Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty

This is a sneaky book—but I mean that as a compliment. It’s got a girly cover and a breezy tone, and it purports to be about yummy mummies whose children attend the same elementary school in an affluent Australian suburb. It looks like a light fun read, and it is, until you realize that it’s also about domestic violence, and how it crops up where you never expect it and how easy it is for the abuse (and the abuser) to hide in plain sight. It’s also a very funny book, except when it makes you cry.

I have already said too much about the plot so I won’t go on. I do want to say that I really was impressed by Moriarty’s ability to hit the right note every single time. She could have gone wrong so many places, veering off into movie-of-the-week territory, or worse, trivializing the issues, but she avoided all these obstacles perfectly. Moriarty is often mentioned in the same breath as Jojo Moyes, another author who excels at giving us a fresh look at the lives of ordinary women, and for tackling difficult subjects with humor.

(Book 2, 2015)

Bread and Butter by Michelle Wildgen

This book was long on description and short on plot. Author Michelle Wildgen has obviously spent years working in the food industry and her expertise shows. And this story, about a guy who opens his own restaurant, could probably provide a blueprint for anyone interested in doing the same. She describes in great detail the steps involved in developing a new dish, managing the waitstaff, and choosing the right décor. The problem is, I can’t imagine these processes are compelling to anyone outside of a narrow group of foodies and restaurant aficionados; I certainly struggled to maintain my interest and I like to cook and eat.

Wildgen hangs pages and pages of luscious descriptions of food onto the thinnest plot framework imaginable: a rivalry between the young restaurateur and his older brothers, who own a different restaurant. Dramatic tension centers around issues like whether or not the younger brother is stealing the older brothers’ pastry chef. I’m not trying to be flip here, but I really would have liked this book better if someone had murdered the pastry chef and hid his body in the walk-in amid all those vegetables Wildgen so lovingly describes.

(Book 24, 2014)

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy by Helen Fielding

Bridget Jones’s Diary was clever and original when it came out in 1996, and I loved it. I also liked the 2001 movie version starring Renee Zellweger and Colin Firth. Somewhat less interesting was the sequel, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. That book broke no new ground and as far as I could tell only served to wrap up the romance.

But now it’s 2013 and we have Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy. Bridget is 51! Mark Darcy has departed this earth in a blaze of glory, leaving Bridget a widow with two school-aged children and all her neuroses intact. It’s the same Bridget, only not; she’s sadder, and her love for her children gives her an emotional weight that was missing in the earlier book(s). She still records the same things in her diary (lbs. gained and lost, her alcohol consumption, who her friends are sleeping with) but she also writes about her pain at losing Mark, her attempts at being a worthy mother, and with great humor, her struggles to get back in the dating game. Funniest of all are Bridget’s encounters with 21st century technology, especially Twitter, as she attempts to tweet her way into a new life.

Helen Fielding is a funny writer, but what I like best about these books is that they aren’t just funny in a narrative or plot-driven sense. Fielding has created a main character (or alter ego) who has a great sense of humor. Bridget’s observations in her diary are funny; Bridget’s tweets are funny; and it’s her humor on line that first attracts the titular “boy” to her in the first place. I can’t think of a lot of fictional heroines who possess this characteristic and it feels as fresh in this book as it did back in 1996. So good to have Bridget back – I missed her!

(Book 34, 2013)

The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown

I’m getting a little bored with books where nothing happens. It’s not like I need explosions or car chases, but really, something has to happen or else I just…drift off… And so I drifted off a lot while reading The Weird Sisters, a story about three sisters in their twenties and thirties who return to their Ohio town to care for their sick mother, and who spend a lot of time ruminating over their relationships, their upbringing, and their futures, but don’t do much of anything other than that.

Because their father is a Shakespeare scholar, this book is peppered with literary allusions, all helpfully printed in italics, in case you can’t tell. And of course there is the book’s title, and the names of the sisters, who are Rosalind, Bianca, and worst of all, Cordelia. The sisters neatly embody various literary stereotypes: the good daughter (Rosalind), the party girl (Bianca), and the artist (Cordelia). Despite these handicaps I enjoyed reading the book, and finished it, despite several detours to read other, more compelling choices.

Here are a few random observations:

• Brown at times writes in first person plural, as if the sisters are all speaking as one. Hence they talk about “our mother” and things “we did” as children. It doesn’t sound like it would work but it does. Brown uses the trick judiciously and it highlights the sisters’ closeness and sense of shared history and destiny. They speak almost as a Greek chorus at times, especially when they comment on their parents’ relationship.
• The sisters and their parents spend a lot of time reading. I like books where the characters read. Of course, reading about other people reading doesn’t make for very interesting reading in itself, so there’s that. But it did make me like the characters. Their reading felt very natural to me and reminded me of my own house, where books are everywhere and everyone just reads whatever is close to hand.   
• This is a nice sweet story where everything works out okay in the end. It’s a good book for a bad day, or if you’ve recently witnessed too many explosions or car chases. 

 (Book 26, 2013)

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

I never describe books as “beach reads” because as I’ve said before, I’ll read anything on a beach. But I have to say, if I were on a beach, this would be a very satisfying choice. On a beach in Italy would be even better. Oh well.

Actual Italian beaches are depicted in this book, circa 1962. Also present day Hollywood and Idaho. It tells the story of an American actress Dee Moray, an ingénue who has fled from the cast of Cleopatra after an ill-fated affair with Richard Burton, and who is holed up (and considering her options) in a seedy hotel on the Italian coast run by a charming young Italian named Pasquale. The story follows Dee and Pasquale (and also a villain: the studio PR man sent to hush Dee up about the scandal) through their lives until they are reunited many years later. It is funny and heartwarming and extremely readable, a term which some reviewers use to mean “overly simple” but by which I mean “flawless” – nothing takes you out of the experience.

Walter could have created a fictional film and a fictional married actor but he chose to use Cleopatra and Richard Burton. I suppose a story about a big-budget Hollywood film made in Italy in the 1960’s would just make us think of Cleopatra anyway and that would be more distracting. That is part of what I mean when I say this book is flawless; Walter knows how to mix fact and fiction, humor and pathos, hope and despair, and it’s got a happy ending! What a treat.

My friend Leah offers advice on a follow-up book: Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century, by Sam Kashner. And guess what? She calls this one a "beach read!" but says it would be a really good companion to Beautiful Ruins. So there you go, two recommendations for the price of one.

(Book 20, 2013)

The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg

Reading this novel is like having a long gossip with your nosy cousin. Get some coffee and some cheesecake, pull up a chair, and settle in. You’ll hear about everyone in the Middlestein family (Edie and Richard, their adult children, and their grandchildren) but mostly you will hear about Edie, Edie and her weight, Edie and her secret eating, Edie and her diabetes, Edie and Richard’s impending divorce. You will feel both happy and sad as you catch up with the Middlesteins but you will also be secretly relieved that you are not that close to them.

Edie Middlestein is at the center of this story and her battles with her weight form a framework on which Attenberg hangs the rest of the tale. Attenberg hops around in time as she tells Edie’s story, using Edie’s varying mass as signposts. Overweight as a child, for Edie, food is love, hand delivered by her doting mother. As a young woman Edie reduces to a fashionable weight but food becomes the enemy, and by middle age it’s a weapon. Attenberg carefully dissects the cultural implications of food in a 20th century American immigrant family but never overdoes it. And she uses humor and wry observations to show that everyone is obsessed with something. Edie’s children Benny and Robin abuse marijuana and alcohol, and her controlling daughter-in-law (perhaps in response to Edie’s ballooning weight) forces her family to live on raw vegetables and tofu – the scenes of her husband and children’s reactions to this are some of the funniest in the book. Indeed, the humor in this book kind of creeps up on you. I wasn’t expecting to laugh out loud but I did, often. But I wasn’t laughing AT the Middlesteins; Attenberg never demeans her characters by making them the butt of jokes. It’s LIFE that makes you laugh, that is, unless it makes you cry.

(Book 18, 2013)

The Distant Hours by Kate Morton

Buried under all the mess in this book is an interesting story: As an adolescent during the London Blitz, Meredith is evacuated to a dilapidated castle in the country, the home of a writer and his three arty eccentric daughters. She immediately feels a connection to this family that she never felt with her own working class family; these people understand and value her in a way that her own parents and siblings never did. When the time comes to return to London Meredith refuses and must be dragged back by her father against her will. Though she tries to maintain her newly awakened creativity and ambition, the daily grind of her family’s disapproval and lack of support eventually defeat her and she becomes as bland and uninspired as the rest of them. It’s a really thought-provoking examination of creativity and how it can be nurtured or squashed, depending on one’s environment.

But Morton can’t seem to tell this story in a coherent manner. It’s buried under all sorts of chaff and digressions and subplots about the three odd sisters who took Meredith in, about her daughter (who is shocked to discover this episode in her mother’s past), and some mystery about a lost letter and a lost lover. Chapters jump back and forth in time randomly and for some reason the chapters set in the present have names and those set in the past are just numbered. Thus a chapter called “The Plot Thickens” is followed by a chapter called “Four.” As my dad says, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

I can’t tell you how disappointed I was. The only thing worse than a bad book is a bad book with a good book inside it.

(Book 17, 2013)

Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures by Emma Straub

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of interviewing Emma Straub for Isthmus Daily Page, Madison’s weekly news and arts website. My interview was part of Isthmus’s promotion of the Wisconsin Book Festival and you can find it here. In preparation for the interview I read Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures, Straub’s first novel, which was released a few months ago. Straub was fun to talk to and very engaging. The book is a sweet story of a woman’s experience in the Hollywood studio system in the 1930’s through the 1960’s. I liked Laura Lamont, especially her plucky Midwestern optimism, but the story didn’t make a strong impression on me; it was at times repetitive, as if Straub didn’t quite trust herself to make her point. Maybe it wasn’t fair to Straub that I was reading it alongside Bring Up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel, which is a masterpiece by a mature writer at the top of her game.

Straub says that she based the plot loosely on the life of actress Jennifer Jones. Like Laura Lamont, Jennifer Jones grew up in the Midwest and married a studio executive (David O. Selznick). We talked a bit about other recent books that are fictionalized retellings of famous people’s lives (e. g., American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld, and Untold Story by Monica Ali) but it seems like Straub used Jones’s experiences more for inspiration than as a template for a novel.

It’s fun to talk to writers about their books but I end up looking at the reading experience differently afterwards. I try always to write these blog posts 100% from the point of view of the reader, and if I have a nice impression of the writer in my head, does it make me a little less blunt in my analysis? (I’m not thinking specifically of Straub here, but just of the interview/blogging process.) I don’t know. I don’t get a lot of chances to talk to writers (!) so in some ways this line of thinking is like wondering if I would get airsick on Air Force One.

(Book 30, 2012)

Untold Story by Monica Ali

Untold Story imagines that Britain’s Princess Diana didn’t die in an automobile crash in 1997 but instead faked her own death by drowning a few months later, and now lives incognito (as Lydia) in a small town in North Carolina. Her life is dull and predictable until the arrival of a vacationing British news photographer who recognizes her despite her disguise. He stalks her and plans to expose her; the plot tension arises out of this conflict.

Joanna Briscoe, writing in The Guardian, sums up this book very well when she describes it as “an ill-advised, debatably insensitive – indeed almost unworkable – project, skillfully executed.” She also references American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld, a book I really enjoyed, and which I believe is more successful than Untold Story, if only because its real-life inspiration (Laura Bush) is more of an enigma (and hence a blank canvas) than Princess Diana. In the interest of full disclosure, I was a big Princess Diana fan, back in the day. She was my age, and so beautiful, and a princess! I copied her clothes (who remembers the black sheep sweater?) and her hair style. Luckily I grew out of that phase though I did watch her televised funeral. But I skipped Tina Brown’s 2007 biography because even that seemed like too much.

So why did I read Untold Story? Only because it was written by Monica Ali, whose novel Brick Lane remains one of my favorites. I was really curious to see what a literary talent could do with this subject. And as Briscoe points out, the result is mixed. Ali’s dialogue and most of the supporting characters seem like they were lifted from a bad chick flick (the exception being Lawrence, Lydia’s fictional private secretary who engineered her escape). The book is best when it’s exploring Lydia’s internal life, her unstable past, her complex motivations for leaving, and her guilt over abandoning her children. This is very much a book about what it’s like to live every day with a huge huge secret, one that defines your entire existence but which cannot ever be shared. Ali was brave to try so risky a frame for this artistic exploration and I give her credit.

(Book 22, 20120)

A Good Indian Wife by Anne Cherian

I must be a sucker for book cover photos of women in saris. It has just occurred to me that sari photos are the Indian equivalent of the “woman in heels carrying a shopping bag” graphics that grace the cover of American and British chick lit. Okay, so now I know.

Suneel, a Stanford-educated anesthesiologist returns home to India to visit his dying grandfather. Somehow he ends up agreeing to his grandfather’s fondest wish: an arranged marriage with a nice Indian girl, Leila. Before he knows it, he’s hitched and can’t get out of it. Together Neel (as he is called in the U.S.) and Leila return to San Francisco where Neel acts like a selfish jerk and Leila wanders dazed and confused through her new life.

This book had some good points: Leila, who was a teacher in India, is smart and tries to make the best of a bad situation. Her tentative attempts to form relationships with some of Neel’s coworker’s wives are endearing, as is her search for a meaningful way to pass the time while Neel cavorts with his white mistress. As you would expect, Neel eventually learns to value Leila, but for the reader this change comes too late. I just hated him so much by the end of the book that I couldn’t be happy for Leila that he was finally reforming his tomcat ways.

I was interested in the ways in which A Good Indian Wife echoes one of the standard plots long seen in traditional regency romances: The bluestocking spinster, considered “on the shelf” by her family, submits to an arranged marriage with a rake. Eventually her intelligence, quiet beauty, and inner strength help him see the errors of his ways and he renounces his promiscuity to swear undying love for his wife. Was this a conscious choice on the author’s part? How could it not be? I wonder why she did this?

(Book 19, 2012)

The Paris Wife by Paula McLain

In the Woody Allen movie Midnight in Paris, Ernest Hemingway talks in clichés as he tosses his lovely hair out of his eyes. In The Paris Wife Hemingway also speaks in clichés, but whereas in the movie you know it’s all a joke, in the book it’s supposed to be serious dialogue. The Paris Wife and Midnight in Paris have a lot in common; both describe Hemingway and his circle in Paris in the 1920’s through the eyes of outsiders. In the movie, the outsider is the time travelling writer Gil. In the book, it’s Hemingway’s first wife Hadley Richardson.

Hadley Richardson was Hemingway’s starter wife and they divorced after seven years of marriage and one child. Hadley was frumpy and domestic and she married Hemingway when she almost 30 and he was only 21. They seem mismatched from the start though you do get the sense that Hemingway, fresh from WWI, needed nurturing and Hadley was a nurturer. The book covers Ernest and Hadley’s years together and ends when he leaves Hadley for wife #2 (with a short epilogue that tells us that Hadley later found happiness with a man who was far more reliable than Ernest). Even though this is a novel it apparently sticks closely to the facts and uses characters’ real names.

It’s the atmosphere that makes this book fun to read, in the same way that Midnight in Paris was fun to watch even though the premise was just dumb. I pictured all the characters in the book as they looked in the movie. Thus in my head Gertrude Stein looked like Kathy Bates, and the Fitzgeralds looked like those two lovely actors whose picture I’ve posted on my Pinterest board. Unfortunately there wasn’t complete overlap and the movie never shows Ernest with Hadley. Nevertheless I pictured her looking like Mariel Hemingway, whose real-life grandmother was Hadley Richardson.

(Book 32, 2011)

Ape House by Sara Gruen

A lot of people liked Sara Gruen’s last book, Water for Elephants, but I didn’t have much success with it. I did better with Ape House and enjoyed it for the most part, though I do have a few quibbles.

Gruen knows how to move a story along at a nice pace but she’s not a great writer. This story, of a family of bonobos and their researcher/caretaker Isabel, held my interest and kept me entertained, but only because I like bonobos. I didn’t like Isabel nearly as much, or really any of the human characters. They were predictable types from central casting – give me one serious female scientist who doesn’t know how beautiful she is, give me an intrepid male journalist in pursuit of a story, give me an evil corporate villain who will stop at nothing to make a buck, etc. etc. I also didn’t think much of the plot which was part bonobo documentary, part animal rights terrorist thriller, part romance, and part sitcom. Gruen just tries to do way too much with only mixed success.

But the bonobos! Gruen does seem to get this part right, at least as far as I can tell. She has clearly done a lot of research and her portrayal of the individual bonobos is measured and nuanced. I loved reading about their language development and their relationships with Isabel and among each other.

I would call this a good beach read, not a category I usually give much credence to. (Any good book is a good beach read, no?) But if you want something to keep you entertained and you aren’t feeling very picky, this might be just the thing.

(Book 17, 2011)

The Three Weissmanns of Westport by Cathleen Schine

This was the January selection at my book club. I enjoyed it, though not everyone else did. Elana thought there was too much “tell” and not enough “show” and I think Phyllis thought it was a bit lightweight, though she was too polite to say so. I, however, was happily entertained by it, though I don’t think either Elana or Phyllis are incorrect in their analyses.

The book is a retelling of Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen, transferred to Manhattan’s Upper West Side and Westport, Connecticut, in the present day. Schine has transformed nearly every plot point and character into a modern version, some more successfully than others. For example, Marianne, from S&S, is a delightfully free spirit, romantic and impetuous. Her 21st century analog, Miranda, is a spoiled drama queen and not nearly as appealing as Marianne. Fanny, from S&S, who schemes to cheat Marianne and her mother and sister out of their rightful portions, is recreated as Felicity, a more fully developed character in Schine’s version, and more sympathetic too (though I confess, it’s been a long time since I read S&S). It’s fun to play the match-up game, though the book certainly works even if you don’t know the origin of the plot and the characters (as a few book club members sheepishly confessed).

I find Schine to be an erratic writer. Years ago I read Alice in Bed, her first book, and really liked it, but I’ve had more trouble with her later offerings. Sometimes she is sloppy and takes the easy way out (telling and not showing, for example). But sometimes she is really ironic and sharp-witted and I like that. 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.

(Book 3, 2011)

The Tapestry of Love by Rosy Thornton

Oh Rosy, where is your sharp edge? What happened to your astute observations, your subtle wit, your understated skewering of all things pompous? I loved your last book, Hearts and Minds but this one kind of left me cold.

The Tapestry of Love is about a middle-aged divorced British woman who buys an old house in southern France, fixes it up, starts her own successful decorating business, meets the handsome (and single) neighbor, etc. etc. A predictable plot, yes, but I had hoped that Thornton’s ever-so-slightly cynical voice could render it fresh and different. But alas, no, it’s a conventional plot rendered conventionally; Thornton’s humor and zing are gone and she just offers up the requisite scenes: the one with the sheep, the one with the priest, the one at the town market. It’s like someone took all the spice out of her writing. I’m so disappointed.

If you want a comfort read, something to take your mind off your bratty kids and your boring job, this might do the trick. It’s certainly not badly written or offensive. It’s just that I was expecting a bowl of chili and I felt like I got Campbell’s cream of tomato soup instead.

(Book 57, 2010)

The Privileges by Jonathan Dee

I picked this randomly off the new book shelf at the library. The cover looked like a Vanity Fair magazine photo and for some reason I thought the story might be like the articles in that magazine: stylish but not shallow. Ah, the effect of a good cover!

The Privileges is about a power couple, Adam and Cynthia, and it follows them from their wedding day through Adam’s rise in the financial world, to their days as New York City philanthropists. The story wasn’t boring and Dee is a good writer. Even though it’s about rich people in New York, it’s not overloaded with superfluous descriptions of shopping and restaurants. There’s also a lot of relationship analysis, which I like.

What I didn’t like was the book’s amorality. Cynthia is cold and harsh, and she treats her family appallingly. Adam justifies his insider trading as some kind of gift from on high, like, because he’s smart enough to figure out a way to do it without being caught, that makes it okay. Dee refuses to judge his characters or provide any kind of divine retribution, and I found that unsatisfying. I really wished the whole thing WAS a Vanity Fair article. It could have used some of that magazine’s “take them down a notch” approach to the rich and famous.

(Book 48, 2010)

The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton

This was a good, sprawling read, something for a rainy weekend or a cottage vacation. It’s long and has lots of characters; also fairy tales, abandoned children, long sea voyages, literary puzzles, locked gardens, evil stepmothers, and mysterious inheritances. I really liked it, except for a few small complaints which I will get to in a minute.

Nell and her sisters have a happy childhood in early 20th century Australia. Only as an adult does she discover that her parents are not really her parents: she was discovered by the harbormaster at age 4, abandoned on a ship full of immigrants from England, and adopted by the harbormaster and his wife. Nell’s quest to discover her real identity (and the reason why she arrived in Australia alone) form the central theme of the book.

The author could have told Nell’s story, and the story of her quest linearly, but instead she opted for a much more complicated approach, and brings in two other central characters: the woman who may or may not be Nell’s mother (named Eliza), and Nell’s granddaughter Cassandra, who continues Nell’s quest after Nell’s death. Thus we really have three stories going on at three different points in time: early 20th century, the 1970’s and the 2000’s. On her web site, Kate Morton says that she “was plaiting the strands of Eliza, Nell and Cassandra's stories, so that each woman's journey could play its part in the solution of the book's mystery.” While I like her image of the three strands of a braid, what Morton sometimes ends up with is a big tangle where it’s hard to remember which woman is uncovering which secret. In the end I wasn’t sure whether Cassandra figured out the whole story or not, and this was a bit disappointing. On the other hand, I certainly had the whole story, which I guess is all that matters.

(Book 43, 2010)

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

This was better than I expected, given its ubercute title, odd narrative structure, and overhyped back story. Did you know that the Channel Islands (located between France and England) were occupied by the Germans during World War II? I did not, before reading this book. Guernsey, along with Jersey, the largest channel island, and several other smaller islands, were occupied from 1940 to 1945. The citizens (the islands are British Crown Dependencies) suffered greatly under the occupation; many were deported to slave labor camps on the European continent, and shortages of food and medicine led to near starvation by the end of the war, and death by disease for many people.

This book is clearly well researched and tells the stories of a disparate group of islanders and how they coped with the occupation. The story is fiction but undoubtedly is based on fact. In the book a group of islanders forms a literary society as a way to conquer the intense boredom and frustration brought on by lack of contact with the outside world, but which also functions as a cover for resistance activities.

Here’s what I didn’t like: the literary gimmick of telling the whole story through letters between Juliet, a London-based writer and the various members of the literary society. Juliet is silly and a lot of time is wasted while we read about her social life. The islanders vary in their story-telling ability. Some are men of simple words, but others are loquacious nut jobs. Juliet does mature as the story evolves, and the plot advances, but I kept feeling like I just wanted someone to tell me what happened rather than forcing me to fool around with all these letters. But I am notoriously intolerant of alternate forms of story telling, so maybe this approach won’t bother you as much as it did me.

(Book 6, 2010)

Best Friends Forever by Jennifer Weiner

Popular fiction is a genre that is distinct from literary fiction, though the boundaries are fluid. I like to think of these categories as either ends of a ruler, with most books falling somewhere between the two ends. A lot of the books I read fall right around the middle of the continuum between popular and literary fiction. For example I put authors like Kate Atkinson, Diane Johnson, and Elinor Lipman right smack in the middle. At the literary fiction end of things are some of my favorites like Mary Gordon and Margaret Atwood. And at the other, popular fiction end are people I read (and enjoy) such as Janet Evanovich. Note that these are my own categorizations; others may disagree.

What baffles me is when the book industry people decide in advance where along the continuum a book goes, and design the cover and the marketing plan accordingly. Such is the case with Best Friends Forever by Jennifer Weiner. The childish title and the frothy cover announce that this is Popular Fiction, capital P, capital F. Readers in search of serious ideas need not bother. Why pigeonhole a book like this? Why not a more ambiguous cover and title? Does the book sell more copies because of what it is, or what it’s not?

In fact, Best Friends Forever was good, and it reminded me a lot of Elinor Lipman’s books, which are often about sibling relationships and close friendships among women. BFF was a little more slapstick, a little less taut than Lipman’s typical work, but the jokes were funny, the characters were multilayered, and the plot (while not groundbreaking) had some originality. The dialogue was especially good. It’s supposed to be a Thelma and Louise kind of story though it’s much tamer than that. I think BFF would appeal to a lot of different readers but unfortunately many of the more serious ones wouldn’t be caught dead with it. Weiner’s publishers have done her a disservice; the chick lit fans will read it anyway because Weiner is already established in that subgenre, and by choosing this fashion magazine type of cover they are denying Weiner the possibility of bringing in new readers who usually hang out a little closer to the literary end of the book world.

The only reason I tried this book was because it was recommended to me by someone whose opinion I trust. If you trust my opinion, you might want to give this a whirl also.

(Book 39, 2009)

The Dressmaker by Elizabeth Birkelund Oberbeck

This book was so forgettable that I forgot to blog about it. It’s one of the books I bought at Powell’s in Portland, Oregon back in the beginning of August. The plot sounded like something I would like: a simple tailor in rural France is transformed into a leading couturier when he creates a fabulous wedding dress for a socialite. I like to read about French fashion, French food, and French family life so I thought this would be good. Instead it proved to be a very dull, plodding story of a boring guy with a boring life, who momentarily gets famous and hates it. It did offer a few good scenes of French village life, but there was almost no food at all! And it had a really weird out-of-left-field plot twist at the end that totally ticked me off.

I found it very odd that this book included a reading group guide. I was absolutely shocked that anyone thought it needed one. I looked at some of the questions and they were as trite as the book. Here is one (and I swear I am not making this up):

Nearly every time a character appears on the scene in the novel, their clothing is described. How does the author use clothing to suggest something about a character? What are some of the most memorable, most vividly described outfits in the book?

Whoa, deep. You can find much better writing about French life, French style, and French food on the Web. Here are a few places to begin:

Paris atelier
The Sartorialist
Chocolate and Zucchini
Pollyvousfrancais

(Book 31, 2009)

Fearless Fourteen by Janet Evanovich

This was an emergency purchase in the Minneapolis airport last week. I was changing planes there (en route to Portland) and realized too late that I had forgotten my book on the first plane. But hooray: A kiosk selling paperbacks was right across from my gate. I grabbed this, the only thing that looked even half way palatable. It’s nearly a four-hour flight from Minneapolis to Portland. Without a book I’d have been crawling out onto the wing before I got there.

And this book was surprisingly good. Evanovich usually sacrifices plot for laughs, but in this she balanced the two fairly well. It actually had a somewhat interesting mystery and the solution was plausible. I would call this a well modulated effort, and certainly good enough for an airplane read. You do need some familiarity with the setup and the characters in order to get the most out of it but I can’t imagine anyone would try this who hadn’t at least read a few of her previous numerical endeavors.

The book I lost was Ysabel by Guy Gavriel Kay. I wasn’t particularly enjoying it. I wonder if I lost it subconsciously on purpose? That’s still kind of dumb because I’m going to have to pay the library for it.

Portland was great. I had never been there before. I visited Powell’s, Mecca for all serious book lovers, and was suitably impressed. I was pretty restrained and only bought three books. I could have bought 20 but I didn’t have room in my suitcase. I did make sure I put all three in my carry-on bag for the return flight. I was taking no chances on a bookless flight home.

(Book 29, 2009)