Undergrad Angst

The Marriage Plot
By: Jeffrey Eugenides

The Author - this guy has mad eyebrows

I loved this one. Loved it.

The Marriage Plot is a novel in the full sense of the word. It has great, fully-fleshed out characters, it’s easy to get lost in the story, and the ending is satisfying without tying everything up in a neat bow. Also helpful? I genuinely empathized with the three main characters, even though I didn’t really like everything they did. The story jumps around chronologically a bit in the beginning, which normally annoys me, but Eugenides handled it perfectly.

This is actually a pretty tight little story – it takes place in the year immediately following the three main characters’ graduation from Brown (with a few flashbacks thrown in for background details). The first 200 pages or so just focus on the summer after their graduation.

That said, Eugenides covers a lot of ground in those twelve months. In The Marriage Plot, he tells the story of the sort-of love triangle between Madeleine, a full-blown Jane Austen-ite, Leonard, a charismatic wanna be scientist with manic depression, and Mitchell, a love-sick, answer-seeking theologist. Madeleine and Leonard are in the throes of an intense relationship, challenged by Leonard’s illness, while Mitchell is trying to cope with his love for Madeleine while seeking a deeper spiritual understanding by traveling around the world.

In telling the story of Madeleine, Mitchell, and Leonard, Eugenides hits on two major themes – relationships (and their complications) and dealing with mental illness, with a little bit of “finding yourself” thrown in for good measure. None of these are new topics, but Eugenides builds a really nice story around them that was hard to put down.

In a nutshell: Eugenides is a great writer and he put together a great book. Four and a half stars.

F Bombs Galore

The F***ing Epic Twitter Quest of @MayorEmanuel
By: Dan Sinker

Nah nah nah-nah nah

I couldn’t resist.

When @MayorEmanuel was actively tweeting, I was a little obsessed, because:

1. It captured a pretty unique point in Chicago history
2. I loved all the Chicago references, both esoteric and obvious
3. It was f***ing hysterical

So I had to pick up The F***ing Epic Twitter Quest of @MayorEmanuel. But I did it with a little trepidation because Twitter doesn’t necessarily translate to a fully baked book. Turns out, reading the book ten months after the fact wasn’t as great as reading the Twitter feed in the moment, but it wasn’t bad either.

I wasn’t on board with the @MayorEmanuel feed from the beginning, so the book gave me a better idea of how the whole phenomenon got started. And re-reading the bits I already knew was great. Plus, Sinker provides some background and color commentary through the foreword, afterword, and footnotes, which helped put things in context.

However, there are wayyyy too many footnotes. The ones that provided additional insight into Sinker’s writing process were helpful, but most of them were totally unnecessary. He includes a ton of footnotes explaining pretty obvious facts about Chicago, the mayoral race, the weather and the Bears, all of which I found distracting and which kind of took the fun out of it. If you don’t know what the Super Bowl Shuffle is, you shouldn’t be reading the book.

That said, it was fun to re-read the whole @MayorEmanuel thing. And honestly, I could see this book being used in a future Chicago history course, because it encapsulates the first real mayoral race in Chicago in 20+ years.

In a nutshell: A quick read that creatively captures an unusual time in Chicago. Three stars.

Peace out, Rahm.

They Both Reached for the Gun

The Girls of Murder City:
Fame, Lust and the Beautiful Killers Who Inspired Chicago
By: Douglas Perry

He had it coming...

The Girls of Murder City tells two real-life stories:

• The first looks at the trials of several “girl gunners” in Chicago in the 1920′s
• The second looks at the development of the play Chicago, based on these trials

The first part of the book focuses largely on the crimes, trials, and eventual acquittals of Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner, the “Most Beautiful Girl” and the “Most Stylish Girl” on Murders’ Row, respectively. By killing men who weren’t their husbands and being acquitted of their crimes, Beulah and Belva perfectly represented the booze-soaked, sensation-hungry 1920′s. The stories of several other female murderers are included, but Beulah and Belva are the stars of the show.

The second part of the book covers Maurine Watkin’s development of the play Chicago based on Beulah and Belva’s stories. As a Chicago Tribune reporter covering the girl-gunner beat, Maurine refused to buy into the commotion Beulah and Belva stirred up. In her articles, she used sarcasm and wit to highlight the manipulative nature of each woman and call out how they played both the media and their jurors. Her play Chicago turned the same critical eye to the sensationalism and media-madness that had gripped the country.

I knew Chicago had some basis in reality, but I didn’t realize just how much had been lifted from Beulah and Belva’s trials. If you’ve seen the play or the musical, then you’ll immediately recognize Roxie Hart in Beulah. The character of Velma Kelly is based on Belva but the comparison is less obvious. You’ll also recognize “the characters” Billy Flynn, Mary Sunshine and the other “mistresses of Murder’s Row”. There are even some nicknames and lines lifted wholesale from newspaper articles of the time and placed in the play’s dialogue (“They both reached for the gun!”).

Being the history nerd that I am, I appreciated the chance to check out the real-life characters that inspired the play and read some of the source material. It also became clear just how much Maurine nailed the prevailing mood of Chicago in the 1920′s with her play. If you’re interested in Chicago history or Chicago the play, I recommend this one.

In a nutshell: A good look at the people and crimes that inspired a great play. Three and a half stars.

And Now for Something Completely Different

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)
By: Mindy Kaling

She writes a lot too...

This book should really just be titled And Other Concerns. It’s a very loose collection of essays about some incredibly random stuff. The only unifying theme through the book is that Mindy Kaling wrote all of the essays. Beyond that, it’s vaguely chronological – it starts with some stories from her childhood, moves through her experience in college and trying to make it in New York City, and then into her current role writing and performing on “The Office”. It then concludes with some random chapters on guys, appearance, and, somehow fittingly, instructions for her funeral.

Something I really liked about this book was the insight I gained into the kind of person Mindy is. And I have to say, she seems pretty great. She’s smart, sticks up for her beliefs (including kicking her boss’s car when he doesn’t like a story line she’s pitching), calls bullsh*t when she sees it, loves her friends and family, and embraces her girliness. She is a very charming mix of quirky, nerdy, and girly.

I can’t help comparing Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? to Bossypants. I realize this isn’t fair – Tina Fey and Mindy Kaling are two completely different people and Bossypants was awesome – but I can’t help it. I think if she had waited until 2012 to release her book, the comparison would be less immediate and I might have been able to give her a fair shake (not that I expect her to wait to release her book because of my personal bias, but, hey, it’s a thought).

Outside of the Tina Fey comparison, I had high hopes for this one because Mindy Kaling has written some of my favorite episodes of “The Office” (see: The Dundies). Unfortunately, this wasn’t Dundies-caliber writing. The book is still entertaining – I ripped through it in about two days and I laughed out loud at points, but it just wasn’t great.

In a nutshell: I liked this one when I was hoping to love it. Three stars.

Probably Giving Up On This Whole Vampire Lit Thing

The Passage
By: Justin Cronin

Poor Little Amy...

I just don’t think The Passage and I were meant to be.

It seemed like things would work out between us – I had heard some good things about it; I put the e-book on hold at the library and conveniently, it was ready to go just in time for two back-to-back work trips, including a trip overseas (i.e. lots of reading time on the plane and at the airport); it’s a thick one (about 800 pages), so I figured I would have plenty of time to dig into it. However, things quickly went downhill. I get on the plane, we get up to cruising altitude, and I whip out the ole e-Reader and the battery is dead. Great. Now what am I going to for the next six hours? Strike one – although I’ll admit that’s more my fault than the book’s fault, but not a great start to what I thought was a promising relationship.

I get to my destination, charge up the e-Reader and start reading. I’m working long days while I’m gone, so I’m only able to get through about 15-20 pages a night before falling asleep. I gotta be honest, those 20 pages aren’t hooking me. I’m interested, but I’m not dying to pick it up the next night. Strike two – 800 page books should not make me work for it right off the bat. Relationships should be easy in the beginning.

I keep trudging through and as I’m going along, there are pieces that are good, especially in the first couple hundred pages. Then the story just starts crawling and I stop wondering why the book is 800 pages long: this guy doesn’t know how to shut up. There are chunks of the book that didn’t stick with me – just blank little spaces in the story where I don’t really remember what happened. Not a good thing. Strike three – get an editor to tighten this story up.

Despite this, I stick with it, assuming there has to be some kind of amazing conclusion. I’ve heard good things about the book, I can see how the author is starting to bring the different characters and stories back together, the premise is interesting, I am engaged with some of the characters. And then… pfffft. The ending falls a little flat. And then I find out The Passage is just the first book in a trilogy! The first book is the one that supposed to hook you in a trilogy! It’s the second one that’s supposed to be a little dull because it’s the bridge of the story. An 800 page opening salvo in a trilogy that’s not captivating? Strike four. You’re out.

Side note: Baseball rules don’t always translate to the lit world – you’re allowed to have four strikes here. Like “no crying in baseball”? Crying is definitely allowed while reading.

For those of you who want to know what the book is actually about, here’s a quick note on premise: the US military tries to turn convicts into human weapons by infecting them with a vampire virus from the Amazon and then, oops, they get loose and start killing and infecting the entire country. Small pockets of humans are able to survive and protect themselves from “the virals” but are totally cut off from the rest of the world. Roaming around in the midst of it all, there’s a twelve-year-old girl, Amy, who was infected with the virus as well, but she seems to get the benefits of the virus (long-life, doesn’t need to eat or sleep, speed and agility, some kind of telepathy) without the need to feed on humans. She can survive on her own and seems to be able to communicate with the virals. Not fully human and not fully viral, it’s clear she has some role in potentially saving the world, but it’s not clear if she’s even aware of it or how it will play out.

Overall, sounds like a nice mix of apocalyptic literature, sci-fi, and human melodrama. I’m not going to deny that The Passage had potential, but it just made me work too hard for it. Unless I hear rave reviews about the next book in the trilogy, I’m not planning to pick it up.

In a nutshell: Four strikes = I don’t really recommend it. Two stars.

Someone Knows My Name

Someone Knows My Name
By: Lawrence Hill

Someone Knows My Name is an epic. Similar to one of my favorite epics, Gone With the Wind, it follows a female protagonist, Aminata, through her pretty tough life, during which she learns who she is and how to fend for herself. Unlike Gone With the Wind, this book is focused on the experience of slaves in early American history, as opposed to the experience of white, wealthy plantation dwellers during and after the Civil War.

Someone Knows My Name covers almost all of Aminata’s life – beginning when she is stolen by slave traders from her village in Africa as a child, to crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a slave ship, to life on an indigo plantation, to securing her freedom, to living in New York City during the Revolutionary War, to assisting the British in relocating freed slaves to Nova Scotia, to moving back to Africa, and finally to becoming a living emblem of the abolition movement in London. Like I said, this book is an epic.

Also similar to Gone With the Wind, this book is really good, despite Aminata’s seemingly endless series of hardships. Really, this is one of those books where you shake your head and say, “This too? This poor woman has been through enough! Can’t she get a break?” But the book never gets bogged down or depressed. Aminata has a hopeful personality which prevents the book from becoming so heavy that it is no longer enjoyable.

I have to give Scott a special shout-out for recommending this one. It was an well-written story that provided insight into an aspect of history that is often overlooked – the role and experience of slaves during the early years of the United States.

In a nutshell: This was a really good pick – one I had a hard time putting down. Four stars

Nevermind about Neverwhere

Neverwhere
By: Neil Gaiman

London Bridge: London Above or London Below?

I picked up Neverwhere because it seemed like kind of an interesting concept: in the book, there’s a completely different, slightly blurry version of London (aka London Below or LB) that exists underneath the real city of London (aka London Above or LA). The people in London Above have no idea London Below even exists, but everyone in LB is acutely aware of LA. William Mayhew is from LA but accidentally gets pulled into LB when he literally stumbles over a LB girl involved in a LA murder/kidnapping/revenge plot.

London Below is similar to London Above, in that it has humans who speak English, tube stations, bridges, food, water, etc., but LB also throws in angels, earls, knights, friars, rat-speakers, rat kings, blood-thirsty beasts, labyrinths… As William gets pulled further into the murder/kidnapping/revenge plot mentioned above, he begins to realize that not only are the denizens of LB different from LA, but the rules in LB are also a little different from those in LA.

So, like I said, an interesting concept, but as I worked my way through the book, the execution of the story didn’t live up to the concept. In the end, Neverwhere was fine – not really that good, but not terrible either (I finished it). Some parts were more interesting than others, but overall, it was just okay. On top of that, the book was randomly gory and gross. I’m not a huge fan of excessive violence, but if it fits the story, I can roll with it (see: The Godfather or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). But with Neverwhere, a character would come out of nowhere and torture or murder another character and it would completely catch me off guard because it felt like it didn’t really fit with the story. Didn’t really enjoy that.

Overall, Neverwhere was just alright, but it is not one that I would strongly recommend.

In a nutshell: Meh. Two stars.

Hemingway and His Paris Wife – From Two Angles

The Paris Wife by Paula McClain
and
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway's Passport Photo from 1923

I recently read The Paris Wife by Paula McClain a novel about Ernest Hemingway’s first marriage to Hadley Richardson and their years living in Paris in the 19020′s. I then immediately followed it up with A Moveable Feast, Hemingway’s posthumous memoir about the same time. Both essentially cover the same subject but are told from opposite perspectives, giving a pretty well-rounded view of what Hemingway was like as a young man. I’ve captured what I think are the key similarities and differences about each book below.

The Paris Wife

• This book is told from Hadley’s perspective and focuses more on her and Hemingway’s marriage than A Moveable Feast does, but I also got more insight into Hemingway’s writing process than I did from A Moveable Feast.
• It was interesting to see Hemingway from another angle. I typically think of him as the quintessential man’s man – likes fishing, bull-fighting, and drinking, and just lived hard in general (kind of like Teddy Roosevelt with a smattering of alcoholism). But through The Paris Wife, it was clear that Hemingway was passionate about his writing, had clear ideas about what constituted good writing and slaved away over his stories to make them good.
• It was also clear that he loved Hadley very much in his own blustery way.
• I found this book to be quietly good – each incident and story is told in a fairly calm and steady manner, which was reflective of Hadley’s personality. It felt like McClain’s writing style matched who Hadley was as a person. And even though the book was written from Hadley’s perspective, it was very much a story about Hadley and Hemingway and his impact on her.

A Moveable Feast

• A Moveable Feast is a series short vignettes and less of a narrative story.
• Hemingway’s book is not really about their marriage, but more about his experiences while living in Paris. There are brief mentions of Hadley throughout the book, but their relationship is not the primary theme. It’s more about what it was like to be a struggling writer in 1920′s Paris surrounded by a lot of other semi-struggling artists trying to make a go of it.
• It’s been awhile since I have read anything by Hemingway and I’ll admit, I had to get about a third of the way through the book before I adjusted to his style. He is all about short, straightforward statements and does not use flowery language. That’s not to say that The Paris Wife is flowery, but it is a novel so it’s more descriptive. Plus, it wasn’t written by Hemingway.
• For me, the most interesting part of the book was that he devotes all of maybe five pages at the very end to the demise of his marriage. And he frames it up in a way that makes it sound like his marriage-ending affair was something that just happened to him, like getting hit by a car, as opposed to something that he had a direct and complicit role in. The affair is kind of framed in a similar way in The Paris Wife – a freak occurence that just happened to them – but at least in the novel I saw the implications of that freak occurence. Hemingway does not really reflect on what the affair meant or how it impacted him or Hadley in A Moveable Feast.

I will admit that reading The Paris Wife first probably primed me to go into A Moveable Feast with a biased perspective – I expected more of Hemingway’s book to be about Hadley and was a little disappointed that she played such a minor role in it. The little that he does include about the ending of their marriage felt so tacked-on that it took me surprise. By the time I got to the last chapter, I figured he wasn’t going to mention it all because Hadley had received so little attention up to that point.

As a sidenote: something these books had in common was that they both made me want to go back and read The Great Gatsby. F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, show up in both books and I got some interesting perspective on who they were and what their relationship was like.

In a nutshell: I would probably recommend The Paris Wife over A Moveable Feast, but I realize that it’s not really fair to compare them side-by-side. Taken together though, they do give a unique view of Hemingway as he was making his way in the literary world.

• The Paris Wife: Three and a half stars
• A Moveable Feast: Two and a half stars

Reliably Creepy

A Reliable Wife
By: Robert Goolrick

It just looks all sweet and innocent...

 I grabbed A Reliable Wife at a used book store because the premise seemed intriguing: a man places an ad for a “reliable wife” in a paper, a woman responds, but she’s anything but reliable. Turns out, he isn’t either. It sounded like it would be a good, buttoned-up, Victorian-type thriller. Well, the author not only nailed the Victorian part, but threw in a heavy dose of Greek tragedy with plenty of Gothic seasoning. See below for a more specific break-down:

• Victorian (50%): This book reminded me of The Scarlett Letter because of all the repressed sexual frustration and its accompanying guilt.
• Gothic (20%): This book was much darker and more graphic I expected. There is a lot of drinking, opium smoking, and whoring, as well as plenty of freak accidents and insanity.
• Greek Tragedy (30%): There are all kinds of layered familial hate in this book. The son hates the father, the father beats the son, the son desires both his new “mother” and his biological mother – there are zero healthy family relationships in this one. Eat your heart out, Oedipus.

This special blend of sex, guilt, awkward family ties, and deceit made for a pretty depressing book. A Reliable Wife wasn’t a bad book, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it because it wasn’t that enjoyable to read. I know not every book is easy or enjoyable to read, but I didn’t feel like I got anything out of this book’s heaviness. Plus, the mystery is given away about mid-way through the book and then things limp along after that waiting for a resolution. The resolution eventually comes, but it’s in line with the rest of the book’s dark twisted-ness and isn’t particularly satisfying.

In a nutshell: Way more intense than expected and not really that enjoyable. Two and a half stars.

Food, Glorious Food

In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto
By: Michael Pollan

Photo Credit

Why does someone need to defend food? Well, as Michael Pollan explains, it all depends on your definition of food. In Defense of Food makes the argument that as a society, Americans have fallen into the trap of nutritionism – focusing too much on specific ingredients or nutrients and eating fake foodstuffs, instead of focusing on eating a well-balanced diet of whole foods, and that as a result, we’re suffering from a number of health issues that our ancestors never had to deal with. At first glance this sounds like a no brainer – we all know we’re supposed to eat fruits and vegetables. But Pollan argues that all of the processed and packaged products we think are healthy (low-fat ice cream, Go-Gurt, nondairy creamer) are really just industrially produced mixes of chemicals and ingredients – too complicated to actually qualify as food.

The first part of the book Pollan covers the science (or lack thereof) of eating and he covers A LOT of it. There were a few points where my eyes glazed over a bit – he pulls from what seems like hundreds of studies – but it’s pretty clear he has done his research. However, he mostly uses this research to call into question our accepted understanding of what’s healthy and what’s not and to cast doubt on the idea that one ingredient or nutrient (fiber, omega-3′s, saturated fat) can be a cure-all or a kill-all.

Pollan’s argument makes perfect sense. If you pause to think about it, how can Lucky Charms be considered heart healthy? How can there be such a thing as protein water? It’s just illogical, but we see the claims in the store and just go with it. However, given what’s available in the grocery store, it’s tricky to completely change the way we eat, but Pollan attempts to address that by providing some recommendations in the second part of the book. I found the last section to be the most interesting and thought-provoking. I typically think of myself as a fairly healthy eater, but Pollan’s recommendations gave me reason to pause and think a bit more about my personal approach towards food – maybe less focus on calories in and out and more focus on whole foods and eating what my body is craving.

Overall, this was a really interesting book. Pollen definitely makes the case for focusing on becoming more thoughtful about eating – not just about what we eat, but when and how we eat it, where our food comes from, what the definition of “food” actually is – basically our culture of eating. Of course, given the industry that has built up around food, it’s easier said than done, but you have to start somewhere, right?

In a nutshell: Three and a half stars. In Defense of Food was thought-provoking book but it was a little heavy on the scientific studies and jargon.