So it may appear that all I read are best sellers... don't be deceived! I just happen to have a few recent reads that are (or were) bestsellers. Stay tuned, though... there are lots of books out there!!
Anyway, The Help is another example of a book that my mom recommended. I really didn't know a thing about it before she mentioned it, except for the fact that people seemed to be checking it out a lot. I will admit that I was under the (totally incorrect) assumption that this was a non-fiction, self-help book. That'll teach me to judge a book by its cover, huh?
What this book is about is the black women who worked for white families in the deep South during the 1960's... the women who were "the help". This novel specifically takes place in Jackson, Mississippi in 1962. We see that in many families, the help are the main caregivers for the children, to the extent that the children form stronger bonds with the black women than with their mothers.
The story is told from three points of view: Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan is a white recent college graduate who stands out from her Junior League friends in that she isn't yet married and she questions some of the things that everyone else just seem to take as given. Aibileen is a middle aged black woman who works for one of Skeeter's friends. And Minnie is probably a 30-something black woman who once worked for the mother of another of Skeeter's friends and who did a "horrible something awful" when she was fired from that position.
Skeeter wants more than anything to be a writer and is challenged by a book editor in New York (via mail correspondence) to write about something that disturbs her about the world. She decides to write a social and anthropological type book telling the stories of these black women who work for white families. Obviously she faces an uphill battle, even in just getting women to tell their stories. Not only is it taboo for them to talk about their employers, it can be life-threatening. Aibileen and Minnie, each in their own way, become important to the project.
I liked this book quite a bit. Parts were hard to read, but I think that proves that the author was able to capture the conflict of the era quite well. Each of the three voices in this book have a distinct personality, which must be a hard task for an author. I truly felt that I came to know these three woman through their stories.
This isn't really a happy ending story, but it is one that makes you think. It feels like reality... and reality can be hard. But the growth of these characters is clearly understood and as the reader I, at least, felt that the ending was the way that it should be.
JHP NOTE: Sorry this one took so long to post. I started it the day after writing my Eat, Pray, Love review and then got wrapped up in the acquisition of a new puppy. Now that she is settling in, I plan to write reviews as often as I can!!
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
Of course I have to blog about this wonderful book as I start this new blog! I just recently read it for the second time. The monthly book group that is hosted by the library where I work was reading it and I was so excited to be in on this discussion. So I read it and loved it even more the second time... marked up the pages of the book... underlined favorite passages... you get the idea. I showed up to book group clutching my beloved book and quickly discovered that I was the only one (in a group of about 12 people) that liked the book! ACK!
So here's my warning to you, oh rare reader who has not yet read Eat, Pray, Love (if you in fact fit into that category): people seem to either love it or hate it. I don't have an explanation, it just appears to be a fact. Go figure...
I was hesitant about reading this book when it first became a huge hit and everyone and their brother and their brother's dog were buying it and placing library holds on it. I read the title and the jacket description and thought "eh, whatever..." But then my mom told me that I HAD to read this book. She and I usually agree about books, so I put my name on the list. Then it came available for me and I checked it out and I brought it home... and still I was un-enthused. I think I chose to read a Harlan Coben mystery first. But then finally I picked it up... and I didn't want to put it down!
Here's the basic deal: Elizabeth Gilbert is a writer who has written fiction and non-fiction and has received some nice praise for her work, but before this book it wasn't anything spectacular. She was married to a man that she had married in her early 20's, serving as the primary breadwinner in the house, trying to convince herself that she wanted to have kids... and she suddenly realized (in her early 30's) that she was dreadfully unhappy. She has found herself in a marriage that doesn't seem to work with the person that she is growing to be... and she painfully admits that she doesn't want to be married anymore, let alone have children. So she finds herself crying on the floor of her bathroom and somehow, although never having much religion or spirituality in her life, starts to pray for the first time ever. For me, this is an amazing "hitting the absolute bottom of depression and reaching for help" moment... and I've been there. And maybe that's why I love this... because I feel like I've been there.
Ok, so after going through this painful divorce, she realizes that she needs to do something to put her life back together. She comes up with this idea to travel the world over the course of a year: to Italy, India and Indonesia. In Italy, she will explore pleasure; specifically, she will eat tons of wonderful food and learn to speak Italian simply because she loves how the language sounds. In India, she will explore spirituality as she has an extended stay in an ashram. And in Indonesia, she will explore how to have balance between pleasure and spirituality. By a stroke of luck, her publisher offers an advance on the book that she will write about this experience and that is how she pays for the trip. The book is organized into 108 fairly short chapters, 36 for each of the three sections of the book. Each of these chapters is almost like a blog post, chronicling a period of time or a particular occurrence during her trip.
Gilbert's style of writing is flowing, informed and sometimes laugh out loud funny. She has a very dry humor which matches my own quite well. She lays herself wide open in this memoir, in a way that I imagine might be uncomfortable for some. And she makes herself a target for people to say "oh poor thing, you got to travel around the world. Stop whining and buck up." And that is exactly what all of those women in my book group said. None of it came across as whining to me, though. It came across as a woman being brutally honest about having found herself in a situation that wasn't making her happy, realizing that she needed to figure out who she really is and then taking a journey to make that discovery. Yeah, she got to travel the world... but metaphorically, don't we all take journeys in our lives to discover important (and sometimes painful) lessons in life?
Gilbert's growth through the novel (and she is writing as she travels) is apparent to me. She does start out as a person who wants to take from the world (but she knows that she isn't a happy person), but she ends up as a person who really wants to give back. It is a wonderful journey... and I hope you turn out to be one of those people who thinks so too!
So here's my warning to you, oh rare reader who has not yet read Eat, Pray, Love (if you in fact fit into that category): people seem to either love it or hate it. I don't have an explanation, it just appears to be a fact. Go figure...
I was hesitant about reading this book when it first became a huge hit and everyone and their brother and their brother's dog were buying it and placing library holds on it. I read the title and the jacket description and thought "eh, whatever..." But then my mom told me that I HAD to read this book. She and I usually agree about books, so I put my name on the list. Then it came available for me and I checked it out and I brought it home... and still I was un-enthused. I think I chose to read a Harlan Coben mystery first. But then finally I picked it up... and I didn't want to put it down!
Here's the basic deal: Elizabeth Gilbert is a writer who has written fiction and non-fiction and has received some nice praise for her work, but before this book it wasn't anything spectacular. She was married to a man that she had married in her early 20's, serving as the primary breadwinner in the house, trying to convince herself that she wanted to have kids... and she suddenly realized (in her early 30's) that she was dreadfully unhappy. She has found herself in a marriage that doesn't seem to work with the person that she is growing to be... and she painfully admits that she doesn't want to be married anymore, let alone have children. So she finds herself crying on the floor of her bathroom and somehow, although never having much religion or spirituality in her life, starts to pray for the first time ever. For me, this is an amazing "hitting the absolute bottom of depression and reaching for help" moment... and I've been there. And maybe that's why I love this... because I feel like I've been there.
Ok, so after going through this painful divorce, she realizes that she needs to do something to put her life back together. She comes up with this idea to travel the world over the course of a year: to Italy, India and Indonesia. In Italy, she will explore pleasure; specifically, she will eat tons of wonderful food and learn to speak Italian simply because she loves how the language sounds. In India, she will explore spirituality as she has an extended stay in an ashram. And in Indonesia, she will explore how to have balance between pleasure and spirituality. By a stroke of luck, her publisher offers an advance on the book that she will write about this experience and that is how she pays for the trip. The book is organized into 108 fairly short chapters, 36 for each of the three sections of the book. Each of these chapters is almost like a blog post, chronicling a period of time or a particular occurrence during her trip.
Gilbert's style of writing is flowing, informed and sometimes laugh out loud funny. She has a very dry humor which matches my own quite well. She lays herself wide open in this memoir, in a way that I imagine might be uncomfortable for some. And she makes herself a target for people to say "oh poor thing, you got to travel around the world. Stop whining and buck up." And that is exactly what all of those women in my book group said. None of it came across as whining to me, though. It came across as a woman being brutally honest about having found herself in a situation that wasn't making her happy, realizing that she needed to figure out who she really is and then taking a journey to make that discovery. Yeah, she got to travel the world... but metaphorically, don't we all take journeys in our lives to discover important (and sometimes painful) lessons in life?
Gilbert's growth through the novel (and she is writing as she travels) is apparent to me. She does start out as a person who wants to take from the world (but she knows that she isn't a happy person), but she ends up as a person who really wants to give back. It is a wonderful journey... and I hope you turn out to be one of those people who thinks so too!
Angelology by Danielle Trussoni
So I saw that this book was hanging out on the New York Times Bestseller list a couple of weeks ago and my curiosity was stirred. I hadn’t even seen it come across the counter at work. So I had to check it out and see what it was all about.
At first, it is slow going and it took me some time to get into this story. It starts out with two apparently divergent storylines (although we always know that they will converge eventually, don’t we?) Sister Evangeline is going about her day at the St. Rose convent in Upstate New York (including her daily “job” of working in the convent’s library… cool!) and discovers a request for access to information from a scholar in New York City related to Abigail Rockefeller’s communications with the late abbess of the convent. Despite the convent’s usual policy of politely refusing requests for access, something about this request leads Sister Evangeline to go searching into the archives. I wasn’t convinced by Sister Evangeline’s motivation to follow this request, but of course there wouldn’t be a story if she hadn’t!
The second storyline turns out to be about the very same young scholar that had sent the fascinating letter to the convent, who seems to only be known by his last name: Verlaine. (Ok, they might mention his first name once or twice, but without the book in front of me, I can’t remember for the life of me what it might have been) Verlaine is working for a creepy guy named Percival Gregori who is apparently quite infirm… and did I mention creepy? So we follow Percival home and we come to discover that he isn’t completely human at all! He lives with his mother (even creepier!) in a luxurious 5th Avenue penthouse, and they all have wings! Percival has apparently contracted some sort of winged-creature disease, though, and his wings have shriveled to blackened stumps and he has trouble breathing. (Seems to me he deserves it… and too bad the disease doesn’t seem to be contagious. His mom is a piece of work, too!)
Anyway, all of this leads to the revelation that these part angel/part human creatures, called Nephilim, live in the world. They are descended from the original fallen angels who broke the rules and mated with human women way back when. And they are evil. Pretty, but evil. Makes you think that the author might have a thing against tall, blonde-haired, blue-eyed folks. They all live a super long time, are quite rich and very snobby. And they are apparently behind all of the bad stuff that has happened in the world. That would figure, huh? It’s always the rich, pretty people!
Ok, so without giving away much more of the plot, the good guys are the Angelologists and the bad guys are the Nephilim and they are both searching for a particular treasure that was recovered on an expedition back in the 1940’s but then secreted away. All of life as we know it hangs in the balance with this treasure. Wow!
I started getting more interested in the book after the first third or so. The story is definitely engaging. There is really a lot going on in this book, but not so much that you have to keep going back and forth saying “Wait, who’s that? What are they talking about?” The writer’s style is clunky at times… the dialog is beautiful, but some of the connecting prose is a big awkward. I found myself wondering “who would think something like that?”
Comparisons to Dan Brown’s novels and Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian are unavoidable. I think the story is more artfully formed than Dan Brown’s novels although the plot twists are more subtle in this book. I saw a couple of things coming quite a bit beforehand here… Brown is able to surprise me more effectively. There is some good action, bringing to mind that the book might make a nice Hollywood film. Trussoni’s writing doesn’t match the beautiful flow of Kostova’s, but the story kept me almost as engrossed as The Historian did. The descriptive passages in this novel are quite beautiful and created a vivid mental picture of the places and people in the story.
The ending of this book was a bit of a disappointment to me… mostly because it was abrupt. It seems to me that the author already has plans for a sequel… the story just seems to be too unfinished. If she doesn’t write a sequel, I will be very disappointed, because I would enjoy reading more about this story and these characters.
At first, it is slow going and it took me some time to get into this story. It starts out with two apparently divergent storylines (although we always know that they will converge eventually, don’t we?) Sister Evangeline is going about her day at the St. Rose convent in Upstate New York (including her daily “job” of working in the convent’s library… cool!) and discovers a request for access to information from a scholar in New York City related to Abigail Rockefeller’s communications with the late abbess of the convent. Despite the convent’s usual policy of politely refusing requests for access, something about this request leads Sister Evangeline to go searching into the archives. I wasn’t convinced by Sister Evangeline’s motivation to follow this request, but of course there wouldn’t be a story if she hadn’t!
The second storyline turns out to be about the very same young scholar that had sent the fascinating letter to the convent, who seems to only be known by his last name: Verlaine. (Ok, they might mention his first name once or twice, but without the book in front of me, I can’t remember for the life of me what it might have been) Verlaine is working for a creepy guy named Percival Gregori who is apparently quite infirm… and did I mention creepy? So we follow Percival home and we come to discover that he isn’t completely human at all! He lives with his mother (even creepier!) in a luxurious 5th Avenue penthouse, and they all have wings! Percival has apparently contracted some sort of winged-creature disease, though, and his wings have shriveled to blackened stumps and he has trouble breathing. (Seems to me he deserves it… and too bad the disease doesn’t seem to be contagious. His mom is a piece of work, too!)
Anyway, all of this leads to the revelation that these part angel/part human creatures, called Nephilim, live in the world. They are descended from the original fallen angels who broke the rules and mated with human women way back when. And they are evil. Pretty, but evil. Makes you think that the author might have a thing against tall, blonde-haired, blue-eyed folks. They all live a super long time, are quite rich and very snobby. And they are apparently behind all of the bad stuff that has happened in the world. That would figure, huh? It’s always the rich, pretty people!
Ok, so without giving away much more of the plot, the good guys are the Angelologists and the bad guys are the Nephilim and they are both searching for a particular treasure that was recovered on an expedition back in the 1940’s but then secreted away. All of life as we know it hangs in the balance with this treasure. Wow!
I started getting more interested in the book after the first third or so. The story is definitely engaging. There is really a lot going on in this book, but not so much that you have to keep going back and forth saying “Wait, who’s that? What are they talking about?” The writer’s style is clunky at times… the dialog is beautiful, but some of the connecting prose is a big awkward. I found myself wondering “who would think something like that?”
Comparisons to Dan Brown’s novels and Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian are unavoidable. I think the story is more artfully formed than Dan Brown’s novels although the plot twists are more subtle in this book. I saw a couple of things coming quite a bit beforehand here… Brown is able to surprise me more effectively. There is some good action, bringing to mind that the book might make a nice Hollywood film. Trussoni’s writing doesn’t match the beautiful flow of Kostova’s, but the story kept me almost as engrossed as The Historian did. The descriptive passages in this novel are quite beautiful and created a vivid mental picture of the places and people in the story.
The ending of this book was a bit of a disappointment to me… mostly because it was abrupt. It seems to me that the author already has plans for a sequel… the story just seems to be too unfinished. If she doesn’t write a sequel, I will be very disappointed, because I would enjoy reading more about this story and these characters.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)