A friend told me that after she had her son, she didn’t get a chance to read till he was well over two years old. Taking inventory of all I’ve read since the Burt Squirt was born on March 1, I came up with ten books. (All novels; the parenting books have been relegated, unopened, to the bottom shelf of my bookcase, where they collect dust, probably forever, or until I donate them to the library or an expectant girlfriend.)

Two books a month is a fine average even if I weren’t a mom, but I’d never have managed to read one book in five months if Mr. Burt hadn’t given me a Sony Pocket Reader for our sixth wedding anniversary.  The only time I get to read is when I’m nursing, and it’s not easy to hold a book and turn pages while wrangling a squirming baby. An ebook reader, however, requires only one free hand.   I’ve grown so accustomed to reading this way that I don’t see myself ever going back to print books, with the exception of when I want to take a long soak in the bathtub with a book. But where my friend didn’t have a chance to read till her son was two, I don’t foresee myself getting a chance to take a bath till then.

Also, when I use my reader, I feel like I’m in Star Trek.

One intent for my revamped blog has been to post reviews for every book I read, but I’m beginning to get the feeling I won’t get that kind of time for a few years, either. Until then, a blurb and a five star rating system will have to do.

#1: Emma, by Jane Austen

The BBC’s latest adaptation stars Romola Garai, who, along with the rest of the cast, seemed all wrong to me. So I re-read the book and was reassured that yes, the cast of the Kate Beckinsale version feels more like the characters in the book. Which is what I’m supposed to be reviewing.

With its hilariously entangled romances and witty social commentary, Emma reads like a Shakespearean comedy. Its strength, of course, is the heroine Austen set out to write as one “whom no-one but myself will much like,” but it’s the supporting characters you love to hate and hate to love who really make the novel for me.

Rating: 5/5 stars

#2: Mr. Knightley’s Diary, by Amanda Grange

Normally I avoid published Austen fanfiction like the cliché I’m avoiding at the moment, but last Christmas I picked up Colonel Brandon’s Diary on a whim because, well, Colonel Brandon…and I loved it. I don’t feel as strongly about Mr. Knightley’s Diary, through no fault of Ms. Grange; Knightley’s (if I may sound like Mrs. Elton) backstory of managing his estate and dining with friends doesn’t make for the page-turner Brandon’s torrid past love affair, military stint, and duel to the death. It is, however, entertaining to get inside Knightley’s head as he stews over Emma’s fascination with Frank Churchill, and the moment he realizes he’s in love with her is sweetly romantic, if not earth-shattering. A light-hearted, well-written, satisfying love story, and if you like the citizens of Highbury, a nice opportunity to visit them again. (An unexpected but welcome touch is a happy ending for poor Miss Bates.) 

Rating: 4/5 stars

#3: Mr. Darcy’s Diary, by Amanda Grange

If I hadn’t read other Amanda Grange novels, I’d never have picked up published Pride and Prejudice fanfiction, which typically amounts to little more than soft core Darcy porn. Like Ms. Grange’s other books, Mr. Darcy’s Diary keeps true to the spirit of Austen’s work and, in this case, enriches a character who doesn’t do much for me in the original. That’s right ladies: I’ve never been a Darcy fangirl. (Have I mentioned it’s Colonel Brandon who holds my heart?) But Pride and Prejudice from Darcy’s point of view at times left me almost breathless. It also cemented my rather unorthodox opinion that Matthew Macfadyen makes a better Darcy than Colin Firth. *ducks from hurled objects*

Rating: 5/5 stars

#4: A Proper Pursuit, by Lynne Austin

I picked this one up because I was in the mood for something lighthearted and romantic; a young woman choosing between a number of suitors and on the hunt for a runaway mother amid the backdrop of the 1893 World’s Fair seemed to fit the bill: a bit like American Girl all grown up. It started off promisingly enough, with a heroine whose stream-of-conscious internal monologue made me chuckle a la Anne of Green Gables. However, the narrative voice quickly got old as the story failed to move forward—not a bit like Anne of Green Gables. The characters were painted with the broadest of brush strokes, the romantic plot was predictable while the mystery was clumsily constructed and revealed through hasty exposition, and the parts that were meant to be heart-wrenching were cloying and preachy; more than once I felt like the author was attempting, unsuccessfully, to reproduce Christy. (Are you starting to detect a theme of this book trying to be like other, best-selling books?) Still, I did read the whole thing, if only because I wanted to see if all my guesses about the plot were right in the end (which they were). That’s something, I guess?

Rating: 2/5 stars

#5: Persuasion, by Jane Austen

A second chance at love for an older couple who just couldn’t make it work the first time around may be Austen’s best storyline.  Unfortunately, it’s not a very good book. Much of the crucial action happens off-stage, reduced to summarizing narrative. While this stylistic choice highlights the reserve and compliance of the heroine, not actually seeing Anne’s first encounter with Captain Wentworth undercuts the emotional impact that should be present when a woman meets her former fiance, with whom she is still in love, eight years after breaking off their engagement.  It’s the equivalent of Austen recounting the Netherfield ball instead of showing Elizabeth and Darcy’s dance and their glorious UST.  I root for the idea of Anne and Wentworth, but my imagination isn’t captured by characters I feel I know. The character I feel I know best is Anne’s hypochondriac sister, Mary Musgrove, who seems to have more dialogue than all the other characters put together.  (Though I do tend to have a soft spot for Austen’s obnoxious characters.)

The novel does contain my favorite line out of all Austen’s novels, Captain Wentworth’s achingly romantic “you pierce my soul.”  Guh.

Rating: 3/5 stars

#6: Sarah’s Key, by Tatiana De Rosnay

It doesn’t sound quite right to say you enjoy Holocaust novels or are a fan of them, so I’ll instead say I read a lot of them. Sarah’s Key introduced me to the tragedy of the French expulsion of Jews, which was carried out not by the occupying Nazi soldiers, but by the French police force. The narrative alternates between Sarah and her parents’ horrifying arrest and deportation while a little brother is left behind, and Julia, a journalist who discovers Sarah’s story while researching an assignment on the 60th anniversary of the French Holocaust. Frankly, I could have lived without the Julia storyline, which detracts from Sarah’s story with that of a rather unsympathetic, navel-gazing character dealing with a crumbling marriage and surprise middle-age pregnancy. I did appreciate how the Holocaust played as a background for an anti-abortion tale, but the two stories simply lack the cohesion and thematic focus to bring them together in a satisfying conclusion.

Rating: 3/5 stars.

7: Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, by Jamie Ford

This is the epic teen romance that should be sweeping the globe: a Chinese boy constantly bullied at his all-white school befriends a Japanese girl just as the US passes legislation to relocate citizens of Japanese descent to internment camps. Who needs sparkly vampires and werewolves to thwart love?

The writing does this beautiful story justice; vivid but not overly wordy description takes you back in time to Seattle, 1942, to the cluttered streets of Chinatown, Japantown, and the desolate internment camps. The characters are people—noble people, flawed people, strong people, weak people, people with motivations, people who act senselessly…Both place and character reminded me of the work of one of my favorite authors, Jhumpa Lahiri, whose stories focus on the differences between first and second generation Indian-Americans. I suppose I’m drawn to themes of cultural and racial identity and generational conflict, all of which charge Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet.

I learned a lot from this book, too, which is always a plus for a history lover. It goes to show how one-track our history studies in the US are that it had never occurred to me that there would be conflict between the Chinese and Japanese in America, particularly bitter hatred on the part of Chinese immigrants, many of whom left China precisely because of Japan’s relentless assault on China for decades prior to the US entering World War II. Not that racism and cultural discrimination are ever acceptable; but I think of a line from Harry Potter: “the world isn’t made up of good people and Death Eaters.” Life isn’t black and white, and insult, injury, and injustice have a way of leading otherwise good people to participate in evil. Another historical aspect that struck me as particularly poignant was the dignity of the Japanese characters even as their every right as American citizens was violated. I hadn’t realized how the Japanese volunteered to build their own prisons and serve in the US military to prove their loyalty. That same inner doggedness that turned out Kamakaze pilots fueled truly honorable US citizenship. I think all these things struck me because the same issues of race and politics of America in 1942 continue to be eerily relevant in 2010. (Why can’t we ever learn?)

Interestingly, like Sarah’s Key, this novel is also told in an alternating timeline. Only in this time, it works, as we follow the same character in two different decades as the events of the war years continue to haunt him forty years later.

The best book I’ve read in a long time, and one I’m sure to read again and again.

Rating: 5/5 stars

8: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll

I think I’m supposed to say something about Alice being a timeless children’s classic, only I’m not sure what kids today think of it. There’s no plot, and a lot of the references to the English court system and poems Victorian schoolchildren would have learned go right over my head, and I have a degree in English lit. Or maybe there’s so much nonsense in it that kids love it, anyway. I guess I’ll just have to read it with the Burt Squirt and report back then.

I do have a soft spot for Alice because I watched the 1985 miniseries hundreds of times as a child. And I can still sing “Jam Tomorrow.”

This time, the Kate Beckinsale version is not the one to watch.

Rating: 5/5 stars

9: Speaker for the Dead, by Orson Scott Card

The Ender series is the first sci-fi I’ve ever read, and I’d definitely read more, if that’s any indication of how I like the Ender books. It takes a bit of adjusting to get into Speaker for the Dead, which picks up 3000 years after Ender’s Game and doesn’t answer a lot of questions about what happened after the first book. However, you’re immediately drawn into an intriguing mystery about some creepy aliens on the planet Lusitania, and the plot never loses momentum even when it comes careening to the end.

I do have several fairly major criticisms. The book suffers from a dearth of sympathetic characters. Understandable, when you’re dealing with a dysfunctional family, which is crucial to the plot and, indeed, part of the whole concept of Ender being “Speaker for the Dead”—one who speaks, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about people. Still, it’s a bit of a struggle for me to fully connect with so many characters who either continually make stupid choices (which, granted, facilitate the plot) or are downright unlikeable. Though supercomputer Jane is pretty awesome; not far into the book I decided that her fate, alone, would make or break the book for me. Another problem with the characterization, though, is that Card is guilty of the telling vs. showing crime. Maybe the genre necessitates a bit of foregoing character-driven scenes in favor of plot? Because I so thoroughly enjoy these books, I’m beginning to re-think that hard and fast stance somewhat. Also, when writing a series, a certain amount of summary of events in previous books is inevitable to keep readers up to speed, but Card isn’t an author who does this particularly well. At times the clunky writing pulls me out of the story.

Even with those flaws, I was unable to put down Speaker for the Dead for the two weeks I was reading it. And as soon as I finished, I immediately went on to the next one.

Rating: 4/5 stars

10. Xenocide, by Orson Scott Card

It’s actually a little difficult to review this one, because the fourth book in the Ender quartet, Children of the Mind, is less its own book than a continuation of Xenocide. Still have problems with the unlikeable characters in this one, though a new, fascinating, and sympathetic set is introduced so I have to conclude that Card intentionally wrote the Ribeira family that way and isn’t simply bad at characterization. This one gets awfully expositional as the sci-fi plot unfolds, but again, I think a certain amount of that has to be overlooked in sci-fi. At least it helped me understand what was going on even as my mind was being blown, and made me want to keep reading. And by the end I’d decided that Xenocide was my favorite of the series so far.

Rating: 4/5 stars

Did I mention that all these books-and more-fit on my Sony Pocket Reader?

What have you been reading?

Recently several girlfriends and I organized a book club.  Our first read was Persuasion, which I’ve had recommended to me many times as Jane Austen’s best work.

Having now read it, I must disagree.

The story — a second chance at love for an older couple who just couldn’t make it work the first time around — may be her best.  The style?  In my opinion, not so much.

One of the qualities I like about Austen in general is how accessible her novels are to today’s readers.  Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Northanger Abbey, for example, read easily, primarily through lots of dialogue that both tells the stories and develops the characters.  It’s the style I’d come to expect from Austen (and, I have to admit, the style of contemporary novel I prefer).

That said, the divergence from the dialogue-heavy style of Austen’s earlier work took me by surprise in Persuasion. While the prose passages are impeccably written and packed with Austen’s wit, they nonetheless exemplify telling versus showing — the ultimate writing mistake, by today’s standards.  I appreciate that the “rules” of writing have evolved over time as the way people live and read has changed, but even bearing that in mind, I found it difficult to connect with the characters of Persuasion because of it.

Much of the crucial action happens off-stage and is merely summarized  in narrative after the fact.  I suppose on one hand this stylistic choice highlights the reserve and compliance of the heroine, Anne.  On the other, not actually seeing Anne’s first encounter with Captain Wentworth undercuts the emotional impact that should be present when a woman meets her former fiance, with whom she is still in love, eight years after breaking off their engagement.  Imagine if Austen had simply recounted the Netherfield ball instead of showing Elizabeth and Darcy’s dance and their glorious UST.  You wouldn’t root for them to get together in the end, would you?  That’s how I felt reading about Anne and Wentworth.  I rooted for the idea of them, but my imagination wasn’t captured by characters I felt I knew; they remained names whose personalities eluded me.

One character in the novel I did feel I saw rather than merely heard about is Anne’s hypochondriac sister, Mary Musgrove.  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that she also seems to have more dialogue than any other character.  Even though she’s meant to be tiresome and obnoxious with her constant bellyaching and oblivion to her sisters-in-law’s attempts to avoid her company, she became my favorite character purely on the basis that I knew who she was amid a bunch of virtual strangers.

While I’d rank Persuasion as my least favorite Austen novel (though I have yet to read Mansfield Park), I must concede that it contains my favorite line out of all her works, Captain Wentworth’s achingly romantic “you pierce my soul.”  Guh.

I’ll also repeat that I really like the story, especially after viewing the 1995 film, which rights the wrongs of the novel because the media of film necessarily shows instead of tells. Captain Wentworth’s bitterness and inability to get over Anne are so much more clear to me as performed by Ciarán Hinds.  

On a related note, Persuasion must be one of the more difficult Austen novels to adapt, precisely because of the lack of actual dialogue in the book.  Lots of work required on the part of the screenwriter to create Austen-like dialogue.  I want to say that in the Sense and Sensibility commentary, screenwriter Emma Thompson mentioned that she considered adapting Persuasion (though I might be misremembering; she might have mentioned that a Persuasion film came out the same year as her S&S).  In any case, I’d love to see what she could do with it, as S&S is not only my favorite Austen film, but my favorite movie ever!

Austen enthusiasts and Persuasion fans, do comment and tell me why I’m wrong about this book.

Last August I read John Boyne’s novel, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, and while I appreciated the unique perspective through which the book depicted the Holocaust (that of an eight year-old boy who doesn’t understand what’s being done to the Jews), I was underwhelmed.

However, I just watched the movie, and for the first time in my life I think I can actually say I prefer a film to the original source.

(Wait.  Scratch that.  I also like the 1995 adaptation of Sense and Sensibility better than the book, but I’ll let Jane Austen off the hook because it was her first novel and I’m sure if she’d had a little more experience, her version would have been just as good as Emma Thompson’s.)

Anyway…while the film version of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas remains doggedly faithful to the novel, it omitted what I now realize to be my key irritation with the book, which is the author’s device of depicting Bruno’s naïveté through his consistent mispronunciation of key words (fury for Führer and outwith for Auschwitz).  Also, the movie never named the concentration camp, which I thought lent a great deal more plausibilty to the premise of A) a free boy being able to observe the workings of a concentration camp from beyond the fence without being noticed by guards (not that other camps weren’t as horrific as Auschwitz, but its being the most notorious one, made it, in my opinion, perhaps not the best choice for the novel’s setting) and B) a young Jewish boy not having been immediately gassed upon entering the camp along with his grandparents.

So while the premise may still require an overall suspension of disbelief, the movie erases the flaws of the book so that this glimpse into the way we perceive good people and evil people (or, more accurately, people who are both good and evil — or have the capacity for both good and evil, which is all of us) stands out in a deeply profound way.  It’s a story that lingers with you after you’ve turned the final page (or turned off the DVD player), particularly after viewing it and having such clear visuals.

For me, even more than the utterly disturbing last scene, is the prominence of Nazi propaganda throughout the film.  Which was one other aspect of the book that bugged me; a boy Bruno’s age surely would have been indoctrinated against Jews in school — especially a boy who’s father ranks high enough to be made kommandant of a major concentration camp.  But this is not so in the book for the sake of Bruno’s absolute ignorance when he meets a young concentration camp inmate.  While the movie does stay true to this on Bruno’s part, it makes excellent use of his older sister, Gretel, who, after developing a crush on a young soldier, becomes enamored with The Hitler Youth and hangs on to the children’s Nazi tutor’s every word.  When Gretel is first introduced to us in the film, her arms are full of dolls; later, the dolls are relegated to the cellar while she plasters her bedroom walls with posters of Hitler and the League of German Girls.  The transformation is disturbing, to say the least; I’m not sure which is more so:  the image of a 12-year-old girl being so given over to a dangerous political movement, or of her mother being stunned speechless to see it.

Here I must comment that I particularly liked the way the film fleshes out Bruno’s mother.  The book focuses more on his father, and while the father remains at the heart of the film, I felt that, again, the plausibility of the premise was strengthened by the film’s omniscient point of view, which allowed us to see her dawning realization of just how final “The Final Solution” was.

Which brings me back to the other propaganda image that lingers with me almost an hour after I finished the movie.  At a crucial juncture in the story, Bruno stumbles upon his father, grandfather, and other Nazi officials viewing a propaganda film that depicts Jewish prisoners happily enjoying the “comforts” of the “work camp” after their day’s labor is complete:  they play organized sports, attend concerts, socialize at a cafe.  Bruno sees these images and believes his friend in the concentration camp is okay — that he is, in fact, happier than Bruno, who is not allowed to play in his own back garden and has no friends.  Despite having seen some Nazi propaganda, I’d never seen this, and was astonished and appalled that they could even have dressed up the concentration camps.  I almost didn’t believe it, thought it might have been an invention of the film-makers, so I googled.  Sure enough, a propaganda film was made at Theresienstadt in the now Czech Republic.

I really must get around to reading Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl and watching Schindler’s List, which I keep putting off because I’m never in the mood.  When is one in the mood for the Holocaust?  One must look at it anyway.