I read this one ages ago, and the one-line summation that currently exists on my blog is this: “I didn’t particularly like this story. Perhaps I ought to re-read it sometime.”

I don’t remember my motivations behind that statement; I went through an Austen phase about five years back, where I read all of her works in quick succession over the winter. Perhaps I was just worn out: too much Austen too fast. Perhaps I was put off by the Gothic novel parody; I hadn’t (and still haven’t) read one of them, so I couldn’t appreciate the joke inherent in Northanger Abbey‘s plot.

Whatever the reason, I’ve been staunchly in the camp that mocks this book, calling it boring and insipid, and not nearly as brilliant as her other works.

I’m here to eat some crow and admit that I was wrong: I like Northanger Abbey.

Why, you may ask? What changed my mind? I think a lot of my change of heart came about because I started this challenge with this one. I was dubious — starting with my least favorite Austen didn’t seem like a good way to begin things — but, being a dutiful reader (and one who is willing to stick with her plan), I decided just to go for it. I came to this book fresh — I haven’t read an Austen book in a long time — and decided to give up my prejudices. The other thing that helped, however, was a very informative and interesting introduction by Claudia L. Johnson. In it, she explains the origins of Northanger Abbey (including Austen’s irritation at the manuscript being bought in 1803, but never published) as well as the jokes inherent in the novel. Because I read the introduction, I was able to more fully enjoy the novel.

And I did enjoy it. I don’t think that it’ll be my favorite Austen novel, but it is a charming little book, a quintessential Austen novel. There’s Catherine, the silly girl, completely oblivious to society around her. Isabella, her “beloved” friend, is the social climber, exchanging both Catherine’s friendship and Catherine’s brother’s honest affections for something more lavish. Eleanor is the perfect, true, honest friend. Henry is charming in his role as the perfect Austen hero: knowledgeable, but not overbearing, falling in love with Catherine for her imperfections rather than in spite of them. The “bad” elements are there, too: there’s John the boor, who went so far as to “kidnap” Catherine for an afternoon, and then became infuriated that she doesn’t return his affections. And General Tilney in the role of the overbearing, disapproving parent who attempts to keep the lovers from happiness. Still, it wouldn’t be an Austen novel without the happy ending, though in this case, it’s incredibly, almost unbelievably, contrived. Maybe it’s more accurate to call this Austen-lite. She became a better writer, delving more deeply into characters and motivations and relationships as she went on, which is why her later books are the ones that are truly the classics. Still, this one is worth digging out and reading every once in a while, if only for the last line:

To begin perfect happiness at the respective ages of twenty-six and eighteen, is to do pretty well; and professing myself moreover convinced, that the General’s unjust interference, so far from being really injurious to their felicity, was perhaps rather conducive to it, by improving their knowledge of each other, and adding strength to their attachment, I leave it to be settled by whomsoever it may concern, whether the tendency of this work be altogether to recommend the parental tyranny, or reward filial disobedience.

Hear that?

It’s the sound of me surfacing, exhaling, sighing with relief now that I’m finished with George Orwell’s classic distopian novel (the word on the back of our copy is “negative utopia”, but then it was also published — and bought by Hubby — in 1984). It went down like bad medicine; combined with my usual January blues, I was thrust into a funk that was only abated by liberal dosages of 30 Rock.

Now that it’s done, I can look at it at least partially objectively. It is a classic, but a very dated one. It’s very blatantly, obviously a product of World War II.

Let me sum up for those who haven’t read it (so you don’t have to): Winston Smith, 39 years old, is a Party member in Oceania. He works in the Ministry of Truth (the “propaganda” ministry — the ministry names were funny, in a morbid way: Truth is propaganda; Peace is war; Love is the police; Plenty is economic affairs), as a recorder of some sort. He spends his days altering history, making minor corrections in the records of the past whenever someone disappears, or the economic realities come out differently than predicted, or they change with whom they are at war. He is unhappy; partially because he leads an unhappy life, but partially, also, because he questions this history-making. He remembers that things used to be different; he remembers his childhood. And so, he begins rebelling in small ways. He gets a diary, and writes in it. He takes a lover, Julia (Party members aren’t supposed to have sex). And, after what could be weeks or months, they get caught. Winston is tortured, beaten down, electrocuted, re-programmed and sent back into the world.

There’s this one point where O’Brien, the Party member responsible for Winston’s re-programming, goes on about the faults of previous totalitarian regimes: they created martyrs. They killed their enemies, sure after torturing them or humiliating them, but they killed them nonetheless. “Above all,” he tells Winston, “we do not allow the dead to rise up against us. You must stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston. Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out of the stream of history.”

Chilling, isn’t it. It’s a dated book, as a mentioned before, and not just because the technology is dated. It’s more than that: we’ve moved past the ideas in the book as a society. I really don’t think this book works as a “warning” any more.

It’s not that there isn’t totalitarian regimes anymore. There is. (I was shocked at how well Orwell depicted Mao and the Cultural Revolution, before it happened. Eerie.) But we’re in a much more global society, a much more capitalistic one (for good or bad). There’s authoritarian countries — China, still, Cuba and Russia under Putin — but they’re not the super-scary places that Orwell was writing about. Saddam Hussein is gone. The only one left, that would fit this book’s description is North Korea. It’s scary, it’s depressing, it’s evil… and yet it’s not the way the world is going. There’s too much information flowing — take the internet — too much capital, there will never be a world like the one Orwell imagined.

But as a political novel, a look at what could-have-been, it it could have been compelling (though depressing) book. Yet, I wasn’t compelled. I was repulsed. Physically sickened. Depressed. It took some talking to Hubby, but I finally hit upon it: Orwell has no hope. There is no way out in this book. There is no hope for a brighter future. This is the way things will be. Accept it, love it, or become run over by it. And I couldn’t. I couldn’t take it.

And so, I suffered through (I should have given up, but I did so want to be part of the discussion, and I can’t do that if I go in and say “I didn’t finish the book.” There’s also the very large chance that most of the other women who come will have not read the book, so somebody had to.), very very grateful for the world we live in today.

I really wanted to like this one. I liked Jane Eyre quite a bit and I had high hopes for Charlotte Brontë’s last novel.

I liked it at first — though I’m a bit disappointed with the blurb on the back (there’s a post — what makes a good jacket/back blurb); I didn’t get the sense that Lucy had a “unhappy past” that she was “in flight” from. I enjoyed the detail fo Lucy’s childhood, the relationship between Graham and Polly, and even Lucy’s job with Miss Marchmont. But once she gets to Villette, things slow way down.

I managed to stay interested through volume 2. I thought the whole Dr. John drama was fun. Especially the bit when Lucy realizes who he his (or rather, the bit when she lets us, as readers, know who he is). But as the book wore on, I began to care less and less about Lucy and her life. It took a l-o-n-g time to get to the main point of the book — at least according to the back blurb again: her relationship with fellow teacher M. Paul and Madame Beck’s attempts to keep them apart. Honestly, by the time I got around to their relationship I was fed up. Fed up with the oh-so-helpful endnotes (great for translating the French, but kind of annoying otherwise), fed up with M. Paul and his annoying attempts to control Lucy, fed up with the excesses of Victorian literature.

So, I read the last chapter, discovered that M. Paul left Lucy and possibly died in a shipwreck, and called it quits.

Maybe I’m just not meant to read so much Brontë. A little goes a long way in this case.

After all the hemming and hawing and picking not very good books for the Armchair Traveler Challenge, I think I finally found a winner in Pomegranate Soup, by Marsha Mehran. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

It’s hard to describe what this book is about. It’s a food book, complete with the recipes for the delectable dishes that Marjan — the oldest sister – cooks up for the town of Ballinacroagh, County Mayo, Irleand, where the Aminpour sisters have ended up. It’s one part travel book — lush descriptions of both Irleand and Iran, as we slowly get the sisters’ back story. It’s magical realism; Marjan’s cooking changes lives, Layla’s (the youngest sister) sent of cinnamon and rosewater inspires lust in younger men and remembrances in older ones. The only sister who didn’t have a healthy dose of the magical was Bahar (the middle sister); perhaps it’s because of her past — it was too brutal and too sad (and the reason that the sisters are in Ireland) for it to be magical.

It wasn’t a depressing book, even though it touched on heavy themes: domestic abuse, the Iranian Revolution, greed, gossip, racisim… It was all there, but done in such an engaging way that the book never seemed depressing or difficult. I loved the characters in this book — from the sisters, to Estelle Delmonico (the landlady of the cafe’s space), to Malachy (Layla’s love interest) to many of the other townspeople. Like the store owner who believes in fairies and leprechauns. Or the hair stylist who used to be an actress. Or the grumpy woman stuck in her house so she spend the day spying on everyone. Or even the town “bad guy”, the bully Thomas McGuire. Sure, he was a jerk, but he was a very well-written one.

Now if I can just find two other books that I enjoyed just as much as this one.

I know I haven’t really posted in nearly a week, but when you’re given a 645-page book that you’re supposed to read by the 15th, blogging just kind of falls by the wayside. After a while, though, it was no longer an obligation that kept me away, but a real desire to finish this book… a desire to know, to experience, and to feel what this book had to offer.

I just finished it — it’s by David James Duncan, by the way — and I’m flabbergasted (sorry, the book’s language is rubbing off on me) as to what to say about it. Hubby asked yesterday if I was enjoying it. “Yes,” I replied. “Very much so.” What’s it about? Well… that’s the problem. See… it’s about a family, the Chances, and their lives, their experiences, their joys, their heartbreaks, their mistakes, their reconciliations… there really isn’t much of a “plot” or a “storyline”, but the story telling is so wonderful that I never noticed. The narrator is Kincade, the youngest of the Chance brothers (though there are twin sisters younger than him), and it’s the observations, wit, soul, and love that Duncan puts in this character that pulls the lives of these people from the ordinary and mundane to the spectacular and transcendent.

At times I laughed — howled, to use bookspeak again — so hard that I figured this had to be the funniest book I’d read in a long time.

Case in point: made up “scriptures” spouting out of the mouth of the brothers.

Deuteronomy three, sixteen: “And they who pinroll the dough shall be airplaned. Verily, unto illness shall they be flown about the yard. Unto airsickness, yea, and unto every other type of disaster shall they be propellered. And their poor mama shall watch though it cleaveth her heart in twain to do so!”

But not two pages later, Duncan had me musing over his observations of people and religion. Here’s one from the middle of the book.

Everett stood up and started pacing. “What I was feeling, Winnie,” he said, “was that maybe the reason prayers never get answered is that everybody prays the wrong way, and for the wrong things. People ask God for good things all the time, and never offer anything in return. But if God exists, if He really made the world and is all-powerful and all-wise and all that, then I figure He made all of the world, including the bad stuff. So if He ‘saw that it was good’, He meant just that. From His point of view, bad stuff must somehow be ‘good,’ or at least must serve some sort of divine purpose. I was trying to give God the benefit of the doubt, see? And look where it got me!”

And a half-chapter after that, I was crying.

Would I recommend this? In a heartbeat. But not to everyone. See, the one drawback, the one that will keep people like many in my in-person book group from enjoying this wonder, is the language. It’s, well, extensive and colorful. But, I suppose, when you write a book about baseball, milling towns and the Vietnam War, extensive and colorful language is going to be a part of that book. It didn’t bother me. And if you can get past that, by all means, I would whole-heartedly recommend this book.

If not, well, you’re life won’t be worse because of it. But you are missing one heckuva book.

It’s my own fault that this is even here. You see, after I read Letters from Pemberly, which I kind of liked, I recommended it to Mme. 76 (remember her?) because I knew she would LOVE it. And I was right. A couple days after I lent my copy to her, she called gushing about how wonderful it was and did I know if there was more? Well, I had just happened to have been in Borders, and just happened to have seen that there was a sequel out, and I just happened to mention it to Mme. 76, who rushed out and bought herself a copy.

Oy! (I never use that expression, but it fits today.) I’m SO totally… Grrr. Let me explain.

Last night, Hubby took the older girls on a campout, leaving me home with Baby (well, Toddler) K. We had fun, watched Dora (she loves Dora), ate, played, and I got her to bed around 8:30. I had started The Traveler’s Gift, by Andy Andrews (poor, unfortunate man. What were his parents thinking?), earlier that evening (during Dora), and realized it was an easy read. I figured I’d finish it before popping in my movie, which a friend said I was sure to love: The Inheritance.

Yes. That Inheritance. I have to say, though, I liked the movie better than the book. The screenwriters took the disaster that was published and turned it into… a cheesy, sappy, maudlin movie. But I did like it better. Just not enough. It didn’t help that the acting was terrible: Merideth Baxter and Thomas Gibson were just showing up for the money. And no one else could act. They had to dress Ida in low-cut costumes so we could tell she was the “bad girl”. At one point — supposedly the climax — I laughed. Um. I don’t think that was the reaction they were looking for. The one thing I did like was that they got rid of the Insufferable Older Brother, and brought back the Father Figure. I liked him; he was genuinely funny (and I think he was meant to be). They killed him off near the end, though. By the time I was finished I was sick of the whole lot. (It didn’t help that they had those notes — what do you call them? — at the end where you get to find out what happened to all the characters. Ida ended up in a mental institution. Serves her right for being a desperate, snitty wench. At least I guess that’s what we’re suppose to think.)

And the book…. let’s just say it’s not been a good month for my in-person book group. David Ponder is 46 years old, with a wife and daughter, who has lost his job. Hit rock bottom (which really isn’t all that rock bottom if you think about it): credit cards maxed, behind on mortgage, daughter sick (with tonsillitis of all things. I figured “daughter sick” would mean leukemia or something important). He’s worthless. He’s failed. He’s going to kill himself. But, no. He gets a second chance: he gets to travel throughout history learning life lessons from dead white guys. (Oh, except he meets Anne Frank, so it doesn’t quite work out.) The back of the book says “The Traveler’s Gift effectively combines self-help with fiction.” Yes. Beware books that effectively combine self-help with fiction. They’re lame.

As a self-help book, this may have been okay. David does learn some good lessons (I’m going to give them to you so you don’t have to read the book, and you still get what you need to change your life. Okay?): I am responsible for my past and future; I will seek wisdom and be a servant to others; I am a person of action; I have a decided heart; I will choose to be happy; I will greet the day with a forgiving spirit; I will persist without exception. See? Not bad lessons. But the situations he receives them in are completely overdone. He meets (in order): Truman, King Solomon, Joshua Chamberlin (who is really cool, but you shouldn’t learn about him from this book!), Columbus, Anne Frank, Lincoln and Angel Gabriel. They lecture a believably disbelieving David on what made their lives great. It wasn’t bad…. but it wasn’t great. It was when he got to Gabriel that I really lost patience with the thing. Gabriel says that David is the last person to take this “trip” (others included George Washington and Martin Luther King, Jr.) and that is was up to David to change the world. Oh. Okay. Then, as an added bonus, David gets to see his future where he does change the world by becoming… wait for it…

A motivational speaker. At this point, I threw the book across the room. I’ll take my self-help from legitimate sources, thank you. Bleh.

(Now to go to book group and face people who actually liked these books. And express my displeasure without sounding snobby. Any suggestions?)