The Imagined Conversations of Ill-Conceived Characters: Anthropologie, Part Trois

Put your hitchin’ hand in the air, ladies, Anthropologie has gone and gotten itself a wedding website! Finally, a place for us women to buy things for our weddings that look homemade and possibly water-damaged but actually cost hundreds of dollars. At long last, we can convey our antiquated-but-not-really style, charm, and quirkiness with mass produced items on the most important day of all our lives, bar none. I could not be more excited! Not because I’m getting married, but because I have EYES and a HEART.

I give you the latest episode in the ongoing Adventures of Lucinda and Peony: Lucinda’s Wedding.

***

Lucinda: Oh honeyboocakedarlingscrumptypie! You’ve come back from St. Petersburg for my wedding!

Peony: Oh, Lucinda, I hope this makes up for last time’s little gaffe. It seems like no sooner had I left on my round-the-world trip than you announced you were getting married the following week!

Lucinda: Let’s not even speak of…the gift you brought me last time. Let’s just be grateful that mummy’s pet exotic Siberian gerbils were replaceable. That hateful owl! I can’t even bear to think of it!  Do you know we’re still discovering fecal pellets hidden all over the house? SUCH a furtive creature.

Peony: I wasn’t…aware. Oh, look at this! Did you use a wedding dress as a vase?

Lucinda: Yes! Isn’t it sweet? My wedding planner assures me that no one else has ever had this idea, ever. It's unique! Anyway, welcome to my pre-wedding! We can both change into our dresses for the actual ceremony in my room later.

Peony: Oh, I wasn’t planning on…

Lucinda: SURELY, you can’t have intended to wear white.

Peony: It's not even CLOSE to white...

...it’s a beige-y sort of cream.

Lucinda: I see.

Peony: I don’t know what I can do about it now, Lucinda. I sent my driver to do laps around a distant field, and I don’t have his number. As you know, I don’t use cellular phones, because mine was giving me cancer. I could literally feel it giving me cancer.

Lucinda: If you do not find something else to wear, I’ll have no choice but to exclude you from my wedding.

Peony: Well, it’s not as if anyone would have brought an extra dress, so I don’t see what you can expect me to--

Lucinda: As it happens, I have the perfect thing. It’s very Laura Ashley as a flapper. Very flattering to women with problem areas below the waist, you know, which don’t SO many women have those? I worried someone might show up in something totally inapp…easily soiled.

Peony: Did you? I really do think you're overreacting. It's not as if I wore a full veil.

Lucinda: I’ll have one of my bridesmaids show you where the dress is. They’re very helpful, although I rather tire of Elisa bumping into things. She has no depth perception since she lost her eye in that skiing accident.

Peony: (silence)

Lucinda: Go try it on! I’d offer you a better pair of shoes as well, but Elisa packed the shoes and...you'll see. It really is a shame about that eye. Sometimes, I think she's doing it on purpose...

***

Lucinda: Oh, Peony, it’s perfect!

Peony: Yes, perfect. I can’t wait for you to open presents!

 FIN

Till next time, my people of the internet! Play me out in the note of twee!

Molly Recommends: Ambition

Some exciting news for nerds everywhere who have been hypnotized by George R R Martin (like Molly: so sad…all she does is sit in front of a stack of his books, whimpering): A Dance With Dragons (and yes, I DID cringe while writing that, it’s not a great title) has a publication date. July of this very year! Between now and then, Molly plans to totally earn her enormous indulgence by reading some Important Books:

She WILL get to The Unbearable Lightness of Being

She WILL buy and read In Other Rooms Other Wonders, because once, she sat in a bookstore and read the first ten pages of that and it was luminous and delicious and available on Kindle.

She WILL read all the books from my MFA reading list. She never quite seems to get around to the stage and screen texts, because she secretly hates The Theatre, but she understands that this is stupid and makes exceptions for Shakespeare and Martin McDonagh.

She WILL finish Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand.

She WILL get The Emigrants back from my father and read it.

She WILL continue to listen to PD James’s and Tana French’s excellent mysteries, because nothing else gets one through a long car ride in such style.

She WILL, once again, try to read Swann’s Way. Her yearly exercise in futility and boredom is once again upon us. One of these years though, she’s totally going to GET IT and just read right through to the end without nodding off every three lines.

Molly’s recently done a little bit of obsessive, frantic googling online research to figure out when the next book in Martin’s series comes out, and discovered that many people have been complaining about the fact that it has taken George R R Martin like six years to finish a thousand page plus book. And by complaining, I mean hurling fiery words of hatred like “you’re old and fat and you need to finish this series before you die”. These people need to stop. First of all, look at him:

People are yelling at a teddy-bear-person, and Molly, for one, is not ok with that. She could bite someone’s face off! Or bark a lot and cower behind her Ana! Whichever! Secondly, George is clearly a writer with ambitions and talent that transcend his much-maligned genre. Molly has the sense that he wants to write something of lasting quality, rather than a disposable book that will have been totally forgotten in a year, displaced by whatever stale iteration of boy-with-magic-sword somebody comes up with next. And that kind of thing takes time. Which Molly is happy to wait.

 

Seriously, come on.

My MFA reading list for May Residency 2011

“As I Lay Dying” by William Faulkner

“Room” by Emma Donoghue

“Tiny, Smiling Daddy” by Mary Gaitskill (Because They Wanted To: Stories)

“And of Clay Are We Created” by Isabel Allende (The Stories of Eva Luna)

 “Shiloh” by Bobby Ann Mason (Shiloh and other Stories)

“A Painful Case” by James Joyce (Dubliners)

“Beginning Theory” by Peter Barry, third edition

“Fragment of the Head of a Queen” by Cate Marvin

“Lighthead” by Terrance Hayes

“The Eternal City” by Kathleen Graber

“The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake” by Breece D’J Pancake

“Devil in a Blue Dress” by Walter Mosley

 “Goat” by Brad Land

“On Looking” by Lia Purpura

“Brokeback Mountain” Short Story to Screenplay (Paperback/Movie) by Annie Proulx, Larry McMurtry, Diana Ossana

“Glengarry Glen Ross: A Play” (Paperback/Movie) by David Mamet

“Writing for Emotional Impact” by Karl Iglesias

CBR III Weeks 4,5, and 6: A Song of Ice and Fire Books 1-3 by George R.R. Martin

I picked Game of Thrones up as a direct result of all the attention the forthcoming HBO series has been getting on Pajiba, and I’ve been (mostly) really pleased. So much so that I read the next two books in the series (A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords) right after. Song of Ice and Fire is a high-medieval fantasy about the descent of a kingdom (Westeros) into civil war even as it’s threatened by malevolent outsiders, including the Others (ice zombies!), and the arrival of a years-long winter. At the beginning of the story, King Robert—who himself snatched the throne from its previous rightful holder—dies under suspicious circumstances, and two noble houses (the Starks and Lannisters) enter into contest for the Iron Throne. Other would-be kings emerge and soon enough, chaos rules.

Martin hasn’t reinvented the wheel or anything, when it comes to fantasy fiction, but he’s put together a great story in these first volumes of what is really an as yet unfinished mega-novel. In a lot of ways, Westeros feels like it was cobbled together from a catalog of fantasy fiction clichés: there’s the Wall-Type Thing Behind Which Evil and Blight Reside (which you may recognize from Lords of the Rings, or Robert Jordan’s work), there are dragons, there are humanoid beings, and magic. At times, Martin’s commitment to creating an original world can feel a little half-hearted. He’s no Tolkien, you know? But—and this is what’s so great about Martin—it doesn’t matter, because that’s not what the story is about. It’s all about the human drama: the machinations of men and women obsessed with power, the drive to survive, the need to avenge. They could be Tudors. Setting his story in a fantastical world merely serves to liberate him from the strictures of our own history.

There isn’t one character in here that is purely good. Honorable characters are often very foolish, and even many “evil” characters have their odd moments of introspection and kindness. My allegiances changed about as often as the characters’—which is to say constantly—and by the end, I don’t think there was a single person that I had cheered for throughout. Except Tyrion. Tyrion could shake a baby, and I’d still like him. Just as surprising as Martin’s willingness to make his characters complex and unlovable is his willingness to kill them. Even the POV ones*. DUN DUN DUN. It’s that kind of story.  

As a writer (in the technical sense of the word), Martin is serviceable. If he could have used a stricter editor to cut down on purple prose and the occasional pointless digression, well, at least he isn’t constantly repeating himself. I like that: I think it speaks to a certain amount of respect and trust in the reader that is often lacking in genre fiction. In Robert Jordan’s books, for example, about 20% of the text could probably be eliminated if Jordan hadn’t assumed we were all suffering from a tragic case of short-term memory loss. Martin ends almost every chapter at a moment of suspense, which is cheap, but effective. The chapters are short, so I didn’t mind so much.

I’d like to address the question of sex for a second: there’s a lot of it (especially in Game of Thrones), and I would argue that a lot of it is written to titillate, rather than to develop the story. Is the sex part of character development? Absolutely. Did I need every last sexy detail of a thirteen-year-old girl’s…um…rape? No. Frankly, it’s distracting. It’s probably more of a problem of style than the actual content. I’m kind of creeped out by the sense that Martin really enjoyed writing all the sex…it’s like a stranger on the bus telling you all about his fantasy involving a peep-toe heel and a lizard named Elmo, and that’s awkward. Even if it is informative.

I recommend this, overall, if you really like fantasy as a genre, and I can’t wait to see what HBO does with it.

---

*I’m the kind of loser who needs to know exactly which character is going to die, or I get so anxious that I can’t enjoy the book. Am I alone in this?

CBR III Weeks 2 and 3: Gorky Park and Spending

Long time no see, Cannonballers. I’ve been awfully lazy lately, when it comes to blogging, but today, to make it up, I’ll be reviewing two books: Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park and Mary Gordon’s Spending. And yes, I will be using all the Russian words I know.

Fist up is Gorky Park: a murder mystery set in Brezhnev’s USSR. The titular Gorky Park is a real park in Moscow, where three corpses are discovered one spring. They’ve been shot and mutilated so as to preclude easy identification and, as it turns out, they’ve been hidden under the snow for several months. Chief investigator Arkady Renko is assigned to the case.

Renko is a man born to the nomeklatura, who rejects the advantages conferred on him by parentage. For reasons that remain sketchy (although I guess his father does seem like an asshole of the first water), he’s extremely skeptical of bureaucracy, which in his experience always devolves into rule by lowest common denominator. He abhors the amount of hypocrisy he’s expected to spout, so while backstabbing apparatchik flourish, Renko’s career has stalled.

Renko’s insistence on the primacy of truth is his tragic flaw, and the closer he gets to solving a case no one wants solved, the more it costs him, personally. Still he persists. Renko is in no danger of going down as one of literature’s phenomenal detectives; every revelation feels deeply earned and he goes down more wrong tracks than right ones. The mystery itself is involving and complicated enough that unraveling motivations is as interesting as figuring out what actually happened. I’m not going to spoil things by going into specifics like Wikipedia (thanks a lot, guy who gave away the end of the book in the character description, when all I wanted was to remember Recurring Marginal Character #347), but suffice it to say that in communist Russia, the mystery solves you.

(Nyet! YOU are more tired that Britney Spears’s weave. Whatever, let’s not fight.)   

Reading this is in 2010, it feels like a time-capsule: a glimpse into the paranoia, disorientation, and disillusionment that dominated the Soviet 1980s. Cruz Smith has a lot to say about police states in general, but he never makes the mistake of letting it shape his story, and the picture he paints of Moscow is full of vivid detail, idiosyncrasy, and even affection.  Here are shabby offices, dim apartments, cheap cigarettes, bad marriages, and Russian cold so vividly evoked that I kept wanting to crawl under a blanket.

Which is why it’s so unfortunate that the story goes totally off the rails about 2/3rds of the way through. There’s a location change (to the USA!), which really took the zip out of the story. His descriptions of NY don’t live up to what he does with Moscow (of course, I’ve never been to Moscow, so maybe that’s the difference). And the ultimate answer to the mystery, when it comes, is sort of disappointing. Still, worth a read if you’re curious about the later Soviet era.

My second review is for Spending, which was a book I read for school. It’s about a middle-aged woman painter who meets a man—whom she calls B—who offers to be her muse. Not only does he want to inspire her, he also wants to offer her financial assistance, so that she can give up her teaching job and devote herself to painting full-time. Complications arise almost immediately when they jump into bed about ten minutes after meeting.

I read this book in the context of a class about writing sex into stories. Spending is about sex (alooooot of sex), but it’s also about creativity, and a woman’s relationship with her work. It charts the confluence of all of Monica Szabo’s passions. It starts with a sexual encounter, and sex is both the catalyst and inspiration for a series of paintings that make Monica’s reputation as an artist. Sex very much defines character: Monica’s sense of joyful abandon during the first sex scene, which surprises even her, is part of our first impression of her. Although we’ve only been acquainted with the character for a few pages, it’s clear that something important is changing for her (“In the morning when I woke up, I was shocked” she tells us). Throughout the novel, the sex Monica has reflects her needs, her frustrations with her work, and the necessary selfishness--maybe even narcissism--she has to assume in order to finish her project. And that project is in itself about sex: she sets out to paint a series of post-coital men modeled on great classical paintings of Jesus shortly after the crucifixion. She draws a direct line from religious ecstasy to sexual abandon.  

This all sounds very cerebral—and Monica is a clever, engaging narrator—but it all ends up being really lightweight, because there isn’t any real conflict. As soon as anyone has a problem, it’s already been solved. B loses all his money about halfway through the book, but hey, look! Monica’s rich now and she loves him. This isn’t even a spoiler—it’s part of the jacket copy. Without a sense of risk and danger, the story turns frothy and inconsequential despite its interesting, unconventional narrator, like chick lit for smart women. It’s the kind of book that you should definitely read if you find it in someone’s bathroom and you’re super-bored of their party.

Next up: A Game of Thrones 

Molly Recommends

2011. Ok. Yes.

Molly has made a list of resolutions: in the New Year, there will be no more cage-matches with raccoons that end in torn-out whiskers, or eating frozen deer poop, or gleefully spreading bathroom trash all over the house. Molly will be five in March (probably), which we are all excited about, because we keep hoping age will mellow her out, despite all evidence to the contrary. She’s looking forward to sharing a NY apartment with me sometime this year (fingers crossed); just her, some humans, eighty pounds of dog hair a week, a rat or two, and incessant whining and barking. Exciting!

Recently, I took Molly’s doggy-bank (a real object that exists) to the Coinstar machine, and while I warmed my hands at a trashcan fire with the other hobos, it counted out a whopping forty-four dollars, which were returned to me in the form of an Amazon gift-card. God forbid I donate it to a worthy cause, or give the change to the Salvation Army Santa standing two feet from the machine, looking me over with his gimlet eye. I mean, take your bell and stuff it, right?

Because of our book-buying freeze, Molly couldn’t immediately blow it all on books, as is her wont. Instead she’s making a list of how she wants to spend it when the long winter of our discontent is over. What I’m saying is, if you have something amazing you think Molly (ahem) should read, I’d like to know.

My residency is next week, and Molly’s agreed to help me express how I feel about 2011 right now:

What is this?

CBR III Week 1: Tana French’s Faithful Place

This is my very first Cannonball III Review, and right off the bat, let me make a confession: I didn’t read this. I listened to it instead. I hope you all don’t mind, but my commute is ridiculous and a girl can only listen to so many NPR stories about genocide/plagues/the endtimes before she begins to get depressed. For me, it’s more like National Panicking-quietly-in-my-car Radio, but I digress.

So: literary mystery set in Dublin. Undercover detective Frank Mackey is forced to return to the home he ran away from decades before when a mysterious suitcase is discovered in a neighboring abandoned house. Mackey’s childhood home—where his parents and older brother still live—is located in a cul-de-sac called Faithful Place: a claustrophobic place full of the kinds of characters that can only be played for laughs or tragedy. It’s the kind of little neighborhood where everyone is drunk, unhappy, or desperately oblivious.  Anyway, perhaps the most defining choice of Frank’s life was to leave Faithful Place, but the appearance of the suitcase (or, rather, what he discovers subsequently) completely changes how he perceives the events that lead up to him making that choice. As the bodies pile up, Frank is drawn further and further into “the bubbling cauldron of crazy that is the Mackeys at their finest”, and is forced to confront the history he’s been avoiding for so long. And what a history it is. French has an enormous gift for making every character feel alive, their wrinkles well-earned, their traumas and disappointments important in our judgments of who they are and what they have done. The result is that what could easily be a melodramatic story about the way violence taints its victims feels wholly original. There’s a once-beautiful, abusive, alcoholic father figure—that old standby—and even that feels fresh.

One of the most surprising things about the way this novel was put together is that we’re given the answer to the mystery about halfway through, but French actually shows us Frank and the other characters dealing with the fallout of what has happened. It’s a rare thing and a great part of the book’s success that the detective character is so invested in the results of what he’s investigating. The more he learns about who his family was and is, the more difficult his position becomes. There’s an awful sense of the real consequence of violence: that, unlike you or Hercule Poirot, the characters in the story are never going to be able to walk away from what has happened.

For next week, I’m trying to finish Great Expectations*, and I think I’ll end this with a little Pip:  “What could I become with these surroundings? How could my character fail to be influenced by them? Is it to be wondered at if my thoughts were dazed, as my eyes were, when I came out into the natural sunlight from the misty yellow rooms?”

*(No, not because Oprah said to.)

200ish Word Review: Peter Carey's Parrot and Olivier in America

It’s hard to do such a sprawling book any justice in just 200 words, but let’s try: young French noble (Olivier) is kidnapped and put on a boat to America by order of his parents, survivors of the French revolution, in order to keep him out of (political) trouble. He is accompanied by a reluctant English servant he hates (Parrot). Hijinx, romance, and personal growth ensue. We become (extensively) acquainted with their complicated histories. The two reluctantly become friends and achieve different understandings of America as a country and an idea.

It was beautifully written, with the kind of luscious language that makes me wish I made more time for poetry, and there were arresting set pieces along the way, but I was occasionally bored because there wasn’t a clear sense of what the point was. It never comes together to form a whole that is greater than the sum of its many beautifully moving parts. The last few pages had me thinking it was all about the American experiment: the way the country’s character (like a person's) is both its luck and its doom, but that felt a little tacked-on, a little like an after-thought. There was an idea in there somewhere about how our origins mark us (but, you know, duh). The whole thing felt rough, like somewhere in there is the story that wants to be told, but Carey hasn’t quite got a hold of it. So: it’s not a great novel, but it’s still worth a read, especially if you’re a fan of historical fiction. As Ursula Le Guin put it in her review: “Are there hidden significances? I don't know. It's a dazzling, entertaining novel. Should one ask for more?”

Dream Big.

I just signed up to do Pajiba's third annual Cannonball Read, wherein one reads and reviews 52 books in a year. Who's with me?

I'm going to take this silence as a sign that you're busy signing up. Yay for us! We're going to have so much fun bringing on that nervous breakdown!

A Book-Buying Break.

I am currently taking a break from buying books, since I recently organized my shelves and found that I have like a hundred books that I haven't read. That is not an exaggeration. For you, I have taken a picture of my Shelves of Shame (not to be confused with the Shelf of Despair, which is where I keep books that I will never read):

Basically, I can't buy another book until I've whittled my to-read section down to two shelves. SIGH. It's hard, you guys, it's really hard.

You'll notice my tiny collection of comic books at the bottom right. DO NOT WORRY. I have read all of them. I know: what a relief that I read Wanted. What if I'd been silly enough to use that time to read Don Quixote? That would've been so tragic.

200 Word Book Review: John le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

 

For the longest time, le Carre has been on my reading list. Why? Rachel Weisz. People, since way back when I watched The Mummy in 10^th grade (please stop laughing at me), I have had a girl-crush on Rachel Weisz. She was so good in The Constant Gardener! John le Carre wrote that.

Anyway, I’m so glad this wasn't like the time I tried to read Robert Ludlum (of The Bourne Disappointment) after loving the movies. This book is a classic of old-school spy fiction, and it’s reminded me of how much I enjoy that whole genre. I went through a short phase during which I read a bunch of Graham Greene and Eric Ambler books. I really don’t know why I stopped.

Spy is an exceptional book because, and I hope I’m not giving too much away (BUT IF YOU’RE CONCERNED TURN AWAY), it’s totally un-triumphant, even beyond the cynicism you tend to find in other spy novels. Le Carre is writing about corrupt cold-war intelligence bureaucracies that uphold ideologies that are, on both sides, hollow and brutal. What effect does living a life molded by the demands and constraints of service to those bureaucracies have on a man? What is the role and what are the limits of redemption in such a compromised life? This book is haunted by ambiguity: towards heroism, towards patriotism, even towards love. It may be a short book, but it’s definitely not a light read. Oh, and obviously: it's really, really twisty and exciting.

The Imagined Conversations of Ill-Conceived Characters: Anthropologie, Part Deux

The last time we saw Lucinda and Peony, they'd had a falling out over some egregious accusations Peony made. They've since made up. 

On the docket.

A list of books I am currently reading, with probability that I'll finish them.

-The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (35%, although I will definitely come back to it later.)

-Parrot and Olivier in America (45%)

-The Man Who Came in From the Cold (82%)

-A Sport and a Pastime (100% because it's for school.)

-The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories (2% Tobias Wolff can suck it with these selections; they are tuh-ribble!)

-The Emigrants (99%)

Up next:

Stop yelling at me!

200 Word Review: Andrea Barrett's Ship Fever

How good was Ship Fever?

You guys, it is about scientists. I have always wanted to be a scientist*.

If someone had told me that she was intending to write a series of short stories about the “mysterious allure of science” (as Kakutani would have it), I would have been all “what does that even mean, are you smoking crack again?” I’d never noticed how the desire to collect and to understand—to truly, intimately know—some particular thing is so much like an enchantment. Barrett is like an alchemist: she takes these people—discoverers, explorers, scientists—and under the heat of their fallibility, their imperfect loves, and their consuming ambitions, the cold substance of scientific discovery blossoms into magic. At other times, she seems to work her spell in reverse, and science is (always imperfectly) applied to understanding the nature of human relationships. In Barrett’s world, science seems less like a field of study and more like a particular turn of mind. Something to call people who can’t stop seeking, even when they can barely understand the impulse. Even when it can only lead to ruin. I think I read somewhere that Ship Fever is about the love of science, and the science of love, and honestly, now that I’ve read the book, I can’t think of a better way of putting it.

*Statement may not be factual, true, or accurate. 

My MFA reading list for Winter Residency 2011

James Salter's A Sport and A Pastime.

Mary Gordon's Spending

Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita

JG Ballard's Crash

Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer

Scott Spencer's Endless Love

Erica Jong's Fear of Flying.

The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, Edited by Tobias Wolff

Andrea Barrett's Ship Fever

Beebe Moore-Campbell's Your Blues Ain't Like Mine

Jeannette Winterson's The Passion

Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter

Twentieth Century American Poetry by Gioia, Mason, Schoerke et al

Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town

The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction

The Best American Essays

Ursula K. Le Guin's Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew

Write Screenplays That Sell...The Ackerman Way

Molly Recommends

Happy almost-Halloween from Molly, you guys.

We weren’t going to do anything dressing-up-wise for Halloween, but then Molly was staring at herself in the mirror and realized that she kind of looks like a bear.

 

Right?

So that wraps up the costuming portion of this post! It’s the thought that counts. We Googled bear-ears, came across a website we won’t link to, and stopped. Some fetishes seem a lot like inside jokes. Suffice it to say that we were never sexually traumatized while holding a teddy bear, and we’re thankful for that on the regular.

Anyway, Halloween is always a stressful night for Molly, because every time a child steps on our planet property, Molly feels it necessary to let said child know that he or she is not welcome by barking until he or she drops dead from old age. I wish there was a way to let her know how ineffectual her barking is, like maybe have an intervention where a series of strangers just drop a cold beverage on her head whenever she barks.

 
 

Oh, is the idea of doggie-abuse making you sad? Just picture her as a person who I’ve locked in my house who yells “SCREW YOU” 46 times every time a person walks by the window she is so generously allowed to spend her day in front of. Did you picture it? RIGHT? I am Norman Bates and Molly is Mother.

Molly isn’t a huge fan of creepy books, so she really had to rack her little brain to think up some Halloween-themed recommendations beyond Poe, Lovecraft, Stephen King, or anything written by a Scandinavian (Let the Right One In is actually a children’s movie in Norway). She decided to go with a recent bestseller, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, as well as Johannes Cabal the Necromancer, and The Walking Dead comic books, ahead of their being turned into a hopefully-awesome zombie series on AMC.

Molly would like to leave you all with this: zombie squirrels. Would anyone notice?

200 Word Review: Andrea Camilleri’s The Terracotta Dog (audiobook)

I listened to this on my way down to Florida, the sunshine-induced-headache state. Chandler thought it was just ok, but that’s because he reads mysteries for the suspense and surprise, while I read them for food and place descriptions. I mean, I love a puzzle and some DANGER, but the ambiance is what really makes it or breaks it. The setting was $money$, even if you could see the ending coming from, basically, page 3. I’ve been to Sicily, where I stepped in dog poop 134,986 times, and I kind of disliked it, but this book makes me want to give it a second shot. Right in the head!

Sorry, the book was full of that kind of humor. Something happened when I heard this book read out loud: the dialogue became super-embarrassing. I don’t know why it didn’t bother me in print; it’s all either corny or melodramatic. After a little while you get used to it, though, like living with someone who farts in public. It’s kind of catching, actually. I mean the language, not the farting. I think at one point I was like “We’re low on gas. What has become of us? We’re the empty shells of the people who left Charlotte. GET IT? IT IS A PUN. I AM PULLING INTO A SHELL STATION.”

5 Children's Books That Ruined My Life

As a counterpart to my post about good books for children, here are five books that should never be given to anyone.

Juventud en Extasis

As part of our sex-ed in like 6^th grade, in order to counteract the effects of “information”, we had to read this hideous book that American children will never be subjected to, and may they thank an appropriate deity for that every day. It’s a book about how if you have sex before marriage, you get syphilis and die. From an Amazon review: “This is a perfect book for who ever thinks that sex and making love is just for having fun.” Those things are not for fun, ok? They are for marriage and sadness.

Even at 13, without actually having thought that much about sex yet, I was like “this is some exquisite bullshit”. I think the main character loses his virginity to a woman with no condom, but I’m not sure. Oh, maybe that’s why he caught syphilis?

No! Syphilis isn’t a disease! It’s a punishment. FOR THE SLUTS. One thing that is definitely true is that married people are safe from venereal disease forever.

Oh, apparently, there's also a really graphic abortion. I don't remember this at all. Because I suppressed it. 

Watching Roses

I mean, I guess I should’ve known that this wasn’t going to end well for me when I saw a girl in a white dress running from some angry-looking man cloaked in shadow. Like me, you may be thinking: “but that could be anything! Maybe she stole his wallet?”

No! She’s actually on her way to get raped. It’s not that I have a problem with rape being dramatized, but it makes no sense in this story, and once it happens the whole story basically goes into shock along with the main character. Sdbfdksjfklsdfnk I can’t even talk about this anymore. I have the grossest memory of that rape scene. I think this was the first time I encountered a full-on description of a rape, and I was unprepared.

I’m squeamish about all rape scenes. I think I had to leave the room during American History X. I blame this book.

Little House in the Big Woods

I wanted to stab everyone in this book. Not out of hatred. Out of boredom. Oh my god, Laura, tell me more about your stupid house that you made out of sticks and mud. I hope you drown in a puddle. I guess I should say that as a child I would have rather put sand in my eye than spend time outside. Maybe it was just a bad fit?

No! It was a terrible book. Look at this dumb beard:

 

That’s what this whole book is like. It took me an entire decade to learn to like the woods.

Just a Dream

The message of this book is that we’re all doomed if we keep acting like capitalist jerkwads. But isn’t that a good thing, you might wonder.

No! Imagine how much happier I’d be if I was cool with living in a smoggy dump where all the trees have been cut down for toothpicks. He even maligns robots. COME ON. People make fun of me because I won’t even throw a banana peel out the window, and it upsets me. When the end-times draw nigh, you’ll all see I was right. The only person I’m letting on my raft when the ice caps melt is Chris Van Allsburg, and only so I can torment him by crying all the time. The rest of you deserve what you get.

This book made me bitter.

The Silmarillion

I can’t. 

PS: This is depressing.

200 Word Review: Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle

This book was about as charming as an orphaned kitten playing with a ball of twine while it’s adoptive mother, a goose named Roger Snorkelbaum, looks on. I wish this book were a vacation that I took, or a room in my house that I could go to when writing goes badly (every day). As the cover promises, it is very romantic. Although that is not why I bought it. I bought it because Dodie Smith also wrote 101 Dalmatians, and for that alone she should have been made some kind of saint.

You know what? I don’t have any bad things to say about this book. Except about Rose, the sister who gets all the men and attention, and is generally just a huge asshole. The story’s one failure, I think, is that we never understand why someone hasn’t taken the initiative of pushing her out a window. Oh, and I suppose that bear episode isn’t exactly…plausible.

Part of the wonderfulness of the book is that it’s so familiar: it’s a fairly conventional story told in a vibrant voice. I guess it says something about a book when you feel so much affection for everyone in it (except Rose) that your main reaction is just “I want to hug you”. Recommended for sick days and just-kinda-blegh days.

Molly Recommends

Absurdly, another month has passed. Molly has book recommendations for the beginning of fall. She wanted to tell you to read Milton’s Paradise Lost because it is about the FALL of man. Get it?

I shot that down because puns are basically the second lowest form of humor after imitation, which is what we do every month when Molly imitates a book critic. Too high.

Molly is excited for fall because she suspects that now that the horrifying heat of summer is gone, I will once again take her out on the greenways so she can whine every time she sees a dog every thirty seconds. Soon it will be winter and her hopes will have been utterly crushed.  Don’t think that I enjoy this, you guys. I’m a good person and not even that crazy.

In October, Molly and I will be driving down to Florida again, and, presumably, at some point we’ll be driving back. We might also go down to the Dominican Republic. Just kidding! Only I will do that. And then in November we’ll be up in New York. Kidding again! Oh, Molly, don’t look so sad.

Oh, right, that’s just how your face is. 

Just like mine is fixed in a slight sneer. Don’t take it personally, person who just expressed an opinion in front of me!

A lightweight list for those of you doing lots of travelling, as Molly and I are:

-Anything from PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster series. Or his Hot Water.

-Molly loves a good mystery, and Cara Black’s Aimee Leduc series is pretty great if you’ve ever wished you were in Paris watching someone get murdered. Molly reads for the atmosphere more than the mystery.

- Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens is good, sacrilegious fun.

-Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana is about espionage and vacuum cleaners. Molly found it terrifying. It’s also legitimately literary, so you don’t even have to hide it on a Kindle or feel ashamed when the guy on the plane next to you is reading something by Jhumpa Lahiri. You can be all "Ooooh, aren’t you special, guy? A book by a brilliant woman. What are you, some kind of feminist? Big deal. See what I’m reading? Fidel had mild objections to this."