The Historian

While I may have much more free time now that I have moved, I have significantly less internet. Actually I have no internet at my apartment, as I'm waiting until I can get internet and cable connected at the same time, and currently don't have a fully-functioning TV. All this to say that I'm getting a lot more reading done, but also a whole lot less blogging.

Case in point: I finished The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova back in early August, but haven't had the chance to write about it until now. It was a great book and I thoroughly enjoyed it, but as I've read three books since then, I can't remember it well enough to give it a complete and well-thought-out blog post. And that really is a travesty, as I literally could not put it down and attempted to read while cooking dinner, which happens to be really hard to do when the book is a hefty 689 pages and you're trying to hold it in one hand and stir pasta with the other.

The book revolved around the tracking of the vampire Dracula, mixing fact with fiction and lore to create a hauntingly believable tale that crossed centuries and borders. There were times that I would have to stop myself from reading it at night because while it was absolutely compelling it was often really creepy. It was also very reminiscent of classic novels, featuring multiple family generations and often told through letters. Before I even finished it I recommended it to my sister, explaining it as a combination between Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code and Tracy Chevalier's The Girl with the Pearl Earring. It's full of history, legend, academia, mystery, and a dash of romance.

Multiple friends of mine whose literary taste I trust had recommended this book to me, so despite being hesitant about reading a bestseller about vampires (been there, learned that lesson), I added it to this year's list anyway, and am glad that I did. This was a great novel.

A Room with a View

I know I’ve been neglecting this blog a little lately – okay, more than a little, it’s been over two months since I last posted, which is not at all like me. I’ve been really busy, I promise! Since I last updated with my review of The Help, I was hired full-time at my office (yay!) and finally made the move to Columbus (double yay!!). Unfortunately I totally missed finishing a book in the month of July. At one point I thought I would be able to make it in the last few days of the month, only to realize that I had got September’s book instead. Sigh.

So now that I’m in my own place, and have a lot more free time on my hands, I was able to get and read July’s book, A Room with a View by E. M. Forester. The novel is about a young woman and her chaperone traveling in Italy sometime before the First World War, with a major theme being the societal roles of women at the turn of the last century. The young female lead, Lucy, is quite an independent young woman, especially for her time period. She wants to learn and have adventures but all of those things are considered “unladylike” and instead she is expected to do a little traveling, meet a nice young man, settle down and get married. While she is in Italy with her older cousin Charlotte they stay at a pension (a term I learned while reading The World According to Garp) and meet the eccentric novelist Eleanor, two kind elderly sisters traveling the world, a kindhearted and funny but socially improper gentleman, and his young son, George, who, if he lived today, would be exactly like Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character in (500) Days of Summer: a sad, creative hipster hoping to meet a Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

While Lucy doesn’t quite fit the mold of the uber-bubbly and quirky as the stock Manic Pixie Dream Girl, she is a kind and thoughtful young woman that everyone seems to be drawn to. She has two men in her life: the successful and traditional but boring and condescending Cecil, and the odd and progressive but exciting and romantic George. The two men represent the conflicting parts of her life: the conventional lady that her elders expect her to be, and the unconventional woman that she wants to be. Should she follow societal norms and become the perfect hostess and housewife, or follow her own heart and strike out on her own, getting a flat in London and seeing the world her own way?

What I loved about Lucy is that despite being innocent and naïve to a point, she also knows that she is, and longs to discover things for herself. She is constantly frustrated and people telling her what she can do and what she can’t and how she should feel and what she should want. In an important scene where she (Spoiler Alert!) breaks her engagement with Cecil, she tells him,

“I won’t be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult. Can’t I be trusted to face the truth but I must get it second-hand through you?”

In a wonderful moment for ladies everywhere, she chooses to think for herself instead of succumbing to those who try to control her life. Good for you, Lucy! She may not know exactly what she wants for her life, but she knows what she doesn’t. In the end, it’s almost as if she were the emotional, brooding creative type (she plays the piano exquisitely) who needed a Manic Pixie Dream Guy like George Emerson, who runs around in his shorts after playing in mud puddles and kisses her amongst the violets without asking her first, to show her what life is really like.

I really enjoyed this novel, and could tell it was written at the cusp of the flapper era, where women like Lucy often did the unconventional. It reminded me of a mix between Pride and Prejudice and The Importance of Being Earnest, with a little bit of modern British romantic comedies stirred in for good measure.

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The Help

I know what you're thinking - "It's only the 8th, isn't that a little early for you to be posting the June book review?" Considering my history, where usually I'm just now getting around to posting the last month's book review, you're right.

But I've already finished The Help! I just started it yesterday afternoon and stayed up until 3 a.m. last night finishing it. I don't think I've read an entire book that quickly since Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire came out twelve years ago and hid out in my junior-high bedroom and gobbled up the whole thing in one sitting.

I put off reading Kathryn Stockett's The Help for a long time. It was all over the media, and the bestseller bookshelves, and everyone and their brother was reading it, which made me a little skeptical. Lots of things make the bestseller list just for being popular, and I didn't want to end up reading another Nicholas Sparks novel but set in Mississippi in the 60s.

But after it was adapted into an Oscar-award-winning movie and was still on the charts long after it's debut, I figured it was time to give it a chance. Last June I decided to give Eat Pray Love a chance and ended up loving it - and the same thing happened with The Help. It's a great novel, full of poignant stories and characters that you grow to love/hate. A quote on the cover compared it to To Kill A Mockingbird, which was a little much for me - sure, it deals with the same issues of race relations in the south, but The Help just didn't have the timeless quality that TKAM does, at least in my opinion. It's a great summer beach or book club read that shows what it's like to be a black woman working as a domestic during the tumultuous 1960s. It reminded me a little of the musical Hairspray, a kind of light-hearted and easy-to-grasp story of racial tension. Not that it was completely sugar coated; there were plenty of sad and horrible things that happened to these women, but for me, it was predicable. Of course women were going to eventually open up, of course the book would get published, of course Stuart wouldn't be as perfect as she expected, of course the ladies would gain some ground.

I know the book has gotten some flak for being a feel-good version of the south, "written by a white woman to make other white women feel better about how blacks were treated," to paraphrase some reviews I've heard. But you know, it got people thinking about racism both then and now, and the movie earned Octavia Spencer an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress - making her one of only 6 black women to ever earn an Academy Award acting. And even if it wasn't on the same level as TKAM, I know I sure couldn't put it down. I would recommend it to anyone looking for a good novel to enjoy and think about over their summer vacation.