Anya’s Ghost

I was excited to include a graphic novel on my reading list this year, and specifically planned to read Anya’s Ghost, the story of a teenager who falls down a well and becomes friends with a ghost, in October for its spooky Halloween qualities. I’ve been reading a lot of creepy books lately – first the vampire novel The Historian, followed by the zombie love story Warm Bodies and the supernatural Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. I’m not quite sure where all of this weird sci-fi/supernatural/other-worldly stuff is coming from, but as next month I’m reading the science fiction classic Dune I’m expecting it to just get weirder. Tina Fey’s Bossypants in December is going to come as a well-deserved respite from the land of speculative fiction.

Anyway, I read Anya’s Ghost in about an hour and a half or so – it’s over 200 pages but as it’s a graphic novel it goes rather quickly, and felt like watching a short film. As I said, it’s a story about a girl who befriends a ghost (not at all like Casper, if that’s what you’re thinking), but more than that it’s about a Russian girl growing up in America and trying to deal with her family, high school, and dreaded runs in gym class. Over the course of the story she learns her lessons – that people aren’t always what they seem, that family is important, that maybe you shouldn’t walk around with a person’s bone around your neck on a string so you have your own pet ghost to help you cheat on exams. Although that last one seemed like a no-brainer to me, but to each his own.

I enjoyed this book, which reminded me a lot of Persepolis, in both it’s leading character and it’s simply drawn grayscale artwork. It’s a lovely ghost story for October, equal parts charming and creepy.

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.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

This was a lovely book that I am so glad to have read. Set just before World War I, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith is the coming-of-age story of a little girl named Francie growing up in New York. We meet her as a child, get flashbacks to her parents lives to learn the circumstances into which she was born, and follow her through her early teens as she experiences school and work and life. In my version there is a forward by Anna Quindlen, who explains that the plot of the book is hard to pin down, but the best way to describe it is as a book about "what it means to be human." I would agree, this novel is not just about a little girl growing up in a sad family in a poor neighborhood, but it's about relationships with your parents, learning about love, doing your best, making the most out of life, and all those little lessons that life teaches you without you really realizing it.

Francie is a wonderful character. She reminds me a little bit of Scout Finch in her intelligence and tenacity. She's not as much of a tomboy as Scout was, but she has that same understanding of the world - that doing what's right is important. She didn't understand when people treated others unjustly, just like Scout. They both have this quality that makes them simultaneously innocent and mature beyond their years, and I suspect that this is part of what has made both of them such beloved characters.

I could see myself a lot in Francie - she was a shy and quiet little girl, who loved reading and spent much of her time at the library. She vowed to read every single book they had and later wanted to become an author, writing stories and compositions in school. Her proudest moment was getting published in her school's magazine, and I could resonate with her excitement as she saw her name in print for the first time. She was also the kind of girl who was often lonely, especially in a crowded room of people, but was independent and didn't mind spending time by herself.

It was interesting to read this right after The World According to Garp. Both books follow the lives of a young character who wants to become a writer, discussing their lives and their families and their thoughts. Both of them have plots that are hard to pin down and both are set in a specific time and place in American history, both on the outskirts of a war. And yet the two are told so differently! I think I've decided that part of the reason I didn't like Garp was that I couldn't find any meaning behind it. People tried to do things that made them happy, but for what? Most of them ended up unhappy, having lived a ridiculous and bizarre life. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, on the other hand, featured people struggling through unhappiness in a routine and mundane life, and ending up happy. Where the characters of Garp seemed to spiral out of control into weirder and weirder individuals, the characters of Brooklyn gathered themselves and stood proudly, becoming better than they were at the start. Even if it didn't have an outright moral, Smith's book gave live meaning - even boring, everyday life. I would recommend it in a heartbeat and am sure I will read it again.

The Bell Jar

This month's selection, The Bell Jar, was included on the 2012 reading list for a few different reasons: first, it is considered a classic, as in a no English major worth their salt has never read Sylvia Plath kind of classic; and second, it is important to me to read classic novels written by women. I choose my reading list after carefully scouring best-seller lists, lists of American classics, and recommendations from other readers. It seems that, overwhelmingly, the books commonly considered to be classics - both traditional and modern - are written by men. Out of TIME Magazine's list of the top 100 novels, only 15 had female authors. That's less than a quarter, which seems low to me, as women have been publishing novels since the mid 1800s or earlier.

Last year somehow turned out to be the year of distopian novels, and it seems that this year might be the year of characters with psychological disorders - two out of the three books I've read this year have been set in a mental hospital. It was actually very interesting to see how the hospital Esther stayed at compared to the hospital in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which was published only a year before, in 1962. In Cuckoo's Nest the hospital was much like a prison, where in Bell Jar it was more like a dormitory. Chief and McMurphy had horrible experiences with the shock treatments, while Esther's went pretty smoothly. And no surprise, considering the contrast in treatments - the men got worse, while Esther got better.

This book is a fascinating insight into the life of a young woman in the 60s. She felt monumentally alone, being distanced emotionally from her family and somewhat outcast among her peers. Her stream of dates and writing scholarship to New York made her seem happy, but deep down she never was, and didn't know how to deal with it. Her journey into insanity was very subtle - I didn't realize how odd she was acting until she threw all of her clothes out of the window and into the wind. Esther's downfall escalated from there, eventually finding her holed up in a dark part of the basement after swallowing a bottle of pills.



I was struck by how much this novel reminded me of the movie Girl, Interrupted - until I found out that it is based off of the memoir of a woman who spent time in a psychiatric hospital during the 60s when she was young. It's no wonder that when I was reading I kept imagining the hospital in the film. The girl she knew in the hospital, Joan, reminded me a lot of Brittany Murphy's character Daisy, who also seemed well adjusted but came to the same tragic end.

This novel was beautifully written, which gave it an almost haunting quality, as it is essentially about a young girl's life. Below is one of my favorite passages, written about the weather:

"When we came out of the sunnily lit interior of the Ladies' Day offices, the streets were gray and fuming with rain. It wasn't the nice kind of rain that rinses you clean, but the sort of rain I imagine they must have in Brazil. It flew strait down from the sky in drops the size of coffee saucers and hit the hot sidewalk with a hiss that sent clouds of steam writhing up from the gleaming, dark concrete." - pg. 41

How delicious is that writing? This is why it is important to read books like The Bell Jar. New books focused on plot just don't have the same quality.

Elizabeth Gilbert

Biography

• Born July 18, 1969 in Waterbury, Connecticut
• Has a Bachelors in Political Science from New York University
• Currently lives in New Jersey

Writing career - Notable accomplishments

• Short story "Pilgrims" published in Esquire in 1993 - first unpublished author since Norman Mailer
• Story "The Muse of the Coyote Ugly Saloon" published in GQ in 1997 adapted into film Coyote Ugly (IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0200550/) 
• Contributing writer for national magazines like SPIN, GQ, The New York Times Magazine, and Real Simple
• Publishes first novel Stern Men in 2000
•  Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia, 2006 
• Eat, Pray, Love spent 199 weeks on the New York Times' Best Seller List
• Named one of Time Magazine's Top 100 Influential People in the World in 2008
• Film adaptation of Eat, Pray, Love - starring Julia Roberts - released in 2010 (IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0879870/) 
• Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage, 2010 

Literary Themes/Genres

• Essayist, memoirist, biographer
• Influences include L. Frank Baum, Charles Dickens, Marcus Aurelius

Official Website (unfortunately designed in Comic Sans!): http://www.elizabethgilbert.com/
TED talk on Creativity: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/lang/eng//id/453

Margaret Atwood

Biography

• Born November 18, 1939 in Ontario, Canada
• Started writing at age 6; eventually graduated from college with a degree in English
• Earned a master's degree from Harvard's Radcliffe College in 1962
• Attended  Harvard for graduate studies but never finished her dissertation and therefore did not graduate
• Has taught at 6 different universities since 1965
• Has received over 55 awards in Canada and internationally
• Holds honorary degrees from 16 colleges, including Smith College, University of Toronto and Harvard University

Writing Career - Notable Accomplishments

• Has published 13 novels, 9 short story collections, 19 poetry collections, 6 children's books, and 9 works of non-fiction to date
• Poetry: The Circle Game, 1964 - winner of the 1966 Governor General's Award
• Novel: The Handmaids Tale, 1985 
• Short Fiction: Wilderness Tips, 1991
• Novel: The Robber Bride, 1993 (made into a film for TV in 2007)
• Novel: The Blind Assassin, 2000 - winner of the 2000 Booker Prize
• Novel: Oryx and Crake, 2003

Literary Themes/Genres

• Poetry often inspired by myths and fairy tales
• The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake are considered science fiction, which at one time offended Atwood, who considers them "speculative fiction" - something that could actually happen.

Official Website: http://margaretatwood.ca/
Twitter: @MargaretAtwood