The Marriage Plot by Jeffery Eugenides

I picked up the marriage plot because I greatly enjoyed Middlesex and heard that The Marriage Plot was a little lighter, perfect for a relaxing spa day.

The three main characters are senior Liberal Arts undergraduate students at Brown University.  Madeleine is a notably beautiful literature major hoping to publish her Victorian writing analysis. Her main beau, Leonard, started as a tall handsome smarter-than-thou philosophy student then spiraled tragically into poorly medicated manic depression.  The completion of the love triangle is Mitchell, who does his job poorly and mostly pines from afar. Very far. He pines from Paris, London, and then from Calcutta.

I feel like the love triangle line wasn’t as love-triangley as the book flap makes it out to be. Sure, there is a third person in the love story, but Mitchell doesn’t make much of an impact on Madeleine’s decision making, and she never really reciprocates his love at all. The thing that comes closest to making this trio a love triangle is one awkwardly poignant description of Leonard’s single sexual fantasy of Mitchell and Madeleine together. I hope that didn’t sound weird, that accepting inclusion of the most banal and disgusting aspect of our lives is what makes Jeffery Eugenides an excellent author.

The heft of the book comes from long sprawling dialogues that give me an idea what it must be like to be an introspective liberal arts student in college. They talk about things like Nietzsche and finding yourself. These are things I could not personally identify with. They spoke about philosophy like you weren’t anyone until you had an existential crisis. It was fun to play along, to be apart of that conversation. It made the characters people I didn’t know, instead of cardboard cutouts representing myself.

(spoilers)

The book takes a turn after Leonard and Madeleine get married. It was a wedding in a book that was completely unsatisfying. It happened without any description what so ever. The scenes that took place on the honeymoon were downright strange. These scenes were not charming, although they very well could have been. Sure, Leonard was getting more and more insane as time went on. I felt like the most manic he sounded was during the taffy shop incident, and didn’t have to be pronounced during the count Dracula casino incident.

(end spoilers)

Of the three protagonists, Madeleine was the least fleshed out. At one point she was described as an upper west side looking woman, and that felt like a surprise. At that point, I had no idea what she looked like. People would describe her as sexy, pretty, and composed, but nothing more was ever said. She is also described as very upper middle class. Her father is described as the president of a very small college, and inexplicably pays for everything. Madeleine seems to get everything she ever wants without so much as a thank you.  She doesn’t act like she deserves it, recognizes her priveledge, or even acknowledges its there. She just is, and things just come to her. Perhaps Madeleine is simply not decisive, aware,  and confused about her future, but I don’t think so. I think this the weakest part of the book. Madeleine was poorly drawn. In retrospect, The Virgin Suicides was about young men observing the strange habits of young women. Perhaps, Eugenides shouldn’t be remembered as the man that draws interesting young female characters, but rather, has always tried his best to observe them.

While Madeleine was poorly drawn, Leonard and Mitchell were very interesting. I loved hearing about Mitchell finding his religion. I thought he responded to situations in interesting and insightful ways. The scene in Calcutta with the agronomist was especially memorable. His embarrassing moment in Greece when he tried to speak in tongues was also interesting. It was one of those moments that happens to everyone, but are rarely shared. He took a leap of faith, and it didn’t pan out.

My favorite moment with Leonard was the moment he kissed the taffy girl. It was so bizarre, yet, you didn’t realize he was crazy until that moment. That moment shed new light on all his activities that day. Those moments are amazing. Its like how at the end of The Descent when you realize that she killed her friends.  

The thing that put me off the most about this book was the upper middle class white privilege every character except Leonard possessed. I read a review before I started reading that said that this book was Eugenides attempt at capturing the essence what it meant to be a young American. When I found out that he meant rich white kids in college, I was heavily put off. The characters were making choices they had the luxury to make. They could think of things like religion, love, and health because they didn’t have to think about money and self sufficiency. Is that how everyone else grew up? Because I didn’t. It’s a nitpicky thing, and it doesn’t put me off from the overall experience.

I highly recommend this book. It was a good read, and I enjoyed every page.

Honeymoon by James Patterson

I have no idea why this novel is called Honeymoon. There wasn't even a honeymoon in the story. I guess after you become the most prolific author in the world, titles don't mean so much.

The story is about the stunningly beautiful brunette Nora who happens to kill the men in her life for money. She raises a few red flags when she transfers a huge sum of money from her most recently dead beaus account into her own, and an investigation begins. An insurance agent named John O'Hara poses as an insurance salesman who steps into her life and makes the near fatal mistake of sleeping with her. They go through a small period of cat and mouse and eventually justice is served.

There is a B story about a briefcase and some offshore accounts. It was supposed to tie the story together and I think may have tried to make some sweeping commentary on american politics, but it was too little too late. You couldn't add weight to this book even if you put an anvil on it.

This book is complicated, recommendation-wise. Although I can't say that I recommend this book, I could definitely use this opportunity to recommend James Patterson novels in general, especially this one (know what I mean?). It is an extremely fast addicting read. I can't say I'm better for it. The chapters are short, the women are beautiful. The plot is sparse, as if it just a backdrop for the antics of the glossy magazine characters. Its complicated, but you can't say the same about the story

The Lucky One by Nicholas Sparks

This is my first Nicholas Sparks novel, although I must admit that I cried like a baby while watching "The Notebook". (I also cried like a baby when I summarized The Notebook to my friend two days ago). I figured that I wanted to see what type of writing enchants the world population in the way that Sparks seems to do time and time again.

The book is about an ex-marine who walks across country to find a woman. This woman is special to him because she is in a lucky photograph he found in Iraq. The biggest conflict of the book is the woman's ex husband who unreasonably does not want her to date anyone else.

It was pretty enchanting. The ending was very powerful, jumping off of the page like a movie. The ending conflicted greatly with the robotic movements and flat dialog that plagued the rest of the book. It is as as if he wrote a rough draft of the book, then did a second draft of the last two chapters, then published it. 

I'm probably not the first to say that the conflict is flimsy. I will give Sparks some credit though, he certainly gives the exhausting and petty aspects of relationships the gravity that bored housewives probably want. I mean, I don't care about ex-husbands and I think Beth and Logan could have told Clayton to piss off from the beginning and live the rest of their lives in peace, but then again, I have never lived that life and I don't know how stressful that stuff can be.

I had one odd moment while reading this book. I thought "it is all a conspiracy". Sparks isn't a person, he is a program that distills field interviews from the target audience. In this case, it wrote a book that panders to single mothers who feel marginalized by their ex-husbands. What they want is to get love unconditionally without having to work for it. Preferably love will fit right into her life without her having to change anything, maybe he will work in the family business and not have any friends or family for her to deal with. Yup, Logan made a grand gesture of love before he even knew her. She doesn't have to feel good enough to deserve it, she just has to be the person in his photograph. It just seemed too perfect.

And he listened to her vent about her problems without judging her, interrupting her, or even trying to fix her. Sparks made a big point about that.


In Roger Ebert's review of the movie he writes

I've seen him in interviews where he's better-looking than some of his leading men and comes across as sincere. I think he really does believe in his stories, and I think readers sense that.

I bet Ebert got the pandering feeling that compelled him to write this. 

But it was enchanting nonetheless. Maybe robots will write all our books, and we'll be better for it.

Other Notes:
- I sensed this with the late Michael Crichton's work near the end of his career, namely Prey. Editors get insecure and don't push enough when the authors get too famous. The authors just assume that everyone will love the book and it will be turned into a movie. All this causes the books to sound like screenplays. Scenes get grander (with more water) and only actions are described. The author abandons  point of view all together.
-  One plot hole: When everyone is rushing to save the son, how did Clayton know that the tree house was dangerous? He wasn't involved in that at all. Him running out to help was also uncharacteristic. 
- I grew uncomfortable when everyone started calling Clayton simply "the ex". I doubt everyone in the entire town would call him that. It showed me that he didn't have voices ironed out. I just don't think Nana would call him that.
- the cliffhanger being resolved in the epilogue was cute, I liked that.
- This is the first review where I didn't spoil the ending. let me know if you want to know what happened.

-

Adored by Tilly Bagshawe

I liked it. It is a self indulgent womens' glamorous fantasy. Who wouldn't want to feel like the most beautiful woman on earth with all the old money to be astute, all the new money to be lavish, and all the attitude to be in control? For 700 pages I experienced owning Armani suits, Louis Viutton luggage, and Hermes scarves. The plot and characterizations were at times subpar, but that didn't take away from the pleasure-of-the-flesh experiences the book so selflessly displayed.

 A short summary: Duke McMahon, the cowboy movie star and patriarch, survives the novel just long enough to demonstrate an especially glamorous form of cruelty to his wife, Minnie. He moves his mistress in much to the chagrin of his live-in adult children. Its a long book. A bunch of stuff happens and it turns out that the book is about Duke's granddaughter, Siena. She decides that she wants to be a model/actress even though her dad wants her to be a doctor. He disowns her and she flails around wildly and 300 pages go by. She eventually meets a wealthy producer that launches her career and challenges her libido. Spoiler: he beats her to a bloody pulp and it ruins her face and therefore her career, driving her back to her family. There is a poorly crafted love story in there and it ends with a wedding.

There is as lot to say if only because the sheer girth of this novel.

The Duke-Minnie relationship was gold and I wish we could have seen more of it before Duke died. I was endlessly enthralled about the thought process behind Minnie standing it. How on earth could a self respecting woman allow her husband's mistress to move in with them? That is the single defining quality differentiating a wife from a mistress. A wife takes care of house! A mistress takes care of the sex! I draw the line right there.
 
The Max-Siena relationship, not so much. Max-Siena is the poorly crafted love story that I spoke about earlier. You could tell that the Max-Siena was end game because he saved her life when they were little kids, but it wasn't believable when they were older. They just fell into eachothers arms out of convenience and began a relationship out of hate-born lust. All the sentimentality and tenderness that they reminisced about after the relationship just was never there. And Max crying endlessly afterwards? That just isn't believable.

There was an insufferable B-Story about Max's brother in England having financial troubles severe enough to "lose the farm", literally. The way it was tied up in a knot at the end, how it held an entire cast of supplementary characters, and how it only served as a place for Max to convalesce all qualified as fat that could have been cut right off the top. The book could have easily been 300 pages shorter and a lot less boring.

It is interesting how a book can be a Pulitzer Prize and not a New York Times best seller. Remember, I am reading this book directly after reading Swamplandia!, a critically acclaimed novel. Quality is such a loose word when judging books. This book isn't earth shattering, and I won't come away with it with an adjusted world view. (Although, maybe I need to buy a new purse). People buy what their friends buy, and then they go and buy what ever is on the New York Times bestsellers list. I just don't think that list is to be trusted to give good books.


Overall, read this book if you 
a) are female
b) feel like having a "light read"
c) Simultaneously want to exalt and execute the fabled 1%

Other notes: 
- Have you noticed how everyone is either tall and slender or 5'4?
- A 5'4 model? pft, maybe in SPAIN
- Is it just me, or is Max and Hunter two halves of the same person?
- Of course a book that exalts beauty to the extent that it does would have Poor Laurie die a spinster.
- Just because the second to half chapter is written in past tense doesn't mean that the book should be winding down.

Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L James

I can't say that I enjoyed this book. That being said, I read the whole thing in 2 days.

Fifty Shades of Grey is about a young virgin new grad meeting a powerful and handsome entrepreneur. She is delighted to begin a sexual relationship with him  only to find that his BDSM sexual predilections frighten and confuse her. She is willing to partake because its the only way they can be together. At the end, she decides that she feels shortchanged and walks away.  

That was an extremely sparse summary. I have ready many other reviews about this  book and a surprising majority do not summarize the plot line. That is because one doesn't come to this book for the suspenseful plot line (except for perhaps the climax, har har). People come to this book because it is a novelty in many ways. This book represents a community people who felt overlooked by the publishing community and self published against all odds. Without the internet, fanfiction would never see the light of day. And now, with e-readers becoming a norm, a book birthed out of Twilight fandom can be a #1 New York Times Bestseller. Also, women have massive buying power, and its not common that an undiluted smutty book can be so popular.

For porn, this book is mediocre. I wouldn't say that one could throughougly enjoy this book one handed, persay. For high brow fiction, this book is just as well written as many of the other current best sellers. I was suprised. It is better than what I read of the original Twilight. Ana has a distinct personality and I can understand her actions and her rationale. She compares herself to characters in classical books. She isn't just some girl. Christian Grey is the idolized Adonis, but he is still human. He can be creepy in an old-man sort of way. The characters feel like real people that I am glad that I don't know.

The book ended awkwardly in a way that funnels me into the next book. The climax occured in the last 10 pages with her standing up to him and leaving. It doesn't feel like an end of the relationship. It felt like a brief 2 days of weeping before going back to him type of seperation.  The author didn't follow the classical 5 part plot structure, seen below

 

It was more like this

This might not be exactly fair. One can look at the local maximas and minimas of the sprawling contract negotiation as rising and falling plot line, I just do not think this is so. Once you introduce constant hedonistic sex into a story, it edges out all other emotion in a story and the plot just stops to watch the show.

Other Notes
- They are making a movie. I bet they are going to put so much vanilla frosting on this that its going to come out rated R. I say I am not going to watch it, but I probably will.

- I feel like I understand the motivations behind Twilight now that I've read this. I never understood the plight of Bella Swan before and thought she should just head out with Jacob and let herself be happy. While I think Ana may not have been better off with Jose, I can finally see why Bella was conflicted at least.

- The book ending was not satisfying, as noted in my plot structure argument above. I hate how authors are making trilogies instead of well placed and structured individual books. I noticed this about the transition between the Hunger Game novels as well. This feels like my 6th grade class when I was learning how to start and end paragraphs. We don't just start a new line and indent when the paragraph length looks good on the page, we have to finish our idea first.

I am not going to read the next novel in the trilogy, 50 Shades Darker. Not right away, at least. I am going to shift gears into Stienbeck for next week.

Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

I bought my copy of the Hunger Games at target for $7.19. After the first few chapters I worried I accidentally bought the dumbed-down discount version. Perhaps that acute sense of an overly pedagogic tone was my fault. I shouldn't be so quick to judge a book meant for the YA audience.  In that respect, the book performed wonderfully, almost brilliantly, as it laid out a story just gruesome enough to be fascinating, and just angsty enough to be relatable by someone who is just about to grow out of it.

 I am sure you know what the Hunger Games is about by now. The movie had the third highest grossing movie of all time. The book takes place in a far future when North America has been rearranged by a civil war into a Capitol and 12 outlying districts that support it. The districts are poor and the Capitol works hard to suppress them. One of their suppression tools is something called the Hunger Games, a romanesque game where 24 children have to fight to the death while the whole country watches.


I can see why teenagers go gaga over this stuff. Adults see the hunger games as a metaphor for the voyeurism that is our media, but I can tell the analogy hits a lot closer to home. The book is all about being watched, and the attempt to behave accordingly while you know that everyone around you is your potential enemy. That sounds a lot like MY high school, at least.

The movie missed surprisingly few things. One of which was Katniss's personal growth. She started the book with the assurance that she was a powerful young woman by the ability to support her family. She ended the book with the realization that sometimes she didn't understand her own feelings. The other thing the movie left out, quite  brilliantly I might add, was the last 40 pages of the book. The last 40 pages of the book acted as a segue to what I believe will be the drama in the second book. It would look silly in the last 10 minutes of the movie if they never made another one. The last 40 pages were about were where you realize that in the arena you at least that there were rules. There is no telling what can happen outside of the arena, when you don't have the assurance of a caring audience to keep things humane.

A notes on onw the books potential flaws. I don't understand her relationship with Cinna. That was one of the things I was looking forward to understanding after watching the movie. They seem to have such a deep and loving relationship without apparently having ever having anything to bind them together.

Overall it was quite fun to be wrapped up in the popular fiction hype. I look forward to my review of the second book in the trilogy, Catching Fire.


Trilogy Reviews
Read Review for The Hunger Games (Hunger Game Series #1)
Read Review for Catching Fire (Hunger Games Series #2)
Read Review for Mockingjay (Hunger  Games Series #3)

Bossy Pants by Tina Fey

I wish I could have done a 24 hour rental with this book. The writing is large with perhaps 1.5" spacing. The pages are so thick and stiff that the paperbacks may last as long as the hardcovers. As you can see in the image, this 275 page book looks as thick as a copy of Moby Dick. (insert penis joke here). All of these things contributed to the psychological effect of a really-quick-read.

I loved it. Learning about her backstory helped bridge some of the gap between her 30 rock writing and her SNL jokes. It was especially funny seeing some of the same themes come up. The flat footed overeater she portrays in 30 rock was a tragic projection of one her jerk ex boyfriends. I felt her pain, I really did.

My biggest qualm, however, is too salient to ignore. I just wish she knew what she was writing about before she started writing. The book is hilarious, I give you that, but I think it would have been more powerful if she chose which story to tell. A whole book could have been written about her childhood, her rise to fame, and even how she handles being a successful woman today. Having all of that fascinating material glazed over in the book just made it a shallow read.

The lack of message was also evident in the pacing. I was sucked into her backstory for the first half, then sent into a sporadic blogpost style opinion essay about her random thoughts for the second. I was especially annoyed by her should-I-or-shouldn't-I essay about having a second child. It came off as a panicked journal entry and should have ended on the cutting room floor.

But its not often that great books are wonderful books, and this was a lovely and entertaining read. I mean, if I am going to laugh aloud in crowded coffee shops, then I should at least give the same impression of pleasure to you. Go read this book, you'll have fun.

Read the New York Times book review HERE.

4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss

Tim Ferriss lives an awesome life. In this book he explains how we too can change our entire lives by rejecting the common path and forging our own by joining the "new rich". He inspires goals, and gives rudimentary business advice and suggestions.

Although his techniques are unorthodox, it is fun to imagine a life where we aren't stuck in a box, being forced to work until a miracle age when we can stop. You too can travel the world on all the money you need by starting a business that makes money for you. It sounds plausible, and if anything, it can convince you to do something you may never have thought of doing before.

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larson

I don't know where I heard about this book. I don't think I know anyone who as read it. Despite all this, I bought this paperback copy from Target because I felt like Everyone was reading it. Four days later, I don't feel cheated. This book offered wonderfully griping suspense, damaged heroes, and despicable villains. Hundreds of pages passed seemingly with a blink of the eye.

The tale is about Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist that writes a story about a high powered CEO, and loses a trial because of it. He risks damaging the magazine of which he was a founder. A rich company owner takes advantage of his dire situation and asks him to help solve a murder that happened 40 years ago. New evidence is brought to light and events occur that lead Mikael to believe that it may not be such a cold case after all. I'm not going to spoil it for you. Besides, the plot is so intricate that explaining it might take as much space as the actual book.

What makes the book stand out aside from the compelling plot are the characters. The book offers two heroes. The girl with the dragon tattoo is Lisbeth Salander, a tough little young adult with major social disabilities. She has a stellar mind which she applies to investigative research, but she also has a repellent attitude that hints at an interesting back story. The lead male is adequately sharp when it comes to negotiations, but an idiot when it comes to women. 

I'm not saying that the book was perfect. Here are my chief complaints.

- It may be a low blow, but its awfully hard to read about something that happened in Sweden. Its unfortunate that my only experience with swedish language is from Ikea, but it has tainted my experience in ways the book can not help. Everytime I read the name of a city, I think of a delightful paper lamp.  I have no idea how to pronounce an umlaut. Its come to the point where everytime a swedish word is written, my eyes skim the word. If a reader skims words too often, their eyes will start to glaze over the page. Getting over the first 50 pages without being completely glazed over was the hardest hurdle in reading this book.

- The plot ebbed and flowed nicely, but when the mystery ended, I didn't care much about the corporate revenge. The Big Reveal should have happened at the end. As it stands now, the last 100 pages are a whisper.

- I see that the theme may have been about the hatred of women. I can't draw any conclusion about this. It seems that some women are poor murder victims and some just need to be beaten. At the end, did we find out that Mikael too hated women? I can't tell.

- Making up a situation where a forty year old murder could be so adequately documented and still solvable is brilliant. The village was isolated on an island with a blocked road, and everyone in town was photographed multiple times on a particular day. The fact that the solution lied outside of this hermetically sealed space felt cheap. How could I have guessed that?

All and all a good read. The book was 600 pages long, but I finished it casually in a couple of hours. I see amazon has copies for a 5 spot now. I can say that is an amazing value for this satisfying experience.