Two or Three Things I Know for Sure
Dorothy Allison
94 pages
Copy: mine (used)
Read: April 13, 2015 (for school)
Spoilers: vague details, but nothing specific

I read this book this morning, in one sitting. It was homework for my Feminist Rhetoric Pedagogy class (wow, that sounds elitist, doesn't it), and I'm very pleased it was assigned. I'll admit I've struggled with this class a bit. I'm a feminist in practice, but not so much in theory (more on that soon--I'm planning to write about my feminism in the near future). This class has, obviously, been heavy on feminist theory (and feminist rhetorical theory...). At any rate, I appreciate Allison's book, and I'm glad that I had this chance to read it.

This slim volume is not for the faint of heart. Allison details her traumas, her sex life, and her mental health, all of which is heart-wrenching. Understand that when you read this book you will encounter rape, sex, and rage. I'd be careful about recommending (or assigning) this book--this is not an easy book to read.

That being said, Allison does a glorious job. The book is expertly crafted. It loops in circles--or perhaps squiggles. We don't quite get the same scenes over and over; rather we move through time, looping between different eras in Allison's life. These loops always make sense and it was only at the very beginning, when I was still meeting people, that I was at all confused.

I think my only complaint about the book is its brevity. I finished it still wanting more. That being said, I would never want to force Allison to dwell on her life events for longer than she wants. I just wish she had taken the opportunity to talk about her mom and her aunts more--and her sisters. The inclusion of pictures definitely helps, but overall I put down the book with very little sense of the other women in Allison's life. I might understand her better, but I'm not sure I know anything substantial about the other women in her life.

I am not entirely sure who I would recommend this book too. It is intense and it is painful. It is also shockingly well-written. Certainly anyone interested in Allison ought to read it. Perhaps people who have suffered from trauma (especially sexual trauma) might find Allison's example helpful. She struggled with her experiences, which might be of help to anyone struggling with their own experiences. Honestly, I'd take this book on a case-by-case basis. I would talk to the person, explain what the book is about, and let them decide.

Coping with Books: "The End of Your Life Book Club"

Book: The End of Your Life Book Club
Author: Will Schwalbe
Pages: 336
Copy: library book
Read: I finished this book on December 26
Spoilers: the mother dies at the end--but you know that from page one

I still can't figure out why I don't love this book. I mean, I read it quickly and enjoyed it well enough. But something about it is off. This partly may be because I've read few memoirs--I may just not know quality when I see it. But I don't think that's it. It could be the writing style--though I usually abandon books that aren't written in a way I like. It's not death--I've read about that before. It might be the cancer--my mom went through breast cancer--but I don't really think that would bother me. Something about this book niggles at me, like a vaguely sore tooth.

The premise is engaging--a man starts a two-person book club with his dying mother. They read a wide variety of books, and he writes about each book and his mother's reaction. These stories are intertwined with stories from his life and his mother's life. At times the organization is a little unwieldy--I think Schwalbe is trying to accomplish an awful lot--but it's always pleasant to read.

In many ways, Schwalbe has provided an engaging guide to caring for a dying parent. He is so careful and so thoughtful, it is clear that he loves his mother and wants the best for her. I don't know that this book would help anyone who's had a parent recently die cope, but I think this book would help some who is going through the final stages of a parent's life--or even just preparing for the day when that comes.

This is a moving elegy, a thoughtful tribute. It doesn't take many pages before you are as in love with Mary Anne Schwalbe as Will is. Her death is moving. Schwalbe lets you into his private thoughts and feelings through his mother's illness, and such vulnerability is quite amazing. The reader isn't held at arm's length through this book; the reader is brought into the hospital, into the house, into chemo therapy. I appreciate that. Schwalbe has provided another way to cope with an ill parent, and I'm grateful he is as open as he is.

Perhaps a second reading, some day, will help me figure out what it is that is bothering me about this book. Perhaps this is just a prickly book that needs to grow on me. I will certainly think about this book often. I will certainly try to sell this book at work. I think this book is good for everyone--people with parents still living, people with parents dead, people with ill parents, people with healthy parents. Young people who don't need to worry about their parents; people who do worry about their parents. This book is quite readable and I think people who only read sparingly will still enjoy it. Find a copy and give it a shot--it may change the way you think of fatal illnesses.

--Benvolia

Not As Messy As You'd Think: "In Praise of Messy Lives"

Book: In Praise of Messy Lives
Author: Katie Roiphe
Pages: 261
Copy: library copy
Read: mid-December
Spoilers: back to essays!

I requested this book from the library because I read a review that discussed how controversial Katie Roiphe is. I was excited--a woman essayist who starts fights! This is the woman for me! Naturally, her book was a complete disappointment.

Her writing style isn't that interesting. She may attack Joan Didion in a long essay, but her own style isn't so different. She uses some personal details, but never fleshes them out (she complains that Joan Didion's memoir is described as "'deeply and intensely personal,' and yet what is striking is how impersonal the book actually is." Roiphe's essays may be "deeply and intensely personal," but they're still strikingly impersonal). She has little in the way of style--I didn't linger over any of her sentences, the way I did with Joan Didion and even Anne Fadiman. Her writing style is academic and utilitarian. There is little color and no music in her sentences. This is the style of modern academic essays, but I expect more from personal essays--especially essays sold to the wider public.

Perhaps the most aggravating part of this collection of essays is the banality of Roiphe's insights. It is no compliment to myself when I say I could have made the same observations as Roiphe. She doesn't enlighten--she points out the obvious. There are few interesting criticisms and almost no intriguing social commentary. George Orwell could take a very basic and very boring part of culture and make astonishing claims about what those things said about society as a whole. Roiphe can't do that.

What intrigued me the most is the fact that Roiphe seems secretly conservative. She writes all about her unconventional family--she is raising two children on her own--and writes at great length about all the criticism she gets. But I never got the feeling that she actually accepts her situation. To me, it seems that she actually agrees with all the criticism. But there's also the sense that she loves to be a martyr. "Look at poor me, raising two fatherless children! Give me your pity and your criticism, because I deserve it!" In more capable hands, Roiphe's life story could have been striking. (I couldn't help but think that if Cheryl Strayed had written Roiphe's book, it would have been absolutely the most stunning book of the year. In Roiphe's hands, everything falls utterly flat.)

Only one essay from this collection has stayed with me. In "Making the Incest Scene," Roiphe writes about the way that incest has become the go-to "dark secret" of modern literature and how no one does it believably. While I think her criticism is spot on, I'm not sure incest is as pervasive as she imagines. Still, while I've thought about that essay once or twice since I read this collection, her analysis and observations in that essay are as superficial as all the other essays. The essay has no point but to point out incest. It goes no deeper.

I really can't figure out what is so controversial about Roiphe. Once or twice I caught myself frowning as I read her essays, but I never felt the need to rail against her. Her essay on Joan Didion bothered me a little, but I thought she made fair points. How does this woman start fights? Perhaps it is the way she writes about her family--I could see some "family values" readers becoming irate about that. Still, how she's earned a name as a "bad girl" eludes me. Orwell says more outrageous things, and he's been dead for almost 63 years. Roiphe is going to have to try a lot harder if she wants to make a lasting impression on American letters.

I don't hate this book, exactly, I'm just disappointed. Yet again another essayist has failed. Perhaps the essay form is just too out-of-date; it seems like no one knows how to do it right anymore. How can a collection this light and shallow cause any sort of controversy at all? Is it because a woman is expressing her opinions? I can only hope that isn't the only reason. Surely women are allowed to express their opinions without being labelled a "controversial writer." George Will writes his opinion all the time, and he's been called "the most powerful journalist in America."

This might be a good introduction to essays--I mean, Roiphe is readable, and shallowness of interpretation might help a person get use to reading cultural essays. Still, I'm not sure exactly who the target audience here is. Women? I hope not. Women deserve well-written essays too. I suppose I can only recommend this to people who want to stay abreast of pop literary culture. I really don't care what is written, it has to be written well. Roiphe needs to learn more about craftsmanship before she can become truly enduring.

--Benvolia

Is Marriage Really Worth It?: "Middlemarch"

Book: Middlemarch
Author: George Eliot (or Mary Anne Evans, if you prefer)
Pages: 802, including endnotes
Copy: a Barns and Noble Classics I bought years ago (it's pretty ugly and it has tons of typos--find a better copy to read)
Read: I read this for book group, so I started it the middle of October and finished it November 11th
Spoilers: exceedingly minor ones--don't worry, I don't give away specifics

This book came with such high praise, I should have known I wouldn't love it. Almost without fail, whenever a book comes with recommendations, I dislike it. That being said, I didn't hate this book. I can see myself reading this book again in 20 or 30 years and having it make a huge impact on me. That's not to say that this book is meant for 40 or 50 year-olds. I think it has a lot to say to young people, especially young people who are in a relationship for the wrong reasons.

One of the reasons I didn't overwhelming enjoy this book is because I just ended a relationship I was in for the wrong reasons. This meant I read most of the book cringing and yelling at the various characters who marry exactly the wrong person for exactly the wrong reasons. That being said, I think this book has one of the most important quotes any young person could read:

She was not in the least teaching Mr. Casaubon to ask if he were good enough for her, but merely asking herself anxiously how she could be good enough for Mr. Casaubon. (Chapter V)

 That is the sort of advice everyone should get quite early in their lives, especially women. I think women spend much of their lives changing themselves to fit whatever they think their men want, and never pause to wonder why their men aren't trying to do the same. That's why I think this quote is so important to many young person, not just women. I don't think many men realize just how much women feel the pressure to change. (I'm sorry to hold up society's emphasis on heterosexual relationships--if anyone wants to chime in about how this dynamic works in relationships I haven't experienced, please do. I'd love to hear if it's different, the same, more complex, less complex...however it works.)

Now to the plot. This is a book about marriage. Unlike Jane Austen, who traces the courtship of her characters but ends the novel at the marriage, George Eliot explores the actual marriage. Courtship is basically skipped, but the marriage part is meticulously detailed. This is both tedious and endlessly fascinating. There are two marriages that are explored in great detail, and one was a great deal more interesting to me than the other, but I think the two different marriages need to be contrasted against one another. No matter how annoying I find Dr. Lydgate and his foul wife, his marriage contrasts sharply with Dorothea's marriage to Mr. Casaubon. If one or the other were missing, the novel would fall apart.

Eliot does have a few side issues she wants to explore, though, which means that several chunks of this novel discuss marriage only indirectly. One of these side issues is medicine in the 1820s and 1830s, a topic that is about as exciting as it sounds. A great deal of medical reform began around this time, but even Eliot can't make it that interesting. Instead, it boils down to petty bickering between the old guard and modern interlopers. Perhaps to those interested in medical history these sections will be funny or more interesting than the marriages, but to me they distracted from the main plot and slowed the novel down. There is also a blackmail plot, which is marginally more interesting than the medical history. However, the bad past doesn't seem that bad and the victim suffers what I thought was an unrealistic punishment. However, I think my reaction may be a modern one; it certainly seems plausible that people of the 1800s would have been horrified. Finally, there is the issue of the Reform Act, a historical event that seems fascinating but Eliot treats the subject unevenly. In several sections, the Act comes to center stage, but Eliot never really looks at the subject in depth. Perhaps the original audience of the novel would have known all the circumstances surrounding the Act, but I think Eliot could have fleshed out the debate more and made it more central. It certainly seems more interesting than the medical subplot.

I noticed a few interesting things about this novel. Eliot seems to have some sort of economic or capitalist critique going on, but it's hard to tease out. It's hard to say if she's actually critiquing industrialism and the other trappings of capitalism, or just noticing their effect on the lives of people. I think it would take a great deal of research to figure out just what she's saying (research that I don't want to engage in, primarily because I find this novel just tedious enough that actually spending that sort of time with it would probably make me want to stop reading altogether). Also interesting is the way Eliot uses babies as a way to characterize marriage. This is so unrealistic that it's endlessly fascinating. One marriage is childless, but the rest of the marriages result in at least two children. Somehow Eliot uses children to reflect on the strength of a marriage, while also using children to reflect on the parents. I don't want to give too much away, but if you read this book, pay attention to the babies. They seem loaded with symbolic importance, the sort of symbolic importance that is absolutely impossible in real life. In an otherwise realistic novel, this symbol is striking.

Eliot's real power lays in her asides and in the voice she gives her narrator. She has some of the finest insults in 19th century literature and some of the strongest observations in literature. The narrator of Middlemarch comes and goes unpredictably, but whenever the narrator is present, you're privy to some of the funniest observations (or drolly accurate summaries) I've ever read. That being said, this book is going to appeal to very specific people. People who like classics could attempt this book, but I'd recommend reading it in a group. Otherwise you might not have the strength to force yourself through it. Because this novel looks particularly at marriage, I'd recommend it to classics readers who are marriage or are in a committed relationship (not because I want to cause problems, but because I think it's always good to think about your relationships and what you're sacrificing). This is also a classic in feminist literature (if it isn't, it should be). Eliot looks directly at the limited choices women have (marry or don't marry, and even if you do marry your choices are incredibly limited) and how those limited choices destroy women. Finally, to any young people who feel ambitious, I'd suggest you read this book. Suffer through some of the dull parts and you'll learn all you need to know about adult relationships--their pitfalls and their joys.

--Benvolia

Flying Home: Katherine Catmull’s “Summer and Bird”

Book: Summer and Bird

Author: Katherine Catmull

Pages: 344

Copy: advanced reader

Read: finished August 27

Spoilers: there isn’t a traditional happy ending: biggest spoiler

Katherine Catmull’s book is wonderful, from its fairy tale atmosphere to its snappy authorial asides.  While Summer and Bird is aimed at readers 10 and up, I think almost anyone could read this book happily (which means grown-ups can buy a hardcover that isn’t overpriced: yay!).  The sisters are realistic and complex, the book weaves between points of view delightfully, and the writing is beautiful.

I love this book enough that it is difficult to know where to begin.  I think one of the finest points about this book is its use of fairy tales and mythology.  Catmull borrows from multiple stories (I think—this may be a more straight-forward retelling of a story I just haven’t read—correct me if you know better), but most of all she captures the atmosphere.  It’s impossible to describe the proper fairy tale atmosphere exactly, but Catmull nails it.  She obviously knows her stuff.

Another important facet of this book is its accurate depiction of sisters.  Summer and Bird are not simple characters and their relationship is as complex as any real relationship.  There is jealousy, but there’s also real love and tenderness.  The two girls will always have to struggle to remain on good terms, but it’s obvious they will always try because they love each other.

The more I think about this book, the better it seems.  The ending is not the “Happily ever after” of Disney movies, but the more difficult salvaging of the pieces.  This book displays a deeply disrupted family that will never completely heal, and that impossibility makes the book all the better.  I think in some ways this book may help any child with a spilt family, if only because Catmull refuses to sugarcoat the difficulties of accepting a parent that has (hopefully inadvertently) caused pain.

Catmull’s use of birds is astounding.  She has an eye for details, carefully differentiating all the different types of birds and their different habits.  (Perhaps this book is a good way to encourage future birders!)  While few of the birds inhabit their real habitat, that Catmull even bothers to describe such diversity is refreshing.  (Some kind of environmental reading of this book would be very interesting to read, if incredibly difficult to undertake.)

This book is fantastic.  Go read it, immediately, while I try to come up with a review that is more articulate.  Maybe my second reading will let me describe it in a less dazed fashion.

--Benvolia

Ms. Reader: Anne Fadiman’s “Ex Libris”

Title: Ex Libris

Author: Anne Fadiman

Pages: 157

Copy: borrowed from Sonoma County Library

Read: September 4-5, 2012

Spoilers: Again with the essays!

Yesterday, wishing to avoid investing my entire paycheck in books as I occasionally do when the feeling hits, I wandered around my public library and collected a huge stack of books (huge not in quantity but in size).  I’ll admit the diversity of topics represented in this pile makes me giddy: two Joan Didions (two hardcovers, one 1122 and the other 223 pages), a book simply titled Dissent in America (hardcover, 792 pages including index, but it looks as large as a dictionary), Reading Lolita in Tehran (a medium-sized paperback, 343 pages), a book on anarchism between the mid-1800s and the early 1900s (a heavy hardcover of 482 pages), and, of course, Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris (a charming shrimp of a paperback that barely covers 157 pages).  Perhaps the pile isn’t so large—I may have only been overwhelmed by the weight and the slipperiness of the dust jackets.

At any rate, I came home and consumed in two short sittings Ex Libris.  (Perhaps its slimness made it the most appealing.)  While Fadiman is no Didion (Fadiman’s essays are somehow softer, lacking the crisp phrasing of a truly accomplished essayist), she is a funny writer who obviously loves her books.  That makes her a saint to me.

Ex Libris contains short essays, each on some aspect of her reading life, whether it is her obsessive habit of proofreading everything or her guilty pleasure (catalogs).  As in any essay collection, some are better than others.

Fadiman opens with the fantastic essay “Marrying Libraries,” a meditation on what it means to combine libraries with the person you love and to whom you are married.  Along the way the essay explores the many ways people organize their books (perhaps by color, or maybe by author, or even by continent, as well as all the ways to organize within a category—once you divide your books by continent, how do you organize them?  Fadiman’s response may be overly complicated [British in chronological order, American by author], but a quite reasonable response if you’re obsessed with organizing your library).  (I reorganize my library at least four times a year, always in different ways.  As my best friend pointed out, books need new neighbors with which to converse.  I’ve always liked the idea of creating strange juxtapositions, just so I can ponder what sort of arguments books will get into as neighbors.  My two, double-packed shelves of mass-market paperbacks are giving me the most fun right now.  Somehow I doubt Carl Sagan’s Contact often ends up sandwiched between This Side of Paradise and Penguin Modern Poets 9: Denise Levertov, Kenneth Rexroth, William Carlos Williams, but I image its quite happy there.  And I couldn’t guess what sort of circumstances would lead to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars ending up between Dialogues of Plato and Anna Karenin, but Plato needs to loosen up a little and read some science fiction.  How Red Mars is getting along with Tolstoy, though, is beyond my ken.  See how much fun this is?)

I also enjoyed her essay “My Odd Shelf,” a discussion of her literary obsession (failed polar expeditions—successful ones aren’t romantic enough).  Fadiman defines an odd shelf as “a small, mysterious corpus of volumes whose subject matter is completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection, reveals a good deal about its owner” (21).  I hardly know which shelf is my Odd Shelf (I’m tempted to say my whole library is an Odd Shelf, but that seems doubtful).  Perhaps my environmental shelf is the obvious choice, though I’m tempted to say it’s my Penguin shelf, since I have a Penguin shelf right now, but I’m not sure devotion to a publishing house really counts.  (By the way, you know you’ve entered a whole new level of book-love when you can rank your favorite publishing houses.  Currently, my ranking runs thus: Penguin [within that category: their old mass market paperbacks, their beautifully designed hardcover Penguin Classics, their fantastic yearly Great Ideas collection, and finally their black paperback Penguin classics—they’re new stuff doesn’t count], Oxford Classics, Modern Library, and, finally, Vintage.)  At any rate, Fadiman will make you look at your library and try to work out which parts make the library and which parts make the Odd Shelf, a fun activity for a lazy day.

My only complaint with the collection is Fadiman’s occasional conceit and snobbery.  The essay that explores her obsession with proofreading demonstrates the drawbacks of being too honest—while admitting to her snobby garners some sympathy, she lost all my support on the last page of the essay, where she outlines all the places she could have saved various people or groups money with her affliction (as she calls it).  While the first step is always admitting to your quirky snobberies, the second step is letting everyone else live their lives without your judgment.  (Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language” contains some salient advice: Excellent writing “has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one’s meaning clear.”  Unnecessary apostrophes may be annoying, Ms. Fadiman, but they rarely make meaning unclear.)  The other essay of Fadiman’s that I disliked is “Eternal Ink,” a rather strange piece about her favorite pen and its replacement, her computer.  One thing that has always annoyed me about writers speaking about how they write is the strange emphasis they place on outdated writing techniques, as if writing with a quill automatically makes you a better author.  (Wendell Berry, who uses a pencil, is the only author I’ve come across that actually has a solid, unromantic reason for using older technology, which he explains in his essay “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer.”)

To conclude, I’d recommend this collection of essays to any booklover of any age (the youngest readers will, at any rate, like to chew on the edges, which I think would make Fadiman quite pleased).  This book would make an excellent present if you have no idea what else to get a person who loves to read (especially if you don’t see eye-to-eye with them about their preferred reading material).  To those who are a bit daring, this might be a good book to present to people who don’t read.  I can’t think of a better introduction to book-love than this collection of essays, which, I hope, can convert even the staunchest anti-reader.

--Benvolia

PS I’m sorry, Ms. Fadiman, if you read this and locate egregious grammatical mistakes.  I belong to the Orwellian school of grammar.

Blood, Guts, Mayhem, Death...: “The Running Man”

Title: The Running Man (from The Bachman Books: Four Early Novels by Stephen King)
Author: Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachman)
159 Pages (pages 533-692) (Hardcover)
Read: 27 June 2011
Spoilers: I go over the plot in scant detail but I don’t really give anything away


To begin with, this book is gory.  Really gory.  There’s blood, everywhere.  There are guts, flying.  There are gunshot wounds, which causes most of the blood and guts.  Having never read Stephen King, I can’t say if there is an unusual amount of blood and guts, but there seems to be quite a bit.  The story is fairly interesting, so getting over the gore seems worth it to me.  However, there is also racism, prostitution, anti-homosexual sentiments, and a screaming woman in distress.  So the worth of the novel is sort of a toss-up.


Stephen King writes in the introduction (a weirdly organized essay entitled “Why I Was Bachman” which is interesting but ultimately useless) to this collection that The Running Man “is nothing but story--it moves with the goofy speed of a silent movie, and anything which is not story is cheerfully thrown over the side.”  He seems rather proud of this assessment.  I think it’s perfectly true, but I’m not sure that it makes the story powerful or even particularly noteworthy.


The set-up is simple.  The masses are sedated by watching violent games on television; in many of these games (if not all, it’s hard to tell exactly) the contestants die.  Ben Richards, strapped for money (his cause is noble, of course), becomes a contestant on the most violent and bloody (and rigged) of the shows, The Running Man.  The story follows his attempt to overthrow the system.  Along the way, King makes room for a indictment of pollution and an exploration of class.


King discusses pollution in an interesting way, suggesting that the effects of pollution are felt by the poorest.  The wealthy are able to escape the negative effects of poisonous air and therefore don’t notice it anymore.  Furthermore, the government of The Running Man censors information about pollution and pollution levels, raising questions about the government’s involvement with environmental injustice.  I think he raises interesting points about pollution and environmental justice, but he discards the environmental question when it starts to take the novel over.  This weakens his argument some, as well as making pollution seem unimportant.  However, this depiction suggests, very powerfully, that environmental issues fade when a person is confronted with terrible personal trauma.  It is depressing, but seemingly accurate.  I think that if King had chosen to focus on the pollution issue he would have had a much more interesting and powerful novel.  As it is, he settled for an action story without any attempts at making it an “issue book.”


King’s discussion of class moves in and out of focus, but remains a theme throughout.  Obviously King has great sympathy and understanding for the suffering of the poor and unemployed and he does his best to uphold them as the better sort of person.  In some ways, this echoes Orwell’s use of proles in 1984, proles being considered the greatest hope for the future, a dream that is complicated by reality.  However, the ending of the novel doesn’t provide closure or even hope for the future.  King points out class issues without suggesting that the lower classes will ever be able to escape.


Interestingly, two of the lowest class characters are readers, suggesting that class can be escaped through education and imagination.  This vision does not work particularly well in the context of the novel.  Ben Richards is depicted as an action hero, but somehow it is necessary to see him also as a sensitive reader of novels.  The other major reader is a gang member, who belongs to a gang of...readers.  They sneak into the library to read about pollution and how the upper classes cope with poison air.  It’s a bizarre moment in the book, one that made me raise my eyebrows (not that I don’t think people should read).  I think reading is great, and I think everyone should sneak into their libraries to read about pollution.  The scenes just aren’t in keeping with the rest of the novel.  I think perhaps King wanted people to know how important reading is and didn’t work too hard on how to deliver that message.


I think this is a fair dystopian novel.  The novel is more about society than about politics, along the lines of Farhenheit 451 rather than 1984.  That being said, this isn’t the greatest dystopian novel ever written.  I think King was trying to take on racism, but he didn’t make his point strong enough.  He just comes across as possibly racist.  Further, he seems to be trying to fight against anti-gay sentiment, but he fails there too.  This isn’t to say that the book ought to have been longer.  The story would have lost its pop and suffered terribly if it were longer.  I just think King should have worked harder on making his argument stronger.


That being said, I’d recommend this to the same audience as Logan’s Run.  The stories are roughly similar (superhuman runs away from bad guys; there’s even a similar scene of claustrophobia), but Richards seems a little more interesting (perhaps because he’s 28 and not just 21) even as his situation seems a little less plausible.  This isn’t a book for the faint of heart or the easily upset.  This feels like a book that a non-reading teenager (I mean this as nicely as possible) would really like--there’s blood, the main character kicks ass, and a couple important issues are mentioned.  It isn’t boring, it isn’t slow, and it doesn’t stop in the middle for a complicated political discussion (ahem, 1984).


-Benvolia


Also read this week:
Water: Tales of Elemental Spirits, by Robin McKinley and Peter Dickinson (23 June 2011)
The Blue Sword, by Robin McKinley (27 June 2011)

Books for Summer: "Practical Magic"

Title: Practical Magic
Author: Alice Hoffman
244 pages (Hardcover)
Copy: Keene Public Library (Although, I have a copy somewhere in my parents' house.)
Read on: 15 June 2011 (I think I first read it in May or June of 2008, sitting out on the lawn, eating countless pastrami sandwiches. My aunt provided both the book and the pastrami and owned the lawn. It was the right kind of New England summer for it, too, just as it is through most of the book.)
Spoilers: 4ish

Every June, somewhere around solstice, I get the urge to read Practical Magic. Alice Hoffman has a very distinctive voice, one that feels very similar to mine. (No, this is not wholly hubris, people have remarked on the similarity, especially in regards to her work Ice Queen) It is a voice that combines the simplicity of a fairy tale with something much more complex, adult, and ultimately realistic. Practical Magic showcases this voice in the story of the Owens sisters, who encounter almost every kind of love.


I'm usually a little bitter about books about sisters. Sisterhood is much more complicated than books make it seem, especially the books that feature "friends so close they are like sisters". (I have a lot of very dear friends, but I would never wish on them the extremely mixed blessing of being my sister.) Equally as aggravating and inaccurate are the books that take the other direction and feature books about sisters that destroy each others' lives (see, for example, the first three parts of In Her Shoes, by Jennifer Weiner, now a major motion picture! as of five years ago). 

But Hoffman maintains a lovely balance and each set of sisters in the novel is believable as sisters. Three generations of Owens sisters, all of then with varying degrees of magical powers, all learn from themselves and from their family how to love. They learn to love each other as sisters, as nieces, as daughters, and mothers, and aunts. With the exception of the elder aunts, who are content in remembering their lost loves, they learn to love the men who wander precipitously into their lives. Almost missing from the novel is fatherly love. Sally and Gillian--the main set of Owens sisters--are orphans. Sally's husband dies early in the novel and in their relationship, leaving the novel without a true father figure. 

Despite this minor flaw, this remains one of my favorite summer reads. I'd recommend it for anyone with sisters. Or anyone in a long term relationship. Or anyone between long term relationships. It is a novel that inspires love, second chances. The last phrase of the novel says it all: "Fall in love as often as possible". Fall in love with the book, if not anything else. 


-Mercutia