false 5 600 430 true 5669622 read 1 true 5281386 currently-reading 169 true 5281363 to-read 235 false 5506422 fiction 86 false 5506440 children 57 false 5506425 classics 54 false 5506428 asian-american 39 false 5506431 cats-dogs-other-superior-creatures 33 false 5506534 biography-memoir 32 false 5506438 non-fiction 28 false 5506716 hawaii 22 false 5506457 chick-lit 21 false 5506442 young-adult 20 false 5506453 comics 15 false 5506487 travel 15 false 5506458 favorites-of-the-elderly 15 false 5506456 pop-culture 14 false 5506707 essays 11 false 5506773 short-stories 9 false 5506630 humor 8 false 5506429 japanese-in-translation 7 false 5506589 christmas 6 false 5506744 poetry 5 false 5506452 for-people-smarter-than-i-am 4 false 5506460 trash 4 false 5506734 seattle 4 false 5506759 food 3 false 5511157 photography 1 false 5510759 wait-i-can-explain 1 false 5510309 reference http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/62980615 Until I Find You: A Novel (Paperback) by John Irving
bookshelves: currently-reading, fiction
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/64015100 to: Dying in a Strange Land (Latitude 20 Book) by Milton Murayama
bookshelves: asian-american, hawaii
Dying in a Strange Land is the final book in Murayama's tetralogy of the Oyama family, and it's told from three different points of view: mother Sawa's, eldest son Toshio's (who also goes by Steven), and third son Kiyoshi's (aka Morris). This coincides with the perspectives of the three earlier books, All I Asking for Is My Body being Kiyo's story, Five Years on a Rock Sawa's, and Plantation Boy Toshio's. The shifting perspectives in Dying are sometimes effective and sometimes just repetitive; although I liked this book a lot, I thought it was the weakest of the four.

Dying covers roughly a 40-year period, from the end of World War II through the mid 1980s. For anyone who has not read the earlier books, much of it will be confusing. The rhetorical tension in the saga has always been based on Toshio and Kiyoshi's respective relationships with their parents, Sawa and Isao, and explores the concept of filial duty that often becomes a source of conflict between Issei parents and their Nisei children. For the Oyamas in particular, the conflict centers around a $6000 debt incurred by Isao's father and passed down to him and later to his sons. Although the debt has long since been paid off, it is referenced more than once and remains a symbol and a sore point, particularly for Toshio. Dying continues to examine the idea of filial duty, but perhaps because this novel has become more clearly autobiographical (Kiyoshi/Morris's life mirrors Murayama's in many respects, including the publication of a novel that is identical to All I Asking), the tone has shifted away from the more subtle stance taken in the earlier novels that each of the children has been filial in his or her own way. The character of Toshio suffers the most from Murayama's harder line; in Dying, he has become consumed by bitterness that plays out in cruelty. Arguably the most sympathetic of the Oyama children in the earlier books, he becomes, towards the end of Dying almost one-note in his hatefulness, and he probably will be hated by anyone who hasn't read the earlier books.

Dying's major flaw is that Murayama either explains way too much or way too little. Too little, in the sense that this book does not stand on its own without the other three, and too much in that Murayama is overly detailed, particularly in the Kiyoshi chapters, when trying to set the time and place. He starts many of the chapters with a laundry list of current events, and I get that he's trying to show that Kiyo's outlook, unlike Tosh's, is concerned with more than just his own business and success, but once he's getting down to things like how many electoral votes McGovern got in the 1972 election, your eyes can't help but glaze over. Similarly in the Sawa chapters, there's a ton of detail about who's related to whom and which cousin was adopted out to whose family after their son died, etc. but since none of these people are important to the story (or even get mentioned again), it's a distraction. Nonetheless, I think this is an excellent and important book, particularly for anyone interested in Japanese-American and/or Hawaiian history and literature. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/60403818 to: Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (Volume One in the Wicked Years) by Gregory Maguire
bookshelves: fiction
I have no idea why I thought I wanted to read Wicked. It's fantasy (which usually bores me), it's technically fan fiction (which I detest) and it's high-concept (which never is and this is no exception). Nonetheless, my affection for Elphaba, better known as the Wicked Witch of the West, eventually overcame that, just not entirely.

Elphaba is the daughter of Melana, an upper-class and politically-connected Munchkin, and Frex, the minister Melana marries to get away from her stifling upbringing. Elphaba is born with green skin and her parents have various superstitious theories as to what sin and/or mistake they made to cause this, an exercise they repeat after the birth of Nessarose (who later becomes the Eminent Thropp, Ruler of Munchkinland, nicknamed the Wicked Witch of the East by her subjects), born without arms. All of their theories come to nothing; late in the book we learn the circumstances of Elphaba's conception, which I won't spoil, except to say it's a cautionary tale for women never to leave their drinks unattended.

Sent away to school at Shiz, Elphaba rooms with Galinda (later, Glinda the Good Witch), who starts out as a seemingly bubble-headed sorority mean girl who is embarrassed by and mildly torments Elphaba, though over time they become as close as sisters. The school is run by Madame Morrible, a minion of the Wizard who is dictator over Oz, and many of the teachers are talking animals, whose civil rights are being threatened by the Wizard. Under the tutelage of Dr. Dillamond, a talking goat, Elphaba studies the sciences and becomes an animal rights activist, whereas Galinda majors in sorcery.

After Madame Morrible attempts to recruit Elphaba, Glinda, and Nessarose to be agents of the Wizard, Elphaba goes underground to continue her animal rights work as a domestic terrorist. She falls in love, something terrible happens, she goes even further into seclusion, and finally she travels to the West and spends her days neglecting her son and stitching wings on snow monkeys until Dorothy Gale of Kansas appears.

The book's hook is that this is the story of Dorothy's visit to Oz told from the point of view of the Witch, but that's just a small and really the most disappointing part of the story. The main appeal of the book is in the character of Elphaba, who is neither wicked nor a witch (despite the fact that she took correspondence courses in sorcery and no, I am not making that up); rather, she's just a tender-hearted, prickly green girl who finally gets pushed too far. A lot of reviewers talked about allegories to Nazi Germany and Watergate, although I would say that's true only if you squint and have a lot of imagination. Neither is Wicked the meditation on good vs. evil that it's touted to be. Elphaba certainly isn't as evil as L. Frank Baum's Wicked Witch, but maybe because Dorothy is such a beloved character, Maguire felt he couldn't invert her with Elphaba, in terms of which one is good and which one is evil. So although there is evil present in Oz, the final scene between Dorothy and Elphaba is all sort of mushy and pointless. They're both inadvertant pawns of political forces that are never made all that clear because there's so much other unexplained noise in the book, e.g., who Yackel is, why and of what the Scarecrow is an icon, hints that Elphaba is a hermaphrodite but if so, so what? etc. And ultimately, Elphaba's death is an accident that has no meaning. Once you've slogged through 500 pages, all along knowing what the ending will be, you expect it to rise to the level of tragedy. Instead, you're left with a reaction of, "oh. How unfortunate." ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/70937048 Thecoconutdiaries's review of Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (Wicked Years, #1)
by Gregory Maguire

I just started reading this a couple of days ago, and I'm hoping it will get better. Less emphasis on the sex lives of munchkins would help. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/64150286 Rachel's review of Old School
by Tobias Wolff

It's not terrible, but it would make a better short story, I think. It's the only thing I've read by Tobias Wolff, and I do like parts of it, so I will probably read something else by him in the future. Just not this one again. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/64150286 to: Old School (Paperback) by Tobias Wolff
bookshelves: fiction
This is a short book that would have benefited from being shorter. Set mostly in 1960 - 1961 at a boys' boarding academy, the first 100 pages or so of Old School is reminiscent of A Separate Peace and The Catcher in the Rye both in terms of how boring it is and in how much in love the unnamed narrator is with what he has convinced himself is is own tragic isolation. He's basically an emo kid in a natty blazer.

At this unnamed school (which shares some traditions with The Hill School, a prep school in Pennsylvania from which Wolff was expelled in 1964), visiting writers are hosted three times a year and one student is selected, on the basis of a short story writing competition, for a private audience. In the '60-'61 academic year, the writers slated to visit are Robert Frost, whom Wolff portrays as phonily self-effacing, Ayn Rand, whom Wolff skewers in one of the relatively hilarious segments of the book, and Ernest Hemingway, whose pending visit is the keystone of the novel. The problem is that Wolff doesn't get to it until close to 120 pages into this 195 page novel. Once he gets there, it's tremendously good. Just as wonderful and awful and tragic as Natty Emo Narrator would want it to be, right up until the story's natural conclusion about 30 pages later. Unfortunately, Wolff then keeps talking for another 45 pages or so and kind of ruins the whole thing.

At one point, the narrator says, "as a writer, how could I refuse to bring the story to so satisfying and shapely a close? Maybe that shapely close was part of what held me back. The appetite for decisive endings, even the belief that they're possible, makes me uneasy in life as in writing ..." Wolff himself goes way beyond the shapely close and tries to provide at least three shapely closes, each one less necessary than the previous one. Had he stopped in 1961, with the narrator pushing his way into the smoking car of the passenger train, this would have been a much, much better novel. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/64083646 Rachel's review of Prep: A Novel
by Curtis Sittenfeld

This is about four times as much as I normally write, but I think the book inspires extreme reactions and I pretty much had all of them. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/64083646 to: Prep: A Novel (Paperback) by Curtis Sittenfeld
bookshelves: fiction
I have mixed feelings about Prep. On the one hand, it's a page-turner that has no plot, which is no small feat. During the times when I was away from the book doing something else, I looked forward to getting back to it and finding out what would come next, but, for the life of me, I can't tell you why. Because on the other hand, very little of interest happens and the main character is tremendously unlikable. Yet overall? I liked this book. Or, I guess I do. I still don't know.

The main character is Lee Fiora, a middle-class teenager from South Bend, Indiana, who is a scholarship student at the Ault School, a Massachusetts boarding academy, and the story, such as it is, follows her through her four years of high school at Ault. Lee is also the narrator, telling the story from a distance of about ten years, but this isn't obvious until later in the book because her remembrances of her teen years very rarely contain anything resembling perspective or maturity. Lee is such an unappealing character; she views her past self as being plagued with low self-esteem and weirdness, and although she is self-deprecating when talking to others, she can't really disguise how unrealistically full of herself she is. She bemoans how small her circle of friends is, and yet she looks down on almost everyone. She is envious when her roommate and best friend Martha is voted senior prefect and wonders if, had she not missed the meeting when nominations her made, it would have been her instead. And she fails to understand that she has no chance of getting into an Ivy League college even though she is, at the end of her junior year, on the brink of being expelled on academic grounds.

The fact that Lee is kind of stupid was the weakest part of the story for me. Ault is a competitive school and although it's not unheard of that someone as dim as Lee could be admitted and manage not to flunk out, it was the description of her courses that rang false. In her sophomore year, she writes an English class essay that sounds as if it were written by a fifth-grader, which her teacher describes as being, "exactly what I'm looking for" (though, admittedly, the teacher is supposed to be kind of a dunce as well). Lee also takes remedial algebra in her freshman year, which doesn't sound right either. Ault is a rigorous, competitive high school; it seems unlikely that they would be offering remedial courses in a branch of math that even students in the worst public schools generally take in the 7th grade.

Lee is also mildly racist. She assumes that the minority students are all on scholarship; when a Latino student invites herself along to Lee's family dinner during Parents' Weekend, Lee assumes that the Chinese restaurant they're going to (as opposed to the more expensive restaurant where most of the parents are taking their kids) will be good enough, deciding that, "surely this was offensive, but it was true--a Chinese restaurant would probably seem nice to her"; and she considers becoming friends with a black student because "her blackness made her exist outside of Ault's social strata ... it gave her the choice of opting out without seeming like a loser," thus suggesting that if Lee could somehow co-opt the other student's blackness, it would make her own social isolation look like a deliberate choice (which it is anyway, even though Lee can't seem to take responsibility for that). In an interview, Sittenfeld acknowledged that Lee is somewhat racist, but just "in the way of a white fourteen-year-old who's grown up in Indiana and just hasn't met a ton of people who are different from her, let alone lived closely with them."

That's a fair point, but the problem I have is that Sittenfeld herself might be a little racist, not in a, "hey, let's go to a rally!" kind of way, but more in the way that makes me wonder how she could have managed to attend Stanford for four years and seemingly not spend enough time with non-white people to notice that they're not all out of central casting. Because, frankly, the minority characters in Prep are offensive, and you could build a drinking game around the stereotypes. The black student Lee considers being friends with is named "Little," because she was the smaller of a set of twins, the larger twin being named "Big." (Drink!) I suppose we should be grateful that she wasn't named "Iguana" or "Labia" or some other name that has its own page on Snopes. Little plays basketball (Drink!) and gets expelled for stealing from the other students. (Drink!) Then there's the Latino student, Conchita, who wears gaudy clothing and is vengeful. And the Asian roommate Sin Jun who apparently learned English by watching Bonanza and taking Hop Sing as her role model. And not for nothing, but was it really necessary for the Jewish girl to have a big nose? Late in the book, Lee has a conversation with Darden Pittard, a popular black student, that reveals that Sittenfeld understands more about racial politics than you would think, if you were just to go by Conchita's outfits or Sin Jun's inability to use auxiliary verbs. I don't know if that makes things better or worse because I can't tell if Sittenfeld is being willfully ignorant, or if she's trying to make a larger point that she's simply failed to pull off.

And this is precisely why I (might) like this book. There are points at which you're not sure if Sittenfeld is playing it straight, or if she's playing with the reader. Not just in the way that the non-white characters are portrayed, but also Lee herself. On the surface, her narcissism is extreme, even for a teenager, but every once in a while she'll make a throwaway remark that seems to indicate that she's not really as self-involved as she appears but is fulfilling the expected role as the narrator of her own story, in much the same way that she fulfills all her expected roles within the story itself. It's almost like the book is a test, and if you think the characters are realistic (or at least something more than caricatures), then you fail. But maybe that's just the generous view. I think Sittenfeld is trying to do something more than just tell the story of a girl who went to boarding school, but either because this is her first novel, or because she's young, or maybe because she's just not that good, she doesn't quite manage it and the ways in which she falls short are pretty awful. But the flaws are what made Prep interesting and gave me something to think about when nothing much was happening plot-wise. So, I do think I like Prep, but based on the first few pages of Sittenfeld's second novel, The Man of My Dreams, included at the end of Prep, in which Lee appears yet again, except this time named Hannah and now working in an office? Hell no. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/60463164 to: The Good Earth (Contemporary Classics (Washington Square Press)) by Pearl S. Buck
bookshelves: fiction
The Good Earth opens on the wedding day of impoverished farmer Wang Lung to the self-sacrificing O-lan, a former kitchen slave from the prosperous House of Hwang, and follows their lives as they move from back-breaking labor to wealth and position. You could build a grad school seminar around the historical and cultural themes contained in the book, but aside from that this is just a ripping good story that somehow manages to be both a quiet character study and a multi-generational saga. Since the straightforwardness of Buck's prose belies its nuance, I think there's a tendency among readers to demonize Wang Lung because he doesn't conform to contemporary Western notions of what makes a good husband and similarly to beatify O-lan for her suffering, but both characters strike me as far more complex -- both in their flaws and their decency. Buck also writes very concisely, in the sense that a lot of things happen in a relatively short (less than 400-page) book; thus, it's hard to talk about the storyline itself without spoiling it. As much of the pleasure of the book is in seeing what happens next, I will stop talking about it right about now. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/60462252 to: To Sir with Love (Paperback) by E.R. Braithwaite
bookshelves: fiction
This short memoir of the author's first year teaching high school in London's East End is a fast and interesting read. If you've seen the movie, you won't find very much more here in terms of the story, but you will have more insight into Braithwaite's reactions to and feelings about his students, in one instance a brief and fairly inappropriate reaction when he described a not-quite-graduated girl as "invad(ing) my mind and my body." Yikes. Keep it in your pants, Sir. Aside from that, it's a lovely and inspiring book. ]]>