This period of time has been much discussed by artists and historians as an era of greed and blood. Many a historian has portrayed Edward IV’s queen as the head of a family of grasping bloodsuckers who wormed their way into the highest positions in the kingdom, much like the Boleyns a few generations later. Shakespeare even dedicated his pen to a play based on the period: Richard III. There’s an incredible amount to tell and so many points of view to take in.

Unfortunately, Gregory decides to take the least believable route. Inspired by the whispers of witchcraft that surrounded the Woodville family (which was supposedly descended from a water goddess), Gregory portrays Elizabeth Woodville, her mother, and daughter Elizabeth (later Queen Elizabeth, wife of Henry VII) as practitioners of wizardry. What made Edward fall for Elizabeth? A ring tied to a string. What made a boat carrying important dignitaries toss violently over the sea? A storm called up by witches’ breath. What withers Richard III’s sword arm and cripples his health? A curse and a locket. Really, Philippa, really?

I think her choice in plot devices shows an author taking the easy way out. Elizabeth Woodville, whether you liked her or not, was a force to be reckoned with. She defied an ordained king by claiming sanctuary for herself and her children in a basement. She suffered through accusations that her husband had been a bastard, sired by a lowly English bowman. She climbed to the highest position in the land and hung there through some of the greatest storms in English royal history. And Gregory credits it to witchcraft? Ugh.

Seriously, if you find this era interesting, pick up Sharon Kay Penman’s The Sunne in Splendour, a hefty novel that relies on history and the strength of the characters. Gregory would indeed need witchcraft to reach her standard of work. Sadly, I’m probably going to end up reading Gregory’s next book, which will be a depiction of the same events, just from the point of view of Margaret Beaufort, mother to Henry Tudor. I will grit my teeth in irritation, then maybe through my Kindle in the trash, but I will read it shamefaced. Why am I so weak?!

My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for his Family's Past by Ariel Sabar

I'm very lucky that my job has introduced me to books and authors that I wouldn't normally hear of in the mainstream media. Besides Tatiana de Rosnay and Jeffrey Zaslow (who's signed book is waiting to be read shortly), none of the authors have been featured very prominently on my local bookstores or featured in the myriad of newspapers that I get on my desk each day. I doubt I would have even glanced at My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Family's Past by Ariel Sabar as I walked by the rows of spines on the bookshelves.

My Father's Paradise spans decades, centuries. Sabar's father, Yona, came from a small Jewish village in northern Iraq, a town in the middle of river where Kurds of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim descent lived together peacefully for centuries. After the establishment of Israel, Jews are thrown out of Iraq, making their way to a new land and a new life.

This may just seem like another Jewish diaspora to repatriation book, but Yona Sabar has a singular trait that lifts him out of the poor Kurdish-Israeli neighborhoods and into the vaulted heights of academia: he grew up speaking Aramaic. Without him, the world would have lost the language of Jesus, as Iraqi Kurds now speak mostly Arabic and Israeli Kurds rely on Hebrew. Yona created the first Aramaic dictionary and was even the Aramaic expert for Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (don't hold that against him).

Sabar's book may celebrate his father's academic career, but it also charts the journey of Mizrahi Jews (Jews from Arab countries) to an Israel overwhelmed with European Jews. Like other countries around the world, Israel has its own problems with racism and classism. Many Mizrahi Jews hold low-paying blue collar jobs, such as construction or taxi driving. It's a difficult, unfair, under-publicized life that may see more light with the publication of this book.

My Father's Paradise is worth the read, if only to find out a civilization that was once a vital part of the Arab world and now fights for appreciation in the State of Israel.

Sister Teresa by Barbara Mujica

I wish I could say that I liked Sister Teresa, a novel by Barbara Mujica recounting the life of St. Teresa of Ávila. I even read it twice to convince myself that there was something to the book that I just hadn't found. But, alas.

Granted, Mujica's Teresa is an interesting, multi-faceted character. She's not a sweet saint-- she manipulative, ruthless, loving, and intellectual, a woman to be respected even over a backdrop of the Spanish Inquisition. It's not the characterization that gets me, it's the writing style.

I know I harp on writing style a lot in these reviews, but it truly affects my ability to fully enjoy a book. I also think that it's a bit of a cop out to use a a fictional, modern-day translator who only appears one time in the whole novel, just to be able to be rid of some of your own writing responsibility. Mujica's translator mentions that she found this hagiography in a market and tried to make the prose sound as informal as possible, leading to a novel full of anachronistic language. It takes me out of the time period, leaving me consciously out of the story. Frustrating.

I don't really want to expend any more words on this book. Suffice it to say that if you're interested in Inquistion-era Spain, nunneries, or saints, this is a book you can afford to spend a few minutes on. Otherwise, give it a miss.

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

It's a rare writer that can make an atom personable. Based on our science books, an atom is a nucleus made up of protons and neutrons, surrounded by electrons. They combine into molecules, which then combine with other molecules, which then becomes the reason I failed chemistry class. If we rely on a textbook, of course an atom is going to be a dead thing.

It's too bad that our text books aren't written by Bill Bryson, author of A Short History of Nearly Everything and many other fine works. Bryson can give an atom life of it's own, a personality, the entirely real sense that atoms are the most important part of our lives. It's not just a numbered figure on an impersonal page.

Bryson, an immensely talented writer, brings all of science to life in this book, a rare feat. He disabuses us of the notion of eternal truths, for example, demonstrating that until just the middle of the last century plate tectonics was not accepted as a viable theory. He destroys the archetype of the all-knowing scientists and shows them at their most vulnerable and ingenious. Most disturbingly, he lays out all of the myriad ways that our planet and universe is trying to kill us.

As you can probably guess, I am a science dumbass. I scraped through three years of high school science and two semesters of similar college classes with smiles and a cheerfully frank self-assessment that though I may try my hardest, I am never going to successfully balance a chemical equation or triangulate the distance to the moon. With Bryson, however, I am introduced to the personalities behind the theorems: venerable, yet staid Lord Kelvin, egotistical Hubble, prickly Newton, thieving Hooke, and (my favorite) painfully shy Cavendish. Science is more than just fact and theory-- it is a violent clashing of egos and dogma, a bureaucratic beast as slow-moving as religion itself.

It will take more than a few reads to truly understand the science portrayed in A Short History of Nearly Everything, though Bryson has made a valiant effort to make everything readable. Looking on Amazon, it appears that he has come out with an illustrated edition of the book, for which I may need to shell out some cash. It's strange that for a girl that can't tell a mitochondria from a nucleus, such a work can become a favorite work and occupy a coveted spot on the bookshelf.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

I don't think that I've ever stopped and tried to imagine America through an immigrant's eyes. To me, America has always been here. I know intellectually that America as I know it didn't exist until the 18th century, but when you've lived here forever, it's hard to imagine that the skyscrapers, freeways, and roadside monuments didn't just spring out from the ground thousands of years ago. They seem a permanent, indelible part of the landscape.

And yet, that can't be how someone just landing on these shores views America. After all, they came from lands steeped in history, where the land is the only constant. Their ancestors have seen governments fall, villages and cities disappear from the face of the Earth, once inhabitable climates turned poisonous. It is this resignation these people bring to America, a land blissfully ignorant of upheaval. Today's America is no place for history.

It is this concept that Neil Gaiman explores in American Gods, a masterpiece of a novel that sweeps the whole of the United States. Ancient and foreign gods, having ridden over in the minds and hearts of their worshippers, are woefully out of place in 21st century America. Reduced to grifting, prostitution, and, in two cases, running funeral homes, the gods drift through time with no followers to speak of. On the horizon, the new gods-- lords of technology, media, and freeways-- approach, determined to wipe the old superstitions off of the planet entirely. In the middle, is Shadow, an ex-con who has little to live for and less to fight for.

I don't think an American could have written a book like this. Granted, Gaiman's native United Kingdom does have the same worship of technology and celebrity (magazine shelves are drowning in £1 rags over there), but not to the extent that only the breadth of the American continent can provide. It takes a foreigner to accurately see our obsessions and our affections. Not only that, it takes someone with a sense of history behind them to understand how the ancient can drown in our modern society.

Gaiman tells a wonderful story and I had a hell of a time trying to identify all of the gods he referenced based only on oblique physical traits. Next time, I hope to sit down with my world mythology book and cross reference. I'm sure that such a thing will make a second read even more enjoyable than the first.

Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks

I think there is something strangely beautiful about The Plague. Not what it does to the human body or psyche, but the ease at which nature was (and is) capable of balancing human populations with a wave of bacteria riding Valkyrie-like on the backs of fleas. Strangely enough, people were better off each time the sickness swept through Europe—there was more land, more jobs and more opportunity with less competition. It’s hard to think of the benefits, though, when you’re reading Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks.

Brooks’s novel depicts the fictional counterpart to Eyam, a real plague-wracked 17th century English village, which quarantined itself to save its neighbors from the sickness. As the inhabitants begin to die horrifically, people begin to fall back on superstition and barbarity. All this is told through the eyes of Anna Frith, a young widow who mingles with both people of exalted status and the people of the dirt to show the reader just how fear has affected every strata of society. She leads us through a nightmare world where saviors are brought low and healers are destroyed by the ones they sought to cure.

Since college, I have read this book three or four times. Despite my intimate knowledge of the novel, I find myself sucking in breath as the ending draws closer, releasing it only after I have shut the final page. It is a gripping, well-told historical fiction book that is a far sight better than some of the popular period pieces these days, which are more bodice-rippers than anything. The writing is fabulous, but I think it’s the very elemental story that keeps the air locked in my chest. After all, we may have defeated The Plague, but it only takes one antibiotic-resistant strain of bacteria to slam the human race back to the Stone Ages. With the ease of travel these days, the ability to voluntarily quarantine ourselves to save others is strikingly diminished—if not defeated all together. Would we have the courage of the real-life inhabitants of Eyam or the fictional ones in Brooks’s novel? I don’t know, but I’m sure that we’ll have a chance to test our mettle some time in the near future.

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach

Bodies. They pulse and squish, intake and excrete. They do the heavy lifting and the fine-tuning. Bodies. You can’t… well, you can’t live without them. In Mary Roach’s Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, you can take a look into the (hopefully) distant future to when your body becomes an inanimate object and someone else’s property.

Unfortunately, Roach does not have enough confidence in her subject matter. Instead of allowing very interesting facts to speak for themselves, she crowbars her own feelings, history, and any extraneous material she comes across (no matter how incidental) into paragraphs or footnotes. I get the feeling that is she were enlisted to do a eulogy, she would fill is with puns, asides, and random observations rather than throwing her all into honoring the life of the deceased. I found her style to be so distracting that I was unable to concentrate on the excitement that the inside scoop on corpses should provide.

The saving grace of Stiff is that dead bodies are just so damn interesting. Even for a notably squeamish person, I can’t pretend that finding out what’s going to happen when I die isn’t fascinating. Roach lays out the whole “donating bodies to science” business clearly, outlining everything from full-body donations to anatomy classes to getting a post-mortem facelift by plastic surgeon trainees. And the body farms. You’re just going to have to read about the body farms.

I’ve always been an organ donor, but Stiff has made me wonder if I can do more after death. While I don’t like the idea of moldering out in an open field, I can certainly consider how I want my remains taken care of in the event of a brain death. Why not save my family the hassle and just have a piece of paper that enables doctors to pull the plug and hustle me down to the OR, ready for harvest for people who really need a piece of me? It’s a final good deed that can echo through the generations.

The Last Witchfinder by James Morrow

If someone had told me that I would be reading a book in which the heroine is an Enlightenment natural philosopher, daughter and brother to witchfinders, witness to the Salem witch trials, a member of an Indian tribe, beloved of a young Ben Franklin, one of two people who knows the coordinates of an island on which escaped slaves debate the merits of government, and the personified end to witch hunting, I would have cocked an eyebrow. If that someone had then breathlessly explained that the book was in fact written by another book, Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, I would have given that person the finger for wasting my time with such nonsense.

And yet, here it is: The Last Witchfinder by James Morrow. And it’s amazing.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t be able to stomach a book that tries to shove everything mentioned above into one book, let alone one character. It smacks of a high schooler trying to combine as many awesome 17th—18th century events into a single story, fashioning a Mary Sue to triumph over each trial, and then uploading it to fanfiction.net. It would be too, if the Principia Mathematica hadn’t been telling the story.

James Morrow gives the Principia perhaps the most understandable voice of the whole novel, both in word and in concept. While the characters speak in a quick, Enlightenment-era patter, the Principia has had the benefit of surviving to the modern day, picking up the up to date slang and a wry sense of humor. While the non-physicist reader stares dumbly as Jennet, our heroine, and Ben Franklin debate Newtonian theories, the very being that embodies these theories molds them into beautiful, non-obtrusive metaphors. It’s the Principia’s very human voice that turns these philosophically-minded characters into relatable beings.

The Last Witchfinder is a book that can span disparate genres of bookworms. Scientifically-minded readers can revel in Reason overcoming superstition and actual Newtonian philosophy; English majors can marvel in the prose that is gorgeous enough to make some of the textbook sections a little less mysterious. It’s a book that I will read over and over—pausing only to pass it along to my engineer mother, who will undoubtedly love it as much as I do.

Mr. Shivers by Robert Jackson Bennett

I frequent a series of forums that I don’t mention often, mostly because I don’t want people to venture there and think terrible things about me. What’s difficult to explain to most people is that, in the tens of thousands of members of those forums, there are quite a few who produce beautiful works of art, be it visual, audio, or even in novel form. That’s what led me to Mr. Shivers, a novel by forums member Robert Jackson Bennett.

Mr. Shivers is a weird amalgam, a mixture of The Grapes of Wrath and Doctor Faustus, generously shmushed up with ancient mythology and good old fashion horror. Throughout the Hoovervilles of Depression-era America and along the railways inhabited by tramps and runaways, there is the tale of Mr. Shivers, a scarred man who brings death in his wake. He’s a ghost story, a legend, a boogyman to frighten children. And he’s real. Enter a motley group of men who have lost everything to the man and will travel thousands of miles for revenge.

The book has quite a bit in common with Southern American literature—surroundings that are not always what they seem, the people of high status brutally brought low, and superstition is in the very air that characters breathe. Yet, I don’t think that I would have ever considered Depression-era America as sibling literature to the stories of Flannery O’Conner before reading this book. Now I see that the intense suffering of families, farmers abandoned by nature, and the seemingly complete absence of government makes for an environment that should spawn ghost stories regularly. Bennett has done his research—the reader is fully immersed in the hopelessness of the time period, the fear that everything familiar was now turned on its head.

I think I’ll be watching Robert Jackson Bennett from now on, hoping that I’ll find out more about his future works. And I’ll be doing it on The-Forums-That-Shall-Not-Be-Mentioned.

Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay

Tatiana de Rosnay was another one of those authors to appear at work, her very presence apparently summoning every Baby Boomer and Generation X-er to our auditorium. Book clubs, a small group of friends, alone—they came, consumed tiny croissants and listened to the author of Sarah’s Key.

De Rosnay is a tall woman, elegant in silvery hair, her French accent rolling over sounds in English that sound superfluous when she says them. She’s an enthralling speaker, like a voice stemming from a culture centuries older than ours. I wish I could read French because I have to believe that when she writes in her native tongue, she reads how she speaks. Unfortunately, she chose to write this book in English.

Before I get into this in earnest, I have to say that de Rosnay tells a story in Sarah’s Key that I had never heard before. I had known that the French Vichy government had collaborated with the Nazis, but I was never told the extent to which they had carried out orders. In the summer of 1942, French police gather Jews in the Vel d’Hiv, a stadium in Paris. Among these Jews were 4,000 children. Kept for days with little to no food or water, all were to French satellite camps and then off to Auschwitz for extermination. Few survived. De Rosnay’s novel follows a little Jewish girl who experienced the Vel d’Hiv and holds a terrible secret, as well as a modern-day American journalist struggling to bring the story to light.

My issue is not with the story (though the modern storyline seemed shallow and a little self-righteous), it was the writing. As I mentioned before, I wish I could read French, for I believe that de Rosnay must have a better style in her native tongue. Her English makes the characters too shallow and the dialogue is peppered with Americanisms that sound shoved it, as if trying to demonstrate a familiarity with American lingo. I found it all distracting, to the detriment of a story that could have been quite compelling. It makes me sadder to say that her dictated interview in the supplementary chapters of the books brings back all of the elegance of her speaking voice with none of the ridiculousness of her writing style.

I can’t tell you not to read the book because I think the story is incredibly important. However, I can say that the tale suffers in the writing, which is a tragedy.

Vows: The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and Their Son by Peter Manseau

You may remember that a few months ago, I reviewed a Peter Manseau book called Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter. You many also remember that, after meeting him, I was thoroughly enchanted by this soft-spoken man with a talent of gracefully weaving disparate words and concepts together into blanket that you want to snuggle into on a cold day. This particular talent, that of blending the dissimilar, is almost the subject of his book Vows: The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and Their Son, a heartbreaking look into the lives of two people who refuse to choose between reaching for a more spiritual plane and raising a family.

Vows is a sweeping memoir that endeavors not only the history of a family, but also of the Boston Catholic Church and the city of Boston itself. Manseau shows us that these three elements—the family, the Church, and Boston-- could not exist independent of each other. Without the Church, neither of Manseaus would have begun their religious journeys. Without the rough areas of Boston, neither of them would have met. And without the family, the Boston clergy would never have been forced to take a look at the centuries-old practice of holy celibacy.

Manseau’s book made me look at Catholicism as I never had before. For a Jew, I thought I was pretty educated about the history and practices of the Catholic Church, having spent more time at mass than at synagogue throughout my time in college. Yet Manseau opened my eyes to the rather mundane reason for priestly celibacy (it’s easier to maintain control of the Church when you don’t have to apportion bits of it to a priest’s heirs), how the child abuse scandals of the Boston diocese affected Boston Catholics, and to the fact that there are far more married priests than you would expect.

Vows is proof that you can find a touching beauty and devotion to a religion, yet still push for improvement and basic human rights. No matter how poorly the Church treated the Manseaus, they continued to worship with the zeal of the truly religious and so find faith in humanity in the basic tenets of their belief. If only all of us could work to truly change things that have potential, instead of throwing our hands up in disgust and abandoning it all together.

Author's Note: I should tell you that I wrote this review before this global scandal about abuse within the Catholic Church struck. Vows actually covers quite a bit of the Boston abuse scandal (it affected the family in ways I won't mention here) and how the training of priests affects the young men sexually. If you want to gain some context for the stories you read in the news, I suggest that you pick up this book.

The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman

You know how in my review of Philip Pullman’s The Subtle Knife, I was little underwhelmed and blasé about the whole thing? I had my reasons—it was your standard middle book of a trilogy, designed to get from you from point A to point B. But this review isn’t about The Subtle Knife; it’s about The Amber Spyglass, which was amazing enough to wipe out the lingering malaise from the previous book.

Pullman drops back into a world gone mad—angels, witches, and monsters from every world imaginable have been culled by either the Church or Lord Asriel to do battle and decide the ultimate fate of the universe and belief. Amidst the chaos, Mrs. Coulter keeps Lyra in a drugged slumber deep within the Himalayan mountains, torn between her cold personality and her desire to keep her only child safe from both sides of the conflict. From the north, Will leads a contingent of bears in a desperate effort to rescue Lyra and restore the altheometer to her. And, finally, scientist Mary Malone braves new worlds to learn more about the Dust, or Dark Matter, that she has dedicated her life to studying. It’s “reader, beware” from there.

Unlike The Subtle Knife, the action is quick and decisive. We’re pulled from the land of the dead, to a world of intelligent wheeled beings, and even as far as the Kingdom of Heaven. Pullman pulls from medieval Christianity, mythology and science to weave a tale where priests can absolution for a future murder by doing penance his whole life, harpies guard the underworld’s doors, and scientists use the mundane to figure out the spiritual. Altogether, it kept me flicking through my Kindle at a mad pace, leaving me distraught as a reader, yet pleased as a student of literature, that the happy ending was not quite as joyous after all. The book brought me back to that delirious fervor that I felt reading The Golden Compass in my youth.

So if you’re setting out on this three-book journey, take heart when you’re stuck in that windless ocean of a second book—you’re world is about to get exciting very soon.

My Jesus Year: A Rabbi's Son Wanders the Bible Belt in Search of His Own Faith by Benyamin Cohen

I do not generally give bad reviews about books. The worst I’ve ever written or said about a piece of literature can be summed up in that infuriatingly smug syllable “meh.” Wasn’t good enough to stick in my mind, don’t you know. Wasn’t good enough to keep its feet amongst the gods of English literature. Meh.

I’m changing that now. I’m about to give a bad review.

It became clear to me from the first few pages of My Jesus Year: A Rabbi's Son Wanders the Bible Belt in Search of His Own Faith by Benyamin Cohen that this was going to be a chore. It wasn’t necessarily the subject matter. I’m a Jew and I like Jews. Check. I get a look into the world of megachurches and revival tents. Check. Enlightenment by the last page. Check. These are great things for a book to take my mind off of other pressing matters, right? Well, as any museum-goer will know, the artifacts can be gorgeous and heart-stirring, but they completely lose their charm when they’re displayed on top of an over-turned cardboard box and lit by a homeless man holding a flashlight.

What I’m trying to say is that Cohen’s writing style and personality made me want to wring his neck. Where there should be humor, there are nudge-nudge-wink-wink pop culture references. Where there should be actual insight into his spiritual journey, there is whining. And, oh G-d, the whining.

Mr. Cohen, listen, that skinny asthmatic Jew thing is all played out. It died once Israel got an army, Lenny Krayzelburg won gold, and the Hebrew Hammer kicked some ass. You’re not Woody Allen—you’re barely a Woody Allen wannabe. Sure, you didn’t choose to become an Orthodox Jew, but last time I checked, none of us had a sign up sheet in the womb. I’m sorry that your mother died when you were young, but you should be thanking your lucky stars that you had a family that loved you, clothed you, and fed you. You know how many people have less than that?

What kills me here is that I agree with many of his assessments of his time in the Christian world. Of course it’s disturbing as all hell when you find Christians wearing the Star of David. Yes, a Sunday mass can be an incredibly uplifting experience. And, absolutely, gospel can elevate a service in any religion. There is so much to be gathered from gentiles, so much to learn that can give us a perspective on our own faith. However, calling someone the Michael Jordon of faith or constantly harping on your own spindly little body is tiresome.

People, if you want to read a humorous book about religion, read A.J. Jacobs’ The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible (why are these titles always so long?). If you want a fish out of water book, pick up Them: Adventures with Extremists by Jon Ronson. The Jesus Year, as much as I wanted to like it, is a sad waste of cellulose.

The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman

I find it hard to begin this review of The Subtle Knife, maybe because it was a book that I had picked up and put down before. Back in elementary school, after I had finished with The Golden Compass, I ran to my school’s library to grab the next in the series—which I ultimately never finished. After having finally pressed the last “Next Page” button on my Kindle version, I remembered why I had put it down in the first place.

The Subtle Knife is not a bad book by any means, but it lacks the otherworldliness of The Golden Compass. This is reasonable, considering that half of the book takes place in our own world, far away from Lyra’s version of England. It’s perhaps for this reason that I slogged through it. When I do read fantasy novels, I like them to be a world where magic and normal lives coexist in a practiced harmony. Jumping back and forth between world, especially between a pretty mundane one and a world that where your souls exist outside your body, is jarring. However, I have to believe that this is what Philip Pullman wanted us to feel. If the characters are forced to endure jumping back and forth through space and time, the reader should be able to sympathize.

I’m usually one to wax on and on about books, but, to be frank, The Subtle Knife felt like the means to get from book 1 to book 3. Who wants to write about the unremarkable path that links two fabulous cities anyway?

Sorry, I suck. :(

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

The first time I read The Golden Compass, I believe I was in elementary school. There is no doubt that I was too young to understand the complex philosophical arguments being thrown around, couldn’t possibly wrap my head around theories of elementary particles and Original Sin. I think mostly my reaction was “OMG, I want a little animal to follow me around all the time and change and be awesome and…” Sue me, I was ten.

Now, a little older and slightly more educated, I’m better able to understand the religious and philosophical ramifications of the novel—and it’s become one of the most terrifying books that I have ever read.

A little synopsis: Our protagonist is Lyra, an 11 year old living in what appears to be a steampunk London. Her world is very similar to ours, though seemingly canted a little to the point where our bedrock institutions seem unrecognizable. The Church has fragmented, outsourcing its thoughts and religious research to private third-party companies. In the midst of this, intrepid and brash Lyra sets off on an adventure to the far north to rescue children stolen by a shadowy group called the Gobblers.

It’s not the plot that bothers me so much; it’s the machinations that drive the plot. Religion mixes with science mixes with religion, tumbling over and over again until it’s impossible to separate the two unlike parts. And, like always, it is the children who are caught in the middle.

Without going into the complexities of the human/daemon relationship, perhaps the simplest way of explaining a daemon is that it is a human’s soul. In Lyra’s world, humans are accompanied everywhere by animal familiars who reflect the deeply held emotions within a person’s heart. Separation from the daemon is painful and potentially deadly, leaving the severed person more zombie than human. The Church severs kidnapped children to prevent them from Original Sin; Science uses the energy created from separating child from daemon to eliminate death. In both cases, children are used as sacrifices.

What bothered me on a deep level was the extremism. I hate extremists in whatever environment they choose to settle in—religion (complete with its flipside, militant atheism), government, science. The inevitable outcome is criminal short-sightedness, an urge to do the right thing and only creating evil. Sure, the Church wishes to banish Original Sin and Science wants to eradicate death, but to what end? And does it justify the suffering of innocents?

The Golden Compass shines a light on this strange dichotomy through the lens of young adult fiction. Yet, I feel that it takes an adult, with all of his or her experience, to truly fathom the depths to which humans can sink in the name of G-d or knowledge. And if there is a kid in elementary school reading this right now who understands, then I pity him.