A Striped Armchair

Well, thanks to last week’s answer post, I didn’t get to cover all of the books I’d read. So we’re in for another long post this week! But at least I can just do paragraph reviews rather than the interview thing. Unlike most of my posts, this one contains several books I didn’t really like, so the tone of my reviews feels a bit like a rollercoaster to me. But we’ll start on a high note!

I loved Wesley the Owl by Stacy O’Brien. O’Brien was a young biology researcher working at the CalTech labs when her mentor suggested she adopt a baby barn owl, Wesley. This book talks about their relationship. O’Brien obviously has a very deep love for animals, which really comes through in her writing. Getting to know Wesley through her eyes was fascinating! Additionally, since O’Brien works at CalTech for about half of the memoir, and I really enjoyed whenever she gave peeks of the ‘weird’ aspects of being in a science community. Parts of it amused me because I went to a liberal arts college that had more than its fair share of strange students, so I could identify with the atmosphere. But I found myself laughing loudly on more than one occasion, due to the stories she relates (and she compares CalTeach to Hogwarts several times, for you HP fans!). Most of the book is lighthearted and fun, but things take a turn in the last couple of chapters, as first O’Brien experiences major health problems, and then Wesley inevitably dies. I cried. I’d highly recommend this for animal lovers, people amused by crazy scientists, those desperately searching for a happy memoir, or anyone who’s hesitant about nonfiction. Just prepare yourself for a less than cheerful ending.

I expected to love Kampung Boy by Lat. It’s a memoir of his childhood in a small Malaysian village. And it’s in graphic form! And Claire loves it. Unfortunately, I have to be honest: while I would have given the story itself five stars, but the drawing style repulsed me. The people don’t even look like people to me, just weird, part-animal, I don’t even know what. Now, Lat has a reputation as an awesome cartoonist, and other reviews I read written by people who understand cartoons are in awe of his drawing. So I totally admit that this is my problem, probably because I didn’t grow up reading cartoons/comics, so my eye isn’t adjusted to it. And I did love the peek in village life that Lat gave me. I’d probably read the sequel, Town Boy, if my library had it, but it’s not a book I’d read over and over again, savouring. Just not my style of art.

It took me forever to read Mia Couto’s Sleepwalking Land. Couto is a white Mozambiquean (?), and this story is set during the civil war. It’s a complicated format, with nested stories, and a definite magical realist flavour. All of that really appealed to me. But the style is just so bleak that I had to force myself to pick it up after I had set it down. And I was never sad when I had hit my fifty pages (I read in chunks), and I never went over the fifty. In other words, it was work to read this novel. That being said, I’m glad that I did. I got to see Mozambique, and in the less depressing scenes, I could feel some of the flavour of life. Recommended for those who are willing to be sad in order to read a novel set in Mozambique!

On the other hand, I raced through My Invented Country by Isabel Allende. She’s one of my favourite novelists, so reading this memoir about (for the most part) Chile was a real treat. And the narrative tone definitely felt familiar from her fiction; I like it when authors have a consistent voice. I didn’t know much about Chile before reading this, so I felt privileged to have such an insightful and intelligent guide. And her family story is almost as crazy as the ones you find in her novels! Reading this is like having a close friend over for tea, and listening to her life story. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and you’ll find yourself nodding your head a lot. And of course, by the end, you’ll want to read her whole oevre! Recommended for everyone.

After Sleepwalking Land, I needed a fictional break. So I turned to Sally Gardner’s The Red Necklace. I adored her first novel, Coriander (about a young girl who gets tangled up with faeries in Cromwell’s England), when I listened to it on CD a couple of years ago. This one is set during the French Revolution, and doesn’t have faeries, but it still has a driving plot, loveable characters, and more than a hint of magic. There are definite overtones of The Scarlet Pimpernel, but without the weird slang or absurdly dense heroine. I didn’t love it as much as Coriander, but it was still a thumping good read, and I plan on reading the next one (The Silver Blade). I’d recommend it for those who enjoy younger YA stories, historical urban fantasy (like Sorcery and Cecilia), magical gypsies, or of course The Scarlet Pimpernel!

I picked up Antoine’s Alphabet by Jed Perl because of the pretty cover, and since it was about Watteau, I assumed I could use it for the Art History challenge. But this isn’t a biography of Watteau at all. It’s more like Watteau is the jumping off point for Perl’s imagination. Rather as if you and an intelligent professor went out for a few drinks, and the professor kept up a steady monologue, that got stranger as the drinks kept coming. And that was alphabetised. I enjoyed it in small doses, but mainly I was frustrated because Watteau seems like an interesting artist, and we only get glimpses of him. Pretension soaked the whole book, and even though it was little, it took me awhile to work through.

Fortunately, the next nonfiction book I picked up, Ann Marie Fleming’s The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam was wonderful. It’s a graphic memoir about Fleming’s quest to learn more about her great grandfather, who was a famous Chinese magician who toured the world, his Austrian wife, and their two daughters (one of them Fleming’s grandmother) who became integral to the act. Fleming is a film maker, and she made a documentary about his life, so I guess the book is a companion to that. It felt complete in itself though! Not only did I really enjoy learning about Long Tack Sam’s unique life, I thought the book’s format was perfect. It mixes cartoons with pictures with old posters and includes little things like timelines for the years; it felt so reader friendly and interesting. Highly recommended for anyone interested in fascinating, cosmopolitan families, magic, or who enjoy graphic memoirs.

I was on a bit of a memoir kick, so I picked up Choosing You by Alexandra Soiseth. In it, she recounts how she got to be thirty-eight, single, and determined to have a baby, as well as the process of becoming pregnant (she went the sperm bank route), pregnany and labour, and having a newborn. This could have easily been banal (Soiseth discusses her struggles with weight, her family issues, etc.), but Soiseth’s brutal and complete honesty instead made it a fascinating read. I also loved it because, at heart, it’s a story of the sisterhood of women. Once Soiseth is pregnant, she relies on her girlfriends to help her out, and of course they deliver! Highly recommended for those who enjoy peeking into other women’s lives.

Then I read my third southern book of the summer, Hillary Jordan’s Mudbound, which I was really looking forward to. I’ve read only positive reviews of it, so I’m going to say upfront that it seems most people don’t agree with me, but I wasn’t very impressed. Most of the characters felt like stereotypes (crochety, racist, sexist grandfather, strong black midwife, fifties housewife left to rot due to husband’s decisions, God-fearing, land-loving black man, etc.), the majority of the sad events seemed emotionally manipulative and ultimately extraneous to the plot (I won’t cite particulars, since it’d involve spoilers), and the whole thing just felt like it’d been done before. Also, while several characters took turns narrating, their voices all sounded similar; I often had to flip back to the chapter heading to see who was talking. Not to say it’s actually bad, I’d call it an average read, and I did like the parts about being a young black soldier in WWII. But it didn’t grab me, or challenge any of my viewpoints, or even introduce me to a society I haven’t ’seen’ before. I saw a Barbara Kingsolver quote on the front, and the flaws did remind me of The Poisonwood Bible, which I loathed and everyone else seems to love. So if you enjoy books like that or The Memory Keeper’s Daughter (which I also hated), I bet you’ll like this one. I think it’s much better than either of those, but it has the same feel, if that makes sense.

Since it’d been an up-and-down reading week, I took refuge in one of my favourite authors! I’ve been rereading Laurie King’s Mary Russell series this year, and I picked up A Letter of Mary, the third in the series. I loved the character development, especially Holmes’ and Russell’s relationship, and most of the book was tightly plotted. That being said, the ending wasn’t from a ‘traditional’ mystery ending, and while I found it refreshing (you mean the suspect doesn’t immediately confess all when confronted with evidence?!), it might annoy some. My own reaction, though, on finishing the book, was to want to grab the next one immediately. I find Mary Russell and her world immeasurably comforting, and of all the fictional characters, she’s the one I’d most want to be. I’ve gushed about this series a ton, though, so if you haven’t read the first one (The Beekeeper’s Apprentice), go out and get it already!

The final book I’m going to talk about now is Alberto Manguel’s A Reading Diary. Now, I loved both A History of Reading (which I’ve reread) and The Library at Night, so I totally expected this to be a comforting, awesome book. Unfortunately, I barely enjoyed it, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it as the place to start with Manguel. It’s published as an actual diary, with random paragraphs following one another in a kind of stream-of-conscious style (but with normal grammar). And for some reason, I thought most of the book just seemed pretentious. Like, I was actually rolling my eyes while reading. I may have even scoffed once or twice. Especially at his comments about “the English speaking reader.” There were a couple of months I thoroughly enjoyed (each month he rereads a different book), but for the most part I just felt sad. Also, there’s lots of political talk about Iraq (the diary was kept in 2002/2003), which I didn’t like at all.

So there you go, the ups and downs of a couple of reading weeks. Most of my five-star reads I either talked about last week or reviewed in their own posts, so my reading has been much happier than this post necessarily portrays! Still, out of the eleven books I talked about, I loved six and didn’t love five, so the overall balance is definitely positive. And reading, even with less-than-stellar books, is always a magical experience.