Tag Archives: fiction

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

Posted by melydia on August 8, 2006 None comments

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn: Al and Lil Binewski own a failing carnival, which they revive by creating a family of freaks though chemical abuse during pregnancy. Not just standard drugs, but pesticides, radioisotopes, and more. The story is narrated by their daughter Olympia, a bald albino hunchback dwarf, who often bemoans her relative normalcy (you should see her siblings). It’s a fascinating look at not only carnival life, but how we view physical beauty in general. Do we really envy those who are completely normal, or those who proudly display their differences? The description is raw, shocking, and painfully vivid, but like a carnival freak show, you just can’t look away. You have to keep reading, to get a better look, to see what they’ll do next. This is not the sort of book that will appeal to everyone, or even most people, but I really enjoyed it. If nothing else, it was very different from most other things I’ve read.

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

Posted by melydia on June 28, 2006 None comments

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden: This is the sort of book that draws you in from the very first page. As the title suggests, it is the story of Sayuri, sold by her parents at a young age to an okiya, a geisha house. Not only is it an engrossing story of suffering, longing, and triumph, it’s also a fascinating look at the life of a geisha during the 1930s and 40s. The description of the places and characters was so vivid I could see it all. The whole concept behind a geisha – that having a mistress was not only acceptable but even expected of wealthy men – was somewhat jarring to my Western sensibilities, but the tale was told with such compassion and earnestness that it was easy to get drawn in to the different culture, and almost forget that it was written by a middle-aged American man and not an aged Japanese woman. There were things here and there that struck me as unrealistic – Nobu’s interest in geisha despite finding them irritating, the pure malice of several characters – but by and large it was a great read.

Also posted on BookCrossing.

Cause Celeb by Helen Fielding

Posted by melydia on April 12, 2006 None comments

Cause Celeb by Helen Fielding: Rosie Richardson works at a refugee camp in Nambula, Africa, where she’s been for the last four years after breaking off a toxic relationship with the famous television man Oliver Merchant in London. It took me a while to get into this book, as it couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be a serious look at starvation in the Third World, or Bridget Jones Goes to Africa (yes, I know it was written before Bridget Jones’s Diary, but you get my drift). Some parts were very funny, and others made me feel like Fielding was trying to browbeat me into donating to charity. At first it stirred my compassion, but by the end it felt more like a lecture than a story. Fielding also relied a bit too heavily on dialect for differentiation, turning her characters into charicatures. Still, there was a fair bit of humor and reasonably engrossing drama; this was certainly not a bad first novel, but I can understand why Bridget Jones is so much more popular.

Also posted on BookCrossing.

Ready, Okay! by Adam Cadre

Posted by melydia on March 30, 2006 None comments

Ready, Okay! by Adam Cadre: The very first sentence of this book tells you that it’s not going to end happily. Lots of people are going to die. Within the first couple chapters you realize that they’re going to die in a shooting, probably reminiscent of Columbine. And you are not mistaken. Don’t get me wrong – this book is very funny. The characters are memorable, unique, and yet stunningly familiar to anyone who went to high school in the last decade (and perhaps longer; I don’t know what high school was like before the early 1990s). Granted, my high school years were notably lacking in the sex, drugs, alcohol, and violence departments, but adolescents are still adolescents regardless of whether they’re being self-destructive. The narrator’s commentary on child and teenage communication is hilariously accurate, and I felt myself nodding along with a lot of the inanity.

However, during the last hundred pages or so it starts to drag a bit. Tragedy after tragedy strikes, people start acting very much unlike teenagers (or real people at all), and there is a lengthy and rather disturbing discussion of nudism and incest. It’s one of those books that I’m glad I read, but I’m also not surprised it wasn’t what you might call critically acclaimed. Ultimately I think I would recommend this book to teenagers. It’s most relevant to their lives; the rest of us are lucky enough to have lived through it already.

Also posted on BookCrossing.

Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Posted by melydia on March 26, 2006 None comments

Life of Pi by Yann Martel: From the cover art, this appears to be about a boy and a tiger in a boat. And it is, though it’s conspicuously lacking of seafaring felines for more than the first quarter of the book. Up to that point it talks mostly about Pi’s life as the son of a zookeeper in India and his quest to find religion (which he does – three of them, in fact). At times it’s a little preachy, others a little graphic, but all in all it’s a fairly believable tale about survival in a lifeboat. In a nutshell: Pi Patel’s family decides to move from India to Canada. They travel by cargo ship with many of the animals from their zoo which are now being shipped to other zoos around the world. The cargo ship sinks, leaving Pi stranded on a lifeboat with a few animals who escaped the ship. He spends 227 days on the ocean, his thoughts taken up by survival: how to get food, how to get fresh water, how to avoid being eaten by the 450-pound Bengal tiger that shares his lifeboat. It’s a classic man-versus-nature story, and if you enjoy movies like Castaway you will probably like this book as well.

Also posted on BookCrossing.

My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult

Posted by melydia on March 24, 2006 None comments

My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult: I finished this book on an airplane, all hunched over in seat 16D, hoping my hair would disguise the fact that I was totally bawling. I haven’t cried at a book in many years, though I knew this one would probably be a tear-jerker from the beginning. After all, it’s a premise straight from a Lifetime Original Movie: Kate is diagnosed with a rare and particularly nasty form of leukemia at age 2, and after much deliberation her parents decide to concieve a genetically engineered child to be a perfect match for their sick daughter. And so Anna is born for her umbilical cord, her blood, her bone marrow. As the story begins, Anna is 13 years old and has decided that she doesn’t want to be an automatic donor anymore.

It’s a brilliantly written book, but very hard to take sometimes. Picoult did an excellent job of portraying the heartache of being part of a family wiuth a sick child without getting too sappy, too outrageous, or too grandiose. Make no mistake, this is a book full of Big Questions about the sanctity of life versus control over one’s own body, but it doesn’t beat you over the head with it or force the reader to take a certain side. It’s one of those rare stories that put me in the shoes of several characters that are (fortunately) completely alien to me while still allowing me to make up my own mind about their actions. It gave me quite a bit to think about, and that’s some of the highest praise I can give any book.

I won’t promise that everyone will like this book. A lot of people will see it as nothing more than a weepy family drama and dismiss it out of hand. But it does raise some serious issues, issues most of us – especially with the continued advances in medical technology – will have to face someday: when is it time to stop trying and start saying goodbye?

Also posted on BookCrossing.

White Oleander by Janet Fitch

Posted by melydia on February 11, 2006 None comments

White Oleander by Janet Fitch: Astrid is the daughter of the brilliant poet Ingrid Magnussen, a gorgeous and distant woman who has travelled all over the world. When Astrid is 12 years old, Ingrid goes to prison for murder, leaving her in a series of foster homes, each with their own rules, their own lessons to be learned. The story chronicles her life through age 18, her journey always returning to the same question of how to escape her mother’s influence, and whether she really wants to after all. On the surface, this sounded like the sort of book I’d read to pass the time, with more interest in having read it than actually reading it. I was mistaken. Utterly. I was completely sucked in, to the point where I was thinking about it during the times I couldn’t read, and had trouble putting it down during the times when I could. I read it for my entire five-hour flight from Nevada; I can’t remember the last time I found a book so engrossing. I just had to know what happened next, what new mentor Astrid, so used to being told what to do and how to think, would choose. I don’t know that I would necessarily call this book “exciting,” but it certainly was a page-turner for me. Beyond the story, the language was intense, beautiful, and precise. I could picture it all.

Also posted on BookCrossing.

The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean

Posted by melydia on January 28, 2006 None comments

The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean: This is the haunting tale of Marina, a woman who works and later lives in the Hermitage art museum in Leningrad during the long winter of the German siege in World War II. It switches back and forth between her suffering at the museum and her present day self in the Pacific Northwest as an elderly woman whose mind is failing her.

Though I had never read about Russia during this time period, much less the siege of Leningrad, as I read I began to wonder if perhaps I’d heard too many stories from WWII. The hunger and death grew wearisome, with the only real interest of the story coming from Marina’s passionate descriptions of the art in the Hermitage. But things improved, and I left this book happy I had read it. This is one of those books you wander through with only mild interest until the last few scenes, when everything picks up and ties together, and you turn the last page feeling uplifted and truly satisfied.

Also posted on BookCrossing.

The Last Juror by John Grisham

Posted by melydia on November 30, 2005 None comments

The Last Juror by John Grisham: This is the first Grisham book I’ve ever read, and it is really not a court drama, despite the implications of the title. In 1970, 23-year-old Willie Traynor moves to the small city of Clanton, Mississippi, and buys the local newspaper, which has recently gone bankrupt. Soon after this, a local woman is raped and murdered by Danny Padgitt, son of the “redneck mafia” that is the Padgitt family. The story vaguely meanders around the trial and subsequent fallout over the next several years, but mostly it’s about Willie’s life in Clanton and the people he meets. There are a lot of scenes and even minor characters thrown in just for color. The ending was mostly predictable, with the only major “twist” feeling like it had been plucked from thin air. It wasn’t a bad book – the characters were definitely believable and often entertaining – but from the very beginning I wondered how Grisham would manage to find enough plot to fill the 350 pages. Unfortunately, he really didn’t. In the end, if you enjoy reading about smalltown Southern life, you’ll like this. If you’re looking for an action-packed legal thriller, you probably want to look elsewhere.

A Void by Georges Perec

Posted by melydia on November 2, 2005 None comments

A Void by Georges Perec, translated by Gilbert Adair: This was originally a novel written in French without use of the letter e, which was then translated into English under the same constraints. I sort of suspect that this little literary game was the main reason it was published at all. This was the kind of book I would have liked to read for a class, where someone would stop and explain what was going on every few chapters. It was far too tedious and heavy on the smug cleverness for my patience as a casual reader. I got about sixty pages in, then realized I was skipping and skimming more than I was actually reading, so I gave up.

Also posted on BookCrossing.

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