☆ Keri's 2012 Reads ☆

I have to admit... I mainly keep this thread up to give myself a place to talk about the books I'm reading. Since I got a promotion at work last July and am more-or-less employed full-time, I have very little time to attend to all my hobbies, and so I fail to read others' 75 Books threads the way I wish I could. I'm also bad about updating my own when I finish reading something, but I try to do so once a month.

Last year, my goal was one book a week (not counting frivolous short reads, like manga), and I succeeded! Yay! This year, I don't have a set number goal, but instead, I would like to read and finish one book from the piles of unread books I own every month...and that book can't be one that I've recently acquired (within 4 weeks). I'd also like to complete one TIOLI challenge per month. So I guess that means I'm goaling myself at anywhere from 12 to 24 books this year at a minimum.

Another thing I'm doing is tying my reading to exercise. I purchased an exercise bike last August and found that a great way to encourage myself to exercise more and read more is to tie 15 minutes of pedaling with 15 minutes of indulgent reading a day. I won't record all the details here, but I have certain books that I won't let myself read unless I'm exercising, too - because I'd be reading them anyway, I can make myself get on the bike.

Let's see if I can do it!

January: Success!1 book from my stack and 3 specifically for TIOLI
February: Success! 3 books from my stack (1 began in Jan, 1 reread), 4 TIOLI

☆ Completed ☆

January
05 - Lucky Girl by Mei-Ling Hopgood - TIOLI Challenge + Unread
07 - He Done Her Wrong by Milt Gross - 1930 wordless graphic novel
09 - Artichoke Tales by Megan Kelso - graphic novel
11 - Daughter of China: A true story of love and betrayal by Xu Meighong - TIOLI challenge
26 - Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie - TIOLI challenge

February
05 - The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher - Unread linguistics
07 - Gemini Bites by Patrick Ryan - TIOLI Challenge (ALA LGBTRT "Over the Rainbow" list)
09 - The Girl of Fire and Thorns by Rae Carson - YA princess adventure
11 - The Thorn and the Blossom by Theodora Goss - Early Reviewer, novella
16 - Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen - reread, TIOLI challenge
18 - Matched by Ally Condie - Unread YA romance/dystopia
22 - Fair Play by Tove Jansson - TIOLI (ALA LGBRT OTR list)
25 - Patty in the City by Carolyn Wells - TIOLI (Still(!) reading since April '09)
26 - Patty Fairfield by Carolyn Wells - #1 in the Patty series, via Proj. Gutenberg
26 - Patty's Summer Days by Carolyn Wells - #4 in the series, via Proj. Gutenberg
27 - Patty in Paris by Carolyn Wells - #5 in the series, long unread

March
10 - Love-letters on All Occasions (also Fantomina, and Other Works) by Eliza Haywood - off the shelf/long-time reading
12 - Bunny Drop, vol. 5 by Yumi Unita - one of my favorites series ♥
13 - It's Lonely in the Modern World by Molly Jane Quinn and Jenna Talbott - TIOLI, nonfiction(satire, modern design)
13 - A Bride's Story, vol. 3 by Kaoru Mori - another manga series I collect/read
15 - Book Girl and the Corrupted Angel by Mizuki Nomura - TIOLI, #4 in series
31 - Welsh Mythology & Folklore in Popular Fiction - ER book, wedged into TIOLI

April
05 - Bearded Lady by Mara Altman - TIOLI humor nonfiction challenge
14 - Some Girlfriends Can by Stephanie Burgis - fantasy chicklit style short story
25 - Undead Philosophy 101 by Stephanie Burgis - vampire-themed short story
30 - The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell - American history/religion/politics, TIOLI + Unread

May
06 - The Governess Affair by Courtney Milan - romance novella
12 - Dead End in Novelt by Jack Gantos - Newbery
13 - Renegade Magic by Stephanie Burgis - YA fantasy series
27 - Let's Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson - humorous memoir

June
04 - Syrian Folktales by Muna Imady - ER + unread
07 - Blood Sinister by Celia Rees - Unread YA suspense
09 - Magic Under Glass by Jaclyn Dolamore - YA fantasy
10 - The Unseen Guest by Maryrose Wood - series
16 - Princess for Hire by Lindsey Leavitt - YA princess (HATED)
30 - The Boredom of Haruhi Suzumiya by Nagaru Tanigawa - unread

July

☆ Dropped ☆
Lucky Break by Esther Freud, because I couldn't care one way or another what happens to the characters, and hated the way one played at being lesbian or bisexual for two scenes, but it was never ever brought up again, as though Freud were trying to be daring or something and couldn't follow through. It was almost offensive.

(Nearly dropped Princess for Hire because it WAS offensive and awful, but powered through because I was determined to finish it. Regretfully. Also nearly dropped Let's Pretend This Never Happened because memoirs are apparently not my thing.)

☆ Acquisitions ☆

January
01 - He done her wrong - Public Library - Wordless graphic novel
01 - Artichoke Tales - Public Library - graphic novel
06 - Daughter of China - Public Library - bio/memoir of Cultural Revolution - TIOLI Challenge
25 - Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress - Public Library - fiction about rural China during Cultural Revolution - TIOLI challenge

February
02 - The Girl of Fire and Thorns - Public Library - YA fantasy, via Stephanie Burgis
07 - Gemini Bites - Public Library - YA ...romance? LGBT, via MyriadBooks blog (Jan'11)
07 - The Thorn and the Blossom - Early Reviewers - fantasy, time travel(?) novella
11 - Written in Stone - BookDepository 24-hours-24-books sale, non-fiction paleontology
15 - Book Girl and the Corrupted Angel - pre-order series book #4
19 - Fair Play - Public Library - lovely Finnish fiction for TIOLI
21 - the hollow chocolate bunnies of the apocalypse - SantaThing! (tBD) looks amazing!
21 - The Wild Things - SantaThing! (tBD) - novel of the film of the book
23 - The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - tBD, amazing 18th C playful novel
23 - To Say Nothing of the Dog - SantaThing! (tBD) (my pick)
27 - Welsh Mythology and Folklore - ER, literary criticism essays

March
02 - Blood Sinister - BookDepository 24-hours-24-books, because I've always liked Rees
12 - Bunny Drop vol. 5 - new series arrival
12 - A Bride's Story vol. 3 - new series arrival

April
02 - Bearded Lady - Amazon Single because of TIOLI and @chatterbox read it (~46pp)
12 - Renegade Magic - caved in despite hating myself a little bit for doing it and got the e-book version because WHEN will my local library get it in?!
14 - Some Girlfriends Can - Stephanie Burgis short story
15 - Undead Philosophy 101 - Stephanie Burgis short story
16 - The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - World Book Night giveaway book
21 - Syrian Folk Tales - ER win (January)
28 - Magic Under Glass - fantasy via Stephanie Burgis
28 - The Governess Affair - short romance, SBTB

May
08 - Dead End in Norvelt - 2012 Newbery winner
22 - Let's Pretend This Never Happened - popular new memoir

June
06 - Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place: the Unseen Guest - new series addition
11 - The Intrigues of Haruhi Suzumiya - series addition
14 - Princess for Hire - YA princess fantasy
17 - Maid for Love - romance, free ebook
24 - Photographs & Phantoms - free romance novella, via SBTB

July
02 - Crackpot Palace - short story collection, June Early Reviewer win
06 - something by Kafka a guy left me at work (update with title later)
07 - Wandering Son, vol. 3 - series continuation, manga

☆ Wishlist ☆

(Titles I come across and would like to read at some point some day)

The Aquariums of Pyongyang
the Book on the Bookshelf
Red Dust: the path through China
Shanghai Girls
Out of Mao's Shadow
Translating Lives (Mary Besemeres)
Understanding Cultures through their Key Words (Anna Wierzbicka)
(2 above from blogpost here by Jennie Wagner)
The Old English Baron (@lizard mentioned in Otranto thread)
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie SantaThing out-of-stock pick
Books as History (thanks jbd1's thread)
The Grass King's Concubine (because of this (via Stephanie Burgis)
A Cultural History of the Chinese Language because of Early Reviewers (didn't win)
The Basque History of the World (maybe)
Howl's Moving Castle

So my first completed read for the year is Lucky Girl by Mei-Ling Hopgood. She is lucky in many ways - her adoptive family had many many privileges her birth family did not, and she was able to grow up away from the strict patriarchal/misogynistic beliefs of her birth parents, which are attributable to the Confucian culture of China. Plus, when you look at her American life, it seems like it was straight out of tv - she describes a lot of what I think of as clichés and stereotypes that I never ever experienced (homecoming floats in high school, mother/daughter tea parties in a church basement, &c) - though, of course, she was subjected to exoticification and racism as one of a handful of Asian-descended children in Taylor, MI in the 1970s, so it wasn't always the easiest life.

I received this book in 2010 as a raffle win from Alyce's "At Home With Books" blog. I read the first chapter or so shortly after receiving the book, but had so many other things on my mind that I didn't really sit down to read it. I finally did so this week thanks to the January TIOLI challenge #3 - read a book about China or Chinese immigrants. I really want to keep learning more about China and its history and culture. Well, and other East Asian places - I've been reading about the Koreas and Japan, and I'd like to include Vietnam and the Philippines and Thailand and so on eventually, but China is so huge and diverse that it'll keep me occupied for a while. (Particularly since I keep flitting around from topic to topic in my reading.)

The class I took at university on folklore & mythology, which focused on China and Ireland, has also influenced me, I suppose. These two places were chosen partly because of the instructor's specialty, and partly because of their differences from each other and familiarity to most members of the class. (The previous instructor always did Mesopotamia -> the Bible with dabbles in Norse and Greek myths, and the one I had thought that wasn't a very good way to introduce us to folkloric concepts, since we were already so familiar with it. I adored my instructor for focusing on more anthropological things, I must say... linguistics and folklore have always warred within me for What I Want To Study For Life.)

Anyway, my review for Lucky Girl.

Starred your thread, Keri. Wishing you luck with your reading goals!

Glad to see you back with us again, Keri!

Welcome back!

My second completed read for the year is He Done Her Wrong by Milt Gross.

I was attracted to the book because it is an early example of a wordless graphic novel (1930 - only the second one published in the USA) and described as something akin to a slapstick silent film. This is very true, and a lot of the scenes were very funny. I really enjoy books that tell stories in an unusual way, which is why I'm so drawn to wordless novels. I'm also a big fan of silent film, though I never do watch as many as I'd like - though I subscribe to TCM, I share the tv with my parents, and I'm rarely around or able to pick the station when silent films are airing. So, really, I don't see any reason why I wouldn't like He Done Her Wrong.

Unfortunately, I think I may be deficient in the visual shorthand used in comics in the 1920s, because I was pretty confused by many scenes. I wasn't entirely certain what the caricatures or set pieces were referring to, so the humor or just plain meaning was sometimes lost on me. For example, I couldn't figure out what the heck the Villain was doing with a coin-operated box that ended up making him destitute. Was it a machine for a train pass? for cigarettes? A slots-type gambling thing? It was plain that he was irritated by it and spending his entire fortune trying to get it to work, which was somewhat amusing, but the real humor was lost on me. It turns out, from the afterward, that it was a gum machine. Now it's hilarious!

But even with my ignorance of some of the visual gags, there was plenty to laugh at - from the way the Hero is completely out of his element in the Big City to the heartrending tale that the Heroine acts out in an effort to get a job, which is repeated step by step up the ladder to the very top of the company in great detail - only for that job to be washing the floors. So much effort and drama for such a thing! Dozens of pages in the build up, only for such pathos!

I would like to become more familiar with cartoons from this period, because I do enjoy them, but I'm wondering if I shouldn't have used a different book as my major introduction. He Done Her Wrong was enjoyable and all, but just a bit too confusing for 21st century me to be a really strong read.

Link to my review on the work page

Nice review, Keri. Sorry the book did not work better for you. I hope your next read does!

Thanks, Stasia.

I finally edited and posted my review for my very favorite read of 2011, Adios, Happy Homeland!, after realizing that I was telling people to go read the book, but didn't have any kind of "why" for them to see. You can read it here, but I'm afraid it's rather clumsy still. I don't think I adequately expressed the joy I felt while reading the book, even the sad or lonely stories within it.

I'm hoping to remember to buy my own copy the next time I place an order, because I loved it that much. And it was almost completely chance that I even saw it at the library and picked it up!

The third book for 2012: Artichoke Tales by Megan Kelso.

Artichoke Tales got on my radar a few different ways - lists of graphic novels on LibraryThing; a browse through the Fantagraphics website; and a few stumbled-upon reviews. For the most part, I was intrigued by the art style and general story description, but came away with the idea that most of the reviews were telling me "don't bother". Were the reviews negative like that, or was that just my memory of what the comments meant for my tastes? I can't recall, but I decided to read the book anyway.

...

I wonder if the story wouldn't be more clear with multiple readings, or with knowledge gleaned from author's comments on a blog or elsewhere. Unfortunately, I don't feel that I have enough invested in the book to make it worth my time to seek such things out, and I don't have enough interest to try to reread it.

Read my full review here.

_____________________

For what it's worth, after two "meh" books, I'm continuing with Daughter of China and enjoying it very much. Well, not that "enjoy" is the best word... it's kind of sad, with the narrator imprisoned in China in the 1980s, but it's a much better read, at least!

Keri, if you like silent films you should definitely see The Artist. Even for people who aren't huge fans of silent films it is amazing. I really liked it (verging on love).

13> Thank you for reminding me! I had heard about it and decided to try to see it, but then completely forgot about it!

Book #4 in 2012 is Daughter of China: a true story of love and betrayal. I chose this one because of the TIOLI challenge (book about China or Chinese immigrants) and wanting to know more about what it was like for ordinary people mid-century. Xu's book definitely helped me gain new perspective and understanding. It's maybe weird that I'm trying to learn the history of modern China through accounts like this, but I have a really hard time understanding political history absent of personal narratives. I've always preferred to learn history by "this is what it was like at the time" than "these are the dates that this thing happened". There's usually so much going on that the context makes for a fuller understanding, I guess? but maybe that's just me justifying my preference!

But anyway, I found the book to be an engaging narrative that tied the "now" of the primary plot (the "love and betrayal" I suppose) with flashbacks showing how Xu grew up to be who she became, including her family's circumstances. Unlike Lucky Girl, where I felt Hopgood did a disservice to herself and the reader in the way she organized the "now" and the flashbacks, Xu's story holds information back until it is more relevant, which helps give the narrative a better plot-style - not that it needs more tension or anything, since the core story itself is pretty harsh, with Xu imprisoned and interrogated for being friends with an American. That American, Larry Engelmann, is a co-writer on the book, and has written several books on the history/politics of Southeast Asia previously, so I wouldn't wonder if it isn't partly his influence on the plotting, as he might be better aware than Xu of what would be important to tell when for a foreign audience.

I'll have to write a proper review of the book tomorrow, since it's my bedtime now. And I stayed up too late the last few nights reading Daughter of China...

My next book went to a vote on twitter, wherein I received one vote, but that's enough for me! It will be the Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher, which I received for SantaThing last year and have been terribly remiss in getting around to reading. (It was that or the Lexicographer's Dilemma, the third of my ST2010 books. I read the first one, the Wee Free Men, last spring.) I'd like to read another book about China, perhaps about the Japanese occupation, but I think it's time for me to change things up a bit, and I really want to make a dent in my TBR stack on the floor, so I can buy books by David Mitchell and not feel guilty for bringing yet another new book into the house to add to the stacks.

That class on folklore and mythology sounds fascinating, Keri. And your reviews of the books about China are interesting. I've yet to start my planned read for that TIOLI challenge.

#5: Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

I picked this book as an end-of-the-month quick read for the TIOLI challenge. I've seen it mentioned here and there for a while, of course, and this was a good excuse to try it. It was, indeed, a quick read, taking me a single afternoon to finish, but it wasn't necessarily short or shallow — there's kind of a lot going on, for as small as the book is.

The plot is presented in the title: it's about how two city boys sent for re-education in the boonies of China in 1971 discover Balzac and a seamstress in a nearby village. The story tells how it happens that they should find such a thoroughly forbidden book in a time when the only books allowed are Mao's Little Red Book and scientific texts, and also how they meet and fall in love with this girl. The story ends when they lose Balzac and the seamstress. It's fairly simple, I suppose, on the surface, but there is a lot of layer to it, which I confess I couldn't quite pinpoint, for being so unfamiliar with the themes and motifs of the books the boys read (Balzac, Madame Bovary, the Count of Monte Cristo, Jean-Christophe).

A more obvious layer of symbolism comes to the forefront towards the end of the novel, when a snake bites the seamstress's hand and leaves a scar — the books and stories, of course, are the Fruit of Knowledge. There's also the fact that the village where the boys are being re-educated is located on the Phoenix of the Sky Mountain, which has certain symbolic meaning.

On the whole, I felt like I wasn't quite able to link up the undercurrents of meaning that I was detecting, which meant the book felt a bit hollow and unfinished. I think that if I were more familiar with the works of French literature referenced in the book, I would have had a richer reading experience.

Also, I have a terrible phobia of dental things, and there is a series of scenes involving the headman's rotten teeth and using somewhat rudimentary tools to drill in preparation for a filling. I wasn't entirely prepared for that, and it was hard to read - I had to skip through, and worried that I might be missing important lines.

---

I'm still reading The Unfolding of Language. I'm very much liking the focus Deutscher is putting to metaphor and how it molds language. The first chapters were a bit difficult to get through because it was mostly rehash of things I've read about time and again, but this is a fairly new angle for me (though not completely so), and he has made some points and links that I hadn't put together before, so that's pretty cool. (I also didn't realize that the English "have" and French "avoir"/Latin "habeo" weren't related! Apparently "have" comes from a Germanic root, not a Latin root. And now I'm hoping that I remembered the Latin word properly, because goodness knows it's been 10 years since I took Latin 1.)

So weird that those aren't related!

Isn't it?! But it's actually a much older borrowing - "have" has the same root as "capture" or "catch". It had been a victim of the Germanic phoneme shifts: k -> ch -> h and p -> f, specifically. Deutscher has the PIE as *kap.

The Metaphor chapter (#4) discusses this on pp 129-133 (paperback, British ed) along with words to indicate possession. Some languages don't have specific verbs but use prepositions, of course, while others are more like "carry" or "took" while have if you go back far enough is "seize". This is a look at language I'd never really seen discussed before, so I thought it was really interesting. The chapter goes on to show how words for movement through space become words for movement through time, or how specific body parts become prepositional, by moving to the abstract, which was quite interesting to see written out, since I've amused myself when studying new languages at contemplating pretty much the same thing (that is, how abstract/grammatical words are similar to concrete terms, and the idiomatic nature of them).

The Unfolding of Language sounds like a really interesting book. I don't think I'd thought about whether have and habeo were related, probably assumed that they were through an older germanic root.

Re abstract vs concrete terms, I often reflect on the difference between Latin and germanic roots for words in English. So much of the vocabulary we use in more academic/formal contexts is latin or greek based, while more every-day terms are germanic - but often the root meanings are the same. 'Concept' is latin based, but the root meaning is from 'concipio' to grasp or catch (again). The German for concept is Begriff - something you can grip or grasp hold of. And informally we would say 'have you got that?' and 'Did you catch what that was about?'. Words are such fun!

20> It is interesting! Which is awesome - I was really worried that it would just be a denser, more academic rehash of the Power of Babel or my anthropological linguistics course from 2005, because the intro and first chapter or two were just that. I think the book really stands out when you get to the third and fourth chapters and Deutscher begins discussing erosion and analogy/metaphor, as I mentioned above.

Chapter 5, "The Forces of Creation", is a bit odd, because Deutscher puts it in the form of a panel-type interview at a conference, but I still found it to be informative, in the way he ultimately describes how words change grammatical function, specifically with the phrase "going to"/"gonna".

Chapter 6 is "Craving for Order", which talks about how we notice patterns in language that might just be accidents of lazy speech (erosion and vowel-coloring/shifts and so on) and extrapolate those "patterns" to other words. For English, the common example is how we got the words "cherry" or "pea" - both were originally ended with an S in the singular - "cherise", "pease". But the main discussion of this chapter is Semitic verb stems, and a look at how they came to be groups of three consonants with vowel patterns that change. This was new to me - though the Semitic (such as Arabic) verbs are often used as examples in my intro texts (I, uhm, have a few >.>), it was usually just "here is another example of ____". So I liked looking at Deutscher's theories for how these patterns came to be (since historical Semitic languages are so old and proto-Semitic is even older, we likely will never see how it evolved).

I don't think I'd thought about whether have and habeo were related, probably assumed that they were through an older germanic root.

See, Zoë is a Classicist and my first non-English languages were French, Classical Greek, and Latin, so we are probably predisposed to see links between English and French/Latin! Especially when "have" and "avoir" are so incredibly similar in meaning and use and sound, and then "habere" is also very similar. But, of course, to really think about it logically, such a basic word as "have" probably entered the language much earlier than the Norman French influence in the 11th century.

 

Gosh, but I find evolutionary linguistics to be incredibly fascinating. Have I mentioned it in these threads before? If I had enough money to make it easy, my dream is to be an academic who studies correlations between folklore transmission and language change due to influence of neighboring dialects/migration/cultural dominance. And not just historical, but current and on-going, though I'm especially interested in Western vs. Eastern mingling in the early 20th century.

I wish I'd had time to take a linguistics course at some point. I feel like it would bring together all the languages I've studied into some much more amazing understanding. Maybe one day. At this point I never ever seem to find time for linguistics books, though.

I really hope that you'll one day be able to achieve your dream of becoming an academic, Keri. It makes me so sad when money is the determining factor. Have you ever considered moving to Canada and living there long enough to qualify for domestic tuition? Even at the top schools it's only about $5000/year. (International tuition, sadly, is more like $22,000.)

Just for the record, I like to consider myself an ancient historian now, rather than a classicist ;). I've actually been doing more ancient near eastern stuff lately, and even if I were sticking to the classical world I think the concept of "historian" would be more appropriate.

My mind still boggles that have and habere are not related. I would at least have expected them to come from the same Indo-European root, but that's not even the case. Such a strange coincidence.

Just for the record, I like to consider myself an ancient historian now, rather than a classicist ;)

Sheesh, I knew that, too. I doubted myself when I typed "classicist" because it seemed to narrow, but being at work and distracted and typing between visitors meant I couldn't come up with the right term. My apologies for getting it wrong! (ancient historians are cooler anyway - or something)

But even if you don't take a linguistics course or read books, maybe follow blogs? Of course there's Language Log, but I find that it's a little too much sometimes. I really like http://literalminded.wordpress.com/ - I'm not sure if it's super accessible to someone new to linguistics, but I think on the whole he writes in a way that is very clear and understandable. He also categorises his posts fairly well, so that it's easy to browse and pick up the basics just by reading a bunch of posts on the same topic.

.

As for my academic dream... it really is a dream, though I figure if I try to educate myself enough by reading (and I hope to be able to follow scholarly journals before long), I can at least do it as a hobby. I think I used the wrong word in "academic", because the main reason I chose to purse an MLIS instead of a folklore MA is that I really don't want to be forced into a career in academia and at the time, it seemed like there weren't many other options, at least none that would let me do the kind of research I'd like to do. But with a degree in archives, I'd have a lot more options and ways to use the degree. Plus if I managed to get myself into a historical museum, I might very well have access to resources that would let me study folklore anyway... ;)

I have considered that when/if it's time to leave the museum I'm at now, I should try to go to Toronto or Chapel Hill and get residency to enroll in the appropriate graduate programs at the universities. There's an archives program in Toronto, and library/archives + linguistics + folklore programs at UNC-Chapel Hill. I need to be independent of my parents before I think about attempting any of that again. Hopefully I'll get to be full-time in July instead of the weird more than part-time but not full-time I am now, and I can move out and start figuring out what direction to go in.

Thanks for the encouragement, though, Zoë.

(And now I need to finish reading Unfolding of Language. The 7th chapter is showing how the different elements discussed in the preceding chapters work together to create the complex and sometimes opaquely-patterned languages we have now, from the starting point of what Deutscher calls the "me Tarzan" stage. This book is a very good companion to the Power of Babel, I have to say - one looks at how languages get to the diversity we currently have, the other shows how languages get to the complexity they currently have, which are almost-but-not-quite the same thing. I do have a bit of a problem with what Deutscher assumes is "natural" to language structure, but he hedges a bit when he says it, and I don't even remember what has influenced me to have such a kneejerk No reaction to the idea that anything in language is natural. It's so difficult to study language and what is truly "natural" and not cultural influence without major ethical problems, though.)

#6: The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher

I've been talking about this book all along, I guess, so not as much to write as my summary, though I do have a Proper Review for my catalogue.

The last chapter and the epilogue take all the elements of language change and pulls them together to describe one way a language might, theoretically, grow to have a complex grammar, yet also appear to be less complex than in the past. In the introduction and again in the epilogue, he returns to 19th century linguists and writers who despaired at the degradation of modern language compared to the complex and "elegant" morphology systems of classical Latin. He points out that our words (morphemes) might not be so complex without dozens of cases, but the actual grammatical structures of language often are, and in some languages, like French with "il aime" -> "lui, l'aime", we are seeing some regain of complexity. He brings up the usual theories for why languages don't seem to be changing as swiftly as they did in the past, and also why more languages are dying out (to wit: as more parts of the world communicate across language boundaries, languages are remaining simple to accommodate new speakers; also, the dominant languages are more important than those spoken by relatively few; also also, the marked increase in literacy and reliance on the written word causes language to change more slowly as we can see how it used to be and mentally "see" what we're saying - spoken vs. written French is an exception, I suppose? but the Academie does try its best to keep written French the way it used to be).

I still think this is an excellent companion to The Power of Babel and have just spoken to Jennie Wagner via her blog and received more recommendations regarding a few particular things that caught my interest, particularly what is "natural" to language, and how language+culture might influence how we categorise our perceptions.

Wagner linked to a fascinating article about color perception and color words, which I think is worth a read: http://www.essex.ac.uk/psychology/department/people/Roberson_files/ProgressInCol...

I've already added a few of the titles she recommended in the post to my TBR list above - particularly Anna Wierzicka, who seems to specialise in cross-cultural linguistics, which is totes an element of my favorite anthropological topics.

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My next book will be The Girl of Fire and Thorns. I discovered it via a link on the side of a blog that had a post from Stephanie Burgis regarding the opening sentences of her next novel ("Renegade Magick" for the UK title), and it looked interesting, though I've already completely forgotten what it was that interested me, of course. It took a couple weeks for the hold request to come through at the library because apparently it's very popular with the YA crowd around here!

I've also got Gemini Bites on hold at the library to pick up on Tuesday. It's one I've had on my wishlist for a year or two and will be reading for the TIOLI challenge I proposed - to read a book from one of the ALA LGBTRT "Over the Rainbow" lists.

______

And here is my posted review for The Unfolding of Language.

My 7th book this year was a very quick read! I picked it up this afternoon on my lunch break, read a few pages, then came home and couldn't stop reading until I finished it.

I couldn't remember why I had added Gemini Bites by Patrick Ryan to my WTR list, only that I was very intrigued by the synopsis I had seen and it looked like a fun book. When I saw that it was on the ALA LGBT Roundtable "Over the Rainbow" list, I figured it was a good opportunity to read it. I'm glad I did!

From the cover description and the first few pages, I was ready for something amusing and a little bit over the top. It seemed to me that the book was setting out to be a vampire-involved love triangle with twins (Kyle and Judy), one of whom is a (fake) Born Again. I couldn't shake the idea that Ryan had used a dart board to pull the various elements together, and I liked it. That feeling is way better than the one where it seems the author is being dead serious with the same elements.

As I got deeper into the book, it became fairly obvious that the vampire character isn't really one - the book is solidly grounded in reality with no fantasy elements, though still humorous in places. At first I was vaguely disappointed, but that passed as I found myself really enjoying the characters' perplexion about Garret's persona. Ultimately, though, the vampiric elements are central to the story, which is as much about sibling rivalry and exploration of identity as it is about the love triangle (there are actually two!).

There are two things that I really loved about the book: the first is that while it is a LGBT book and one of the narrating character is gay, it isn't an "Issue" book about being gay. Kyle simply is and it's one part of his identity, and that's that. The second element that I liked is the narrative style. The chapters alternate between first-person narratives by Kyle and his twin Judy, each of whom has their own perspective and voice. As they are the central characters with their competition and rivalry, I liked that we aren't stuck with just one side, and also that it wasn't some omniscient narrator. The twins' voices felt genuine to me, a lot like how I remember my teenage years being.

While Kyle is fairly secure in his identity and doesn't explore it much, he is bothered by the way Judy seems to detest him. He's also preoccupied with their houseguest and classmate Garret, who may or may not be a vampire. For his half, the book is about teenage love and dealing with a big family, including a sister that he loves but who continually goes out of her way to ruin things for him.

Judy doesn't have a clear idea of what she wants, other than a boyfriend. She pretends to be Born Again to get the attention of Jacob, meanwhile hiding it even from her family that it's fake. She can be petty and angry/mean without fully intending to be. She doesn't necessarily think about how others perceive her because she is fighting so hard to keep them from seeing her insecurities. Her half of the book is about these insecurities, the way she tries to fake what she isn't (in several ways) to get what she thinks she wants, without really knowing that that is.

If there was anything that stood out to me as something I didn't like, it was the solution to the two major conflicts. When Judy and Kyle work out their differences, followed by Kyle and Garret working out theirs, the dialogue felt a little too scripted and perfect. I had trouble believing that 16-year-olds would talk to each other like that, though it did work well for the story, and I happen to have really liked the way the romance grew between the boys, including the love triangle aspect. I also noted at least two places that needed a copy-editor for how they momentarily threw me out of the story: at one point, the dad is watching football on a Sunday in May, well after football season; at another, Kyle and his best friend Ian discuss their calculus teacher and hope they won't have him for trig the next year, though I was under the impression that trig comes before calculus. I was also confused about Kyle and Judy's younger sister's ages, as they often seemed a good deal older than they should have been.

On the whole, I did enjoy this book quite a lot, and I think it was well worth my time. It was exactly the sort of book I was itching to read - light but not shallow, with romance and humor elements without being all-out romance or humor.

This review is posted here, too.

8. The Girl of Fire and Thorns by Rae Carson

I basically read The Girl of Fire and Thorns in a single day, because once I began, it was so engrossing that I couldn't bear to wait until the next day to finish reading. It is one of my favorite genres, which helps a bit - princess adventures with a touch of magic. (There's a little bit the "Farm boy" story and romance as well!)

It really is an adventure story, with a lot going on. I can't really say that it is about any one thing, as there are a lot of things that it could be about - I don't think you could even limit it to being about the main character and our narrator, Elisa, since some of the topics are more general and are simply explored through her.

Of course, if you read other reviews and synopses, some of the major topics become clear: religion, faith, destiny, self-confidence, body size/image, war, friendship, and trust.

I think that Carson did a splendid job at handling the very many plot hooks and themes, and didn't really feel let down at any one point. I was surprised by some of her narrative choices, whether because she went an unexpected route, or because she did what I expected - but only after leaving very obvious red herrings. Since much of the foreshadowing came to play out very regularly, those red herrings were all the more surprising in the end.

Speaking of the end, I think that while it was a bit rushed and a little beyond my ability to suspend belief regarding the stated passage of time, I thoroughly enjoyed that it is very bittersweet. Without spoiling too much, I hope, I found that the ending was hopeful and as positive for Elisa as it could be, considering the hardships she suffered to get to that point. I'm given to understand that there may be a sequel in the works, but I don't think a sequel is necessary at all. I am very happy to think of Elisa growing into a mature woman and capable queen (oops, spoiler?) with the pieces that were set out in the last chapters, and I don't need more. (I'll probably read a sequel anyway, though!)

Two themes in the book had me wary before reading, worrying that it might be totally horrible and not my thing and I'd hate it. Luckily, this wasn't the case!

The first item is the religious aspect. Elisa is very devout to her faith, and is, in fact, living proof of a supernatural God. There is a crystal or gemstone lodged in her abdomen that spontaneously and miraculously appeared at her nameday, and which burns hot or cold with no clear physical reason. While titled "religion" and all, I felt that this wasn't very indistinguishable from much magic in other books. The God and religion in The Girl of Fire and Thorns is very tangible and with an unmistakable presence.

I did like the way Carson addressed religious schisms and fundamentalism, as well as different translations/interpretations of the religious texts. In the context of the story, the ultimate message to "continue to have faith and trust that things will work out as God intends, but there's nothing wrong with stepping up and trying to help things along" makes a lot of sense, though I'd think it's kind of stupid in a story based in our reality with no proof of the supernatural.

The second item is Elisa's appearance, though again, a lot of it is helped by the context of the story. I hate the idea that in order to have self-confidence and happiness, one must be thin and conventionally attractive, and a lot of stories force their overweight heroines to slim down for no particular reason than to get that "happy" ending. But for Elisa, things are a bit different. While she is terribly overweight and unhappy about it in the beginning of the book, with doubt that anyone looks beyond her appearance even while having no motivation to change it (something so many of us can relate to!), and she does become much slimmer by the end, it isn't just for the "happy". Her weight loss is due to some pretty serious events and accompanies weeks or months of grueling physical exertion and not-quite-enough food. It is not a positive thing for her, though it does result in positive effects - being more physically fit and able to walk long distances or being able to fit into ready-made disguises more easily. In fact, much later, Elisa jokes that her new size is only temporary, but it seemed to me that she was only half-joking, that she accepts that she might gain much of the weight back - she often mentions how food is a comfort to her, and that and the lack of physical exertion needed as a member of royalty is part of why she became overweight in the first place. She also points out that she may have lost a lot of weight and looks better in clothes, but she's by no means conventionally attractive, with loose skin due to the sudden near-starvation, and I suspect that she's still a bit overweight, if not nearly as much so as at the beginning.

On the whole, I found Elisa to be a very believable and sympathetic character. She is a princess and was raised as a princess, so is pampered and spoiled and a little self-centered, but she grows in the story, recognizes this, and attempts to improve these faults. But she's also quiet (a bit shy, really), observant, studious, and cares deeply about others. She does her best with what she has at hand, but isn't always successful, and sometimes makes the wrong choice.

I could go on about many other things I found interesting in the book, from the other characters to the various relationships, but they can mostly be described as the more important they are to the basic workings of the plot, the more nuanced they are, without being wholly Black or White, which was very nice.

I very much enjoyed The Girl of Fire and Thorns and can see why it's received so many positive comments, and why it took a month for my library hold to come in!

9. The Thorn and the Blossom by Theodora Goss

I fell in love with this little book because of the binding. I requested it from the ER list based on the intriguing description of a romance told twice with elements of time-travel or something via Medieval England. It looked like it could be interesting, and with Quirk books, it very likely would be. But it's the binding that made me decide to love it.

The Thorn and the Blossom uses an accordion binding so that there is no "spine" to the book. The front cover is the back cover and when you get to the end of one side, you can flip the page and be right back at the beginning of the next part (where the last page is actually part of the cover). There's no real reason that the book requires an accordion binding - it could have been done in many other ways, as used with dual-language books or two-in-one bookclub affairs where you turn the book upside down and back to front for the second story - but Quirk Books's choice gives the whole thing a special air of something I can't quite put my finger on, but which works very well with the story inside.

The story itself is brief, totaling just about 80 pages altogether, but it doesn't really feel short. It is exactly as long as it needs to be to tell of the bittersweet romance between Brendan and Evelyn. Both characters are medieval scholars and interested in the tale of Gawain and the Green Knight and the Cornish variation that Brendan grew up knowing. This poem plays a large part in the story, which suggests that maybe it isn't an invention but perhaps playing out through the modern lovers. Both of them do have visions which could be straight out of the poem, after all.

I loved that haunting element, the wondering whether these visions and the poem's influence are real. Either way, the curse within it does seem to echo into Evelyn and Brendan's reality, keeping them apart even when they continue to drift back together. There is no conclusive ending or happy ever after, but with the shadow of the curse and Gawan poem, it is perhaps all the better that way.

I may have included some plot spoilers in my comments about the book, in which case I apologise if I've ruined anything! I daresay that knowing these plot bits won't destroy the enjoyment of reading the story, though. I'd known more than a few details and found that it hardly mattered, as no spoilers could mess with the deft way that Goss wove the tale or destroy the shimmery magic feeling of the reading.

The Thorn and the Blossom is a beautiful book and well-done in every way. Even the woodcut-style illustrations on either side of the hard cover pages add to the delight in the book, though "delightful" might not be the best word for something so bittersweet.

______

My next book is going to be from my TBR stack on the floor - the first of Fforde's Nursery Crimes series. I think someone else is reading it for TIOLI, so I'll do a shared read.

I finished number 10 last night! Feeling pretty smug that it isn't even ten weeks into the year. Northanger Abbey was pretty much entirely due to the influence of SqueakyChu and Lyzard and the tutored read thread they're doing, and also that Madeline had put it on the TIOLI challenge, so I figured I might as well reread it and make it a shared read.

It is just as funny as I remembered, if not moreso now that I understand bits better, and very enjoyable. I find it interesting that so many folks say this is their least favorite Austen, yet it is my very favorite. Perhaps it's because I enjoy books which poke fun at themselves, as this one is definitely doing, and I also enjoy the Gothic and Sentimentalist books straight-up, but I'm less interested in the more straightforward novels of manners.

Because of this book and the tutor thread, I have finally ordered a book I've been dying for since I saw it on the Caustic Cover Critic's blog - The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman from Visual Editions. I can't wait for it to get here! It looks amazing, as much a piece of book art as a printing of the book itself, and what I know of the book makes me reluctant to try any other edition.

Glad you enjoyed your re-read of Northanger Abbey, Keri. I love the humour in it too. I also find that Catherine Morland is probably the Austen heroine with whom I most identify. I love Elizabeth and wish I was as spunky as she is, but I'm far more of a Catherine. :)

11.!!!! Matched by Ally Condie, which I couldn't bring myself to buy even though I wanted very much to read it, because after the reviews started coming in, I knew I'd be disappointed in it, so a dear friend who worked at Borders sent me an ARC copy she had lying around. YAY. (I could've gone to the library, but I didn't want to feel pressured to read it, and having the time limit would've sucked.)

I ended up getting around to reading it because I was talking to another friend about dystopias and she had finally read The Giver and then Farenheit 451, and loved them, and she was intrigued by Matched. So of course I promised to get around to reading my copy and send it on. It should be in the mail in a few days...

So, to give a brief review:

I didn't expect much out of the book. I figured that it would be just okay, as it's mostly a romance and less of a dystopia, and I hate it when awesome elements of a story, such as the setting or themes, are neglected in favor of a romance, even if I enjoy reading romance stories. I had the idea that this is the case here. So by not expecting much, I wasn't disappointed. I was actually surprised by how readable Matched is, and how quickly I was able to get through it - though that's not always a good thing. It does mean it wasn't boring, at least!

But for all that it's a quick read, I still found myself stopping here and there to reflect on the story and whether or not it was surpassing my prejudgment, and, well, most of the time I was frustrated that the main character is so passive. She lets herself be pushed along by everyone else, particularly the men in her life, and never really does anything for herself. Even the one time that she really rebels against the oppressive society, she does it by doing nothing!

I was also kind of squicked by the fact that the Society had apparently never heard of the Westermark Effect when calculating the most suitable matches. Cassia and Xander had been friends since a very young age, which I understood to be within the Westermark Effect range. It was a bit uncomfortable for me (and I often find it uncomfortable to read about romances springing from friendships that go back to childhood for the same reason).

The Society itself is interesting, and I'm intrigued by the way it functions. Cassia doesn't really know much or accepts it as being the way things are, so she doesn't provide a lot of extra insight. There isn't any mention of other kinds of training than the "Sorting" that she does, other than medical, which her friend Xander does, for one example.

But speaking of Xander... it was disappointing that he and Ky are set up as so Special and Perfect for Cassia that they are the only two people she knows who are involved in any kind of rebellion against the Society (though her dad does a bit). Why did they both have to be Special like that? One is Safe and one is Dangerous, so you get some love triangle, but the heroine almost always chooses the Dangerous one, so it's not like there's any question of how things would fall.

Ky is kind of irritating to me because he has so much ability to plant seeds to get people to improve the Society by working with his peers, but he has done nothing but hide. It's cowardly, I think is the feeling that I get. But I've also read so many dystopias that I expect the character who Know How Things Are to do something about it, rather than hiding away, because they have ethical objections to it.

In the end... I'm glad I finally got around to reading the book, because I was curious about it and it has had a lot of hype. But I wish that it were better, to be deserving of the praise and chatter.

(I'm terribly amused that most of the blurbs on the ARC cover come from "field sales" and "sales manager" types at the publishing co.)

Northanger Abbey is my favorite Austen book.

31> Hooray! I'm not alone! ;)

But I also prefer S&S to P&P, which seems to be unusual. I'm reluctant to attempt Emma or Mansfield Park, though I've been told that Persuasion might be up my alley.

At any rate...



I've just finished #12 for 2012. Chosen because it is a shared read for the TIOLI this month, and it's a challenge that I started.

Fair Play by Tove Jansson, who might be more famous for the Moomintroll series. I'd never really heard of her before, but I quite like this novel. Novella? Hm, it's really just a series of vignettes about Jonna and Mari, two women in their 60s or 70s who have been dear friends for a very, very long time, and (though it's not said directly in the text) are rather in love with each other.

I'm not sure how to describe the book, except that it is lovely. I suppose I could say that it is quietly intense, too. The vignettes don't really say that much about the women, thinking back on them, yet they give a wonderfully full view and description about who they are. I really liked that.

I also liked how Jonna is sketched as being analytic and angular and a bit unfeeling, and Mari is the romantic who gets emotional easily, but as the vignettes pile up, the soft and sweet aspects of Jonna's personality and her love for Mari peek out, and Mari proves to have elements to her nature that are just as hard and obsessive as Jonna might appear.

I think the book is ultimately about the women's love, and friendship, and the ways of living with one another and caring for the other after years and years of being together. I really liked it, though it's a bit different from what I usually read.

I had never heard of the Westermarck effect and had to look it up just now. Interesting stuff.

I recently borrowed a copy of Forbidden, a YA novel about incest, and I'm curious to see what the situation is like there.

I don't know where I first learned about the Westermarck Effect, but it is interesting, especially when considered in conjunction with the theory that we are attracted to people who most resemble our family members (or so it goes, with the separated-at-birth twins who fall in love stories).

I've actually looked at Forbidden before, but it looks far, far too angsty and heavy for me. I finished my Flowers in the Attic phase ages ago when I was a teenager, and I'm not sure I want to go back.

The super-high ratings won me over, and the rave reviews from various 75-ers when it first came out in the UK a couple of years ago. We'll see how it goes.

Ha! Oh, this is so amazing. I got the visual editions of Tristram Shandy today and it is even more amazing in person than in photos. The text just feels so playful with the day-glo orange ink, which I think was a genius move on the part of Visual Editions. it could have been blue or green or anything, but the orange works well. I like that the paratext is also orange, so the orange within the text flows and doesn't suddenly spring up, startling, when it appears.

I'm looking forward to reading it!

I've also finally received all my SantaThing books:
The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse
The Wild Things
To Say Nothing of the Dog

I was meant to get Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, I believe it was? but that ISBN got out-of-stock so when Jeremy re-ordered my books, I got to pick and after a lot of frowning and indecisiveness, I ultimately chose the Connie Willis book, partly because Zoë (I think) has mentioned The Domesday Book a few times, which caught my interest, but I found myself more interested in the second book than the first, once I'd looked at them a bit.

I have never heard of Robert Rankin before, but I am completely in love with that title, so I hope I'm not disappointed by it. It seems like it is most definitely everything I wanted in my SantaThing books this year. :D I'm also going to make an effort to try to read the 3rd book chosen, at some point, even if I don't buy it for myself.

>36 keristars: - Nice! I like that edition, too - they did a nice job with it.

Yup, I did like Doomsday Book. I've had To Say Nothing of the Dog on my TBR pile ever since I read that one, but I still haven't managed to get around to it.

13. Patty in the City by Carolyn Wells.

I began this one back in April of 2009, directly upon finishing the previous book in the series, Patty at Home, but for various reasons mostly related to Shiny New books and one Patty book being awfully similar to the next, I set it aside and then misplaced it and never quite got back to finishing it. There's a "Finish That Book" TIOLI challenge (or: "Still(!) Reading"), so I dug it out from the stack it was in with stationery and art supplies and finished it off.

I happen to love the ridiculous and oh-so-proper plots in these old series books. Patty is almost perfect and everyone adores her and she very rarely errs unless it is necessary to show the reader what is proper. I can't read too many of these together without growing a bit jaded and cynical, but it is so much fun when I can enjoy them for their merits. I was reading the last few chapters at work today and read bits aloud for my coworkers, because it's also fun to read sentences out of context and titter at the way the language and bosom friendships between teenage girls sound to modern ears. ;)

At any rate, Patty Fairfield has succeeded at setting up a household for herself and her father in perfect proportion in Vernondale (proportion being the main theme of the Patty books - not too much of any one thing, and achieving it - like how you get themes of "Outdoors" or "Moving Pictures" for other series), and so they are off to live in New York City for a season or two, while her father makes preparations to marry (he is a widower - Nan is 6 years older than Patty, so only 21!) and so that he needn't take a 2 hour train every morning to get to work, or something like that.

The Fairfields are wealthy, I'd say upper class without being absurdly wealthy. These books would have been read by middle and upper-middle class girls when they were published (this one has a © date of 1905), so Patty must be a bit aspirational, for the girls to admire and want to be like. That means she's also terribly good-natured and everyone loves her and whenever she sets out to do something, it turns out right in the end.

In the city, the Fairfields live in a boarding hotel with many rooms, and Patty is sent to the Oliphant school, where she discovers the girls are grouped into "Prigs, Gigs, and Digs" - Prigs are the snobby elite, Gigs are the girls who make jokes and don't bother with studies, Digs are the ones who are only concerned about marks. Of course, Patty can't stand the divisions and doesn't want to have to choose which group to be in, particularly when none of them are as jolly and well-proportioned as the Tea Club friends she left in Vernondale. So, naturally, she erases those lines to create a group called the "Grigs" (after an English members saying about a cricket): 8 girls with the mission of spreading cheer, such as by making scrapbooks and toys for the hospital, or helping a surly and frowny classmate to cheer up and be friendly (I told you that Patty is almost insufferably good!).

It seems that the book's main point is the months from September through December, and how Patty brings cheer to her circle in the city, and learns proportion of friendship and merriment and also meets an absurdly wealthy girl (whose father bought the adjoining townhouse/mansion and turned it into a "Casino" with a bowling alley, ballroom, indoor squash court, &c.) and goes to the circus and enjoys a Cinderella Party at Christmas - wherein everyone must leave at midnight. There's also the vague plotline of poor Lorraine who hates everyone but Patty and later turns out to only have been jealous and to have believed herself incapable of being merry or friendly, and so reforms and joins Patty's circle of jolly friends.

Hm, I'm not sure why I just went into detail about the plot, since there isn't much to it, and I'm not entirely sure that anyone really cares, but honestly, I did have fun reading it and laughed at the jokes and shook my head at the privilege of these girls (the 1905 sort), and imagined how certain bits would play out in a modern book of the same type. I think, like with the sensationalist novels of 100 years previous, half the fun is reading it out loud and letting yourself get carried away with the nonsense.

 

I never did read the first book in the series, and since Patty in the City ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, I searched out the 4th, and ended up reading the 1st! So book #14 this year is also about Patty - Patty Fairfield, from Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8456/pg8456.html

For the first book, we meet Patty and her family. Her father has decided that it's time they set up a proper household in the civilized lands Up North (they are currently in Virginia), and so sends her to live with each of her 4 aunts for 3 months at a time while he ties up business with his property in Virginia and also a plantation he owns in the Caribbean. Each of the first three aunts are examples of poor proportion: the first aunt in New Jersey is too focused on appearances and wealth to the point of being gaudy and a bit gauche with no time for seriousness; the second in Boston isn't at all concerned with appearances, but is a little too serious and set on self-improvement (and societal improvement) without much jolliness and too much scheduling; the third aunt's summer house on Long Island fairly well describes what's wrong there: it's called "The Hurly-Burly" and the family are mainly interested in fun and merriment, and don't worry much about the time or even whether or not there's a bed in Patty's room the first night!

There is a party at each house, which of course represents the main problems, just as the bedrooms provided for Patty do. And, naturally, the very last aunt in Vernondale is perfectly in proportion and has the best party (wherein Patty saves the day and is a hero) and best bedroom and is where she and her father end up living in the next book. I was terribly amused that Nan Allen, whom Mr Fairfield marries in book #4, is presented with the Hurly-Burly group as a playmate-of-sorts for Patty! Also, she had suffered from typhus the season previous and so is completely bald. Somehow, I had missed these facts in the later two books I'd read.

I don't think the first book is nearly so amusing and fun as the other two, probably because it's so very moralistic and more about setting up the series than getting on with it.

Meanwhile, I'm working my way through Carolyn Wells' mysteries. :)

These stories sound rather like Faith Baldwin's Divine Corners stories (allowing for 25 years' difference in mores) - everyone's so cheerful and well-behaved, it's ridiculous.

I might have to try her mysteries at some point! I reread my review of Patty at Home and remembered how delightful that book was - moreso than #1 or #3 in the series. It reminded me that the bits where I thought Wells was poking fun at girls' books in Patty in the City probably were just that, and not me being cynical. Unfortunately, the City book fell a bit as it tried too hard for some of the lessons for Patty (just like how in the first book, each of the aunts are a little too obviously out of proportion). It was still very funny.

These stories sound rather like Faith Baldwin's Divine Corners stories (allowing for 25 years' difference in mores) - everyone's so cheerful and well-behaved, it's ridiculous.

Oh, it's not just these books - just about every girls' series from the first part of the 20th century is this way! At least, those that I've read. It's a little bit sickening, really, but so much fun to enjoy, like a nice candy. I quite enjoy how silly the Outdoor Girls books are, with everyone so good and all. I think Nancy Drew was one of the first to be a little bit shocking that she wasn't perfectly good and ideal, and then they went and erased all that with the rewrites mid-century (and reacted to it by creating Trixie Belden, who was more like a normal girl). But I'm saying that from what I gather by other readers of the series, since I'm far from reading even most of them. I have to do it in small doses!

I'm not very experienced in this kind of literature. That's probably why I'm enjoying the Divine Corners stories so much. It's easy to think that too much at once would become cloying.

Do you know the Ruth Fielding series at all? I haven't read any, but they're on The List. They're supposed to have been a big influence on the Nancy Drew books.

Yes, I know of Ruth Fielding! I haven't read any yet, but she's of a kind with Patty Fairfield, I'm given to understand. One of the more interesting series and not as cloying as some of the others. I believe that Ruth is particularly interesting for being a filmmaker and flying her own aeroplane, once she gets out of school.

Yes - apparently she became a little *too* advanced and independent for some people's liking!

Do you know if it's possible to get hold of the original Nancy Drew texts?

Part of the trouble with these series is that they are so long. I'd love to dive in, but it takes forever to get past the schooldays books, which are usually of a kind and not very interesting (no wonder Carolyn Wells confined it to a single volume for Patty and in the opening chapters of Patty's Summer Days, which i've nearly finished, speeds things up and gets Patty her diploma a year early), and then some of the more interesting bits are bogged down and spread out and it takes so much time to get through.

I like how Patty's Summer Days almost deconstructs the happy, gay, everyone-can-rely-on-the-heroine idea in the first half, with Patty practically having a nervous breakdown from the stress of being so reliable and merry, and having to study extra hard to do two years' work in one, and also run the Commencement play, and so on. The second half begins with a most interesting description of a motor car excursion (part of the doctor's orders for Patty to recuperate her good spirits), which was very fun to read, at least partly because it did away with the social niceties and focused on the exotic form of transportation. (And then there's a millionaire's household with a pet bear cub chained in a little house which was so sad! The girls treated it so nonchalantly as a cute little thing and dressed it like an infant child for pictures.)

 

ETA: Yes, it is possible! For one, you can purchase the "Applewood" editions, which are original texts plus illustrations and reproductions of the original covers. You can also sometimes find the original texts in used bookshops or online - they're not nearly so valuable as some might suggest. I don't think they're out of copyright yet, though, so I'm not sure if you can find them on Gutenberg or the like, though you might. The first was published in 1928 or 1929, which is the cut-off for public domain.

Am I wrong in hoping there's a later volume called Patty's Long And Painful Recuperation After A Savage Bear Attack?

I'm hoping that a later chapter goes back and does something like that, I'll admit! It's right in the middle of the book, so there's plenty of time, and Wells doesn't often include things just to include them - it's always a plot element of some kind or another, or is meant to show characterisation. But this might just be a way of showing how filthy rich the the Warners are, and how immense the Pine Branches estate is.

Okay, so, #15:


Patty's Summer Days

Will I continue on to Patty in Paris after this? I'm not sure. It's the only other one that I own, and Project Gutenberg doesn't have all the books in the series.

At any rate, I have very much enjoyed this 4th book in the series compared to the 3rd, as I mentioned above. In addition to the near nervous breakdown brought on by too much studying and being-relied-upon, we had the wedding of Patty's father and Nan (who is 24 here while Patty is 17), the motor car excursion through New York or Connecticut or somewhere to Pine Branches, where Patty experienced a quilting bee and a Summer Christmas party on the 4th of July. Alas, poor Abiram the bear cub was trotted out again, but only to make an appearance at the Christmas party. Poor thing. After this, her father could take a month vacation, so Patty and her parents moved out to a summer house on Long Island, where we have the requisite Lost Baby plotlet.

I have to say, much of Wells's writing is very funny:

“She seems to be having the time of her life,” said Dick Phelps, as he watched the baby, who with a macaroon in one hand, and some candied cherries in the other, was smiling impartially on them all.

“She’s not much of a conversationalist,” remarked Mr. Fairfield.

“Give her time,” said Patty, “she feels a little strange at first.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Phelps, “I think after two or three years she’ll be much more talkative.”

At any rate, as we saw with the bear cub, not all is happy and gay in this 1906 story: when her parents go on their honeymoon, Patty makes a visit to Atlantic City with Mr and Mrs Allen, Nan's parents, and explores the boardwalk from a wheeled chair, which is pulled by a strong black man. There's something like a bazaar on the far side, where they stop to admire the Gipsy things, and cunning Oriental designs, and Mr Allen buys a necklace made of charming, gaudily colored beads that makes Patty look a bit barbarian. :( The description was still interesting to me, as I've never even been to Atlantic City in the modern age, but I'd read of another visit in a series book which now escapes my memory, but had some rather amusing tales. I can't for the life of me remember if it was a modern series book or not. I think it is like to drive me crazy, until I can hit upon it. There was a mystery involved and I haven't read very many older series with mysteries, so I'm thinking it must have been the "History Mysteries" series from Pleasant Co/American Girl. That still doesn't seem right, since those are stand-alone books, and I'm almost positive that the story I read was part of a longer series.

But the Gipsy thing returns to Patty's story towards the end, when their little village on Long Island holds a fair and bazaar for Associated Charities. Each household participates, creating a "Bazaar of All Nations", and Patty is in charge of the "gypsy encampment", which she is sure will be the most popular booth of them all. (How interesting that the word isn't spelled consistently in this P.G. edition - earlier in the book it was "gipsy", but now it's "gypsy".) The main point of this interlude isn't the theme of the booth, though, but that Patty and Bertha Warner have gone to cut flowers to go with their gypsy costumes, and get stuck on an island when the boat drifts away, so they make references to Crusoe and all sorts of books of that type. Of course they don't stay stranded all day, as three of the young men circling Patty save the day, and we get a bit of romantic tension as they all want to court her, she isn't quite willing to take steps towards that direction with any of them, and there's a to-do at the bazaar as Kenneth decides he's snubbed and sulks quite obviously. (But if I didn't know any better about how the series would go, I'd say he's one of the top contenders for marring Patty. Him and Roger Farringworth, one of the rich kids who has the casino attached to the house.)

The book ends with comments from some of the primary suitors that they want to keep hanging around Patty, which amused me, though I think I shall set her aside for now and read something else for a bit. There's a lot I like about the series, but a lot that's not so good, and of course if I try to read it all at once, the delightful bits will be overshadowed by the problematic ones, and I'll get too cynical about it all.

So I think I'll try to finish up my Haywood book I started last March, and am nearly done with, except that it's so dense I keep letting myself get distracted by something shiny and easier.

Which Haywood?

I'm still years away from her, sigh - I keep letting myself get distracted by things dusty and harder. :)

It's the last inclusion of the Fantomina, and Other Works book I have: "Love-Letters On All Occasions". I finished the 3rd piece ages ago ("Reflections on the Various Effects of Love") and started in on Love-Letters, but as you tease about, there were shinier new books with much less dense text that came around, so I took a break with them and never quite got back to Haywood.

Also, I said I was going to stop with Patty, but then I was a little bit curious how she would get to Paris and now I'm four chapters deep into the next book in the series. There are some good, amusing lines here:

"I can't see what makes your father so late," said Nan, as she wandered about the room, now adjusting some flowers in a vase, and now stopping to look out at the front window; "he's always here by this time, or earlier."

"Something must have detained him," said Patty, rather absently, as she poked at a log with the tongs.

"Patty, you're a true Sherlock Holmes! Your father is late, and you immediately deduce that something has detained him! Truly, you have a wonderful intellect!"

"I don't wonder it seems so to you," said saucy Patty, smiling at her pretty stepmother; "people are always impressed by traits they don't possess themselves."

Though I might be appreciating these as terribly funny only because I've been immersed in Wells's Girls Series writing for the last three days and it's getting to me. Someone might need to send me some Austen or Twain and bail me out ;)

Ha! I know what it's like to get hooked on a series more or less against your will. :)

It's the last inclusion of the Fantomina, and Other Works

I remember! Was that really a year ago?? Eep!

Not quite a year - I started with Fantomina in May and finished Reflections in September. Of course, with breaks between those three, too, and not just the especially long one between Reflections and Love-Letters.

The preface to the Love-letters is a dedication to Walpole's widowed sister-in-law, coincidentally.

Oh so amused by this from Patty in Paris:

"But you don't love Patty as I do," said Marian with a sigh, as she gazed at her adored cousin.

"No, Marian, I don't," said Kenneth; "not as YOU do, for I assume that you love her as a first cousin. Now my affection for Patty is more on the order of a grandmother's brother-in-law once removed. You can't be too careful about the exact type of attachment you feel for a young lady, and I think that expresses my regard for Patty. Now toward Elise I feel more like a great niece's uncle's brother-in-law. There is a very subtle distinction between the two, but I know that both girls are acutely aware of the exact kind and degree of my regard for them."

16. Patty in Paris, 5th in the series. I shall have to scan my cover so that it's the older looking one, not the more modern one.

I've talked quite a bit about Miss Fairfield, and I don't think there's much else to say, but I started to go on to Patty's Friends and just couldn't quite do it, so I think I'm done with her for now. I should like to finish the series one day, though, particularly since the 6th book introduces some very tongue-in-cheek/parodic mystery plots (for 1907).

This blog is where I first stumbled upon Carolyn Wells: http://redeemingqualities.wordpress.com/the-patty-fairfield-series-by-carolyn-we...

Melody only has synopses/reviews of the first 6 books posted, but she has descriptions of all 17 and there's a wonderful list of Early 20th C. Bestsellers that may be interesting: http://redeemingqualities.wordpress.com/early-20th-century-bestsellers/

I rather like Melody's description of her blog and the title:

How many books published this year will be remembered a century from now? Probably not many.
...
So, there are a lot of books (published a hundred or so years ago) that have been forgotten. And most of them probably weren’t very good, but I bet a lot of them were fun.

I had a lot of fun with Patty in Paris, with the fluff and humor and reading about steamship travel across the Atlantic and Paris in 1907. Have another quote that amused me:

As they followed the hurrying people across the deck, Mr. Chester went on: “After you have crossed the ocean a few more times you will discover that there are only two things which make the people rush frantically and in hordes to the rail. The one that isn’t a porpoise is a passing steamer.”
...
“That isn’t a real steamer,” said Patty whimsically; “it’s a chromo-lithograph. I’ve often seen them in the offices of steamship companies. This one isn’t framed, as they usually are, but it’s only a chromo all the same. There’s no mistaking its bright colouring and that badly painted smoke.”

(PS: I fear that after 4 of these books in a row, my vocabulary has taken a decided turn for the old-fashioned, in addition to thinking such descriptions to be quite funny. If you find me peppering my posts with words such as "jolly" or "lief" or goodness-knows-what-else, please don't hesitate to send for help. I suppose a shock to the nerves with a dose of Gossip Girl or Hunger Games would serve me well, even if I should protest.)

If you find me peppering my posts with words such as "jolly" or "lief" or goodness-knows-what-else, please don't hesitate to send for help.

I do that. Worse, I do it out loud. Gets me some looks, I can tell you.

On the other hand, thanks to George Eliot I was able to stun my office by producing the word "amanuensis" at a critical moment.

Not really on my reading list for this year, since I last picked it up on 29 December, but I'm officially dropping Lucky Break by Esther Freud today.

You can see my review here, which is a lot of vagueries and doesn't even have the characters' names, because they were so uninteresting that I couldn't even remember that! I tried and tried to like the book and got into it a few times, only to find that after a few days of not having time to read, I didn't care a whit about what happened to them, and wasn't even interested in looking at the last pages for closure.

I suppose Freud is a decent writer - a lot of the descriptions and tension and pacing are quite good - but there are too many characters here and not enough time devoted to any one to make them sympathetic or the page-turning "I need to know what happens to him/her" kind.

Blech.

It makes me sad with an Early Reviewer book sucks. I just got Welsh Mythology and Folklore in Popular Culture today from McFarland and will have to slot it in somewhere, because it looks like it's going to take me a while to get through, but should be interesting. It's all academic and stuff.

Re: Love-Letters on All Occasions:

I've decided to catalogue each of the inclusions in Fantomina, and Other Works separately, so that I can review them individually, and then the collection as a whole. I'm finding it very interesting the way each of the 4 pieces reads on its own, and then the way they work together as a collection to play off each other.

Love-letters &c. was dedicated to Robert Walpole's widowed sister-in-law, which I found to be an interesting little addition to the work. Haywood discusses the notions of dedications and flattery and...well, for some reason I've forgotten why I found it so amusing when I read it. I think I was under the impression that she was saying "nonsense to everyone who writes dedications and prefaces like this as a way to flatter and get attention/support from a lofty and important person: I'm doing this only because I hope it will amuse you". She goes on to say how Mrs Walpole isn't all that famous or influential, so the usual use of dedications is worthless, but also includes all these flatteries and praises that I suppose my first read-through made me think she was really poking fun at the whole thing. But I'm doubting myself now...

At any rate, there are LXII letters in this work. Some stand alone and tell a story in only a few paragraphs, while others are a series of correspondence between a couple that draw the tale out for some time. I wish I were better aware of the symbolism behind the names chosen, since they read to me as stock romance names that imply certain characteristics. For example, right now I'm in the midst of THEANO and ELISMONDA's affair, which runs from XIII through XXXVI - I'm currently on XX.

I wanted to stop here and comment on XIII and XIV. When I read THEANO's letter to ELISMONDA complaining that he thought they had a mutual love and were in an understanding and everything was delightful, so why did she ignore him and so on the next day - even if there were people around? I wasn't entirely sure what exactly had passed between them. So ELISMONDA's response is to say that oh, of course she loves THEANO and she didn't mean to reject him, even if that's what it seemed like, but it was nighttime and she was swept away by the moonlight and the sweet talk and THEANO couldn't see that she was blushing and shy... and the next morning she was a bit ashamed of herself and didn't know how to face him... and at first I thought maybe the sweet words and "Request to grant what ought to have been the Reward of Years of unceasing Pressures, and prov'd Constancy!" was maybe an agreement to marry him? but then I realized that such an agreement may just as well have been sex... and wouldn't you know it, that's what happened.

This is one of the reasons I love Haywood so much compared to writers a century later. Her characters and situations are so human and fall into common behaviors, but it's not just stories of ordinary people - Haywood uses the realities of human behavior to explore things like love or social rules or whatever, without elevating her characters to some ideal state where they aren't quite real.

17. Fantomina, and Other Works by Eliza Haywood (but particularly "Love-letters on All Occasions"

I've finished the love-letters! It took me a lot longer than I expected, but mostly because they are a bit stop-and-go with not having a continuous narrative, and I kept spending time on manga, which was a lot less mentally taxing. I've been feeling pretty worn out lately, too, and yesterday I went to Epcot for the Flower & Garden Festival so that took an entire day of reading time away.

I feel like I needed help looking at the Love-letters critically, because I kept wanting to fire the synapses and twist my brain a bit and make connections and deeper comprehension, but it was like that understanding was just beyond a corner that I couldn't quite turn. It's kind of frustrating, I gotta say.

The letters seem to be organized to create a sort of continuum of feelings of love. About 2/3 of the way through, there are a bunch of unhappy romances and several break-up letters, followed by letters that resulted from less than ideal circumstances, but are less unhappy (including one from a woman who has got pregnant and is entreating the father to marry her). I noted that just as in the other works in the book, there are no real claims that women are one way while men are another - both can be inconstant, prone to jealousy, true, idealized, and so on. In one letter, a man complains that the woman he loves is too fond of leading men on and not being serious, while in another, a woman complains that the man she loves won't stop flirting with other women. I think if there's anything that could be ascribed to a single sex, it's that the women have less power when it comes to the relationships and being able to say how things will go - whether it's introducing the topic of marriage or having sex. She still has influence in that regard, but her power is weak.

It amused me that for so many of these letters, the love-relationship is so dire and important and everything. And then I got to one towards the end (in the 40s or 50s) that comments specifically on that, very self-aware almost. But they are "love letters" so there's not much room for comments on other bits of life.

I do love Haywood and the way she writes. All the people in these letters had strong voices and I could almost see them at their desks with pens in hand. While it wasn't terribly easy reading, it was worth my time, and Haywood is still a favorite author of mine.

18. Bunny Drop 5 by Yumi Unita

I love this series quite a lot. I've said it again and again, but Unita is one of my favorite cartoon artists. I love the round-but-angular lines and the way she varies the thickness and the way she draws hands and expressions. I'm also really into her characterisations and the way she weaves a story.

Now, there are some less than awesome bits to Bunny Drop, which is why a LOT of people stop at volume 4 (now that the series has finished in Japan). Because I want to support her and I want to trust that other people are just being dumb, I'm continuing on with the series, and pretending that the spoilers don't exist.

The first half of the series explores the meaning of family and growing up through Daikichi (30) and Rin (6), who are thrown together with the death of Daikichi's grandfather (Rin's father). It is super sweet and touching and I think did a fantastic job. The fourth volume has a well-done echo of the first, showing how the two have grown and grown together over the course of a year.

The second half of the series starts out almost like an entirely new one. It begins ten years after the fourth volume ends, with Rin almost 16 and in her first year of high school (which is only 3 years long, ages 15-18ish, in Japan). I'm not really sure what the themes are going to be now, though the nature of family and growing up are still prominent. There is a lot of story-time devoted to Rin and her friend Kouki, who has a crush on her though Rin only sees him as a brother (they've been close since pre-kindergarten, and Daikichi and Kouki's mom helped each other out, as they're both single parents). So I guess a lot of this second half will also be about navigating relationships as a teenager, and dating and first love and so on.

Rin and Kouki as teenagers are amazing. I love the way they're drawn, and the way Unita shows their personalities in the drawings. There are a lot of little details in the backgrounds or how characters have aged over the last 10 years that I rather like. Sometimes you get time skips in manga and everything seems the same, so it's a little too much like a plot convenience to get past the boring bits. Which, okay, that might be the case here, too, but Unita has put effort into it — and there's a bonus volume she's doing now of the time in the middle that was skipped.

Anyway, I was in the middle of It's Lonely in the Modern World when Bunny Drop 5 and A Bride's Story 3 arrived at the front stoop, so of course I dropped everything to read the new one from Unita. Love it so much!

19. It's Lonely in the Modern World

I am a big fan of the Unhappy Hipster blog (uhm, unhappyhipsters.com, I think?) and was thrilled when the authors announced a book. Even better, it's only inspired by their blog, instead of being a reiteration of the same, which is a pitfall for a lot of blogs-turned-book.

While the blog is a series of sardonic captions attached to photos of modern design (interior, exterior, architecture) usually sourced from Dwell magazine, which includes "natural" settings - that is, not overly contrived or fake, but actually how things are. A lot of the photos include the residents doing ordinary things, perhaps with the goal of not appearing overly posed. At the outset, Dwell's vision was a reaction to the pretentious and fake-feeling design magazines, but as the years have passed, the photo spreads have skewed more and more in that same direction as Dwell magazine gains renown. Or so the introduction of It's Lonely in the Modern World explains.

The blog - and the book - poke affectionate fun at the super serious world of modern design. They inject a playful air to what can be severe lines, hard surfaces, and stern colors. I really enjoyed the book's method. It mimics a general design book, discussing "Interiors", "Exteriors", and "Accessories", with each broken into smaller sections - "Surfaces", "Lighting", "Kitchens", "Rooflines", "Windows + Doors", "Children", and "Pets", among others. These sections provide examples, give suggestions, and note pros and cons of different options. There are also intermediary portraits of famous modern designers (very well done in pencil by Jenna Talbott) with accompanying quotes and very brief biographies which occasionally have a gossipy, lurid turn towards the end (rather than being strictly professional or formal).

While the layout and trappings of the book are very much traditional when it comes to the design genre, the contents are less so. The authors write very seriously about each subject, but go to extremes in pretentiousness, display of wealth/expense, and disregard for common sense. This is, truly, a satire of some of the ideals and trends in modern design magazines. The voice is snobby, dismissive of anything that is "common" or "popular" - IKEA is a common object of derision.

I tried to find quotes to show some of the humor I appreciated, but nothing seemed quite right when taken out of context. You'll just have to trust me that if you're familiar at all with modern design, the current trends, and have an affectionate humor towards them, you will understand exactly why a page showing swatches of ideal shades of white for concrete - all of which are the exact same with different names - is so great. Or, perhaps, the charts to help decide which dog breed or chair style is right for you, whether you're an Artist, a Vegan, Ironic, a Thrifster, or one of several other types.

It's Lonely in the Modern World did leave me with conflicting emotions at the end: on the one hand, I was thoroughly amused at the satire of the design magazines and how unrealistic they can be; on the other hand, I was totally in awe (and lust) for many of the designs included as examples, or even some of the examples from Dwell Magazine. I suppose this is the same feeling the authors have - affection for modern design, but weariness with the seriousness and expense (amongst other things) involved in doing it Perfectly.

20. A Bride's Story vol 3

Another manga that is part of a series I enjoy. I think I need to reread this one in a week or two, because there's always a lot going unsaid that a first skim to get the general idea of the plot doesn't really show. It's interesting how this one changes focus to a new "bride" rather than Amir, who was the "bride" in the first two volumes, and it looks like the series is going to be following Mr Smith as he meets various women and learns their stories (he's a linguistic anthropologist in the late 19th/early 20th century).

This volume also seems to be looking especially at the restrictions on women in the male-dominated society of nomadic groups in the Aral Sea area (Pakistan region?). It introduces some conflict with Russia (or makes it more obvious than previously), which suggests that a more solid plot might be forming as Mr Smith travels to Turkey (Ankara) to report home and pick up news, and then...?

>59 keristars: Aw man, I heart IKEA. Probably not the book for me then. ;)

No way! The main point of the IKEA-mocking, near as I can figure it out, is that IKEA is a popular and inexpensive alternative to the high-end luxury name-brands. They mention IKEA relatively often because IKEA does make modern design affordable for tons of people.

Just gotta keep in mind the voice that the book is written in, and that it often goes to extremes in order to satirize the snobs. The authors don't necessarily agree that the only suitable surfaces are concrete, plywood, and brushed chrome, even if that's how it sounds. Or that the design is only worthwhile in some cases if it's from Finland (thus, the explanation that Fly-Ply is the only plywood worth considering, because it's the most expensive, because it's from Finland - not the only point where Finland is lauded as superior!).

Good deal. I'm not hugely into design but it sounds like a fun book to flip through. I should check out the blog...

...I was definitely a kid who played with paint swatches and fabric samples as a kid, and drew up house designs rather than sketching horses or clothes, so there is that. ;)

My dad was almost positive that I'd grow up to be an architect or interior designer. I was, too, until I learned how expensive the education is, and how much annoying math is involved. (I'm not good with a lot of advanced math - whether pure mathematics or applied in physics & chemistry. I was always able to understand the concepts, but not actually have the number turn out properly.)

When I was about 13 I wanted to be an interior designer. I ended up being a librarian. :)

21. Book Girl and the Corrupted Angel by Mizuki Nomura - 4th in the series

I kind of started reading this yesterday on my break at work, got home, and stayed up too late in order to finish it. This whole series is like that - I start a bit leisurely, then find myself compelled to finish the book as soon as possible, because I have to get to the end. Even with the over-acted, melodramatic, confusing climaxes that blur the lines between fantasy and reality-based acts. I never know for sure if a particular incident or character is "real" or if it can truly be something supernatural, since the title character of the series is a book-goblin.

Anyway, the fourth book is much like the other three. The volume's plot in this case is based on The Phantom of the Opera. Konoha Inoue and Tohko Amano are made aware of something unusual in the lives of schoolmates and curiosity and concern for their friends drives them to investigate. In this case, though, Konoha is mostly doing it on his own, since Tohko is busy studying for university entrance exams, and he doesn't want to distract her. It turns out that one of Konoha's classmates, Nanase Kotobuki, is worried because her best friend (at another school) has gone missing, and Nanase has always been wary of the friend's descriptions of her "Angel of Music" and her boyfriend.

This first-person narrative by Konoha is interspersed by a second first-person narrative by someone intimately involved with the mystery - whether it is the missing friend herself, the Angel, or someone else, takes a bit to become clear (and even then, there are sometimes red herrings and twists). The second narrative drops clues about the nature of the mystery, but they're often opaque or misleading until the climax solves it all. And, of course, Konoha has no idea about it. It makes for a very compelling read, to get to the point when the two merge and all becomes clear, though that climax is in this case a bit melodramatic and confusing to me. There was so much going on, and so much blurring of reality, that it felt like it was overdone and it took me a bit to figure it all out.

The weirdness to the climax is partly because Konoha is the narrator, and Konoha has some serious problems with depression. This is what I think of as the primary plot, which is the basis for the entire series. Although it's called "Book Girl", Konoha Inoue is truly the driving force. Before the series begins, he has written a novel at age 14 which won a new author prize and became extremely popular - there were many adaptations. But he wrote it under the name Miu Inoue, after the girl he was madly in love with (Miu, of course). The only thing is that she jumped off a roof in front of him, and he couldn't stand the link with her name and the publicity (even if everyone though he was actually a girl and not himself), so he had a bit of a mental break and became a recluse during his last year of middle school. The series is about him coming to terms with what happened to Miu; to come to terms with his writing and the novel; to gain confidence in himself and learn to open up to friends. As each book progresses, the reader learns more and more about the facts of his past, and it becomes increasingly clear that as part of his breakdown, he deliberately blocked out certain things related to Miu.

I am super impatient to get to book 5 in a few months, because we'll finally have more details about Miu herself and find out what really happened. Because I think this is a great series (please ignore the manga-style illustrations if that's not your thing!), I don't want to spoil, but Corrupted Angel dropped a HUGE bomb of revelation about Miu and her and Konoha's relationship, and I just know it's going to be all kinds of drama and amazing in the next book.

22. Welsh Mythology and Folklore in Popular Culture

As a collection of essays chosen because they are loosely based on the theme of "Welsh Mythology and Folklore (in Popular, if not Contemporary, Culture)", it is to be expected that this book is a bit hit-or-miss, and will be more interesting to someone who is fairly familiar with Welsh mythology. The essays are grouped so that the first set focus on literature and traditions of the past, particularly the works of Evangeline Walton for a number of essays, while the second set looks at much more contemporary popular culture and Welsh mythology and folklore. Thus, I personally found that the second group were more accessible to me, as I am much more familiar with more recent examples than the earlier ones.

Nonetheless, each essay varies with style and accessibility, as is to be expected. While most of those looking at a very specific work (such as Walton's tetrology, the television series Torchwood, or the Chronicles of Prydain, if not the Four Branches of the Mabinogi itself) tend to assume at least some familiarity with the work in question, others are written so that one needn't have prior knowledge at all - I was particularly taken with the essay "Everyday Magic: Howl's Moving Castle and Fantasy as Sociopolitical Commentary": though I'd never read the book or seen the movie, I was able to follow the arguments easily and am now curious enough to seek out Jones's novel.

I had hoped when I came across the book that there would be more general essays about how Welsh mythology and folklore appear in popular culture, and how those depictions or traditions vary from historical sources. But, of course, I didn't realize the book is from the "Critical Explorations" series. There are a few essays that do take this angle, however. "Celtic Studies and Modern Fantasy Literature", "'An Age-Old Memory': Arthur Machen's Celtic Redaction of the Welsh Revival in The Great Return", "Magical Goods, 'Orphaned' Exchanges, Punishment and Power in the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi", "The Hand at the Window: Twm Siôn Cati, the Welsh Colonial Trickster", and "An Irregular Union: Exploring the Welsh Connection to a Popular African-American Wedding Ritual" were all in that camp and were worth reading.

Commenting on the individual essays and their content or worth is beyond my ability, since I was forced to skim or even skip a few. However, there were two I read that stood out as being particularly poor additions to the collection. The first is the one about Torchwood - while I looked forward to reading a critical take about Welsh mythology and folklore in the tv series, the essay wasn't very focused and seemed to lose track of its point from time to time. The second is "We're Not in Cymru Anymore: What's Really Happening in the Online Mabinogi", which is a long rant about how horrible the RPG Mabinogi is because the only link it has to Welshness is the title - everything else is either Irish or Asian (it is, after all, a Korean game). There was a strange disconnect as I read it, because I don't particularly find mash-ups of different folklore or mythology to create new fantasy worlds to be inherently bad or wrong, and I don't have a problem with an RPG using a medieval theme while the primary attraction is in-game commerce. The author spent the essay ranting about these things (including the fact that the Korean creators used anime-style art!) instead of discussing why neomedievalism as defined by Umberto Eco is so bad in this instance (though it is stated as such) or why the use of a distinctly Welsh title for a not-at-all Welsh game would have been done.

It took me way too long to read this, despite the essays being short, because I've had a couple weeks of pretty awful pain. I started going to physical therapy 3 weeks ago for my chronic back pain, but then it flared up, which is frustrating. So I hardly did any serious reading at all - mostly I reread romance comics and slept or played games, which has put me off my book schedule.

Amusingly, I went to a Jake Shimabukuro concert last night, and the seat at the Florida Theatre was really awful for my back pain, but around the time I waited in line to say hello and get an autograph, I realized that I was actually feeling much better. So I guess shaking Jake's hand cured me? The hand that does amazing things with an ukulele... :P

Anyway, I'm starting the Tutored Read of Tristram Shandy with @lyzard now. And maybe reading Howl's Moving Castle at some point this month, too. Also The Wordy Shipmates for my April TIOLI + off the shelf book.

Sorry to hear about the pain you've had.
That book of essays sounds as if it was worthwhile, even if it had a few duds/rants. I'd certainly be interested in some of the topics you mention.

23. Bearded Lady by Mara Altman

I have to confess that I felt a bit skeevy reading this because I have an aversion to Kindle and Amazon, but it's not so strong that I will resist completely - I just hate having to admit publicly that I patronise the damn website. Still, this is an Kindle Single, so it's a short piece published through Amazon by the author.

I read it because @chatterbox did for TIOLI and it's short and I figured it would be something I could relate to (I have very hairy genes - got the brown peach fuzz on my lip when I was 8!). And then one night, I was too tired to sleep and not awake enough for Shandy, so figured I'd pull this up on my laptop and read it. It didn't take very long at all.

This is my review - rated 2.5 stars because it was fairly average, but not quite satisfying. Not a bad read, but not really outstanding either, yanno?

In Bearded Lady, a short memoir, Mara Altman talks about having unwanted body hair as a woman, trying to get rid of it (or not), and all the things that go along with that. She writes in a conversational tone with plenty of humorous touches that made for an engaging read.

Altman doesn't necessarily embrace the hairless ideal of current fashion, but she doesn't exactly reject it, either. What she does do is give voice to the frustration and dissatisfaction with the whole ordeal, the desire to just quit bothering and the reluctance to stop.

It was funny in bits, and other bits not so funny even though they were meant to be humorous - I think sometimes Altman was a little bit too crude for me. But it was definitely a topic that I could identify with, as can most Western women, probably. The memoir is kind of a fluff piece, so you don't really get any deep sociological or anthropological studies about the fashion (or shame) for body hair on women, nor does she go into a lot of detail about the history of what is fashionable and when. I think that as a memoir about her experiences with body hair, it doesn't need to have those details or studies, but I kind of want to read them now!

 

Still plugging away (slowly) with Tristram Shandy. My social life got a boost last week, and my brother surprised me by coming into town yesterday, so that's made things slow, too. And then I can't read it well unless I don't have any distractions, and I just got a new one - Poupée Girl, which is basically Engrish flash-based Paper Doll Crack. http://pupe.ameba.jp/profile/92JmiMPfVUFd/ is my doll. I do not need another time-sucking website like LibraryThing or Kingdom of Loathing, and yet when my friend showed me her Steampunk Squirrel dress up, I caved like a souffle fresh out of the oven in the middle of a tap-dancing performance.

I love this painting to pieces. It reminds me so much of the advertisements for the gator wrestling tourist spot in Swamplandia!:

I am really far behind on everything around here. When World Book Night came, I tried to push myself to read Oscar Wao, but didn't quite make it, and then I pushed myself to finish The Wordy Shipmates, which happened yesterday evening, and meanwhile I read 2 short stories by Stephanie Burgis and tried to read Tristram Shandy, but wasn't home long enough or was too tired to work on my summaries in the tutoring thread, so didn't feel comfortable continuing too much further.

Blech.

First order for May will be catching up on my Shandy thread and writing about the two short stories I read. One I enjoyed a lot, the other I felt was a little too cliché feeling but had a fantastic setting that I wished had more time to shine. (I'm a big big fan of Stephanie Burgis, so when she put these short stories up as 99cent ebooks, I couldn't resist supporting her.)

I've also got an ER book to read this month - Syrian Folk Tales - which looks fairly brief but interesting. My stepgrandmother is Syrian, so it'll be interesting to talk to her about some of the recipes included.

24. Some Girlfriends Can by Stephanie Burgis

I wasn't entirely sure about this short story from 2004 as I started it, but I trust Burgis to write something interesting, so I kept on with it. The narrator just struck me as being kind of a cliché, though I'm not sure how to describe her - I suppose "chick lit heroine" might work? Smart and sassy and self-deprecating and a little overweight (but still lovely) and so on and so forth. There: that's a good description. But it swiftly becomes clear why she has some of the confidence issues she does - she lives in a world where gods and goddesses are real and do deign to interact with humans, and those gods and goddesses are gorgeous (and powerful, and, oh yeah, her boyfriend's ex was a goddess).

The plot takes the heroine and her boyfriend to a party hosted by the ex-girlfriend goddess, where we get to see some really cool world-building, and the heroine undergoes some character growth. It's a simple plot, and the ending itself was a bit predictable, but I enjoyed Burgis's turn of phrase, and the world-building was fantastic. I'd love to see more from her set in the same universe.



25. Undead Philosophy 101 by Stephanie Burgis

As a vampire story, "Undead Philosophy 101" surprised me. Maybe I don't read a lot of the genre, but I was not expecting the plot to fall out the way it did at all. The heroine is a freshman university student in Ann Arbor, MI, and has discovered that one of her professors is a vampire...and another vampire is about to turn her roommate into a slave. She doesn't like her roommate too much, but she definitely doesn't want to share living space with someone enthralled to a vampire, so she approaches the professor to see if he'll help her out. What happens then is what surprised me and made the story so much fun, by playing with my expectations. The vampires here seem to be in the Dracula mold when it comes to vulnerabilities and powers, which was refreshing after so many other kinds of vampires I've read about over the years.

This was a perfect short story for me, in that the length was just right. While I was curious to learn more about the setting and the heroine, I was very satisfied with the story that was told and didn't feel like it went on too long or wasn't long enough - an occasional problem with the form, as I found in my creative writing classes.

I think Burgis has definitely improved her skill in the 4 years between these two short stories, and I'm interested in reading more from her. (Especially the WIP she got a grant from a Welsh Writing Council thingy for, which is a cross-country-to-Hollywood road trip slapstick rom com set in the 1930s, or so I hear.)

(PS: Thanks to Zoë or whomever it was that introduced me to Kat, Incorrigible/A Most Improper Magic and thus Stephanie Burgis. I'm quite the fan!)



26. The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell

Like many people, I'm sure, I first learned of Vowell after hearing her tell a story on This American Life. I promptly decided that I absolutely had to go out and read Assassination Vacation ... and then failed to ever actually get around to doing so. Likewise, when I heard about The Wordy Shipmates, I knew I needed to go read it, but took my time. It wasn't until I saw the book on sale for only $4 that I acquired it, and then it took me almost a year to actually read it. So you might understand that this book is one I expected to enjoy, but didn't have a super urgent need to read.

That's pretty much how reading the book went for me: enjoyable and informative, but maybe not the best or most exciting thing in the world. I very much appreciated Vowell's research and views on the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay Colony in the early 17th century, as well as the links she drew between them and modern America. I feel that I have a much greater understanding of many aspects of American culture and politics, or at least some of the roots, than I did before. I'm also a lot more aware of American history in general - having grown up in Florida within shouting distance of St Augustine, I mostly learned the Spanish colony stuff and not so much the details about New England except in a general sense. I also appreciate having better context for much of the early American literature I've read (or will be reading) and even some of the stuff that was written in England at the time or shortly thereafter.

Sometimes, though, I felt that the contextual links with modern events and people were a bit too biting and sharply drawn, though I can't really fault Vowell for them, since that's kind of what she does, and the book isn't exactly promoted as a straight-up history or anything. I also felt that the various sections flowed together a bit too much. I wanted more demarcation between one topic and the next, if only to help me space out my reading and to provide clearer conceptual links between stories. There are no chapter breaks, but I don't think that's what I wanted, exactly. It wasn't difficult to read without the kind of demarcations I'm thinking of, but it did get a bit tiring towards the end.

Overall, I'm not really sure if this is a positive or negative response to the book. I did like it a lot and I learned a lot from it, but maybe it wasn't the best reading experience? I still plan to get around to reading Assassination Vacation one day, but it might turn out that I just plain prefer Vowell in shorter radio segments and long-form essays than in full book format.

So there you are! I was beginning to worry. :)

Sorry you've been having a rough patch. Take as much time as you need getting back to Shandy - it's not a book to be tackled with a woolly head!

Catching up because I was still too overwhelmed by everything, and trying so hard to read... I think I need to recalibrate my medication because I was really very depressed in May and early June.



27. The Governess Affair by Courtney Milan

Stephanie Burgis mentioned this on her twitter, and because I have an author-crush on Stephanie these days and was itching for a pure romance (rather than YA romance or romance mixed with some other genre?), I hopped over and picked up this ebook. I think it may have been a free Kindle purchase?

It satisfied my need for a romance novel, but it's only novella length and it's mainly a prequel for a longer series, which I think did the story a disservice. It felt like the romance was a bit rushed and flung together, whereas ideally, this should be the first half of a book and not end with an HEA for the two characters, but be the start of the resolution.

Courtney Milan is super popular, but this is the first of her books I've read! I may very well pick up the next book in this series at some point, if I can get it for free/from the library.

 



28. Dead End in Norvelt by Jack Gantos

I had resolved last year to try and read the Newbery Winner every year and more of the ones I've not got to yet. So Dead End in Norvelt is this year's. It felt very similar to last year's winner to me, almost like a spiritual successor? Where last year's took place in the 1930s, this one is in the 1960s, but it's still a story about a tween and summer time and growing up and coming to terms with family and also the changes in society/the United States.

I liked it okay, but couldn't really come up with a proper review - there's a lot to talk about and analyze, but that's not really a review for me.



29. Renegade Magic by Stephanie Burgis

I was so impatient to read this second book in the Kat Stephenson series that I didn't wait for it to come to the library, but bought it from Amazon for Kindle-on-the-desktop. I am not sure if I regret this? I feel guilty because it's definitely the first part of slip-sliding into the Amazon-Kindle clutches (and now my mom is giving me her Kindle eventually, because she just won a Kindle Touch).

Anyway, I really liked this! I have to read it again, because I read it so quickly the first time, through, actually. But I still love the dynamic between the Stephenson sisters (Kat, our heroine, and Angelina, who is 16), particularly as they visit fashionable Bath and try to deal with the messy fallout of the previous book, their older sister's marriage, and frustrating complications for Kat's magic-learning. I totally loved everything to do with their stepmother's cousin and the way Kat tricked her into letting them stay at her house in Bath, and also the relationship between the cousin's two daughters (and their relationship with Kat and Angelina, in turn).

There were a few things I felt weak or troublesome - particularly some of the descriptions of magic happenings in the Pump Room and the King's Bath - but couldn't really fault the book for, since it's all part of the genre. I'm not sure that it's quite as amazing as its predecessor, but it's still a fun book, and I continue to fangirl Stephanie Burgis.

 



30. Let's Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir) by Jenny Lawson

My review for this is pretty much what I have to say.

If you're fan of Jenny Lawson's blog, you'll probably enjoy the book - though you will have probably also already read many sections on the blog itself. I only discovered her in the early spring via Maureen Johnson and Evil Wylie's twitter conversations, and then I saw the book available for Early Reviewers and got curious. Not curious enough to buy it - I put a hold request in at the library.

Ultimately, I think it could have been a very good book, but a lot of the memoir aspects didn't work for me, and I thought some of the self-conscious elements (conversations with her editor and referring to the book as a book) were a bit much. I also hated how she kept referring to her vulva and mons pubis as her "vagina". It was like "look at me, I'm being brash and crude but you can't fault me because it's the medical term!" except she's using it to describe the wrong thing? And I can understand that the word might be shifting in meaning outside of medical contexts, but I hate when people do that with female physiology because it really screwed me up as a kid. That and growing up Catholic, I guess, gave me a lot of confusion about all that.

31. Syrian Folktales by Muna Imady

My review - for Early Reviewers.

I liked this as an introduction to folklore from Syria. It was a nice non-scholarly little book, though I admit I was caught by surprise by the strong Islamic elements - I shouldn't have been surprised, but I tend to associate Syria with my stepgrandmother, who is from the Catholic minority.

 



32. Blood Sinister by Celia Rees

I rather liked the few Rees books I read as a teenager, so when I saw this pop up on the Book Depository's spring 24-books-in-24-hours sale, I went ahead and bought it. It's an interesting take on vampires from the early '90s (I think?), following fairly closely to the type in Dracula. It's a suspense/romance type of story, but I thought some of the suspense was a bit weak and the conclusion was a lot rushed and confusing and almost a bit deus ex machina.

Still, it was a nice diversion and I did like a lot of the ways that Rees played with the vampire mythos.



33. Magic Under Glass by Jaclyn Dolamore

I think I expected Magic Under Glass to be more amazing than it was, thanks to the hubub about the book and its cover a while back. I'm not sure how I stumbled upon it this time around, but I think it was thanks to Stephanie Burgis linking to a blog which mentioned it? Anyway, it sounded like an interesting premise, so I picked it up for my desktop ereader and read it during the evenings when I didn't want to turn on the light and but wasn't in the mood to watch videos or play games on my laptop.

It was a nice enough book and very satisfactory, but that's kind of all it was. I wasn't totally engaged by the characters or drawn into it emotionally. I was also frustrated by the Jane Eyre element to the plot - honestly, the first half is probably meant to be an homage or something, but it felt too clunky and obvious. I also didn't like that it's meant to be the first of a series. I would have liked it more if it were tied up better at the end so that it doesn't obviously lead to a sequel. That probably would have also improved some of the pacing.

I did like the fact that the narrator is "Other" and a minority immigrant in her land, and the different ways that the fantasy world was revealed. It sounds interesting, and I would like to read another book set there (but not necessarily a direct sequel to this one). I haven't read very many fantasy books where the protagonist is not only new to the land and all, but is aware of it and treated that way? I'm not sure how to explain it. But I liked that it felt a bit more realistic here.

The things I liked didn't really outweigh the bits that made me go "meh", though, so I'm not running off to get to the sequel anytime. Maybe if I have an itch for more of the same...?

 



34. The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place: The Unseen Guest by Maryrose Wood

My review, here, is incredibly similar to Zoë's, but with a slightly different focus. I think we're mostly in agreement about the way the series/this book is going, anyway. I liked this a lot, but found myself wanting to hurry to get to the end - which is an element of boredom with the store or with excitement and just needing to know the answers to the mysteries. Or both! It bugs me a bit that we're only halfway through the series and the fourth book is still 18 months out, most likely (the author took a break after writing the third). But I really like the wordplay and the character growth and the way the mystery is developed and the plot is thickened in the background as each book has its own fore-plot and adventure.

35. Princess for Hire by Lindsey Leavitt

SO MUCH HATE for this book, it gets a post all for itself.

Until I can bitch about it at length, please see my review. Also, why the hell is it that Mormon authors tend to have such offensive, prejudiced, problematic shit in their books?!?!?! I mean, even Shannon Hale who I quite liked at first came out with the atrocious Rapunzel's Revenge series with its terrible racism, and comments she made about her adult novels make me suspect that there are weird and problematic relationship issues in them.

---

Okay, so here's how I found this book:

Stephanie Burgis links to other authors/blogs when they reference her works, both to point people at the other authors/blogs and to be excited that folks are talking about her novels. Which is great! She's an author and it's her personal twitter and she can be excited about whatever she wants to tweet. I like that it points me to other potentially interesting books in similar genres, too.

Lindsey Leavitt posted something about MG books and I was curious about the others on the list (if they're similar to Kat, I thought, I might want to check them out), and while I didn't really care enough for the other 4 she included and had the ol' raised eyebrow response to some of her reasoning AND went WTF at her blog style (seriously? it's like a twelve-year-old made it, which isn't awful if that's her reading audience, I suppose), I was intrigued by the posted description of her MG fantasy book Princess for Hire.

Since the book was linked to Leavitt's blog post, which wasn't exactly giving me a lot of confidence in her writing, I naturally came to LT and looked at the reviews/stars. I also checked out the book on Amazon. It seemed to be well-liked as a generic Princess book from Disney/Hyperion and the plot synopsis continued to intrigue me. So I decided to go ahead and download it.

I've said it before in last year's thread (or 2010's?) that I enjoy Princess books. I read them all the time as a kid and teenager, and still return to them now and then for the nostalgic comfort. They're like a fun, predictable bit of book candy, and I'm not ashamed of it. The meta-plots are usually very similar: heroine Ann is bummed about her pedestrian life and the super hardships she has, be it family problems or school problems or boy problems whatever. One day, Ann finds out that she's really a princess! (or insert other super special privileged role) It's exciting and fabulous to suddenly be special, but it turns out that Ann's a bit of a fish out of water, having not been raised to be a princess (of course). She learns that being a princess comes with just as many problems as her mundane life, and many are exactly the same. The end of the book either has Ann returning home, happier with herself and with more self esteem/assertiveness, or if that's not possible because of how she became a princess, she settles into the role and becomes an awesome princess who can identify with the commoners and does things like dresses plainly or eats hamburgers.

Some books start with Ann already a princess, but the meta-plot is still very similar, as she takes control of X-aspect of her life/government/magic/whatever and breathes common sense into the whole affair or escapes to a different role. (I think Girl of Fire and Thorns fits the description, as does The Goose Girl by Shannon Hale.) I tend to call the subgroup that Princess for Hire fits into the "Suddenly! A Princess!" stories. Not all books that are about a heroine with a princess-type of role (like Graceling) are Princess books, though. I liked The False Princess, which I read last year, because it takes the Suddenly! A Princess! role and turns it upside down - she's Suddenly! A Commoner!

And but so anyway, the description of Princess for Hire appealed to me because it's the Suddenly! A Princess! plot, but done over and over again, as Desi literally substitutes for princesses who need a break from their lives for a little while. It's kind of meta and self-aware and seemed like it would be a lot of fun and maybe some playing with the tropes while still maintaining the meta-plot of Desi learning to better deal with her own life problems. (Or, maybe not! Maybe she's happy and not suffering from tween angst, but that's unlikely, since she's a tween.)

The book is very firmly middle grade and targeted towards the 8-12 crowd. It read very strongly like a book version of the tween television shows on Nickelodeon and Disney Channel, which isn't a problem (again, I like some of those shows!), but it is an indicator of the type of language and characterisations you will find inside. At first I was kind of thrown off by Desi's narration, but once I realized it was just a book version of what you hear on those tv shows, I was able to follow it easily. (I wish I could better describe the characteristics! It's the type of language used and where focus is placed and basically a "you know it when you see it" kind of thing.)

I wanted to like Desi a lot, and I would have identified with her very strongly when I was in the target demographic. She loves old black and white films and admires Audrey Hepburn and Lauren Bacall and everyone, and she's a bit apart from her peers partly because of things like her hobby of making snarky t-shirts (indicating her intelligence, I guess?) and because her old best friend has completely shunned her for something that isn't Desi's fault at all. (It has to do with the friend's dad doing something less than legal and Desi's dad being the prosecutor in the case.)

(cont'd)

(cont'd from previous)

I don't mean to say that I dislike Desi, only that she failed to really inspire any real interest in me outside of her interaction with the plot. I think this is a failing of the genre as a whole, not so much Leavitt's writing or the book. You see, other than what I've mentioned above with regards to the old movies and t-shirt business (and maybe her hopeless 3-year crush on a boy), just about everything that is provided by the novel to give her more character or some kind of appealing "flaw" is externally imposed - either it's not actually anything to do with her or it's imposed by the genre.

The Set-up:

Desi is a 13-year-old seventh grader in a small town in Idaho with a state prosecutor dad, a former beauty queen mom who now runs a pageant school, and a baby sister whom everyone adores and dotes on. Her former bff hates her because her dad sent the bff's dad to prison, and the ex-bff is Miss Popularity at school, so most of the other girls ignore Desi, too. She has a crush on a cute boy since the fourth grade when they played Boggle together, but the ex-bff keeps interfering there so Desi can't get any closer to him. And, what's more, she has to work at a pet store during summer vacation to save for college, which means she's dressing up as a giant groundhog instead of playing around or working on her hobbies.

The result of all this is that Desi is suffering tween/teen angst - she misses her friend, she wants the boy to notice her, and she is frustrated that her parents pay more attention to her baby sister, who seems to be perfect in their eyes. She isn't depressed or anything, but she does need to gain some self-confidence and self-assertiveness.

The Plot:

One day while working at the pet shop, she makes a wish via a weird aquarium to "be the kind of person who has impact. Like Grace Kelly." It's a wish to be "the kind of girl that others want to be around", essentially. The way she words her wish pretty much signifies how the rest of the book will go, for what it's worth. Anyway, it isn't answered in any way that Desi expects, but by a green-haired woman in a pinstripe suit suddenly appearing while Desi is in the bath and offering her the chance to work as a substitute princess for the Façade Agency.

The first substitution is for an actress who merely plays a princess - but it's at a SF Con and the princess is "Princess Catter", which means an awkward caterpillar type costume that the actress hates while meeting fans and signing autographs. It's a job to test Desi's ability to act and also to show off the magic abilities of the Agency.

Things seem to go well, so green-haired Meredith takes Desi to the Agency HQ at the top of Montparnasse Tower, where she gets a crash-course in method acting and what all is involved in being a substitute. Also infodump about the magic and potential plot hooks for sequels. Meredith is shown to be stern and demanding, yet a bit of a flaky type? i dunno, but she's apparently not in the good graces of the other Agency women and doesn't think much of many of the traditions/rules.

The second substitution is for Simahya, 13-year-old daughter of "Sheikh Zafir", a sovereign prime minister. Simahya is a second daughter and overweight - she likes ducks and the french horn, is a bit shy and cowed by her bully of an older sister. Desi is playing the substitute for about a week, during a charity event with lots of important people and family coming to the palace. Simahya and her family are Muslim, but the only thing that means is, as Simahya says, "we don't dress provocative...not that I can". Naturally, because Desi wants to "have Impact", and because she can't abide the bullying, she stands up to the older sister and is a bit forward with Queen Raleena (transparently based on Queen Rania of Jordan), which changes Simahya's life For The Better, since Simahya couldn't stand up for herself. but this gets Desi into hot water with the Agency, since she's very expressly told not to do anything the princess wouldn't do herself.

Because of plot excuses, Desi gets to remain a substitute for now and has a third job: this time it is for 14-year-old Ama Yakinomi of the Ticuna in the Amazon. Ama has been in isolation in preparation for her puberty ceremony, which she is nervous about, so she asks for a substitute so that she can destress and just not have to deal with it. Desi is shocked to suddenly be naked, then covered in paint and feathers, and then have to do a dance in front of a lot of other naked people, which will lead to her being promised to marry someone since she's now an adult. Technically, subs aren't supposed to be involved with important things like this, and Desi has no idea what to do. She gets frightened of Ama's dad the tribal chief and runs away, hoping to find the bubble that will take her back.

Only, Ama is there already, and then the tribe members see the both of them and the bubble, which causes lots of complications and trouble. The emergency bubble gets arrow'd and Desi is dropped from the Agency, not least because she actually talked to Ama for quite some time.

Except that she isn't. She's given a bit of time in her own life, which involves a parade and fair thing to celebrate the town's founding, but in a crappy moment, Meredith shows up and whisks her away to another sub job, because they're desperate for subs.

This fourth substitution is for a very minor princess without even a place to reign. Elsa is 15 and lives in the eastern Alps with her grandmother - her only relative left after her mother died from illness a few years before. Elsa is unhappy in this relative isolation on the mountain after living a rich girl's life previously, and she misses her best friend/crush quite a bit. Of course, the boy she's crushing on is a prince and younger brother to the most popular prince ever. They're basically analogous to Princes William and Harry, I believe.

This is a total spoiler, but Prince Karl/Harry is ALSO using a sub while Desi is playing Elsa. It's not said outright in this book, but there are a lot of little things that add up to exactly that. Anyway, while Desi is giving Elsa a chance to go to concerts or lectures or whatever, Karl shows up in the small mountain village and they get together for old times' sake. Karl is supposed to tell Desi that he's got a girlfriend now and they're probably getting engaged, but that never really happens. Desi is supposed to be meek and just let things happen, but she ends up having Elsa tell her grandmother that she's unhappy and doesn't like not being able to talk to her friends (such as Karl). Incidentally, Desi-as-Elsa seems to develop a crush on Karl, too, and they share a kiss.

Naturally the Agency is livid that Desi has gone and interfered with a princess's life yet again, and they're all ready to remove her magic ability entirely and maybe also her memory, except that all the princesses so far report being super pleased at how she has meddled in their lives, and that she did things they wanted to do, but couldn't do themselves. (Mirroring Desi's own situation.)

There's some other plot thing happening, but I can't remember what since it's not really important except to move the book along, only that the end result is there is a new boy in Desi's hometown (Karl's sub, actually, but she doesn't know yet), she communicates to her parents how ignored she feels because of her baby sister, and she improves her relationship with the girls in her class - if not the ex-bff. Also, she gets a promotion at the Agency and gains some self-confidence.

 

And now that you have the background knowledge, I will talk about what is so problematic about this book, and why I have a prejudice against Mormon authors. But not tonight, because it's late. I've written a lot more than I meant to about the plot and the genre, but I ultimately decided that it's better to understand what are the trappings of the genre and what aren't, and how the book falls into it.

I've also just realized, when opening the ebook to check names (oddly, I can still read it on my device despite having returned it for a refund due to the offensiveness), it's written so that it could very easily be turned into a screenplay or film.