The Flight of Gemma Hardy by Margot Livesey

It takes a lot of guts to adapt a classic novel into a contemporary one. An author opens herself up to all sorts of judgments about whether or not the new work lives up to the original. I have mentioned this dilemma before, when I wrote here about The Three Weissmanns of Westport by Cathleen Schine:

I can’t decide if updating a classic like S&S is brave (oh, the challenge of writing as well as Ms. Austen!) or lazy (don’t have to waste time coming up with a plot!). Maybe it’s both. 

But I think Margot Livesey does a better job with her retelling of Jane Eyre than Schine does with Sense and Sensibility. Schine tries a bit too hard to be completely faithful to the original, creating analogs for even the most minor of Austen’s characters. Livesey knows when to quit and while many characters and incidents are parallel, Livesey’s differ enough in a few important ways so that her work feels fresh. You don’t spend all your time trying to play match-up.

The plot does parallel that of Jane Eyre, so we’ve got a story of a young orphan girl who is ill-treated by her guardians, sent off to a cruel boarding school, and who ends up as an au pair to a family in the Orkney Islands. Livesey makes a smart decision to set this novel in the 1960’s, which updates it enough to make it different, but frees her from the need to give Gemma a cell phone and an ATM card, both of which would make her flight from Hugh Sinclair (Mr. Rochester) a lot less plausible. The remote estate on Orkney feels just as isolated and mysterious as Thornfield Hall and Mr. Sinclair is sexy and conflicted, just as he ought to be. This is a good read, both for fans of Jane Eyre and for anyone who likes a complicated emotional story.

(Book 15, 2013)

Radioactive by Lauren Redniss

This book was the 2012 Go Big Read selection at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Here is a link to the online version of a feature story I did for Isthmus about Go Big Read and about this book.

While I appreciate what is innovative and interesting about this book (the illustration process, the graphic nonfiction format, the author-designed typeface) it didn’t satisfy me as a reader. It wasn’t a true biography, nor was it a comprehensive analysis of Marie Curie’s impact on science, but instead some kind of weird hybrid in a pretty package. And that typeface: Tiny hand-rendered light blue type on a dark blue background. On some pages it could have been Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet for all I could tell. Yes, my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be, and I realize that some allowances must be made for the sake of art, but this was a book, for crying out loud, not an exhibit at an art gallery. What good is a book that you can’t read?

(Book 14, 2013)

The Kashmir Shawl by Rosie Thomas

This book was a breath of fresh air after weeks of reading several dark things in a row. Sometimes I just need to escape, preferably to someplace far away. The Kashmir Shawl tells the story of a young woman’s trip from Wales to India and Kashmir to discover the answers to some mysteries from her grandmother’s past. The narrative shifts back and forth between the granddaughter Mair in the present day, and the grandmother Nerys, in World War II era India. Thomas’s research is top notch. I loved her descriptions of both time periods and she did a great job evoking the tattered luxury of British Raj-era Kashmir, and contrasting it with the current troubled political situation there now. The two women’s journeys mirror one another’s but never to the point where you feel manipulated by the author. Both Mair and Nerys encounter birth, death, religious strife, romance, poverty, war, and the Vale of Kashmir, which sounds just awesome. Now I want to go to Srinagar and stay on a houseboat on the lake. 

This book reminded me a bit of The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton, which I read in 2010. Both books use the grandmother/granddaughter construct and jump back and forth in time. In both books I sometimes had a little trouble keeping the secrets straight but that’s a small problem. Kate Morton (who is Australian) has been getting a lot of good press recently and I have her latest book on hold at the library. But I hadn’t heard of Rosie Thomas before. This was a random library find on the new fiction shelf. A little Internet research reveals that she is much more popular in Britain than in the U.S., where her books are bestsellers and she wins awards, but maybe that will change with the release of this excellent book.

(Book 13, 2013)

The Wool Series by Hugh Howey

The Wool Series is comprised of eight novellas (the first one of which is called Wool) that all take place in a post-apocalyptic USA where a small contingent of survivors are holed up in something resembling a missile silo. Hugh Howey self-published this series through Amazon’s Kindle Direct publishing system starting in 2011. Book 8 was published in January 2013. All the novellas are available in various permutations (singly and in omnibus editions) as Amazon Kindle downloads, and volumes 1-5 are now available in print from Simon & Schuster. Howey made news when he struck his print deal with Simon & Schuster (which occurred after these books were already Kindle bestsellers) because he retained the e-book rights. I wanted to try the series in part because I’ve been enjoying the post-apocalyptic genre, but mostly because I was interested in seeing whether a self-published book was any good. I’m skeptical because they seem like such wild cards – some have lots of spelling and grammatical errors, not to mention derivative plots. I prefer to read books that have been professionally edited – is that such a bad thing?*

I have only read the first three volumes (Wool, Proper Gauge, and Casting Off -- as a knitter I love these allusions but these books are definitely NOT about knitting). So far the plot and setting seem a little like “the survivors of the vampire apocalypse go to District 13” but I have a feeling that greater complexity is right around the corner. At least I hope so; right now these feel a bit formulaic to me, but perhaps that’s a function of reading three in a row, rather than spacing them out as you would if you were caught up. Howey is a good (if workmanlike) writer (and there are no typos); the characters are likable (except those that are supposed to be hate-able) and there is no shortage of strong women characters. That said, why am I not rushing out to read volumes 4-8? I’m not sure. Maybe I just need a break from post-apocalyptic dread?**

I noticed on Amazon that at least four authors have self-published e-books that are set in Howey’s world. From what I can tell, two of the authors have Howey’s blessing, as evidenced by quotes from Howey in the product description. So he’s authorizing fan fiction; that’s interesting.

(Book 12, 2013)

*I know that commercial publishers release bad books all the time, and that many good books never get published.  Nevertheless I don't want to waste my limited reading time on something that absolutely no one has vetted, as is the case with some self-published e-books.

**I promise not to write about this genre any more for a while.

The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant

This sounded like a good adventure: the true story of the hunt for a man-eating tiger in modern day Russia. In 1997 a giant Siberian tiger has a run-in with a poacher who steals the tiger’s kill and shoots him in the leg; a short time later that tiger (now really annoyed) stalks the poacher, lies in wait for him at his cabin, and devours him. Revenge! All the reviews made this story sound so gripping and suspenseful.

And really, it is a good adventure, except to get to it you have to wade through pages and pages of other….stuff. Random stuff. Like the history of Sino-Soviet border conflicts in the Bikin River valley. The depressive effect of perestroika on the economy of the Primorski Kai province, the ecosystem of the Russian Taiga, the subsistence lifestyle of the residents of Sobolonye in which one slang term for “tiger” is “Toyota” because that’s what you can buy with the money you make from poaching one. Some of it’s interesting but most of it is way too detailed for my taste and just took up too many pages that weren’t about the tiger.

Some reviewers have made comparisons to Moby Dick with its asides about sailors’ lives and traditions, and its meditations on good and evil, and you know that Vaillant was happy when they did that. When describing the ultimate death of the tiger Vaillant invokes the great whale, saying that “The tiger had absorbed bullets the way Moby Dick absorbed harpoons.” But I never liked those parts of Moby Dick that much either. This is just another book that would have been better as a magazine article. The description of the hunt for the tiger (without all the accompanying filler) would have been a welcome addition to an issue of National Geographic.

(Book 11, 2013)

Exit Music by Ian Rankin

Have I gone off mysteries? I have read very few in the last few years, not so much by design as by oversight. But I thought I would try again with a classic author/detective combination: Ian Rankin’s John Rebus, in his most-recent-but-one offering Exit Music. Appropriately titled, Rebus is days away from retirement but can’t keep himself from going rogue yet again and getting suspended in the process. As usual, his colleague Siobhan Clarke tries to keep him in check while getting herself into position for her long-awaited promotion.

In the end I was just kind of “meh” about this book. There’s nothing wrong with it. Rankin is a good writer and Rebus is an interesting guy and a bit easier to take now that he’s sobered up somewhat. Clarke still has a bit of a chip on her shoulder but that’s to be expected. I just couldn’t get very invested in them and what they were up to. And so then what’s the point? I guess I am breaking up with mysteries. This must be the part where I say “It’s not you, it’s me.”

Here’s something: All the Rebus novels are set in Edinburgh. Rankin’s website has lots of good stuff about Edinburgh, about Rebus and his origins, and about Scottish literature. It also includes an interactive map where you can follow Rebus around the city and a Rebus playlist for Spotify (Rebus is a huge music fan).

(Book 10, 2013)

The Twelve by Justin Cronin

I wrote about this book for the Isthmus spring break reading guide. Here’s a link.
 
I want to add something to what I said in that article: It’s never a good sign when you have to ask someone to explain a book's plot developments. One such query session with my friend Elana took up an entire hour at a coffee shop and involved the perusal of both volumes of the series, and some quick e-mailing back and forth with Elana’s brother. My advice is to read The Twelve carefully and read a print edition rather than an e-book. The Kindle was a bad choice; the maps are too small and the awkwardness of paging back and forth to look things up is off-putting. I just kept reading, even when I wasn’t sure what happened, thinking it would all sort itself out in the end, but it didn’t. I did find some satisfactory answers when I went back through the print edition, but it was far from an ideal reading situation.

Or, you could just take my word for it that things do hang together, even if you are left with some moments of "huh?" Together the books have a total of 1,376 pages -- who can remember every detail? It doesn't make them any less fun.

(Book 9, 2013)