1.) … taught me new things about Federalist America and early-19th-century France
2.) … in the ending, made a vivid point about the differences between America and the “Old Country,” be that where it may
3.) … had excellently ficionalized historic figures in it (Alexis de Tocqueville, I mean you)
4.) … made good use of narrative, flashback, and general literary structure
5.) … was, in short, quite an enjoyable read
6.) … was also not terribly memorable or challenging
7.) … could be read in two sittings (I got slowed down by a brief stint in an American prison by one of our two narrators in the middle and had to break)
8.) … intrigued me sufficiently to take look at Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda
9.) … had moments of sauciness, seriousness, silliness, and sadness, sometimes all at once
10.) … set up a nice tale of contrasts that was neatly carried through to the very end

Towards the end of 2011 I looked around me and discovered that there was a sizable, but not insurmountable, pile of books that I had had every good intention of reading in 2011, but had never got around to. With the clock ticking and just under a week left in 2011, I set my nose to the grind-stone and did my best to get through them. I was only successful on two counts before getting pleasantly lost in Henry James’ thick prose, but they were a good two.

The first book I successfully got through was J. Courtney Sullivan’s Commencement. (The second was A.S. Byatt’s enjoyable The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.) I’d been wanting to read this book practically from the moment it first came on the scene in 2009 because Sullivan and I shared an alma mater, Smith College. Smith here serves as both inspiration and setting for much of the book and, because of this dual role served by our college, I felt compelled to check it out.

Commencement is basically the story of four Smithies dealing with the post-college life and remembering their time together as Smith as they float together and apart out in the Real World. I wanted it to be one of those empathetic post-college reads I’ve been stumbling upon every year or so since I graduated and loving for their shared experience of Odyssey and uncertainty.

There was a good deal of controversy among Smithies when the book first came out, with some saying that it portrayed Smith realistically and lovingly while others contended that it painted the college in a very bad light, highlighting some of its more saucy traditions for commercial reasons and playing up (unusual at Smith) professor/student romances.

So I started Commencement with both excitement and a little bit of worry. I needn’t have had either.

The read went quickly and pleasantly enough without any earth-shattering revelations or shocks of any kind. Even the “twist” ending was more-or-less expected. Occasionally Sullivan would achieve the Holy Grail of authorship (expressing something complex with utmost eloquence and simplicity, stunning the reader with the very perfection of the phrasing), but most often it was just a fine sort of book.

In regards its portrayal of Smith, I can’t say I empathized a great deal. Sullivan’s Smith existed a decade or so before mine and on the opposite end of campus (the more party-hardy end, to be honest). The traditions were familiar, but her experiences with them (or perhaps I should say her characters’ experiences with them) were made different by our lack of shared living experience. So much of Smith is shaped by which house you’re sorted into before you even arrive and that point was probably the most stark one made to me by Commencement. Turns out there were even more shenanigans going on out in the Quad that this little Green Streeter had heretofore imagined! (Not that I would trade my bookish, notably shabbier experience on Green Street with a Quad girl for anything.)

All the same, I definitely enjoyed the book and was pleasantly surprised by its intelligence and sociopolitical awareness more than a few times. I like to support fellow Smithies in their writerly endeavors, so I’m glad I bought the book, but I doubt I’ll re-read Commencement and I’m not sure to whom I should recommend it. Perhaps readers looking for something chick-lit-y, but with more smarts, more feminism, and more nostalgia. If nothing else, Commencement sure as hell made me miss college.

Enter The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye. Recommended to me as the ideal Byatt for a grudging Byatt reader (me on my best days), The Djinn was nothing short of delightful. Finally I was able to see for myself that which I had formerly taken on faith from true Byatt fans: Byatt’s remarkable imagination, her ability to masterfully weave a tale, and her engagement with the very tradition of story-telling.

The Djinn is, perhaps to its benefit, short, although I definitely could have pictured myself skipping through more stories of the kind contained in its pages. It is a collection of fairy tales, but not the ones we all know retold—this is no Ella Enchanted for adults. Instead, Byatt creates her own fairy tales. They are full of vim and whimsy and fit perfectly into the established fairy tale canon familiar to readers of Grimm and their ilk. At the same time, Byatt’s stories maintain their own originality and evident intelligent outsider’s perspective on that very canon, creating something of a unique fairy tale experience that looks both inward and outward on itself.

Reading The Djinn was akin to a religious conversion for me as I at long last found myself smiling over an A.S. Byatt’s book and even enjoying it. I highly recommend this short, pleasant read for anyone else desperately wishing they could only “get” Byatt and also for those with no Byatt preferences at all, but a love of expert tale-weaving.

Like hundreds or maybe thousands of people across the nation, I got a Kindle for Christmas.

I know what you’re thinking — I have been anti-Kindle in the past, much preferring paper books that one can get for about a dollar at any thrift store. I collect used books, I love old books, and I take an intense amount of pleasure in hunting used book stores for the perfect edition of my favorites. In short, the printed (not displayed) word is my one true love.

But my other love–my well-meaning boyfriend–had somewhere along the line heard that I had been considering getting a Kindle or other e-reader, and decided that a Kindle would be the perfect Christmas gift.

“You love to read!” he said as I opened the gift. “This is perfect! You can carry all your books everywhere! How awesome is this?”

His enthusiasm caught on, and I warily but gamely spent most of the weekend and the weeknights afterward playing with my Kindle.

The reader itself has its advantages, but it also also has its frustrations. In the interest of informing those of you (ahem, Corey) who may be considering a Kindle or other e-reader, here’s the pro-con list I have compiled so far:

Pros:
Storage and Portability
The Kindle is TINY. Rather than having to lug around my giant copies of Anna Karenina or all four volumes of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, I have them on my Kindle and can take all of them everywhere — a plane, a bus, the coffee shop, anything. Sure, this doesn’t help for newer books that I only have in hard copy, but it’s great to know I can pick up Anna right where I left off, any time I want.

Browser
This is more of a neat feature than anything else, but I love that I can get new (free) e-books from the comfort of my couch without even breaking out my laptop. The Kindle Touch includes an experimental web browser that works perfectly with Project Gutenberg’s mobile site, letting me stockpile Austen and Dickens like there is no tomorrow. Of course, there is always the Kindle Store for the same purpose, but it’s way more expensive.

Search function
I wish I had this while I was in college. The Kindle allows you to highlight passages, add notes, view those notes separately, and even search books for key words or phrases. Do you know how much time this would have saved me when I was writing my thesis? If I didn’t have to constantly flip through hundreds of pages looking for a scene that may or may not actually be in The Golden Compass or looking for mentions of Guinevere in Le Morte D’Arthur, I could have saved myself hours of time.

Cons:
Look and feel

I’ll admit it, I judge books by their covers. My copy of Anna Karenina was purchased solely because I love the cover image of a bunch of purple flowers on an understated grayscale background of a woman’s knees. This is why Penguin Publishing and Vintage Classics are my best-loved publishing companies–they truly have internalized the idea that design matters when it comes to the front of a book.

The Kindle has no such equivalent. I can’t look across the room at my Kindle like I would at a bookcase and immediately sense pleasure at the combination of color created by a line of books with well-designed covers and spines. As an electronic device, the design is streamlined and understated, which is what one wants in one’s laptop or tablet, but not what one looks for in a book.

As Eva has suggested, this can be alleviated by purchasing an e-reader cover. Etsy has a myriad of beautiful handmade covers, some of which are even made from old books.

But the one I bought cost me what I might have paid at one of my ordinary venues (thrift stores, used book stores, consignment shops and rummage sales) for a dozen paperbacks. Was it worth it? Probably. It was still cheaper than I would have paid for a new book in hard copy, and it is one of my favorites.

Am I likely to pay $13 every time I want a new book? No, I am not. I expect to purchase a book for Kindle only occasionally, and use it mostly for classics I don’t otherwise own, or classics I want to try but don’t necessarily want to buy.

Also, $99 for the Touch? That could buy a lot of books. And not the electronic kind.

Temporary nature

And now Kindles are obsolete. Or I decide I want a Nook, or I go the whole hog, decide I want an iPad or iPhone Touch or whatever and add an e-book app to it. Or I swear off electronic devices and go off into the woods and become a hermit.

Where do my books go? I think I can transfer them from a Kindle to another device, but I simply don’t like the idea of not having a tangible book right there, in my hands. It’s not even so much that I don’t have the tangible book — what will happen if the Library of Congress goes all e-reader?

This is probably not a convincing argument, but damn it, e-readers are the beginning of the end of printed books. The bookocalypse, if you will.

Now that I live with my boyfriend, reading chick lit is somewhat of a struggle. I couldn’t do it at all for the first few weeks, only venturing to break out the books with pastel covers and cleverly-named heroines when he wasn’t around. Now, I’m a little more comfortable, only because he seems to find it hilarious that with all of my English education, sometimes all I want is to read a trashy book.

“Is it, like, a rebellion?” he asked this weekend. “Is it like, ‘Oh, I could read Dickens, but I’m going to be bad and read trash instead?’”

I had to think about this for a while, but I eventually concluded that no, it wasn’t that. Though chick lit might not exactly top required reading lists worldwide, it does have its merits—one of them being accessibility, and another being a reassuring conformity to genre. No matter what happens during the course of any given chick lit novel, the reader can relax into the plot, knowing that it will end happily.

In Something Blue, the heroine has cheated on her fiancé only to have the fiancé run off with her best friend. Not only that, but she finds herself pregnant with the guy she cheated on, who quickly flees the picture. It is impossible to imagine that this woman, who up until now has shown herself to be shallow, delusional and self-centered, could ever come out of this situation intact.

In Everyone Worth Knowing, the main character quits her banking job and is thrust into the high-end P.R. world, surrounded by anorexia, cocaine and celebrity gossip. She finds herself a target of a vicious gossip columnist and trying to figure out a way to save her best friend from marrying a party boy.

Of course, everything works out fine in the end. They both find love, they both solve many of their problems, and they both live happily ever after. As well they should; this is chick lit, after all, and that sort of thing is expected. But Weisberger and Giffin are such good writers that you don’t mind the ride to entirely predictable endings.

In the interest of full disclosure, I make roughly 50 percent of my area’s median income, which qualifies me for subsidized housing. Rent for a studio in my town is roughly $500 to $600 a month, and at my salary, I cannot afford anything more.

Heating bills are high, gas prices are skyrocketing and to be honest, some months it’s tough to pay all of my bills (student loans and car payments making the biggest dents in my income).

The above paragraph, however, is only to let you know that while my life might be hard, it is nothing compared to what Barbara Ehrenreich endures during her work on Nickel and Dimed. Her goal is to find the lowest-paid job and the cheapest apartment she can in any given town and see if she can make ends meet.

The results are startling. Simply, she can’t. She ends up paying $50 a day for the privilege of working at Wal-Mart somewhere near the end of her experiment, when the cost of gas, rent and food are taken into account. The closest she ever comes is while working two jobs, one as a maid and one as a nursing home assistant, working 7 days a week at minimum wage.

Granted, some of her figures are outdated. The book was published in 2001, and therefore some of the numbers are slightly off. For example, I believe the $7 Ehrenreich made working at Wal-Mart might now be illegal in many states – minimum wage in California was $8.50 last time I checked.

Her point remains crystal clear, however: the poor, even the working poor, are always with us, and nothing will change until wages are hiked. Telling residents on welfare to simply “get a job” is not enough – the jobs have to be able to support a single person, at least.

This is the most compelling piece of non-fiction I have read in ages – definitely worth the entire dollar I spent on it at a thrift store. I might recommend borrowing it first, but definitely give it a read.

 After struggling through The Children’s Book by A. S. Byatt, I needed a refreshing read. The Corrections, Lonesome Dove and We Need to Talk about Kevin were all in my to-read pile, but I simply could not face tackling one of these quite yet. It would have been like running a marathon only to enter another marathon the next day.

But I couldn’t face a fluff book, either. I’ve read all of the Jane Green novels my library has to offer, ditto Sophie Kinsella, and rather than turn to Marian Keyes, I decided to find some book that would be timeless, captiviating and an overall excellent reading experience.

Enter Jewel by Bret Lott. The novel opens with a woman telling her husband that she is pregnant with their sixth (and last) child. Set in 1943, the novel is epic in its scope, spanning two states and four decades as it depicts a unique relationship between a mother and the daughter who is both a burden and a blessing to her.

Part of what makes Jewel so appealing is how familiar it feels. It seems like a cross between The Grapes of Wrath and The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, maybe with a splash of Faulkner-esque Southern Gothic and maybe a little Toni Morrison for good measure.

Over and over, Jewel tries to find the American Dream for her child—and herself—by heading as far West as fast as she can. When she loses it, you cannot help but cheer her on as she clings to her dreams despite a husband with emotional problems and a crumbling family dynamic.

The novel is written in a beautifully sincere style, and Lott has captured Jewel’s voice so perfectly that I could not believe it when I discovered that 1) Bret is definitely a man and 2) was not raised in Mississippi, where the characters hail from.

If you are looking for a book that feels timeless but is not too taxing, please check out Jewel—and don’t be deterred by the Oprah’s Book Club stamp on the front cover.  Even though I got it at a rummage sale and paid, oh, a quarter, this is a book worth buying — at full retail price, nonetheless.

1. Supernatural – The plot centers around a malevolent (or is she?) Egyptian queen who may or may not be coming back to life in the form of her mummified body (and the mummified body of her cat-familiar). Queen Tera doesn’t make much of a splash herself, but Stoker conjures up an impressively large number of supernatural phenomena that she could be credited with if one were so inclined. These include theft, attempted murder, actual murder, and general mad scientist-ish attempts to live forever. The whole story kicks off with the attempted murder (or was it?!—Stoker’s attempts at the supernatural are largely matters of just not really knowing what’s going on, rather than any detailed descriptions of said supernatural events) of a renowned British Egyptologist, which may or may not have been the fault of Queen Tera.

2. Egyptomaniacal - Did I mention the (possibly) undead mummy of an Egyptian queen? But even apart from Queen Tera, Stoker’s narrative is also liberally doused in various bits of Egyptomania: canopic jars and ancient Egyptian lamps are major plot points while Stoker name-checks notable contemporary Egyptologists like Petrie and Budge and makes jokes about the British Museum’s holdings. The house where most of the story takes place is a trove of Egyptological artifacts, which are all laboriously described by Stoker in great detail. Stoker also feels compelled to assign lengthy Egyptological lectures to various characters. Most of these are somewhat relevant to the plot, but are so long that they are a slog to read. And the others are just rudely inserted into characters’ mouths, apparently to prove Stoker did his research.

3. Victorian – I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that no Victorian novel would be complete without:

a) a virginal female protagonist who is both prone to swooning and can keep a stiff upper lip with the best of her fellow Brits;

b) an intelligent and stalwart male protagonist who is easily overcome with manly emotion by his love for the virginal female protagonist and is likely pretty well in the dark about what’s actually going on (sadly he is also likely our narrator);

c) some kind of quirky professorial character (likely the father of the virginal female protagonist) who is more aware of what’s going on than any of the other characters;

d) assorted other male characters in various professional capacities (a doctor will probably make an appearance at some point);

e) the household staff of the virginal female protagonist (she treats them with hugely emotional respect and they love her in return).

Stoker hits all these points as well as assorted Victorian plots involving admiration/love, courage, and (above all!) propriety. You won’t catch the virginal female protagonist doing much more than passionately holding hands with the intelligent and stalwart male protagonist. And what a thrill that hand-holding is!

See?

It may sound like I didn’t enjoy Seven Stars, but actually I really did, perhaps because of my affection for all three of Stoker’s hard-hit tropes. The sheer ridiculousness of all three (particularly the Victorian part) to modern readers actually proved quite entertaining in a way I’m sure Stoker did not intend.

In fact, the only real stumbling point in Seven Stars is the plot itself. Stoker was so concerned with Egyptological accuracy, keeping the mystery alive, and maintaining his Victorian virtues that he appears to have spared very little energy for the plot. The first 3/4 of the book—wherein mysterious things happen and someone repeatedly tries to murder the comatose Egyptologist—works perfectly. By the time the Egyptologist suddenly awakens (no spoilers, it’s always assumed he will at some point), I, the reader, was excited and dying to come to the climax and expected big reveal.

Instead, Stoker takes a super-dull left turn in the plot and veers off into the land of lengthy Egyptological lectures (mostly about fictional historic figures and half-true mythologies) that explain a lot about Egyptian history but not much about what’s going on in the book. The Egyptologist seems to have all the answers, but doesn’t care to share the most important ones with the audience, leaving me pretty unsatisfied.

This feeling of disappointment was further kindled by the abrupt and wholly supernatural ending. Stoker wrote two endings for the book (both provided by the Penguin edition I read), one which is guillotine-abrupt and leaves gaping plot holes open and one which is a little bit longer and answers a few questions, but also leaves a few open to interpretation, presumably in an attempt to keep the supernatural portion of the book fully alive and creepy to readers. Both endings were disappointing (the former more so than the latter) and totally unfulfilling.

All the same, I enjoyed Seven Stars a lot more than I thought I would. It was interesting read something by Stoker that wasn’t his opus and it was an appropriately Halloween-y read. There are probably more satisfying supernatural Victorian novels in the world, but probably not as many who hit the tropes of the genre so precisely.

–Corey

But in case you’re thinking of taking a break from reviewing and musing in favor of trying your own hand at novel-writing, check out our NaNoWriMo-themed Clip Show for the day for all the inspiration you’ll need.

Firstly, some reasons to do NaNoWriMo from the LA Times to get you rarin’ to go.

Then check out Mental Floss’ great list of famous novels that were written in under a month to inspire you.

And lastly, size up your “competition”: The Huffington Post chats to a few different authors about their speed-written masterpieces.

And don’t forget to get involved with your local branch of NaNoWriMo to participate in write-ins and all manner of other writerly festivities throughout the month.

Have you ever participated in NaNoWriMo? If so, how’d it go for you?

I saw the tree from the car window when I was six years old. I was on vacation with my family, heading up north to go camping. It was on the far bend of a winding road, so as soon as I saw it, it was gone. It only ever truly existed in my sight for just the briefest of moments, but the memory of it has been tattooed into my brain. I’ve never forgotten a single detail of that twisted shape and of the man hanged dead from one of the thicker branches. That tree knotted and bunched like a giant twisted in an ash gray cloak; suffocating and powerless. It had a mass of sharp branches that cluttered up to the sky and held brown sickly leaves that shivered in the breeze, and that body twisting lazily against the trunk.

We rounded the curve so quickly that I wasn’t able to process the vision until we were well away from the bend. I can still remember all the details; that hand curved and stiffened only just touching the rough, inky blue denim of his jeans. I could only partially see his face; puffed, bloated and ringed by matted, greasy dark hair. I didn’t say anything to my family. I couldn’t, they wouldn’t have believed me, all Fall I had been getting in trouble for making up stories. I probably don’t need to mention that I didn’t sleep a wink on that week of camping out in the deep dark woods, with bare branches eternally clustering out, reaching toward me. We took a different road to get back home, so I was even denied the closure of seeing if the tree had been cut down, or if there was at least some crime scene tape fluttering in the wind like an obscene party streamer. Maybe that’s why it’s been such a persistent image in my mind. I was offered no closure, and no validation.

Once we got home I kept an eye on the newspapers and some of the TV news, but I never heard anything about that tree. In effect the thing existed only in my mind, and I’m not likely to ever forget that sight. Even now, so many years after I’d seen it, it still haunts me, literally, like a ghost skirting the edge of my vision when I close my eyes at night, visiting me in dreams; a dark silhouette hovering behind me all throughout the day. Sure, sometimes I would go for weeks without thinking about it and then, in the dark of the night, I remember those hands, fingernails chipped and filthy. That bulging face with distended eyes and blackened tongue. Sometimes, when I’m driving, I’ll find myself scanning the sides of the road, watching the trees fly by and wondering what’s going on just beyond the tree line. I’ve never had any lasting relationships, and I’m not blaming it on that tree, but I don’t sleep well. I had a good friend once, a wood carver by trade, who said that the secret to creating life-like carvings is to be able to see the shapes the wood has within it before you ever start carving. She said that each and every block of wood is hiding its true shape, and it is up to the carver to coax it out.

I think about that a lot. Even now it comforts me, as I stand before that tree for the first time in over 20 years. The ease with which I found it was surprising, but I suppose it would have to be. Every second felt like a millennium as I hid my car in the brush and finally laid eyes on the monstrosity, and it was every bit as terrifying as I expected. Usually when we see things as children they seem huge, but once we see them again as adults they become considerably smaller and prosaic. Not so the tree, which appeared to be immune to the physics of childhood. It was massive, and I stood before it as if were the idol of a fallen god, barely breathing, barely moving, for even the slightest indications of humanity felt profane as I stood in its shadow. I saw no evidence of the violence that had defiled it so many years ago. Its swaying branches creaked mockingly at me and I barely noticed the ache in my hands as I clenched my fists shut as hard as I could. I probably would have stood there longer had the weakened, muffled kick from my car not broken my reverie. The boy looked hazily up at me when I opened the trunk. He was half dead already, broken and battered, the rope would only finish him off. His hair was the right type of black, curly and matted from sweat and blood. His build was thinner, and the denim of his jeans wasn’t as dark. As I lifted him out of the car and carried him to the tree, like a bride across the threshold, the words of my wood carver friend came to me. She would say that the hardest thing to do was to reproduce ones vision perfectly, but that trying was half the fun.

Tim Mucci ATK : 1D20 + 14; DMG: 2D8 + 4. You can dispute this on his twitter: @timx13

Happy Halloween, Transgressors! Comment below with any questions or reactions for Tim!