An Abundance of Katherines: Tasty Soft Serve Ice Cream

It happened at Costco.

I hadn't had breakfast, but I had been eating from the buffet of free samples throughout the store. My blood sugar started to drop and I started making poor decisions, such as picking up a Value Pack of Häagen-Dasz ice cream bars.

It was while I was in my low blood-sugar stupor that I passed the giant pile-o-books near the sweat pants and chocolate bars.

Because this was Costco, the books were all sold in shrink-wrapped Value Packs. On one side of the table there were shrink-wrapped series: Game of Thrones, 50 Shades of Shit, Twilight, Hunger Games; on the other side of the table were books shrink-wrapped by author: John Grisham, Michael Crichton, Dan Brown, John Green.

When I saw the John Green collection I thought, "Hey.. Doesn't everyone love John Green? I wonder why. Wasn't An Abundance of Katherines banned or something? Maybe I should read his stuff." I decided to pick it up, along with a Value Pack of Kinder Bueno Bars so I'd have something to snack on on my way home.

Once I got home and ate something other than a Kinder Bueno bar, I started feeling buyer's remorse. I started wondering who I could gift The Fault in Our Stars to; I really did not feel like reading that book. I was going to read An Abundance of Katherines only because it had been banned, but I had no intention of reading the other two books: Paper Towns and Looking for Alaska (though I did in the end, but that's a different blog post).

Anyways: the book.

It wasn't bad.

I wouldn't say it was the world's best book, or even one of the better books I've ever read, but it was OK.

The plot is that this guy Colin is some kind of genius, but he shows promise without making good on it. He's apparently been dumped by 19 Katherines (hence the title of the book) and is now trying to crack some bizarre mathematical Katherine-heart-winning code to win Katherine #19's heart back. Of course we all know that that isn't going to happen. Some contrivance does happen to get him to go on a road trip and then meet a girl who's boyfriend's name just so happens to also be Colin. The girl is more or less a Manic Pixie Dream Girl with some extra personality and depth of character, and things go on as you'd expect these things to go because this book has all the depth of a shallow wading pool.

Now, that said, it's a pretty cute book. The writing is well-done; it's funny; it's fun. Because it's well-written and the characters are well-developed, you get fairly involved with them, and you start to care for them as deeply as you will ever care for somewhat shallow teen protagonists.

There really is no twist to this book. It's a straight up road-trip-come-romance. There's no deep meaning, no metaphors for anything, and no insights into the human condition. It's basically the equivalent of good quality chocolate-vanilla-swirl soft serve. How this book managed to get banned is entirely beyond me.

Charlotte Street: A Cheap Ripoff of High Fidelity

If there were any justice in this world, someone would have called out Charlotte Street for the cheap ripoff of High Fidelity it is.

What blurred lines?

Unfortunately, there is no justice. Instead we have people saying that Danny Wallace was "influenced" by High Fidelity, or "drew inspiration" from it, or that Charlotte Street is "reminiscent" of High Fidelity. But believe you me, this is a cheap ripoff if I ever saw one. If this were a song, it would be on Rob From High Fidelity's List of Five Hit Songs That Were Cheap Ripoffs of Genius Originals.

Charlotte Street isn't even a clever cover or reimagining like Clueless (Emma), or 10 Things I Hate About You (Taming of the Shrew), or Arctic Monkey's cover of Drake's Going 
Home, or anything by Weird Al; no, it's just a cheap ripoff, like My Sweet Lord, or Blurred Lines, or Led Zeppelin's entire catalogue (let's see if anyone is actually reading this). The damned book even has the same "twists" as High Fidelity. What it doesn't have that High Fidelity does is insight, wit, character development, and excellent writing; and what it does have that High Fidelity doesn't is two-dimensional characters, a pointless road trip, a stupid scene at a wedding, and a pat happy ending.

If the book had been tremendously good or spectacularly bad, I may not have regretted buying it, but it's a mediocre book that appears to have been written for the purpose of being made into a movie script. It has all the depth and charm of The Help, but with less suspense because you've already read this book.

Charlotte Street angers me more and more as I think about it. I wish I could ask for my money back.

Cinnamon Toast and the End of the World: It Gets Better

The most heartbreaking story you can tell is that of love rebuffed, because it isn't just that the person doesn't love you back: it's that they refuse your love, and then use it against you, mocking you with it.

Cinnamon Toast and the End of the World (CTatEotW) does a great job of telling the story of complete and utter emotional devastation that is love rebuffed.

Stephen spends the first seven years of his life living on a hippy commune, getting homeschooled. His family then moves to a small town where he doesn't fit in and is ill-equipped to interact with the kids in school. He gets picked on a lot until he gets a champion in the form of Mark, a tough kid who needs help with his homework. 

Cinnamon toast is really tasty, btw.

It's all going along swimmingly until a few months before high school graduation when Stephen realizes that he's in love with Mark. Then it all goes south, and fast.

It's the 1980s, so no one is out yet -- not even George Michael or the guys from Frankie Goes to Hollywood. It probably isn't even a hate crime yet to beat up people simply for being gay.  In other words, regardless of what Our Man Jeff would lead you to believe, it is not the best time to discover you're gay. 

Stephen has a terrible time coming to grips with the reality of who he is. And he feels he can't tell anyone. He doesn't know if the person he tells will be supportive or revolted by his revelation. He confides in only one person: his other best friend, Lana. But then Stephen goes down a self-destructive spiral and betrays her, leaving him even more isolated and alone than he was previously.

The real strength of CTatEotW is the way Janet E. Cameron captures what it's like to suddenly realize that you're different and that you're in love with the wrong person: the self-doubt; the self-destruction; the anger; the sadness; the heartbreak. But most importantly, the dawning that everyone knew what was going on before you even did. That sinking feeling that everyone was in on the joke except you -- that everyone has been talking about you your whole life without your knowledge.

It's a feeling that anyone who's ever come out is familiar with. That feeling of the floor falling out from below you as you realize that everyone has known and has been talking about you for years. When that feeling is compounded with the rebuffed feelings, it's so much more devastating.

But it's not all gloom and teen angst: there's fun and games and making out and telling off parents and partying with friends. And each of the supporting characters in Stephen's story are fully realized, real human beings: his mother, who had to raise him on her own; his absentee father, who is just your typical self-involved academic; Lana; Lana's boyfriend; Mark; and even Mark's girlfriend, Stacey. They all have motivations, back stories, feelings, ambitions, and regrets. None of them feel like stand-ins or place-holders. They're all characters in their own right. You almost want entire novels written telling their stories.

CTatEotW is more than just a few months spent with Stephen as he finally becomes who he is and stops pretending to be someone else. It's the story of how his self-discovery is felt by everyone around him, too, making this a really great coming of age novel.

Oh, the other good thing is that the story has a happy ending: like the song and video for Small Town Boy, he moves to a city and leaves the homophobic asshats behind.  

The Bell Jar: I Feel Nothing

The Bell Jar is one of those books that everyone tells you you need to read: "You must read The Bell Jar!" "What do you mean you've never read The Bell Jar?" "How could you not have read The Bell Jar?!"

So I read The Bell Jar. And it did nothing for me. 

In case you're like me and had only heard of The Bell Jar from references in pop culture, it's the story of Esther, a discontented college-aged woman in the 1950s. Esther's got this cushy internship at a women's magazine, but she thinks it's bullshit. She has these friend she goes out with, but she thinks they're shallow. She wants to get laid (well, actually, she decides that getting laid is something she wants to do), but has no idea how to go about it. And, finally, she hasn't gotten into the program of her choice in college.

Basically, she might as well be a character in any movie about twentysomethings ever made, except with fewer yucks and more ptomaine poisoning.

Anyways, she decides she needs to commit suicide with the same dreary determination as she decides that she needs to get laid.

After a few failed attempts (I can't decide if they were supposed to be funny or tragic or just lame), she almost manages. Unfortunately for all of us someone finds her before she's completely dead and the book doesn't end there.

This is where we get into Phase 2 of The Bell Jar where she spends some time in an asylum where she gets electroshock therapy. She meets more random people. I care for everyone even less than previously. No one seems to get better or grow as a character. I feel incredibly numb and start to wonder if I'm not suffering from depression myself. Then someone dies. And then I really hope that all the characters eventually die so that the book will end.

But then Esther starts feeling better -- or the doctors say she's feeling better -- and then the book ends. 

And then I think about how much I really do not care whether or not Esther is going to be OK.

That space invader is more compelling.

I know Esther is supposed to be depressed, but I didn't get "depressed" from her. I got "discontented". I got "trapped". I got "unhappy". But I didn't get "depressed". Esther seems to just hate her life rather than hating living. There is no overwhelming feeling of despair. And while many a webcomic shared on FB and Twitter has explained that depression is more about feeling nothing than feeling sad, I did not get a feeling of nothingness from Esther. I just felt like Esther just doesn't like what she's doing and is suffering from the typical twentysomething malaise compounded by the fact that as a woman in the 1950s she has limited choices. I get that and I'm OK with that, but it really made the suicide attempts feel like melodrama (if you've ever had a friend who wrote suicide notes on a weekly basis, you know what I mean).

She's basically unhappy.

It would have been more poignant if they had institutionalized her for being unhappy. But as it stands, they institutionalized her for trying to kill herself, which is not unreasonable.

I think my biggest obstacle to feeling anything about The Bell Jar was that I really didn't care about Esther. Esther wasn't developed enough as a character for me to care about her at all. She was like my coworker's niece's next door neighbour's cousin who lost an internship and didn't get into college and then ended up in the hospital for a psych evaluation. That's really sad, and I'm really sorry for her, but I've gotta go grab some lunch, so we'll talk later.

Green Girl: Accidental Brutalism

Bad Things happened after I finished reading Middlesex.

Middlesex was such a long, pointless, arduous, frustrating, and unsatisfying read that I was actually disoriented after I read it. I was like, "where do I go from here?"

Green Girl had been sitting on my night table for months, partially read, but prettymuch abandoned. I wasn't sure whether I liked the book or not, and I was pretty sure I hated the author. But I couldn't bring myself to read anything else. My usual literary palate cleansers -- Bridget Jones's Diary; Tales of the City; Bachelor Brothers' Bed and Breakfast Pillow Book -- seemed too flighty and lighthearted to lift the malaise I felt after reading Middlesex.

That's why I decided to finish off Green Girl.

Before I get into Green Girl, I want to tell you -- if you exist; if anyone is reading this anymore -- about the building where I worked during my graduate degree. The building was brand-new. It had been designed by a famous architect. It had been profiled in the newspaper. It won an award. The only problem with the stupid building was that it was totally inadequate for actual people. The rooms were small and awkward, with the occasional column appearing smack in the middle of a room. No one who worked in the building liked it, so when an architecture student wanted to interview us about the building, we all jumped at the opportunity.

It turned out that the architecture student really didn't care how we felt about the building. She just wanted to write a fan piece about her favourite architect, and her favourite building. During the course of my conversation with her, I said that the building wasn't just unusable, it also looked sloppy. "The columns aren't even finished," I complained. "They still have the scribbles the construction crews left on them!"

The architecture student wasn't deterred. She went to the column in the room we were in (it was awkwardly located in a corner where a desk could have gone) and lovingly caressed it. "You don't understand," she said. "They were supposed to be finished, but when they unmolded them, the architect saw how beautiful the concrete was, and decided to keep them raw."

I get the idea that raw concrete can be beautiful. I'm probably one of the few people on the planet who doesn't hate Brutalism. If you're not familiar with the term, Brutalism is the architectural style that celebrates raw concrete. It was all the rage sometime from the late sixties to the early eighties. There is probably at least one out-of-place Brutalist structure in your city, sticking out like a sore thumb.

Anyways, the thing with Brutalism is that the concrete is textured and left unfinished intentionally. Columns aren't left unfinished after the fact, quasi-accidentally. And Brutalist esthetics usually don't mix well with modern glass-and-steel buildings.

Now that we got that out of the way...

I really felt like Green Girl was a bit of accidental Brutalism.

The book is ostensibly about Ruth, a cute American chick, living from paycheck-to-paycheck in London. She moved to London after a bad breakup, I think. She lives a pretty pointless existence as a shopgirl, going out to bars with her roommate, going on random hookups, and basically not doing much. You're not sure what's up with her family aside from her mother being dead. You feel that she's probably slightly depressed.

Anyways, none of that matters because it seems that how the book is written is more important than what it's about. It's a kind of post-modern, experimental novel with the author, Kate Zambreno, hanging around, like some bad version of that movie, Stranger Than Fiction. Zambreno's voice is right there in the book. It's not just narrating the story; it's narrating the author's intent. It's telling you how much the author hates Ruth; it's telling you that the author is purposefully giving Ruth a hard time; it's basically telling you that Zambreno really, really, doesn't like cute girls and thinks that they're all vacant idiots who refuse to be anything but something to be owned or admired. You can feel the contempt oozing from the author's voice.

To be honest, it feels like Zambreno was writing through writer's block. She wrote for herself, putting down notes and comments for herself, telling herself how she felt about Ruth and the situation and what to do next. Then, as she re-read her draft, she decided to leave the notes and comments in the text because it was so beautiful. Just like the architect of the building where I did my research.

Now Jeffrey Eugenides's novels could be grouped together in a volume entitle, All About Jeff, but he at least made some kind of crazy attempt to pretend that that's not what's happening. Zambreno, though, has actually put herself in the novel, front and centre, to the point where I started to wonder if she wasn't the subject of the book. She wants the reader to see how the sausage is made. "See how clever and post-modern I am," you almost hear her scream over the din of the boring prose.

Green Girl is like the TV show Girls if Lena Dunham had decided to just narrate the show instead of star in it, and if she told you how shallow and pointless her friends were instead of making a statement about how we all feel rudderless and unmoored in our twenties.

I wouldn't say reading it was a waste of my time, but I probably won't be recommending it to anyone.

Middlesex: Two (Sucky) Novels in One

It's two novels,
two novels in one
it's the novel it wants to be
and the novel it's become

That prettymuch sums up Middlesex, the giant mess of a novel Jeffrey Eugenides (our man Jeff!) put out between the Ode to Obsession that was The Virgin Suicides, and the I-Want-A-Cookie tantrum that was The Marriage Plot.

Middlesex is the story of hardship and woe that is the immigrant Greek experience. The sad story of eviction, destruction, exile, belonging, and rebuilding. It's like a Greek version of Gone With The Wind, except with a less than compelling love story, and fewer feisty heroines. (Disclosure: I never read Gone With The Wind. I only saw the movie. But still.)

Middlesex is the story of an intersexed man named Cal, who tells the story of how he was brought up as a girl named Calliope, or Callie for short. His is a story of discovery of self. A bildungsroman, if you will.

Middlesex is both those books, and neither is particularly good. When shmooshed together in a kind of black-and-white cookie of a novel, they're even worse.

I know Jeff was trying to be clever in creating a book that is two things at once, like Cal, the narrator and (kinda) protagonist of the book because he said so in a longwinded interview he gave to a fawning journalist. But really, if he needs to tell you that, then he has screwed up the execution. It should be obvious by reading the book that that's what the book is.

Anyways, I probably could have overlooked all of this had the writing been any good, but the writing was amateurish and ham-handed, and the book was duller than one of those chapters Dickens wrote because he had to.

And yet Jeff won a Pulitzer Prize for this mess.

sigh

Anyways, in that same longwinded interview with the fawning journalist, Jeff said that he wanted Middlesex to be critiqued for the book it is, rather than for the book people wished it were. If this were the book I wished it were, this would be a much shorter blog entry. This would also be a blog entry where I'd say, "OMG! This book was awesome and it truly captured the gender confusion that comes from being raised as a girl and then being told at puberty that you're really a boy!"

However, this is not the book it is. The book Middlesex is is not a very good book.

For all of the research Jeff put into writing Novel #1 about the Greek Immigrant Experience - let's call it "Jeff: A Fictionalized Family History of my Dad's Side of The Family" ("Jeff: AFFH") - he really didn't put much effort into finding out what it meant to live as a girl in a traditional Greek family in the late 60s and early 70s.

In Jeff:AFFH, which takes up the bulk of the book entitled "Middlesex", Cal tells us about how his grandparents ended up in Detroit. He tells of how they left their tiny town, headed for Smyrna just in time to watch it burn down, and got on a boat headed for America.

Cal, our first person narrator, seems to know every detail about what happened to his (incestuous) grandparents, right down to their innermost thoughts and feelings for each other - innermost thoughts and feelings that his grandparents never shared with the rest of the family. Ever.

Cal also knows the details of the life of family friend, family physician, and co-refugee of Cal's grandparents, Dr Philobosian (the token Armenian for the sake of acknowledging the Armenian genocide).

It's very interesting that Cal knows the details of Dr Philobosian's history because Cal admits that Dr Philobosian never told anyone about what happened to his family. In fact, Cal doesn't just know the general outline of what happened to Dr Philobosian's family; he knows the gory details!

Cal knows that Dr Philobosian had gone out during the sacking of Smyrna and came home to his entire family slaughtered - including his daughter's who'd been violated and maimed.

How the fuck could Cal know this if Dr Philobosian never told anyone, not even Cal's grandparents?

Well, in the longwinded interview with the fawning journalist, Jeff claimed that it's obvious that sometimes Cal is making shit up because there's no way he could know the things he's recounting.

And to that I say, "whatever".

Cal's narration is not written in the style of someone who is taking liberties with the truth. I think Cal says at some point that he will be filling in the gaps with his own imaginings, but his narration is not actually written that way.

Cal's narration is written with certainty and clarity. There is no indication that any of it is made up. There's no wink to the reader. No, "I can only imagine why Dr Philobosian threw himself into the frigid waters in the port of Smyrna." No, instead it's a very certain "this is why he did it."

But let's, for the sake of argument, assume that Cal is making this shit up and this is his flight of fancy. Why the fuck would he invent such a gruesome death for Dr Philobosian's family, and especially his young daughters?

Actually, let's step back a minute and think about the decision Jeff made when he wrote that in.

Authors make choices. It's true that their characters have to ring true and be true to themselves, but authors can choose what they're going to do with a narrative.

In the case of showing that war is hell, an author can choose for the humble doctor to be attending to all kinds of emergencies all night as the invading army destroys his city. Each time he shows up to a call, though, he either finds dead people, or people so badly off that he can't possibly help them. Maybe at some point he's in a house at the same time as the soldiers and witnesses them murder some people. The doctor manages to escape from the house, but he's so scared that he immediately runs off to the port to escape the city, abandoning his family to whatever awful fate awaits them. He gets to the port, but he's consumed by guilt. He throws himself into the water hoping to die, only to be rescued by a Greek couple who are also fleeing. He wishes they hadn't saved him. His guilt gnaws at him his whole life, and even informs his behaviour as a physician once he gets to the US.

On the other hand, the author can be cheap and do what every made-for-TV movie, pulp novel, comic book, and cheap video game does, and have the doctor find his wife and daughters raped, and the entire family murdered. Basically, introducing a whole set of characters for the sake of killing them off to provide a motivation for the doctor.

I can just see some dumbass editor saying "this is so powerful" as they read this part of the book, insisting that it be kept in even though Dr Philobosian's story prettymuch begins and ends right there.

Sure Dr Philobosian tags along with Cal's grandparents to Detroit and becomes their family physician, but for the rest of Jeff: AFFH he's just some background character mentioned in passing. There really was no point in giving him this backstory. He was just there to show that war is hell, and that there was an Armenian genocide.

The rest of Jeff:AFFH is duller than dirt. It just outlines the establishment of businesses, the purchase of houses and Cadillacs, and the forceful entry of the family into middle class American society. It doesn't really go anywhere, and it isn't really told with enough depth to allow the reader to get invested in the plight of these characters.

And, on top of it all, Jeff channels his inner M. Night Shyamalan and throws in a twist or two. Unlike M. Night Shyamalan twists, though, these twists are entirely pointless. So let's move on to the second novel, Cal: The Dude with Ambiguous Genitalia ("Cal:TDAG").

The only thing good I can say about Cal:TDAG is that at least the writing wasn't as flabby as it was in Jeff:AFFH.

As someone who writes technical documents no one reads, I'm not actually allowed to call myself a writer. However, there's an art to writing good technical documents. If you want your document to be readable and usable, the writing has to be tight. That means that after you've written the document, you have to make the world's most boring edits: removing passive language; removing adverbs; removing unnecessary words; removing unnecessary information.

I spend my work days making sure that you can't pinch an inch on my writing, so I feel insulted to come home to the rolling mounds of flab that is Middlesex. Every paragraph in the book could have been trimmed and made about 1/3 as long.

I understand that Cal is supposedly the one "writing" this book, and he's in love with his own voice, but just because your narrator/writer is a bad writer, doesn't mean you have to let them take over your novel. Unless (a) you didn't realize this was happening, or (b) you actually don't think that this person is a bad writer.

Which brings me to the same problem I had with The Marriage Plot: does Jeff know what he's done? Does Jeff know that Cal is an asshole? Does Jeff know that Cal can't write? Did Jeff do this on purpose, or was this an accident? Or, more scarily, did Jeff not realize at all that Cal is an asshole who can't write?

I have no idea.

In any case, the novel picks up its pace in Cal:TDAG. It gets a little tighter, and becomes slightly less boring.

Unfortunately, Cal:TDAG is about as believable as Letters to Penthouse.

Jeff has apparently been grossly misinformed about what it means to be brought up as a girl. He appears to think that girls growing up in Greek families in the 1970s had perfectly idyllic existences, except for having to have their body and facial hair removed. Girls raised in nice Greek families never wondered why they had to set the table while their brothers got to watch TV. They never felt that hot sense of inequality as they watched their freedom slowly disappear as they got older, while the opposite happened to their brothers.

This was not on their mind. All they really noticed was that they needed to get waxed.

Maybe Cal doesn't remember resenting his brother. I mean, that's possible, right? I mean, just because he can recount his (possibly fictionalized?) family history in glorious detail doesn't mean he can remember his own story? Right?

Though Cal does remember that he felt that his brother getting drafted into the army was sexist. Because that's really the heart of sexism right there.

Did I not mention that Cal has a brother? He's referred to as "Chapter Eleven" for the entirety of the book with no mention as to why.

Because apparently Cal knows all and reveals all, except that.

sigh

Anyways.

So we have Callie learning to be a woman by going to get waxed, and it seems that Jeff has also been misinformed about what a waxing salon is like. He seems to believe that women lie naked on beds in a communal room as they are being waxed.

This is not true except in letters to Penthouse or maybe in Lesbian porn made for heterosexual males.

Jeff apparently also learned about girls' locker rooms from teen movies from the 1980s. In real life, though, girls in high school locker rooms do not walk around completely naked. They usually hide behind towels and curtains. Most girls learn how to change clothes without ever exposing their breasts or vulvas to the world. It's a skill women use forever, actually. It comes in handy at the gym, or when you have to participate in the office squash tournament.

And, finally, SWEET CHEESUS ON A CHEESESTICK, JEFF, OBVIOUSLY CALLIE WOULD HAVE FELT WEIRD ABOUT CRUSHING ON A GIRL! Prior to, say, the past five years or so, there has been no time in history when a girl would crush on another girl and not worry that she wasn't normal. There were after-school specials, Very Special Episodes of sitcoms, and scenes in teen movies about this very topic because IT WAS CONSIDERED SOMEWHAT OFF-NORM!

But none of this matters because Callie's really a boy.

All the sexual ambiguity Callie experiences gets wrapped up nicely by the reveal that Callie is in reality a straight dude. Lucky for him. And lucky for Jeff because he would have been in big trouble had Callie expressed an interest in boys. I don't think Jeff would have been able to write through that. His brain would have exploded if he had to move away from his own reality.

Now, as for the matter of the gender ambiguity, apparently that isn't really an issue either. Cal realizes he's a boy and presto he's a boy! He gets a haircut, buys a suit, learns to swagger, and voilà: instant boy!

It doesn't matter that he's been a girl his whole life. No! He's a boy! He likes girls. He… I don't know what he does. But he definitely is a boy. He knows he's a boy because a piece of paper said he was a boy. He never doubts that maybe the doctor is full of shit. He never thinks, "OMG! How can I be a boy? I like dresses! I'm bad at sports!" Nope. He just runs away from home to become a boy.

And once he is reunited with his family, they're totally cool with his transformation.

I'm guessing that what Jeff meant that people shouldn't judge the book for what it isn't, is that they shouldn't say, "In real life this would never have happened", but accept that the family accepted Cal's change.

I could have accepted it, you know, if it had been covered in more than a couple of paragraphs. I could not accept it, though, as it was written. It was just glossed over, and brushed aside, like Jeff had no idea how this would even play out. The scenes between Cal and his brother especially feel lazy. I can accept that Cal's brother would accept Cal, but I need more than a single stilted conversation.

The writing in Cal:TDAG was so lazy at the end that I didn't care about Cal or his family.

All I actually cared about was why Chapter Eleven was called "Chapter Eleven".

Eleanor & Park: Preferable to The Scarlet Letter

I can't remember how I heard about Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell, but somehow I did. At the time I didn't know it was a Young Adult (YA) novel. Nothing about it suggested that it was a YA novel other than the fact that the main characters are teenagers.  I had picked it up on a whim and it wasn't in the YA section of the bookstore.

I only found out it was a YA novel when a "mom" who is "also a librarian" told me it was. At first I thought she was mistaken because she had never heard of Daniel Handler, nor his alter-ego, Lemony Snicket. What kind of librarian has never heard of Daniel Handler? (Answer: Librarian Moms Who Live In The Suburbs.) But then I looked it up and found out that not only was it a YA novel, but it was a smutty, evil, banned YA novel! In that case I had to read it!

YA novels and I never really got along. Here is an incomplete list of the YA novels I read between the ages of 12 and 17, including what I thought of the books at the time:

• Everything Ever Written By Judy Bloom: That was fun! But why did her menstrual pads need a belt?
• Ask Anybody by Constance C Greene: What does "Meet you at the laundromat, bring suds" mean? 
• I Was a 15-Year-Old Blimp by Patti Stren: So don't become bulimic? Got it! 
• After The Bomb by Gloria D. Miklowitz: I'm not sleeping for the next 10years, thankyouverymuch.
• Some random book with "Love" in the title: Don't have sex because the guy will cheat on you? Um...that doesn't sound quite right, but OK? Maybe not. This sounds fishy.
• Nancy Drew reboot books: Her friend the athlete sounds hot, but man these books suck.
• A bunch of survival books mostly centred around boys who seem to be having sex with hot chicks: Hey this book has a chapter titled "Post-Coitus"! This is much better! I wonder if there are more of these in the library...There are! Awesome!

YA novels were pretty boring, and they tended to be moralizing. I preferred my mom's Agatha Christie novels, and my dad's Isaac Asimov novels over most YA novels (with the notable exception of Foundation's Edge, which was the dullest book ever).

After a while, I also realized that YA novels were incredibly poorly-written. YA, trash, and science fiction/fantasy all suffer from the problems of excessive exposition, poor character development, and shoehorned endings. They aren't your best books.  This is probably why your teen will usually move from YA to trash, or YA to scifi/fantasy before reading something that's actually good.

Unless they never read anything actually good and instead contribute to the popularity of 50 Shades of Shit.

But I digress.

Eleanor&Park isn't that kind of YA novel. It's better written than most books you run into in the "regular" lit genre, and the plot is neither moralizing nor saccharine.  And yes, there is swearing because teenagers swear. I hated those YA novels (and Teen TV Shows) where teens didn't swear or talk to each other in ways that they'd never be caught dead talking to their parents. Like, really, your teens are going to talk like characters out of Leave It To Beaver, and yet learn Important Lessons about why you shouldn't drink? I don't think so. (Can I just take a moment to hate Degrassi Jr High? Thank you.)

The story of Eleanor&Park isn't anything that hasn't been covered on A Very Special Episode of Any Teen Show (I'm pretty sure some '80s sitcoms even covered this). Eleanor is a kinda chubby misfit from a bad family. She's new in town, and the local kids pick on her. Her stepfather is an abusive asshole who's kicked her out once before and now makes her life hell. She has no place where she feels safe. Fortunately, though, she meets Park, who's also kind of a misfit. He's half Korean. His father looks like Tom Selleck, but he doesn't. He does martial arts, but loves comics and post-punk rock.

Eleanor and Park fall in teen-love and Park defends Eleanor against the raging lunatic haters in the school, and, ultimately, against her raging lunatic stepfather.

Of course, all good things must come to an end and so does Eleanor and Park's relationship.

It's a really cute book. Some parents may get their knickers in a knot because the book describes Eleanor and Park's make-out sessions, but personally I'd be more upset if I caught my kid reading Ender's Game, A Game of Thrones, or anything by Piers Anthony.

Or Dune. No kid should ever read Dune.

Actually, no one should read Dune. Ugh.

The one thing that did annoy me a bit about Eleanor&Park was that each chapter alternates between Eleanor and Park's points-of-view, and Rainbow Rowell isn't skilled enough as a writer to pull that off. You can't really tell without reading the title who's point-of-view you're seeing. Eventually I just stopped paying attention to it and let it go. Had this book been as dead inside as The Help, it would have gotten me mad, but fortunately this book has soul. Rainbow Rowell can do emotion without being melodramatic about it.

I want to end on a small note about what my school thought was appropriate teen reading. When I was 13, I had to read The Scarlet Letter for school. I'm sure you know what The Scarlet Letter is about, but in case you don't, here's a quick synopsis:

Hester Prynn is a Puritan living in Massachusetts in 16-something. She's married to some guy she's never met and who hasn't arrived from England yet. Hester gives birth to a baby who is, obviously, not her husband's. The father is the town reverend. Instead of coming clean, the asshole hides the fact that he's the kid's father. Sure he asks Hester to out him, but really dude's a giant coward. Meanwhile Hester's husband arrives, but nobody knows who he is. He proceeds to make everyone's life a living hell because he's that kind of asshole. Everyone goes about their miserable lives feeling guilty for prettymuch everything until they die. The book is a thick, joyless read, full of Piles of Evil. 

If I had to chose whether to let my thirteen year old read Eleanor&Park or The Scarlet Letter, I'd fucking choose Eleanor&Park any day of the week.  At least in Eleanor&Park neither Eleanor nor Park are cowards, and it's pretty damned clear that the assholes making everyone's life hell are the bad guys.

If On A Winter's Night A Traveler: If On An Afternoon A Reader

If on an afternoon a reader sits down outside to read If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, and the friend she was waiting for arrives and asks her if the book is any good, what should the reader answer? What did the reader answer?

The reader buried her head in the book and sobbed in exasperation, "I don't know!"

***

I wish I could tell you whether or not I liked If On a Winter's Night A Traveler.

At first it wasn't bad. I was on board with the whole idea that the main character, The Reader, started reading a book, but found that it was missing all but its first chapter because of a binding error. I was OK with the archaic descriptions of tearing apart the pages of the folios of a new book. I have never done this ever, and none of my parents' books -- many of which predated the publish date of If On A Winter's Night A Traveler (IOAWNAT) -- seemed to have had their pages physically ripped apart, but maybe in Italy in 1978 books were still sold with their folios uncut.

And it didn't even irritate me at first that even though the book addressed the actual reader -- i.e. me -- in the second person as if it was telling my story, the main character was a sexist heterosexual male. I mean it's not as if Italo Calvino is unique in portraying women as secondary, undeveloped characters in the stories of men. He wrote the book in 1978, a year when everyone thought it was OK that Tony and his pals weren't arrested for rape and attempted rape, so what can you expect, really?

The entire book is the story of The Reader and his attempt to find the rest of the book he's started reading. Each time he thinks he has the rest of the book, it turns out to be the rest of another book. So he basically keeps reading bits and pieces of different books, never actually finishing any of them.

He's accompanied on his odyssey to get the rest of the book -- any of the books, really -- by Ludmilla. The Reader meets Ludmilla when they both go to the same bookstore to get the rest of the original book they were reading -- which is If On A Winter's Night A Traveler. They decide to read the book together.

At first Ludmilla keeps him at arm's length for reasons he can't glean. For some reason The Reader doesn't realize that he's a creepy guy at a bookstore who just asked her for her number. But hey, it was OK to harass women for their phone numbers in 1978. So we'll let that go.

Eventually, though, Ludmilla starts introducing The Reader to all kinds of scholars and whatnot to get to the bottom of all these books they're reading. It's like a real-life version of going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole: you start at the list of Twilight characters and keep clicking on the links until you end up reading about fricative consonants.

I stopped reading around the time when it turns out Ludmilla is the Sultana that some author or agent or something wrote about in his letters about some manuscript, a manuscript Ludmilla may or may not have a copy of.

Now, just so you understand -- whomever you are -- I didn't stop reading the book because it was too confusing. I was able to follow just fine, thank you. I didn't mind the ride.

What pissed me off was that I wasn't sure if I did or did not like the book!

The problem was that each book excerpt was supposed to be a random passage from a book, but each random passage contained too much backstory to be a random passage. Each passage was like a book written by someone with a love for Exposition Fairies. It became tiresome after a bit.

So I was OK with the attempts by Ludmilla and The Reader to find the books, but I really didn't like reading the books these guys found. They were really crappy books.

On top of it all, each book excerpt was written in almost the same post-moderny baroque style as the rest of the book. Maybe I should blame that on the translator?

So yeah, I can't tell you whether or not I liked On A Winter's Night ATraveler because I liked the story, but not its stories. It was like existential angst in book form, but not in a good way.

Wired Love: Let's Chat

I've been in science in technology my whole life. As such, my dating life has been carried out online for a lot longer than eHarmony, Match.com and OKCupid have existed. I used to be up all night using Linux's talk and write with my boyfriend back before browsers had the capability to display background colours. (Yes, people, there was a time when all you got was grey. That was when you weren't using a text-based browser like Lynx. I'm old.)

Back in the day, no one I knew outside the Faculties of Science and Engineering flirted over the internet (or even the LAN, as the case may be). Hell, even as late as 1998, not many people I knew exchanged extensive emails and online chats with potential romantic partners. I mean, sure, there were chat rooms and whatnot, but the popular opinion was that they were populated with pedophiles and rapists rather than horny computer science majors trying to impress each other with their knowledge of obscure operating systems.

Anyways.

That said, I've never read a book where the protagonists met online, spent most of the book never meeting face-to-face, but yet fell in love -- that is until I read Wired Love.

Wired Love is about Nattie and Clem, two twentysomethings who meet and carry out an extensive courtship online, much to the annoyance of their coworkers and customers.

The catch, though, is that Wired Love was written in 1879 and the "online" in question is the telegraph line. Nattie and Clem fall in love using Morse code.

The book is told from Nattie's perspective. She's bored at her job in the telegraph office, and one day Clem, at another telegraph office, tries to outdo her by sending her a message so fast that she has a hard time transcribing it. Nattie gets pissed and indignant and tells him that he's an ass. Clem apologizes, and they strike up a conversation. The conversations follow the usual courtship patterns: questions, elusive answers, teases, irritations, apologies, etc. The thing with a telegraph line, though, is that everyone on the line can hear your messages. The other operators on the line start getting annoyed with Clem and Nattie's flirting and try to shut it down.

Nattie, meanwhile, tells her friends all about this, and they have a hard time understanding, much as my friends never understood when I told them about the chats I had with boyfriends online ("Couldn't you just call each other?" "OMG No! What would we talk about! Plus that's so forward! I'd be too scared!")

The novel is surprisingly modern for something written in 1879. Nattie and Clem's conversations could be used in any modern-day RomCom, if anyone ever cared to make a movie about a girl sitting infront of a computer typing messages to some guy and then telling her friends about it.

I really liked Wired Love. It was a cute, easy read. And unlike the piles of Edith Wharton books I've been reading, Wired Love has a happy ending, which was a refreshing change. (Did you really think it would have an unhappy ending?)

In case you want to read Wired Love, it's available free from Project Gutenberg.

The Sense of an Ending: An End That Can't Come Soon Enough

At least it was on sale.

When my mom was in college, she had been assigned An American Tragedy for a class, but was having a hard time finishing it. One of her profs had noticed that she had been dragging the book around for a rather long time and said to her, "Any book you can't finish in three weeks is not worth reading."

I was about to invoke my mom's An American Tragedy Rule and stop reading Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending 25 pages before the end. But I felt I needed to finish the book because Dame Stella Rimington, the chair of the Booker Prize judges the year The Sense of an Ending won, said that it was "subtly plotted" and "revealed new depths" each time you read it.

Usually the books I can't finish are craptastic pieces of trash like The Help and Rubyfruit Jungle. They're books that I feel I shouldn't waste my limited existence on. But The Sense of an Ending is a really well-written book -- and it won the Booker Prize! After reading the first few pages of the book, I became sad because I'd never write as well as Julian Barnes.

And yet...

And yet Julian Barnes has used his incredible talent to write a book whose protagonist, narrator, and almost sole character is the equivalent of the boring guy sitting next to you on a long bus ride, talking your ear off about some guy who's been dead since 1970.

I skimmed the last 25 pages because I couldn't take it anymore. It was the equivalent of putting on my headphones and missing parts of what The Boring Guy on the Bus said.

Maybe Julian Barnes knew exactly what he was doing when he made his protagonist, Tony, the literary equivalent of dry toast. It isn't so much that Tony is boring; it's that he's so boring that I honestly saw no reason to want to spend time with him and listen to his stupid story of woe. If I were to meet Tony at a party, I would make up a dumbass excuse like, "Oh! I think I see Becky by the punch and I must go talk to her about that 21 game next week" to get out of talking to him.

But A.D. Miller said that losing the Booker Prize to this book was like losing to Brazil in the World Cup.

Tony, the protagonist and World's Most Uninteresting Human Being Ever, is an old guy who is sad that he is getting old. He looks back wistfully on his youth, misremembering all kinds of things and not realizing what a mean sunovabitch he was to his friend Adrian when Adrian started dating Tony's ex-girlfriend, Veronica. The trigger for all this misremembering is that Veronica's mother has died and she's left Tony Adrian's diary. Tony -- who is about as deep as a drop or two of water on your kitchen counter -- doesn't really wonder why Veronica's mother would have Adrian's diary. Instead Tony starts thinking about how batshit insane Veronica was and misremembering their breakup, eventually just becoming obsessed with the whole thing.

Oh, and Tony starts thinking about memory. He starts thinking about how your memory of an event is different than what it was, and why you need other people to corroborate a memory, or even refute a memory as you get old. He sinks far into the depths of deepity, just like that Boring Guy in the Bus eventually does.

You know which book discusses the imperfections of memory, especially in terms of old romances, but does it better? High Fidelity, that's which book.

You know what the difference is between High Fidelity and The Sense of an Ending? High Fidelity has funny moments and doesn't take itself Seriously.

There is nothing funny about Tony or The Sense of an Ending. Nothing. There are no moments where you lightly chuckle to yourself. There are no jokes. There are no amusing moments of levity. It's all Very Serious.

Now, it's established that Julian Barnes is brilliant, so why the fuck did he write this book this way? Did he deliberately set out to write a book with The Boring Guy on the Bus as the protagonist? Did he want to tell The Boring Guy on the Bus's Boring Story to the masses? Is he making a point about people who are lonely and how they just go on and on and on without really making a point?

I don't know. I don't care.

Maybe I'm too dumb to understand the subtle nuance of the book, but I swear Veronica's version of this story would be way more interesting and enlightening.

A Game of Thrones Was Not Written For Me

It is, once again, the middle of my lunch break at work. As usual, I was reading A Game of Thrones while eating my lunch.

Right before my coworkers came in and distracted me, I read a passage that made it abundantly clear that George R.R. Martin is a horrible writer.

The mark of a good writer is that he (or she -- I'm just gonna use 'he' for brevity) can write clean prose that is still descriptive, while giving each character depth, feeling, and a voice. A character's thoughts, words, and actions need to ring true. They can't just be what the author thinks the character would do, think, or say based on how the author wants the story to unfold. Characters also should not act as mirrors for main characters by saying, thinking, and doing things that only reflect their opinion of the main character rather than something about themselves.

Good writers observe people and read a variety of books. They then sublimate this information into characters who don't act the way the author desires them to act, but in a way that a real person with the characteristics of the character, at the time the character was living would act.

This is why Pride&Prejudice rocks as a piece of literature. All the characters in the book act like real people. They're just as dumb, impetuous, narcissistic, selfish, and stubborn as real people. And while the mores of time during which P&P is set are alien to us now, the way the characters behave is not.

Now back to A Game of Thrones.

George R.R. Martin (GRRM) has written a character with no flaws in Eddard Stark. The man's fucking perfect. He takes care of his bastard son. He takes care of his kids. He is just. He is compassionate. He is fair. He is everything you want in a hero and so much fucking more. He is so fucking fantastic that all his wife wants to do is let him impregnate her.

To wit:

[Eddard Stark] looked somehow smaller and more vulnerable, like the youth she had wed in the sept at Riverrun, fifteen long years gone. Her loins still ached from the urgency of his lovemaking. It was a good ache. She could fill his seed within her. She preyaed it would quicken there. [...] She was not too old. She could give him another son.

 I'll give you a moment to finish your "Ewwwwww!"

All good? Great. Moving on.

Stark's wife is sitting in bed after he's apparently pounded her like nobody's business and what is she thinking? "My husband still looks hot. I'm not old yet. I hope I get preggers again. That way I'll prove to him that I'm worthy. Plus he's so awesome that I just totes want to be preggers by him!"

What does that tell us about these two people? It tells us that Stark is FUCKING ACES! YEAH!

Ahem.

We learn that Stark still looks young, even though he's old. We learn that he can still bring his wife...wait...I was going to say "bring his wife to orgasm", but that's not clear. All we know is that his wife has genital bruising. Let's be generous and say that he can still satisfy his wife (who may have never actually had a good lover, for all we know). Finally, we know that he's such a great guy that his wife hopes that she's not too old for him and can still carry another kid -- a son, specifically.

What do we learn about Stark's wife? We learn that she is a figment of someone's imagination because no woman in the history of humanity has ever thunk these things after sex. Ever.

I could believe that she thought her husband was pretty hot. I could believe that she thought that her 'nads were achy. But that's where it ends. I doubt she'd be thinking, "I hope I'm not too old" or "I hope I get preggers". I'd be more inclined to think that she'd be thinking that that was a pretty good romp, and that she would really like a nice bath and maybe a nap. And why the fuck isn't her husband coming to bed to cuddle?

*sigh*

I'm not renewing the loan on this book. I'm done.

 

Foundation's Edzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

In 1986 my homeroom teacher was Ms Michaelson. She was a severe, skinny woman who thought that being entirely unreasonable instilled discipline.

The class was English and Ms Michaelson insisted that we arrive 10 minutes early for class. For the first five pre-class minutes, we wrote in our journals; the next five minutes were spent reading a book of our choice.

A reasonable alternative to NyQuil

I really disliked Ms Michaelson. For one thing, if you were late for the pre-class, she'd send you for a late slip. This was insane. You'd end up arguing with some minor administrator -- or worse yet, secretary -- who would send you back without a late slip (because you weren't late). But by the time you'd get back to class, you would be late, and so you'd be sent down for a late slip again. For another, she was one of those people who told you that only boring people get bored. That is so not true. You know who gets bored? Smart people who are trapped listening to idiots all day and don't have a decent book with them, that's who!

I have no idea why I decided to bring Foundation's Edge as my book of choice. My parents' house is lousy with books. Books literally fall on your head when you open closets. I think I had originally brought Agatha Christie's A Cat Among The Pigeons, but that took me about a week to read. My guess is that I wanted something more challenging and that's why I picked up Foundation's Edge. But I was a teenager, so who the fuck knows what I was thinking.

Anyways, I did not like the book. I thought it was dull as all get-out until the last few chapters when something actually happened. 

And so the book remained at my parents' house, in the basement.

Until this past Christmas.

You know what happens when it's Christmas, you have nothing to do, you're sick, and you're at your parents' house? You make bad decisions. Decisions like reading Foundation's Edge again to see if it's as dull as you remember it.

Spoiler: it is.

A good 90% of the book is blahblahblah. And by this I mean that 90% of the book is taken up by exposition fairies. Exposition fairies take over every single character for most of the book. And they go on and on and on. Paragraphs of dialogue take up entire half pages! Who the fuck cares how the fucking spaceship works? I don't. I care about where you're going and why. Who the fuck cares about how you calculated the fucking coordinates of the dumbass planet? I don't. Maybe someone does. Maybe some überfanboy somewhere is keeping track of all the tech and making sure it makes sense. But that fanboy is not me.

I was too busy skipping over pages and pages of this blahblahblah to get to some part -- any part -- where someone talked to someone about something not tech. I swear there should be a Bechdel Test for science fiction. I'm calling it the Snad Test:

1. There must be at least two "regular" characters
2. Who have a conversation
3. That is not about tech

Sweet Cheesus on a Cheesestick! I think I had to wait til the before last chapter or something for a climax and dénouement to happen. And when it did, it was totally antclimactic. 

Do you want a synopsis? Here's a synopsis:

Eons (millennia?) after the Seldon Plan, some guy named Golan Trevize decides that the Seldon Plan is going too well and that obviously the Second Foundation -- which was full of "scholars" with mind control abilities yaddayaddayadda -- had not been destroyed back in that other book (Second Foundation? Foundation and Empire? I don't know; I didn't read it.) and was still controlling their minds. So he gets booted off his planet and sent off to find these Second Foundation guys for reasons that are totally bizarre. Meanwhile, back on the farm, some guy from the Second Foundation gets attacked by a bunch of ruffians, and his Second Foundation buddies also send him off to do something because of Extra Tasty Contrivance. Oh, and Golan's bestie, whose name escapes me, is sent off to follow Golan because of Super Chocolatey Contrivance. Golan correctly guesses that his bestie is a Second Foundation operative, but that really doesn't matter. In the end, they all end up in the same place -- a planet called Gaia -- that is sentient or something. A whole lot of deus ex machina dust is sprinkled by the mind-control entity that is Gaia so that the entire implausible storyline makes sense. 

There ya go. 

Only read this book if you're suffering from insomnia and you find NyQuil distasteful.

Dear Friend, I Just Read The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Dear Friend,

I just finished reading a book called "The Perks of Being aWallflower". It is about a boy who is 15 in 1992, but it was written by an adult man in 1999. The book is written in the form of letters from the boy to a friend. The boy's name is Charlie. I don't know what his friend's name is. I don't even know if the friend really exists because we never see any replies to Charlie's letters. I think the letters may be a writing exercise, but I'm not sure.

The boy is very sad. He tells you he's sad a lot, and it seems like everything that happens makes him sad. The boy doesn't have many emotions, come to think of it. He only tells you when he's sad. He never uses other words to describe how he feels, like "distraught" or "devastated". When he does use fancy words, he puts them in quotation marks. I guess he wants to show that he doesn't really know what those words mean because he only read them in a book or heard them in English class. There was no internet in 1992 where he could have looked them up. Dictionaries also were not invented yet.

Beside being sad, Charlie has a very exciting life and has some very good friends. His friends are Patrick, Sam, who is a girl, and Mary Elizabeth. Patrick is gay and he is dating the quarterback of the football team. They have had sex. Charlie is in love with Sam, but she is dating Craig. Mary Elizabeth really likes Charlie, but Charlie doesn't like Mary Elizabeth as much. They all participate in the Rocky Horror Picture Show floor show, which is unusual for teenagers in 1992.

Charlie has listened to Nirvana's new album and he even put a song from it on a mix tape that he gives Patrick. Patrick tells him that the mix tape is very sad. That's how you know that there is something wrong with Charlie. Charlie also tells you that there's something wrong with him because he is not "normal". Charlie writes everything in a very "monotonic" voice. This may be because the grownup who wrote the book thinks that this is the way teenage boys write.

This book reminded me a lot of Go Ask Alice, which was also written by a grownup pretending to be a teenager. In Go Ask Alice, the author pretends that the teenager is writing in a diary. The author does not do a good job, though, and you can tell that the teenager isn't a real teenager. The author who wrote The Perks of Being a Wallflower (his name is Stephen Chbosky) also does not do a very good job at writing like a teenager. The author puts in too many details in some cases, and not enough in others. Sometimes it sounds like you are reading a regular book and not letters. This would have been OK if the book did not feel "like an afterschool special". Too many bad things happen to Charlie for it to be believable, I think.

I am also not sure if Charlie is autistic. Charlie has very deep insight into many things, but can't figure out the people around him. Charlie does not get excited about anything, not even sex!

Charlie has an aunt that died. She was very nice to him. Charlie feels guilty about her death because she died in a car crash getting his Christmas present. Then Charlie finds out something very sad about his aunt. This is very important.  I can't tell you more about this because that would ruin the ending.

I do not think I really liked this book. I think The Catcher in the Rye was better. The Catcher in the Rye was also written by an adult about a teenager who is not normal. That teenager, Holden Caulfield, is telling his story. It is a good book and Holden Caulfield seems like more of a real teenager, even though he lived a long time ago when there wasn't even any TV.

That is all for now. I think Stephen Chbosky thought he was very clever.

Bye for now
Snad

Rewriting A Game of Thrones

In music and painting, it's typical to reproduce existing works. Sometimes musicians and artists just reproduce the work to gain skills ("I can finally play Stairway!"), and sometimes they don't reproduce the work so much as they reinterpret it ("I'm re-doing Stairway as a Gregorian Chant. It isn't really much of a stretch.").

But there's no such tradition in writing. In writing, if you try to rewrite anything, it's considered plagiarism.  (Though I do know of one guy, Chris Eaton, who did a remake -- a cover, if you will -- of Thomas Hardy's A Pair of Blue Eyes. The book's called The Grammar Architect and it's not bad.)

I don't like that. I think that a good way to practice writing is to take something miserably bad -- something like, say, A Game of Thrones -- and rewrite it so that it's almost palatable.

I'm not an awesome writer, but I think that I can make at least one passage from that first Game of Thrones book less awful. I mean, seriously, this book reeks. The author, George R.R. Martin (you need those initials if you want to be a fantasy writer, right J.R.R. Tolkien?), shoves so many unneeded words, including superfluous adverbs and obnoxious turns of phrases, into his writing that I have to assume that the book is a big giant fuck you to Strunk&White, Anne Lamott, and Stephen King.

That is if George R.R, Martin's heard of them.

You may be wondering (if you exist) why the hell I'm reading A Game of Thrones to begin with. Well, as you may or may not know, I work at a technology company. All my coworkers have read A Game of Thrones and they're all big fans of the show. I just started watching the show and I am not a big fan. I decided that maybe -- just maybe -- the books would be better. So I checked the first book in the series out of the library (I'm not making the mistake I made with The Help and Peyton Place ever again). 

Within the first few pages I realized that this was not going to go well. When you roll your eyes five times within the first ePage of your eBook, you know that this is not going to go well. When you spot the second mention that the blood was "like summer wine" on the snow, you know you're deep into 50 Shades of Shit territory.

I read a passage to one of my fanboy coworkers and asked him, very seriously, if he thought George R.R. Martin could shove any extra words into the sentence, and my coworker answered, "Obviously it's bad if you insist on reading the words!"

*sigh*

This brings me to right now. I was reading the book over lunch and thought, "I could rewrite this. I could rewrite this with fewer stupid words and keep the intent. I'm sure I could."

So for your reading pleasure -- or not, I'm doing this cold in the few remaining minutes of my lunch hour -- is a rewrite of a passage from Book 1 of A Game of Thrones.

The passage:

Viserys had been a boy of eight when they fled King's Landing to escape the advancing armies of the Usurper, but Daenerys had been only a quickening in their mother's womb.

Yet sometimes Dany would picture the way it had been, so often had her brother told her the stories. The midnight flight to Drangonstone, moonlight shimmering on the ship's black sails.  Her brother Rhaegar battling the Usurper in the bloody waters of the Trident and dying for the woman he loved. The sack of King's Landing by the ones Viserys called the Usurper's dogs, the lords Lannister and Stark. Princess Elia of Dorne pleading for mercy as Rhaegar's heir was ripped from her breast and murdered before her eyes. The polished skulls of the last dragons staring down sightlessly from the walls of the throne room while the Kingslayer opened Father's throat with a golden sword.

She had been born on Dragonstone nine months after their flight, while a raging summer storm threatened to rip the island fastness apart.

The rewrite:

Viserys was eight when he and his pregnant mother had fled King's Landing to escape the advancing armies. Viserys had told Dany the story of the battle so often that she almost felt that she had been there herself. She saw the sack of King's Lading by the invading armies of the Usurper, led by Lord Lannister and Lord Stark -- the men her brother called "the Usurper's dogs". She saw Princess Elia of Dorne plead for her child's life after he was taken from her. She saw the blood filled waters of the Trident, and her brother Rhaegar battling the Usurper there. He would die in vain trying to protect Princess Elia. She saw the Kingslayer slash her father's throat with his gold sword as the dragon head trophies watched from the walls.

Finally, Dany saw their departure in the dead of night. She saw the moonlight shimmer on the ship's sails, and she saw Dragonstone in the distance. It was on Dragonstone that she was born nine months later.

There ya go. That took me 10 minutes and I haven't made any revisions to it (I haven't even given it a once over). I have no idea how good or bad that is, but it can't be that much fucking worse than the original.

Feel free to comment on how I missed the point of A Game of Thrones and how the fake medieval language is part of the book. (Just like how Gwyneth Paltrow's fake Brit accent is part of Shakespeare in Love?)

The End of Eternity: Starring Cary Grant and a Young Ingenue

My well-loved ancient copy.

In case it isn't obvious by my profile, I work at a technology company. My coworkers are, for the most part, nerdy men who only read science fiction and fantasy, if they read fiction at all.

I have no idea who you are reading this, but it is entirely possible that you aren't familiar with computer scientists and engineers. Computer scientists and engineers do not believe fiction is worth reading because it doesn't teach you anything the way non-fiction does. And by "non-fiction", they mean books like AntiPatterns, rather than books like Let's Pretend This Never Happened.

They will read science fiction and fantasy, though, because it's "entertaining". They don't care about stuff like character development, worldview, or empathy. They've said as much to me when I've argued that fiction is worth reading because it allows you to put yourself in another person's mind and experience life from a different point of view.

I don't particularly dig science fiction myself, though I've read quite a bit of it. My coworkers quizzed me one day about what I had and had not read, presumably to decide whether or not my opinion on the subject should be taken seriously (this is how it is with computer scientists and engineers, and most science-y people in general). Unsurprisingly, they had never heard of my two favourite science fiction novels: The Gods Themselves and The End of Eternity. 

Science fiction often suffers from the same ailments as your garden variety trash: a focus on events (or technology) rather than character development; an over-reliance on exposition fairies to provide backstory (or explain the tech); and a feeling that the ending was pre-determined and everything was shoehorned into the story.

The End of Eternity is by no means perfect. I mean the ending -- the destruction of Eternity -- was obviously the main goal of the novel, and all the loose ends got wrapped up with a heaping serving of deus ex machina, but at least the exposition fairies didn't get into the way too much.

The other nice thing about The End of Eternity is that even though it was published in 1955, it still somehow managed to be somewhat sexually progressive and -- almost -- feminist.

Granted, according to The End of Eternity we all have to wait til the 482nd century for humans to be as sexually liberated as your average Montrealer circa 1995, but that's still pretty impressive given most science fiction from the 1950s and 1960s assumed that women would be housewives for ever and ever and ever.

The basic plot of The End of Eternity is that there are these people -- all guys, natch -- living outside of time, who are in charge of making small changes to the world to prevent wars and famine and all kinds of other things. The thing is that all the changes they make result in space travel never being developed and humanity dying off instead of Spreading to the Stars. This is, apparently, a Bad Thing. Because it was the 1950s and the assumption was that human existence had to go on forever because...um...because Humans are The Best!

All these small changes also result in people, places and families being radically changed, or even sometimes getting eliminated from reality altogether.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking "but according to the many-worlds interpretation of QM, the realities where the changes were not made still exist!"

Thing is that Hugh Everett didn't postulate the many-worlds interpretation until 1957, two years after the publication of The End of Eternity. So it's interesting to see read a book that was written prior to that interpretation. Nowadays the many-worlds interpretation would be taken for granted, and probably our hero would "travel" to the other universe to be with the woman he loved, or some such nonsense.

Oh, right, that brings me to our hero, Andrew Harlan. Actually, he's less of a hero and more of a dupe. He's manipulated by prettymuch everyone for their own purposes. He goes along with all the duplicity because he wants to save the woman he loves, Noÿs Lambent, from a reality change that he has to make -- a change that will erase her from her reality's timeline.  He devises a plan to take her out of her reality and hide her in Eternity -- the place where the guys dissociated from time live -- until he can figure out a way for them to be together.

In the end, he decides that Eternity has to be destroyed. And at that moment every loose end ever is wrapped up by an Exposition Fairy who also sprinkles some deus ex machina powder all over the place.

So. I tried to convince my coworkers to read this book, but before I could explain why, they had started quizzing me about whether I liked The Lord of The Rings (I didn't).

But this is my blog and I can try convincing you: You should read this book. It's a bit over-explainy at times, but you can totally just skip over those parts; they're boring and they don't advance the plot. Plus once you skip over those parts you end up with a pretty decent story about a guy who doesn't like his job, finds some happiness in a girl, and decides to buck the system for love only to discover that he's been a pawn in a game.

The book is a product of its time and feels like an old black and white movie starring Cary Grant and some young ingenue. But unlike my coworkers, I like old movies starring Cary Grant and a young ingenue, and so do many other people.

Peyton Place: Burn In Hell

This was such a bad idea.

I thought reading trash would be easy. I thought I'd go through a book per week and not have to think too hard. I thought they would rest my weary mind.

But no.

Which stinks more?

Instead they made my head hurt something fierce.

Stupid Peyton Place! Stupid, stupid Peyton Place! And stupid me for trying to read Peyton Place.

I couldn't finish it. Look, I tried. I got two chapters into Book 3 and then I gave up. I'm amazed I got that far. I should have just quit when the author smashed me with metaphor fists.

I'm not going to waste energy writing something witty and interesting about this book. The author didn't bother writing anything interesting or witty, so why should I?

So here, in no particular order, and in point form, is why this book sucked ass:

• The book is about events, not people. There is no character development. There is no depth. There is no motivation. There are only clichés, like the wise old doctor and the neighbourhood lushes.
• For reasons unbeknownst to me, the high school principal date rapes his girlfriend to seduce her. She eventually marries him because he's a good guy and great in bed, even though she shudders when they pass where he fucking raped her. This was where I disengaged completely because the author definitely didn't think there was anything wrong with this, but I am sure that even in 1950-whatever this was not acceptable.
• A character was introduced solely for the purpose of killing her off and making another character lose her shit. How lazy is that?
• A fire literally suffocates the town during the time when all the Bad Things happen. It's like the World Wrestling Federation gave the author lessons on subtlety.
• Exposition Fairies narrate most of the book. They possess characters and don't let them go. 

This book is what happens when an author has the plot, climax, and dénouement already nailed down, and just fills in the blanks.

This was horrible, awful, and shittastic.

If you want my copy, let me know. Otherwise I'm leaving it in the subway.

The Marriage Plot: So, Jeff, You Doing OK?

I fully expected to hate The Marriage Plot. I had read all the reviews. I read about how the supposedly main character, Madeleine, was really just a Mary-Sue. And I read about how the two male protagonists, Leonard and Mitchell, were just "Muppet-Baby versions of David Foster Wallace and [Jeffrey] Eugenides".  So I fully expected some kind of narcissistic, introspective literary craptacular that I would hate.

Instead, I was hooked after the first 10 pages.

It was obvious that Eugenides was working out some issues, and I wanted along for the ride. I wanted to make sure my pal Jeff (Can I call you "Jeff"?) was doing OK.

Initially I thought the book was about some unresolved issues Jeff had with Academia (Brown in particular).  Eugenides spent so much time describing insufferable academics and painfully smug students that I was sure that this novel was actually going to be about that. Then Leonard entered the scene. It was obvious from the get-go that the hard-drinking, hard-loving, utterly brilliant, but totally broken Leonard was DFW. I mean, Eugenides even gave the guy a bandana! How much more literal (literally!) can you get?

I didn't find our man Jeff for a while, though. Mitchell isn't as obviously Jeff as Leonard is DFW. Mitchell starts off being your typical Mr Sensitive Nice Guy and slowly builds up to being Jeff's literary doppleganger.

That left one character who needed identification: The Lady They Loved, Maddy. Who is Maddy, exactly? Is she some chick who rebuffed our boy Jeff at Brown and who Jeff is now punishing by making her clean up figurative DFW barf?

After much thinking about this, I submit for your approval that Maddy is, basically, The Reader. She is you. She is me. She is the guy from the New York Review of Books and the Guardian Books Editor and The Folks at Salon. She is all those readers who loved DFW unconditionally, enjoying the non-stop fuck fest of Infinite Jest, hanging on for the crazy mania of 10-page essays on Lobsters (with footnotes!), and waiting patiently during unbearably depressing sojourns at the grocery story.

While everyone's fawning over bipolar DFW, our boy Jeff is on a quest to better himself and the planet. He's making a pilgrimage to India and volunteering with Mother Teresa's organization. He wants to heal the world and make you whole. He wants to be the Bestest Jeff He Can Be.

Jeff respects you too much to just take you on the stairs. He's going to talk to you about Important Things and make sure you get home OK. He isn't going to play games with your emotions or suddenly run off to the casino in the middle of the night. But despite all this, you never fall in love with Jeff. You just keep loving DFW, even when he's all limp and fat, lounging around the house in ratty shorts, smoking cigarillos, and using too many parentheses.

That, people, is what this book is about. YOU are Maddy. YOU love a marriage plot. YOU have read too much Austen and now YOU are in love with Mr Darcy, despite the fact that a real Mr Darcy would not make you happy.

You. You would rather hang out in a dingy apartment, scrubbing floors waiting for a disturbed genius to return than tour the world with our boy Jeff. Jeff would show you beautiful, sad places, too, you know. He'd show you strange, beautiful, and sad people and places, but he'd keep you at arm's length from it and you'd never be in danger.

But you've read too much Henry James and what you want is drama! You want to be swept off your feet by an author who's different, troubled, and a little scary. You pass up our man Jeff for a guy who über-verbosely describes every emotion and thought that was ever had until the room is so full of descriptions that you feel you can't breathe. And just when you think he's opening the door to give you some air, he'll grab your hand, drag you to the bluffs, and make you look over the cliff, into the void until you beg to be left alone.

And even when DFW lets you down, you still don't run into Jeff's warm embrace of sublime descriptions of sad but beautiful melancholy places. Instead you have a one off with a dirty post-modernist who's stopped using punctuation. (I can only assume that shaven-eyebrow Thurston Meems would be that kind of author. I know I've read him when I've been let down by my usual favourites and need a change.)

You silly reader.

The only problem with all this is that our man Jeff doesn't realize that Mitchell -- his literary stand-in -- is an asshole.

I spent a lot of the book trying to figure out if ol' Jeff knew that Mitchell was a douchebag. Was Jeff aware that Mitchell is not really Maddy's friend? Mitchell is not a nice guy, but is instead pretending to be a nice guy to get into Maddy's pants -- something which is despicable and duplicitous. He wants to be able to grab Maddy, throw her on the bed and give her the fucking of a lifetime the way Leonard does, but he can't because he lacks the self-confidence to even respond to Maddy's direct advances. Instead he obsesses over Maddy, weasels his way into her life, and finally manages an uncomfortable and unsatisfying romp with her.

And then he dumps her. Because he's a nice guy and he knows that he'll just tie her down.

"FREEBIRD!"

So, no, Jeff does not realize that Mitchell is a duplicitous, false, fake, inauthentic, self-congratulatory jerk.

Or maybe Jeff does realize this, but he's actually a literary genius and wrote the character as if he didn't realize this, in some kind of weird double-fake-out.

And what does this means in terms of the literary analogy? That our man Jeff doesn't really respect the reader? That, in essence, he isn't so much interested in telling heartbreaking stories about oppressed teen girls as he is in just getting us to buy his books?

And when we do and don't like the story, and don't give him praise and a prize, he'll shrug it off and decide that maybe we'd be better off without him. Because he's Better Than That.

Either way, it doesn't matter. I liked the book and couldn't put it down. I didn't care if it failed the Bechdel Test. It made me laugh and I actually cared about the characters. And I actually wanted to watch Jeffrey Eugenides work out his issues in a book.

And for the record, I never, ever, ever liked David Foster Wallace. I always found him too dramatic and morose.

Fifty Shades of Grey: One Shade of Shit Brown

In the spirit of reading only trash for the remainder of the year, I tried to read Fifty Shades of Grey.

I feel pretty stupid for having attempted to read this pile of garbage. I succumbed to peer pressure and media frenzy, the same way I did with The Help. I'm an idiot.

Unlike The Help, though, I did not purchase Fifty Shades of Crap; I checked out the eBook from the municipal library.

I did not get past Chapter 2, so I can't even comment on the smut. I can't say whether or not the relationship between the two protagonists is truly a BDSM relationship or if it's actually an abusive relationship. The book was so bad that I couldn't even bother reading ahead to the smut (of course that's also partially the fault of the asshatty eReader that my municipal library required I use on my htc Whatever S phone).

Now I get that the work started as Twilight slash fiction and hence was captastically written by a bored netizen with lots of time and little talent, but I had assumed that the manuscript would have been edited at some point. I assumed wrong.

There is no way that Fifty Shades of Dung was edited. Had it been edited, at least one of the zillion references to Whatisface's "penetrating gaze" would have been changed to something else. It was funny the first time (was it supposed to be funny?), but by the third time it had become tiresome.

There is also no way that a competent editor would have left in a non-ironic use of "put the pedal to the metal". Nor would a competent editor have left an incredibly long-winded description of a commute -- including make and model of the commuting car -- in this book.

And presumably a competent editor would have told "EL James" that you can't be confronted by a desk. You may enter a room and find yourself facing an imposing desk. Maybe you were even confronted by a tall blonde behind an imposing desk. But you sure as hell weren't confronted by the actual desk. Desks, by nature, are not confrontational. They're inanimate objects; they can't accuse you of being a fraud -- though I wish the ones in the book had.

I know it sounds like I'm nitpicking, but I assure you that after fifty pages (Fifty Pages of Bleuch!) of little or no character development, no plot development, and no actual insight, it is hard to overlook the book's incredibly awful writing and nonexistent editing.

Sometimes bad writing can almost become art in and of itself (see Irene Iddesleigh), but this is not one of those times. There's no emergent poetic or amusing properties arising out of Fifty Shades of Yuck.  It reads like a bad teen novel written by a teen.

I am astounded that so many people have managed to get to the end of this book. I now know that the collective IQ of my neighbourhood -- a place where the municipal library has a waiting list of 78 people for Fifty Shades of Shit, but no waiting list at all for The Marriage Plot -- is lower than its walk score.

Rubyfruit Jungle: Passing The Bechdel Test on a Technicality

Excellent as a coaster.

I resolved to read trash for the rest of the year and decided to start with Rubyfruit Jungle.

I had meant to read it ever since I saw Educating Rita (the movie, obvs). At one point Rita tells Michael Caine that she's been reading Rubyfruit Jungle, and Michael Caine rolls his eyes in response. Who could not want to know why Michael Caine was so dismissive of this book?

Wikipedia told me Rubyfruit Jungle was a bildungsroman (seriously, the next person to use "bildungsroman" without being ironic is gonna get a smack upside the head) and a Lesbian coming-of-age book. Molly, the protagonist, is supposedly funny and strong and blahblahblah...

...YaddaYaddaYadda....

Whatever.

This book reeked.

It's true: this book is a stinky mess of crap. It's just bad.

It started off OK. Molly's young and obviously gay. She has a thing with another girl. She's not sure what the hell's up with her. It's all good: Molly's growing as a character; the narrative is funny; the conflicts are set up; it looks like it's going to be a fun ride.

But then her family moves to Florida and the narrative becomes stupid. The rest of the book might as well be called "Molly: The World's Most Out Lesbian Evah!"

I've known feminist lesbian activists in 1999 (arguably the last time it was still scandalous to be gay) who were less out that Molly is supposed to be in 1960-whatever.

Molly announces her gayness to the world in flashing neon lights. She flaunts it to the point where it's almost like her gayness defines her more than anything else. Everything is about her being gay.

"Hey Molly, what time is it?"

"It's Gay-O'Clock, buddy!"

But that isn't a problem in and of itself. No, the problem is that the story is thin and poorly-written. The entire book is about how Molly fucks her way through life with a zillion attractive women who're all cool with being out from the get-go. In 1960-something.

I have met a lot of strange, horny people in my life -- both LBGT and het -- and I have not known a single one to have the pick-up success as our intrepid little Molly. Molly basically fucks everyone she wants to fuck. Not once does she get "no" as an answer. She bats 1000 without even trying. Even all the het girls she wants to bang say yes because...because they're secretly gay? Because they're bi-curious? Because Molly is just so gosh-darned alluring? I don't know.

In fact, I have no idea why anyone would agree to have sex with Molly. Molly is a really unpleasant individual. She's mean-spirited, vindictive and cruel. She torments coworkers, antagonizes employers and blackmails educators. She thinks she's funny, but she's really a bit of a bully. Why everyone wants to get naked with her is beyond me.

But our little Molly does face adversity. She faces sexism all the time -- apparently. You hear all about it when she tells people about it. Yes, she'll tell people -- people she's trying to fuck -- all about how men hate her and whatnot. It's like listening to Stacy in accounting bitch about how Stan in procurement has been giving her a hard time.

In the end, I got so sick of the book that I didn't even read the last few chapters. I read the ending, though. The dénouement is that she finally becomes a movie director. I had forgotten that Molly was working toward becoming a director. It wasn't like you ever read about her actually doing any directing or going to film classes. I thought her life's ambition was winning the award for Most Sex By A Female in a Gay Lead.

I was so surprised by the ending that I read backward to see if at any point she discussed the movies she was working on or anything. I found nothing. Working toward being a director was almost like an afterthought by the author: "I need my protagonist to do something that is impressive but doesn't involve spending hours in a library. Hmmmmm.... Oh! I know! She'll be in film school!"

It reminded me of people's professions in soap operas: "Ridge is a fashion designer, but he spends most of his time seducing women and impregnating them with babies that aren't their husbands'."

Rubyfruit Jungle is a remarkably shallow book that isn't much better than most daytime soaps in terms of feminist message. Unlike daytime soaps, though, Rubyfruit Jungle does pass the Bechdel Test -- but only because Molly doesn't date men. Had Molly been heterosexual, this book would have failed the Bechdel Test in a very, very spectacular way.