Get to Work: A Manifesto for the Women of the World (Linda Hirshman)

Genre: Nonfiction
Year Published: 2006

Get to Work is the kind of book that shakes the world, or at least the country, and makes believers in Hirshman's thesis hope that we can actually make radical change in this day and age (while critics hope things just settle back down). Hirshman's idea: that privileged, educated women are doing a disservice to themselves, their families, and their fellow countrywomen by dropping out of the workforce to have children.

Hirshman's critics far outnumber her supporters, and their arguments run along many different lines, the most strident being 1) "you shouldn't tell women how to live"; and 2) "women should be homemakers." If you find yourself nodding your head, dear reader, at either of these statements, you will hate this book, unless you are one of those rare souls whose openmindedness knows no bounds. Hirshman doesn't spend much time trying to convert her opposition; she just states her facts and opinions and leaves us, the readers, to either grab hold of them or reject them in her wake.

This is probably not the place to throw my lot in with Hirshman (though I'd do it in a heartbeat), but I will say that when I brought this book to work with me to read on my lunchbreak (it's very short; it can be finished comfortably in one day), one of my coworkers with whom I'm very close asked me what it was about. She's an immigrant to this country who started a degree at a prestigious university but was forced to leave school when she found she couldn't work enough hours to keep up with the tuition payments. That was twenty years ago; she's never managed to earn her Bachelor's.

When I told her what the book's about, she expressed anger and frustration that anyone who had the chance to get a great degree would give it all up to stay home for the rest of their lives. She's having her first child this fall, but she's determined to keep working after her baby girl is born, and then begin the classes that will enable her to finish her degree. I'm hoping with all my heart that she succeeds. In the meantime, she's borrowed my copy of Get to Work. Thus I can say with complete honesty that I have personally seen this book resonate, and not just with my white, privileged agemates.

Recommended? It's bitchy, preachy, and . . . brilliant. Only you know whether you can handle it.

Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami)

Genre: Foreign fiction
Year Published: 2002

Here are some of the things you will encounter in Kafka on the Shore: a malevolent spirit that takes the form of imaginary corporate spokesmen (e.g. Colonel Sanders), an Oedipal prophecy, a flute made out of the souls of cats, a magical town without memories, a murder committed via astral projection, and the nicest old man in the world.

It's a weird book. I'm not above tarring an entire nation with one brush, so let me say that it's a weird book in the tradition of Japan's often weird pop culture phenomena. That having been said, it's not weird for weirdness' sake, and there's much more to the book than its various oddities.

In short, the story is executed by telling alternate chapters from two points of view: the odd chapters are told in first person by Kafka Tamura, a young runaway who is escaping his father's cruelty. The even chapters are in the third person; they follow the adventures of an elderly man named Nakata who has only "half a shadow" due to a terrible incident during WWII. Over the course of the book, they both become entangled in a mystery involving an "entrance stone," a pop song, and a bereaved librarian, and each has his part to play in solving it.

Kafka is a good book, and it certainly kept me interested, but I have to admit that there were large swaths of plot that left me slightly baffled. Apparently I'm not alone in that feeling, either. Despite my lack of understanding, though, I'm glad I read it, if for no other reason than the window it provides into Japanese culture.

Recommended? Depends on whether you're the kind of person who's all right with open-ended books. If you are, then go for it.

Rise and Shine (Anna Quindlen)

Genre: Fiction
Year Published: 2006

For my money, Anna Quindlen is one of the best columnists alive. Her essay "Life Begins at Conversation" is one of the finest popular pieces ever written on abortion. So we know the woman can write. The question about Rise and Shine is not whether Quindlen can write, but whether she can do the unseen work necessary for fiction. After reading it, I'm not convinced she can.

Rise and Shine is narrated by Bridget Fitzmaurice, a 43-year old New Yorker whose sister Megan is the most famous woman on television. When Megan's life starts falling apart, Bridget has to deal with her own problems and shoulder the burdens that Megan has left behind. The opposing-sisters gambit -- they're alike, but different! -- is not necessarily what I would expect from a writer of Quindlen's caliber, but I gave her the benefit of the doubt up until the very end, when I felt vaguely dissatisfied by what I'd just read.

I'm trying to decide what, in the end, is my problem with Rise and Shine. Partly it's the arc of the plot, which feels altogether too linear and unsurprising. Partly it's the ridiculous "insights" about New York and each other's personalities that the characters are constantly spouting. And partly it's that the book isn't weighty enough to justify its lack of fun. (It is funny in parts, but never fun.)

Recommended? Nah. If I pick something else up of hers, it'll be nonfiction.

The Magician's Assistant (Ann Patchett)

Genre: Literary fiction
Year Published: 1997

Of the books I have loved in my life, Bel Canto by Ann Patchett stands out as one of the most mature and beautiful. For those of you who haven't read it, I won't spoil it -- I urge you to go pick up a copy and see for yourselves.

So naturally I began The Magician's Assistant with high hopes, but (perhaps inevitably) these hopes were dashed. The Magician's Assistant is not in the same universe as Bel Canto. You'll forgive me for making the obvious comparison, but if the latter is opera, the former is musical theater.

But let me for a moment examine the book on its own merits. Certainly I enjoyed The Magician's Assistant, but I found it to be too generic and predictable to really recommend it to you all, dear readers. And you must take me seriously when I call a book predictable, because I'm generally terrible at working out how things are going to end up. Yet I saw the arc of this as clearly as a contrail on a clear day.

The plot is simple: Sabine, the eponymous assistant, is the recent widow of Parsifal, a gay, HIV-positive magician who married her so that she would be taken care of after his death. Sabine had thought Parsifal had no family, but he did, and her interactions with them form the bulk of the novel. Self-discovery (often in the form of too-rational dreams) ensues.

I hate to bring up Bel Canto again, but that novel felt like a book that no one else could write, it was that original and heartbreaking. The Magician's Assistant felt like a book you could pull off the shelf and see any American woman's name on the cover. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it was just like every other middlebrow, female-authored book aimed at women from coast to coast. I prefer my reading to be a little quirkier, a little less marketable.

Recommended? You can pass it up.

The Man Who Loved Only Numbers (Paul Hoffman)

Genre: Biography (mathematical)
Year Published: 1998

While I was walking to the train station yesterday, having just finished this book, I tried to think of a historical figure to compare Paul Erdős with, so that non-mathematicians could appreciate the enormity of his legacy. The best I could come up with was an unholy cross of Buddha and Bach: Buddha for his itinerant, indigent lifestyle and complete generosity; Bach for his highly prolific genius. (Now try to imagine Buddha with Bach's crazy white wig. Doesn't the imagery alone make it worth it?)

With that bizarre hybrid in mind, I admit it cannot be easy to begin to contemplate how to write a fitting biography of Erdős. There are probably a dozen directions in which an author could go. As much as I enjoyed The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, it never quite achieved whatever lofty ideal was in the back of my mind. Apparently the book grew out of a biographical story that Hoffman wrote for The Atlantic, and it shows: it retains the jumpy, floating structure of a typical high-class magazine piece instead of assuming the more linear pace of a typical work of nonfiction. Even more tellingly, we as readers are never made to think too hard in a mathematical sense: never are we given even a sketchy outline of one of Erdős's thousands of proofs, nor do we learn much more about number theory (Erdős's field) than the definition of prime numbers.

Having said all this, I'd like to reiterate that I did enjoy this book very much -- I barely put it down once I'd begun it. I simply wish that it had achieved more. This volume is a mere glimpse into the life of one of the most intriguing mathematicians to ever live (and that is saying a lot!) If someone could marry the very good, anecdote-heavy legwork that Hoffman has done with a bit more serious biographical information and a deeper insight into Erdős's mathematics, we'd have the makings of a first-rate biography. As it stands now, it feels somehow incomplete . . . part book and part fog.

Recommended? Only if you are a mathematician, or particularly fond of same.

I Was Amelia Earhart (Jane Mendelsohn)

Genre: Literary fiction
Year Published: 1996

It's been about a week now since I finished I Was Amelia Earhart, and I still don't know what to make of it. In short, it is the imagined autobiography of the aviator, taking place mainly after her plane disappears, though with flashbacks to the time beforehand. Mendelsohn's prose is atmospheric and dreamlike, though her imagery is as vivid as can be.

I could tell without Googling Mendelsohn that she was a poet long before she was a fictioneer: her constructions, habits, and tics all broadcast her poetic background. The first hurdle you have to clear to enjoy Amelia Earhart is that Mendelsohn's work has all the shortcomings (as well as the beauty) of lyric poetry -- that is, the prose is a little too breathy and saturated in wonder and revelation.

The second hurdle, which for me was the nigh insurmountable one, is that Mendelsohn constantly toes the line between fantasy and reality. Not difficult, you might think, in an imagined autobiography, but I'm talking about internal consistency. Are Earhart's post-crash experiences all an elaborate, last-minute fever dream as she drowns? Are they a form of afterlife? Or are we meant to take them more literally? Mendelsohn never says, and though perhaps I shouldn't resent this, I do. Ambiguity isn't necessarily an evil, but it is at least enormously frustrating here.

Recommended? Thumb through it at your local library; you'll be able to tell pretty quickly if you're going to be able to stomach Mendelsohn's prose. If you can, then it's a quick, intriguing read -- though not, on the whole, a satisfying one.

In the Company of Cheerful Ladies (Alexander McCall Smith)

Genre: Fiction
Year Published: 2004

If you haven't yet discovered the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, you're missing something special. In the Company of Cheerful Ladies is the sixth book in the series, so I won't speak to specific plot points that would ruin earlier books.

Cheerful Ladies is mostly about second chances, and as such it's hopeful, and rarely troubling. To be honest, it isn't my favorite in this wonderful series -- I think that would be Morality for Beautiful Girls, though that one's predecessor and successor are also exquisite -- but it's certainly of the same consistently high quality we've come to expect from McCall Smith. If everything works itself out a little too smoothly, we can't blame McCall Smith for wanting to keep the peace in this little piece of Botswana he's created in his readers' imaginations.

Recommended? I doubt you'll be able to resist it if you've made it this far in the series! (I don't recommend reading these books out of sequence.)

The Code Book (Simon Singh)

Genre: Nonfiction
Year Published: 1999

Some people's blood races when they read stories about war. These are the people who keep a Michael Shaara book by their bedside, who participate in reenactments, who spend their Friday nights playing Risk.

But there's another side of war, one filled with warriors who don't wield guns or crouch in trenches. Their purview is communication, both protecting their government's messages and finding out what their enemies are saying. They are cryptologists, and their story is the largely unwritten side of military history. And for me, as a mathematician, that's what makes my pulse speed up, to read about those breakthroughs, especially as they so often happened as countries clashed on the battlefield.

I was actually surprised by the visceral reaction I had as I was swept up in the various races to create and break ciphers, but perhaps I shouldn't have been. No one does pop science better than Simon Singh (between this and Fermat's Enigma, he is, as far as I'm concerned, to math lit as Ina Garten is to cookbooks). I could say a thousand wonderful things about him, but the highest praise I can give him is that he is the least lazy writer I can think of. He cuts no corners; he does enormous amounts of research, including interviews with all the relevant living people; and he always ensures that difficult concepts are presented clearly, in multiple ways.

Because of his deep commitment to his readers, the average reader should be able to understand all the concepts in this book with no trouble. The final chapter, which deals with quantum physics, may be a little beyond the comprehension of non-scientists, but everything else is perfectly lucid.

I only wish that Singh would write an updated, post-9/11 version of this book. The section on privacy versus national security is already terribly outdated.

Recommended? If you're going to read one "educational" book this year, it should be this one.

Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst (Dan Reingold)

Year Published: 2006
Genre: Memoir

Remember the '90s? Can you recall the soaring heights of the market? Do you have some inkling of what happened when the telecom bubble burst, or were you too young or poor to care?

I can say without shame that prior to reading this book, I had only the murkiest picture of the telecom bubble and its subsequent pop. The key players -- MCI WorldCom, Global Crossing, Qwest, AT&T, and all the others -- were either complete unknowns or near-blank slates. I lost money in the market in 2000/2001 like everyone else who had a toehold, but I was much too young to care about the particulars.

While Confessions certainly won't win any awards for its prose, it did blow the doors off my ignorance surrounding the telecom debacle. I became intimately familiar with people like Bernie Ebbers, Jack Grubman, and Sandy Weill. The entire idea of investment banking, which can seem like a vague, gold-plated industry, is laid out explicitly. And the conflict between research analysts and i-bankers, which lies at the heart of this story, is hashed out again and again. The author was a research analyst at a number of big banking firms, and he both witnessed and was subject to pressures from i-bankers to influence supposedly independent research.

Like so many nonfiction books, though, let the reader beware: the author has an ax to grind. If we're to believe him, he was one of the lone holdouts against an increasingly corrupt business model, and suffered for his nonconformity. It's not necessarily easy to believe that he could always keep his head above the waters of poor ethics, but as he's our narrator, we have to accept his point of view.

Recommended? If you're at all interested in that period of history as it pertains to the market, then yes. It's not a tough read.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street (Burton Malkiel)

Year Published: 2003 (8th ed.)
Genre: Nonfiction

The stock market is not really my thing. P/E ratios, IPOs, the EAFE index -- while those jumbles of letters may be some people's livelihoods, I've never understood them, nor made an effort to.

But at some point, I think most Americans with halfway decent incomes begin to realize that saving for retirement is a big deal, and that without some idea of how investing works, they stand to suffer a good deal of losses -- either flat-out monetary losses, or losses of opportunities to do better by themselves in the long run.

My faithful readers will note that I began to investigate the vagaries of the market with an earlier read, A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market. While I loved Paulos' book, it wasn't quite the primer on investing that I needed. Paulos had cited Random Walk in his volume, so I picked it up the last time I made a bookstore run.

Random Walk has become something of a classic in the investment field, though Malkiel's arguments are often rebutted by professional investors. Malkiel's premise is relatively simple: the stock market (encompassing both domestic equity and international equity) always gives excellent returns in the long run, but no one can determine if any one stock will give good returns. Therefore, in order to maximize your return while minimizing your risk, invest in a broad-based index fund (i.e. a fund that simply buys a large amount of stocks without buying and selling them all the time) and hold it until you need the money (i.e. for retirement or a home purchase). This is in contrast to advisers who advocate investigating specific stocks or heavily managed mutual funds -- in essence, attempting to "beat the market." Malkiel, citing several economic studies, shows that managed mutual funds mostly underperform unmanaged ones, and that there's no way of telling in advance who will be the few outperformers, so why gamble with your savings?

Now, if this were the entirety of the book, there'd be no reason for it to be upwards of 450 pages. However, Malkiel also runs through the major market "corrections" of the past four centuries (complete with snarky commentary), the tenets of the Efficient Market Hypothesis, the basic precepts of the two prevailing types of stock analysis, and, most helpfully, the types of investments that people should make, based on their age and risk tolerance. On all these counts, Malkiel does a superb job, combining hard-nosed economic analysis with funny, incisive (and often derisive) comments about everyone else in the business. See, for example:

Curiously, however, the broke technician is never apologetic. If you commit the social error of asking him why he is broke, he will tell you quite ingenuously that he made the all-too-human error of not believing his own charts. To my great embarrassment, I once choked conspicuously at the dinner table of a chartist friend of mine when he made such a comment. I have since made it a rule never to eat with a chartist. It's bad for digestion.

My only hesitation in recommending this book is the somewhat worrying fact that Malkiel is a member of the Vanguard Group, the group of leaders of the eponymous corporation that is best known for being the world's leader in the sale of -- you guessed it -- index funds, the very investment Malkiel recommends all people make. This is no way negates his advice (some may even see it as putting his money where his mouth is), but I wish he had been more forthcoming about it; he only reveals this affiliation about four-fifths of the way into the book.

Recommended? Yes: the lifecycle guide to investing alone is worth the cost of the book.

Selected Poems (Mark Strand)

Genre: Poetry
Year Published: 1979

Have I really been gone so long?? It didn't feel long to me at all. I apologize, dear readers. I won't say it won't happen again, but I'm in the middle of at least three books right now, so I'm bound to finish at least one soon.

In a wonderful YA book called Baby, the main character's grandmother explains to her granddaughter why she bothers to read poetry (in this case, William Carlos Williams) to a small child: "She doesn't need to understand, dear. She likes the way the words sound."

That is, in a nutshell, how I feel about Strand's poetry. Very little of what he says makes any sense to me. His poetry is almost never narrative, and though it's often in the first or second person, he relies mainly on images of inanimate objects to carry his poetry.

And in that particular arena, he succeeds. His poetry is among the most atmospheric (often creepily so) that I've ever read. Consider:

The Sleep

There is the sleep of my tongue
speaking a language I can never remember --
words that enter the sleep of words
once they are spoken.

There is the sleep of one moment
inside the next, lengthening the night,
and the sleep of the window
turning the tall sleep of trees into glass.

The sleep of novels as they are read is soundless
like the sleep of dresses on the warm bodies of women.
And the sleep of thunder gathering dust on sunny days
and the sleep of ashes long after.

The sleep of wind has been known to fill the sky.
The long sleep of air locked in the lungs of the dead.
The sleep of a room with someone inside it.
Ever the wooden sleep of the moon is possible.

And there is the sleep that demands I lie down
and be fitted to the dark that comes upon me
like another skin in which I shall never be found,
out of which I shall never appear.

How I feel about "The Sleep" is actually an excellent example of exactly how I feel about all of Strand's poetry: I appreciate it for its technical brilliance; I am mildly haunted by it for a moment; but in the long run, I'm not moved. In a very, very long book (long for poetry, i.e. over 150 pages), there were very few lines that jumped out at me for tucking away in my subconscious.

Strand's style, to be perfectly honest, can also get a bit tiresome. Lots of short declarative sentences with simplistic constructions, long stanzas, the same images used over and over (the moon, bones, night, shadows, and whiteness, to randomly name five).

If you want to read any of Strand, I'd suggest an earlier standalone work, not an anthology. (I liked the poems at the beginning of this book better than those toward the middle and end.) It may be more of a book to study than to enjoy.

Recommended? Totally a matter of taste.

Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy And Its Consequences (John Allen Paulos)

Genre: Nonfiction
Year Published: 1988

With A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market set firmly in my mind as one of the greatest nonfiction books I'd ever read, I set out to find more John Allen Paulos at the Penn bookstore. I knew Innumeracy was his break-out hit, so I snatched it up and began reading it that very day.

The bad news: it's not nearly as entertaining as Stock Market. The good news: it's probably a lot more important. The book is less fun because it's not as personal; it's a little more didactic and less rambling. But the fundamental idea behind the book is, in my mind, vital. As Paulos puts it:

At least part of the motivation for any book is anger, and this book is no exception. I'm distressed by a society which depends so completely on mathematics and science and yet seems so indifferent to the innumeracy and scientific illiteracy of so many of its citizens; with a military that spends more than one quarter of a trillion dollars every year on ever smarter weapons for every more poorly educated soldiers; and with the media, which invariably become obsessed with this hostage on an airliner, or that baby who has fallen into a well, and seem insufficiently passionate when it comes to addressing problems such as urban crime, environmental deterioration, or poverty.

Whew. Couldn't have put it better myself.

For anyone who has a degree in, say, mathematics, this book is not necessary to add to your shelf. But if you're one of this country's many mathphobes, the brilliant people who opted out of science and into English or sociology because the quantitative aspect of other disciplines was too scary to you, or the average people who barely passed the minimum required classes at your high school, this book is crucial. Paulos demystifies probability and statistics, subjects that arise at least every hour in most people's lives, and tries to gently lead innumerate people to the light.

Math is important, and it isn't going away. This book could help you to bridge the gap between confusion and comprehension, and that should be enough to make you want to read this.

Recommended? If you've ever uttered the sentences "I hate math" or "I'm so bad at math," you need to read this, yes.

Drums of Autumn (Diana Gabaldon)

Genre: Historical fiction (with a touch of fantasy)
Year Published: 1996

I have to say, unfortunately, that I enjoyed this installment in the Outlander series much less than its predecessors. It's similar to the first three books in most ways: same unbelievable length, same complex, adventure-heavy plot, same interesting, well-drawn characters.

Where Drums of Autumn stumbles, in my opinion, is on the plot that centers around Brianna Randall (whose provenance I won't explain here, in case others want to read the books but haven't gotten around to the first one yet). Other commentators have remarked that for a smart girl, she makes some dumb choices; I flatly refuse to entertain the argument that she should be blamed for the misfortunes that befall her.

I really hate, though, the particular plot arc that Gabaldon foists on Brianna. (Again, I won't be too specific for fear of spoilers.) I've seen it done in other books, but for a girl of her era, it just struck me as ridiculous. I don't like the whole "damsel in distress, waiting on her ass" gig. In fact, I hate it. Also, the probability . . . well. I won't go into details. I just didn't like her plot, and it dominated the latter half of the book, so the whole last 400 pages or so were pretty much unpleasant.

The thing about these books, though, is that you're too invested in the characters to quit. I have the next one, The Fiery Cross, out of the library, and I'll be beginning it shortly. I hope it's better than this one.

A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market (John Allen Paulos)

Genre: Nonfiction
Year Published: 2003

This is one of the most helpful books I've read in years. Paulos, a professor of mathematics at Philadelphia's own Temple University, gives his readers a broad rundown of the stock market, game theory, behavioral finance, and basic statistics. Although I am a mathematician by training, I knew next to nothing about the world of finance before starting this book, but I consider myself relatively well-informed now about the very basic structure of the market.

But -- and here's the great part -- this is the most enjoyable work of nonfiction I've read in years. Paulos is amazingly funny, and manages to cram in asides and jokes that take what could easily have been a primer and make it into a wonderful read instead. I found myself laughing out loud, something I rarely do while reading. (One quick example: "I thought news stories in November 2002 recounting New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's criticism of . . . analyst awards were a bit superfluous. Spitzer noted that the stock-picking performances of most of the winning analysts were, in fact, quite mediocre. Maybe Donald Trump will hold a press conference pointing out that the country's top gamblers don't do particularly well at roulette.")

Here's the catch (isn't there always one?): this is not a book for the mathphobes among us. If you hate the idea of being taught something about covariance or chaos theory, skip this book. But if you're intellectually curious and open-minded, and you have a thorough mathematical grounding (say, up to precalculus at least), don't miss out on this one.

Recommended? If you can stomach the math, then don't hesitate!

Secrets of Six-Figure Women (Barbara Stanny)

Genre: Nonfiction (self-help)
Year Published: 2002

As a rule, I don't read self-help books. I'm not against self-improvement by any means, but the idea that you could read a book and suddenly realize your self-worth, or find out how to snag a spouse, is pretty absurd to me. In general, I think the best way to learn about life is to live it.

But the title of Barbara Stanny's book grabbed my attention, and I found myself unable to leave the library without checking it out. The idea of an entire book about women who make what only men are supposed to make was fascinating to me.

Stanny's book doesn't qualify as social science, but if it did, it would be a snowball study; she identified some "six-figure women" and then asked them to help her identify others. Because she doesn't care what, exactly, the women do, her sample gives a refreshingly unconventional picture of wealthy women. So while most are financial, legal, or marketing gurus, a few women read tarot cards, and one is a matchmaker. And because they have to be earning this money through work, the book is happily free of wealthy women who sit on their butts and collect from a trust fund. Most of the women are from middle class or lower-middle class backgrounds, and it's intriguing to watch them grapple with making more than their parents ever did.

There are sections of the book that I would like to photocopy and distribute to all my female friends. In particular, when Stanny compares "underearners" (women who make less than they should, either by virtue of their education or their experience) to her six-figure women, I had to restrain myself from running to the copy machine. Here's an example:

Whether it's family messages, personal experience, or religious indoctrination, many underearners genuinely believe money is tainted, materialism is bad, and there's something virtuous about surviving on a shoestring. According to this line of reasoning, they are much better people for rejecting financial gain . . . . Like it or not, money affects virtually every area of your life. Lack of it leads to dependency and hardship. It can limit your access to health care and lifestyle choices. It can keep you in an unhappy marriage and an unsatisfying job. It perpetuates the cycle of poverty and debt, of discontent and chronic stress.

I really would like to send that message to every woman I know. (The cleverest among you may note that I've just done exactly that by quoting it.) Too many girls and women I've met are blasé about their earning potential and investment regime, because they believe that family money or a future husband's money will "save" them. To put it mildly, this is a bad strategy. We all like to think our future (or current!) marriage won't fail, but statistics indicate otherwise. And crises do happen, regardless of your position in life.

Anyway, proselytizing aside, Secrets of Six-Figure Women is at its best when it is addressing the daily concerns of regular American women in this fashion. Unfortunately, the rest of the book is, on the whole, flaccid and simplistic. Stanny relies heavily on quoting well-known figures in just about every area of culture (including, and I'm not kidding, T.S. Eliot, who, I'm fairly certain, had no idea of his words being taken in such a way) and on quasi-absurd statements about luck and "higher powers" and the universe just sort of stepping in to help those who've decided to become well-paid. Surveying a group of six-figure women and asking them if it really does work to rely partly on luck or the universe (and then pushing that strategy on average women) is like asking a group of clergy folk if they relied on God to help them choose their career. It's a biased sample by design, and to draw any meaningful conclusions about success in a larger sense is circular and misleading.

Recommended? She has a book called Prince Charming Isn't Coming that's all about financial self-reliance, and I suspect that would be a more worthwhile investment, so to speak. I'll try to get my hands on it: stay tuned.

A Foot in the Door: Networking Your Way into the Hidden Job Market (Katharine Hansen)

Genre: Nonfiction
Year Published: 2000

I have a good friend who has always managed to be that well-placed person, to know all the people in all the upper echelons of whatever organization you could think of. She's never been shy about suggesting to near-strangers that they exchange info; she'll be one of those people, I think, who ends up with an overflowing Rolodex, who can always pick up a phone and find out what's up.

I am decidedly not one of those people, but in my search for a satisfying, long-term job since college (still haven't gotten there yet), I've quickly learned how much personal relationships can grease the wheels in a job application process. In short: a blind C.V. and cover letter drop is about as helpful as standing at the bottom of a canyon and shouting up. Sometimes someone wanders by and you get lucky. Most times, not so much.

A Foot in the Door is an easy, practical guide both to creating your personal network and utilizing it when the time comes. It's simplistic to roll out the old adage, "It's not what you know; it's who you know," but there's more truth in that than most people would like to admit.

This book will give the average reader a lot of ideas about expanding their own network -- creative ones that may not have occurred to them -- and sample business letters and questions for informational interviews. It isn't full of annoying exercises or overblown testimonials. It's helpful without being overbearing. This should probably be required reading for anyone who thinks they may ever be on the lookout for a new job, i.e. nearly everyone.

Meanwhile, my only way of imitating my oh-so-connected friend is to learn these techniques by rote. I'll let you all know if they pay off in the long term.

Recommended? Yes!

The Year of Magical Thinking (Joan Didion)

Genre: Memoir
Year Published: 2006

What is there to say about The Year of Magical Thinking that hasn't been said a thousand times in the past year? It won the National Book Award; it's a bestseller; it was on everybody's Best of 2006 list. Yes, it is an astonishing, captivating, illuminating book. Yes, it's brilliant. Yes, it's devastating. Yes, yes, yes.

So what can I say that hasn't been written about? Well, what's interesting for me as a relatively young reader is that I have yet to really experience death. I type this with trepidation, for fear some avenging angel will swoop down to punish my arrogance, but . . . no one I've loved has ever died. So Magical Thinking for me was less an affirmation of feeling I've had than a glimpse into another country that I'll undoubtedly be forced to visit against my will in the future.

Not a wholly unfamiliar country, mind you: grief, as it applies to lost opportunities, lost friends, lost experiences, is a shadow of the grief of losing a loved one. We've all probably experienced the former; and indeed, I did find echoes of my own, smaller griefs in Didion's large, all-encompassing grief over losing John (her husband), like this passage, which rang very true to me:

All year I have been keeping time by last year's calendar: what were we doing on this day last year, where did we have dinner, is it the day a year ago we flew to Honolulu after Quintana's wedding, is it the day a year ago we flew back from Paris, is it the day. I realized today for the first time that my memory of this day a year ago is a memory that does not involve John. This day a year ago was December 31, 2003. John did not see this day a year ago. John was dead.

I was crossing Lexington Avenue when this occurred to me.

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.

I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead . . . .

In fact the apprehension that our life together will decreasingly be the center of my every day seemed today on Lexington Avenue so distinct a betrayal that I lost all sense of oncoming traffic.

The rest of the book is just as beautifully written. Of course it's beautifully written; it's Joan Didion. Compelling, too: I plowed through it in about twenty-four hours. At some point in the book I realized I was slowly coming to feel that I knew, at least a little, what this family (Didion and her husband John and their daughter) had truly been like, and that a scrap of her grief was dawning on me. I too wanted John not to be dead. I too wanted to hear what he would have said about a political piece she was writing. I too wanted him to be with Didion as she cared for their ill daughter.

We don't allow ourselves to think about the inevitable death of everyone we know and love, because it would make us crazy -- it would make us like Didion's narrative self in Magical Thinking. A book that not only permits us but forces us to think about those inevitabilities is at once necessary and terrifying.

Recommended? Yes, yes, yes.

Ararat (Louise Glück)

Genre: Poetry
Year Published: 1990

I cannot even tell you all how miserably disappointing this book was to me. I've read one other Glück book -- Vita Nova, which is one of my all-time favorite books of poetry. So I picked up Ararat expecting the same exquisitely refined turns of phrase and beautiful images.

But Ararat is a bitter, clumsy book that focuses on one topic -- her family -- with the singleminded focus of a therapy patient. There was not a scrap of enjoyment to be had from any of the poems. Depressing poetry can illuminate circumstances without being easy to read, but most of the pieces in Ararat read like lines cribbed from Glück's diary. She writes of her sister: "That means/she's going to feel deprived again." Of her mother and aunt: "It's how they were raised: you show respect by fighting./To let up insults the opponent." Of her father: "he showed/contempt for emotion." There is no maturity or art in her observations. It's a rotten read, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone.

Recommended? No. A thousand times no.

Voyager (Diana Gabaldon)

Genre: Historical fiction (with a touch of fantasy)
Year Published: 1994

Well, people, she's done it: Gabaldon has sucked me in entirely.

That's right: the Outlander series has completely engrossed me, and I will not rest until I've read all six books. Well, I mean, I'll rest. But I'll be all jittery until the next two titles make it (via interlibrary loan) to my local library.

Voyager succeeds in a way that Outlander and Dragonfly in Amber didn't -- couldn't, maybe -- because our protagonists have grown up, and the clichéd plot arc of a typical romantic novel (forced marriage, surprise love, blessed pregnancy) has to go out the window. Voyager is the first volume in this series that is really surprising to the reader, and it's this quality that elevates it above its predecessors.

Not that it doesn't have the same glaring flaws of the first two: purple prose, subplots that anyone with three-tenths of a brain could predict, disproportionate length. The biggest problem I had with it, though, was that Voyager has a serious case of Small World Syndrome. Surely you've encountered this in other books: protagonists whose adventurings span great distances inevitably run into the same people over and over again, or meet new people who are inextricably linked to people they already know. It's a cheap way of adding drama, and I wish Gabaldon would be a little more realistic about the chances of running into the very same guy who blah blah blah et cetera.

Yet for all its flaws, Voyager is a great read. Not a great book, mind you, but definitely a great read.

Recommended? It's the best fluff I've had in years.

Dragonfly in Amber (Diana Gabaldon)

Genre: Historical fiction (with a touch of fantasy)
Year Published: 1992

The first paragraph of the prologue of Dragonfly in Amber reads thus:

I woke three times in the dark predawn. First in sorrow, then in joy, and at the last, in solitude. The tears of a bone-deep loss woke me slowly, bathing my face like the comforting touch of a damp cloth in soothing hands. I turned my face to the wet pillow and sailed a salty river into the caverns of grief remembered, into the subterranean depths of sleep.

And if you think that prose is purple, you should read one of the multitude of sex scenes.

Then why read Dragonfly in Amber? Well, I have to give Gabaldon this: for all she natters on about destiny and love and honor, she also concocts some fascinating plots. As for myself, having read Outlander, I couldn't content myself with leaving the story where it ended; I didn't rush to get my hands on the next book, but the next time I made a run to the library, I picked up this one (as well as the next one . . . which I doubt I'll finish before its due date). Then, once I began it, I took it with me on the train to work and to lunch every day until I finished. As I mentioned in my Outlander post, Gabaldon is a compelling author above all else.

And whereas Outlander starts off rather slowly and only picks up momentum a couple hundred pages in, Dragonfly hits the ground running; I felt rather like I was being yanked along by the wrist on a cross-country race. The story is framed -- we begin and end with Claire as a woman of fiftyish in late Sixties Scotland, while the huge bulk of the middle is Claire at about thirty in the 1740s -- and this gives the reader an acute sense of just how far the story in the past will progress before dumping us back in the twentieth century. At 743 pages, though, the finish line seems like a long ways away . . . until you realize, all of a sudden, that you've reached it, and it's not a happy transition.

This is not to say that what lies at the end is unexpected. Both because of the inherent nature of the genre and because of the framing device, some of the subplots' resolutions are abundantly clear to the reader long, long before the pieces fall into place for our heroine. At first, I thought that Gabaldon was undercutting her own book by essentially telling us how things would turn out, but when I reached the end, I revised my opinion; knowing that Claire goes back to her own time lends the book a poignancy that outweighs the importance of the reader's foreknowledge.

And yes, the prose is occasionally purple. But it's in-keeping with the genre and plot, so don't be surprised if you become rather attached to her ornate turns of phrase.

Recommended? It's a long, long book. If you feel that your time is better spent reading real literature, I wouldn't hold it against you. But you'll have more fun reading this.

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (Grace Paley)

Genre: Short stories
Year Published: 1974

Having been raised by a boomer mother, I can safely say that the events of the "long Sixties" (1958 to 1974) informed just about every aspect of my upbringing. My mom was, as we'd say now, old school: she marched on the Pentagon, wore white lipstick, and broke the glass ceiling in her department at her public university. She bought me The Beatles: 1967-1970 for my eleventh birthday and deconstructed the gendered messages in Cinderella. So the long Sixties is an era that I feel I understand, at least as much as one can who did not live through it.

Yet within that little dependent clause lies my difficulty with Enormous Changes: I did not live through that era, and in much the same way that I need to read an annotated version of Shakespeare because of his period inflections and references, there is so much that Grace Paley writes on that I have no hope of understanding without help. Her work in this book is imbued with a huge sense of time and place -- New York City during the "cultural revolution" -- which certainly is in her favor as far as realism and weight go, but a young reader like me has next to no chance of grasping all her points.

Let me back up a moment and say that Grace Paley is one of the finest writers of the twentieth century. I've read Begin Again, the newest collection of her poetry, and though her style isn't really my thing, I can appreciate her brilliance. Similarly, while reading Enormous Changes, her writing abilities were never once in question. Take this tiny snippet from the story "Faith in a Tree":

Of course that is what Junior is upstate for: love that forced possession. At first his father laced him on his behind, cutting the exquisite design known to generations of daddies who labored at home before the rise of industrialism and group therapy. Then Mr. Finn remembered his childhood, that it was Adam's Fall not Junior that was responsible. Now the Finns never see a ten-speed Italian racer without family sighs for Junior, who is still not home as there were about 176 bikes he loved.

Her prose is sharp and lean and often hilarious or upsetting, or sometimes both at the same time. I can't off the top of my head think of another writer who has managed to squeeze so much into stories that are so short.

A little less than half of the stories contained herein concern Paley's most famous character, Faith Darwin, a woman who is featured in stories throughout Paley's career. I have to say that I enjoyed these stories least of all the stories in the collection. Out of all the stories in Enormous Changes, they rely most on the minutiae of life in the working-class areas of New York City during the long Sixties, and thus were the least accessible to me.

My favorites in the collection include "Wants," the title story, and "A Conversation with My Father," the first and last of which seem very autobiographical. Thinking about it as I write this, what I think I really want from Grace Paley is a memoir, which would give me both her astounding writing and a firm context for it all.

Recommended? If you're over forty, I say yes wholeheartedly. If you're younger, I say yes with some hesitation.

How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (Julia Alvarez)

Genre: Literary fiction
Year Published: 1991

There's a musical called The Last 5 Years that I love with all my heart and soul. It is less like a traditional musical and more like a song cycle, as nearly every song is a solo sung by one of two characters, and there is little dialogue. The premise of TL5Y is that the two characters, Jamie and Kathy, sing alternating songs about their relationship -- but while Jamie starts at the beginning and moves towards their eventual divorce, Kathy begins at the moment after Jamie has left her for the last time and moves backwards in time to the night of their first date. They meet in the middle for his proposal and their wedding.

It's an extremely effective device, particularly for Kathy's character, who seems so unreasonable and distraught at the beginning, and eventually becomes a hopeful, cheerful (if flawed) young woman. I've known relatively stoic people to be moved to tears by the last song in the show, in which Kathy is joyfully reeling from her first date with Jamie, while Jamie tells Kathy why he needs to divorce her.

What does this have to do with Julia Alvarez's first novel? Well, as you may have guessed, Alvarez employs a similar device in telling the story of the four García sisters: she begins in 1989 with the return of the third sister from the U.S.A. to her birth country of the Dominican Republic, and traces the sisters' lives back to 1956, when they all lived there, before they were forced to flee. This allows us to look at the girls' childhoods through the lens of foreknowledge, and lends a poignancy to the hopes and ideals of the girls, who, as they grow older, face the double hardships of being both female and immigrants during a turbulent period of American history.

Alvarez is an exquisite writer: her prose is immediate, compelling, and poetic. She writes in a blend of the past and present tenses, of first and third persons, so that she erases the distinctions of time and perspective. Her characters are eminently believable, as are the relationships between them. She is a superb novelist.

My chief complaint with the book is that the timeline seems heavily skewed toward the few years spent in the Dominican Republic, with little room left over for the decades the girls lived in the States. Two of the girls, we are told, suffer psychiatric breakdowns that require hospitalization, but we know next to nothing about the causes or outcomes of those stays. The eldest survives a bad marriage that we are told nothing about. While the stories set "on the Island" are vivid and telling, the storytelling seems almost to break down when they immigrate, and though the "girls" are in their thirties at the book's beginning, their paths through life seem nearly untraceable after college.

Recommended? Yes, but be prepared to want more. (Alvarez has published a companion volume that I may have to search for at the library.)

Blue Shoe (Anne Lamott)

Genre: Literary fiction
Year Published: 2002

Years ago, I used to read Anne Lamott's work on Salon.com, and while I found her writing both inspiring and comforting, I used to wonder about the white woman with dreadlocks whose ecumenical spiritualism seemed to reach its fingers into every corner of her odd little writing life.

I forgot about her, mostly, until I spotted a copy of her novel Blue Shoe at the local secondhand shop. Then I recalled how much I enjoyed her weird relationship with God and her expansive authorial style, so I bought the book and took it home with me.

Blue Shoe is only a novel in the sense that it is fictional and not too short or long. There isn't much of a narrative arc, though there is a lot of character development. It reads more like a novelization of three or four years' worth of a woman's diary than a traditional novel. The main character, from whose third-person point of view the novel is told, is Mattie Ryder, a divorced woman with two children who is barely able to make ends meet. The novel centers around the important relationships in her life, those with her best friends, her brother and mother, her children, and God.

The changes in those relationships comprise most of the book: Mattie struggles to parent her children alone, barely copes with an aging mother who is quickly spiraling downward, falls in love, and uncovers the truth about the life of her late father. The blue shoe of the title is something that Mattie finds in her father's old car and tries to place in her father's life. As she learns more about him, she is simultaneously horrified by the revelations and desperate to know more about a man she feels was almost a stranger to her. All the while, though, she is falling apart in a thousand other ways -- her children are beset with anxiety and anger, her mother doesn't want the help she needs, the man she loves is married to another woman -- and Mattie clings to her life by her fingernails.

Throughout it all, though, Mattie's spiritualism (which is, unsurprisingly, much like Lamott's) is her anchor. It is not rigid or demanding, but rather flexible, forgiving, and patient. Her spirituality does not overwhelm the book, or even form a major plot point. It is just a part of Mattie, like the fact that she is a size 12 or that she loves dogs. This was, to me, a point in the book's favor: so few authors seem willing to make their characters quietly religious that most novels are populated either with fanatics or blithe agnostics.

I cannot say that I enjoyed Blue Shoe; it is too emotionally difficult to enjoy. Lamott's prose is beautiful -- she can cobble together the most exquisite metaphors -- and her characterizations are astounding. Yet I can't see myself ever rereading this novel. Mattie's pain is too real, and the book is too close to life to offer any sort of resolution at its conclusion. Lamott seems to be fighting the idea that there are any easy answers or simple solutions in life -- true enough, certainly, but it makes for a tough read.

Recommended? It is a very good book, and it will make you look at the world a little differently. If you think you can swallow the requisite angst, take a stab at it.

Love Between Equals (Pepper Schwartz)

Genre: Nonfiction
Year Published: 1994

Dear readers, I apologize most profusely for my attenuated absence. For most of the past week I've been trying to get through a Mark Strand anthology, which did not go well. (It's not that I dislike his work -- quite the contrary -- but I find it very difficult to get through.) I was flailing to find something else that could grab my interest for the week, but when one of my close friends had a piece published on Salon that was tangentially related to peer marriage, I thought I would pick up Love Between Equals again and read it through.

I try not to review books here that I've read before, since I like to come to each read with a fresh take, but in this case I had one anyway, as I barely remembered anything about the book. Love Between Equals is the end result of a sociological study that Dr. Schwartz conducted regarding a certain kind of marriage, one she terms "peer marriage." (Unsurprisingly, I first read this as a requirement for a class in college.) Peer marriages are ones in which the traditional male-first hierarchy is toppled, and husband and wife have forged an equal partnership. In Schwartz's words:

They want a marriage that has intensity and partnership and does not create the distance between men and women that is inevitable between people of unequal status and power . . . . The common theme among these peer couples is the preservation of intimacy, the desire to be neither oppressor nor oppressed, the commitment to a relationship that creates a shared universe rather than parallel lives.

This work is interesting to me as a feminist, as a heterosexual woman who one day plans to marry, and as a friend of many heterosexual women who will soon be getting married. (Today's post actually coincides with my discovery that I will be assuming the mantle of bridesmaid for the wedding of my college roommate!) It's frustrating, as someone who cares about women's rights, to see the advances that are made every day in the public sphere (just looking at today's news, I see that China is increasing the number of female delegates in its parliament) and to observe that the private sphere remains largely unchanged: women still do most of the housework, most of the childrearing, and most of the emotional work, regardless of whether they work outside the home. (And, similarly, they are of course much less likely to work outside the home.) What's a feminist woman who someday wants to get married to do?

Well, in Schwartz's view, the idea of marriage and the idea of equal partnership are not mutually exclusive. She interviewed dozens of couples who claimed to have egalitarian marriages and tried to pin down exactly how they achieved those ends, and what the rewards and failings of this lifestyle were. Those interviews comprise what I think are the most intriguing and compelling sections of the book, where Schwartz's academic language (which is at a minimum, but not nonexistent) falls away to reveal the heartfelt words of the people living these peer marriages.

I enjoyed this book very much, because it is clear about its agenda (i.e. getting couples to think about egalitarianism as a way of life) but also honest about the various consequences of peer marriage. Additionally, unlike the raft of self-help books about marriage and gender relations, Love Between Equals is heavily researched by a Ph.D. in sociology and as such, is written at a highly intellectual level and supported by hard data.

Recommended? Absolutely. While you're at it, pick up a copy for any friends of yours who are engaged or recently married.

The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing (Melissa Bank)

Genre: Short stories
Year Published: 1999

Once upon a time, back in the magical land of college, I had a writing class requirement to get out of the way, so I spoke to my friend, who was the student representative of the creative writing department (as well as a highly regarded poet in her home country of India, but that's another story for another time). I asked her, "Do you think I should enroll in a short-story class, or a poetry class?"

And that wise girl told me, "Poetry. Short-story classes are full of girls who write about sitting in cafés and smoking cigarettes while they discuss their failed relationships."

I took her advice, and I was privileged enough to study and write modern poetry under the auspices of a very accomplished poet. I believe that class changed my life.

But enough about me (at least for the time being). The relevant information in that story, as you've probably guessed, was her remark about the type of material that surfaces in short-story classes. And that, I'm afraid, is what I have to take Melissa Bank to task for.

The Girls' Guide is not poorly written. Some of Bank's turns of phrase and stylistic choices are very well done. Her characterizations are on the nose, and the stories never drag. But at the end of each story, the smoke clears and you realize all Bank has given you is yet another cigarette-filled tale of relationship woe, punctuated by pithy realizations and dry wit.

The protagonist of the book is Jane Rosenal, who is the narrator and main character of almost all of the stories (which can be read as a whole in this book or individually). Her life seems to be permeated by the drifting uncertainty of the quintessential young adult, but with none of the associated passion. Jane is not political; Jane is not ambitious; Jane doesn't seem to give a damn about anyone or anything that's not just under her nose. She is well-read but not cultured; she is blithely upper-class without acknowledging it; she is endlessly introspective without much to show for it. In short, Jane is exactly the sort of character (or author) that my friend was warning me about years ago when I had to decide which writing class to take. Her voice and perspective make The Girls' Guide interesting at first, repetitive in the middle, and irritating towards the end.

Melissa Bank is certainly not a hopeless writer. I think she has a unique voice and an understanding of humor that's rare. But I think she needs to do a few things: one, to branch out to stories that aren't so similarly themed; and two, to ease up on her reliance on Weighty Realizations that no one ever has. (For example: "It occurred to me that if I really had grown up I wouldn't want to be told" and "I realize we sound like strangers who happen to be staying at the same hotel.") My aforementioned poetry professor was fond of forcing people to write poems about love without using words like "love" or "heart" or "soul"; I think if Bank could learn to write stories of people realizing things about themselves without constantly, explicitly referencing their realizations, she'd be on the road to better writing.

Recommended? Not so much. If someone recommends a certain story within the book, ask to borrow their copy just to read that one story. Taken individually, you might be able to get more out of them.

Delights & Shadows (Ted Kooser)

Genre: Poetry
Year Published: 2004

Ted Kooser is a poet of the moment. For the most part, he eschews the sweeping statements poets often make ("To be or not to be," anyone?) and concentrates instead on minute observations about the natural world and people around him. His style is prose-y in its adherence to normal sentence structure and grammar (something I, for one, am thankful for), and he makes little to no use of stanza breaks. He is precise and never jarring in his use of descriptive language.

The end result is a series of still lifes that are like reflections in a calm pond: while there may be deeper currents underneath, those currents are not overly accessible, and the image is all that will remain with most readers.

Here's a short example:

Biker

Pulling away from a stoplight
with a tire's sharp bark,
he lifts his scuffed boot and kicks at the air,
and the old dog of inertia gets up with a growl
and shrinks out of the way.


It's a very well-crafted metaphor, certainly, but I have a hard time getting beneath that to any other sort of truth.

This is not to say that this kind of poetry can't be beautiful or meaningful. It is just a certain style that you may like or not, depending on your poetical predilections. I for one am more fond of poetry that is a little more outwardly emotional, that perhaps pulls the focus back from the beauty of the image and lets some greater image resolve.

It's not surprising, then, that my favorite poems in Delights & Shadows are the ones in which Kooser breaks his own rules a little and allows a little of himself to shine through his work. There's a handful of poems, maybe a half-dozen or so out of the maybe six dozen in the collection, that appeals more to my sensibilities. Obviously the following poem is not representative of the collection, but it is representative of that dazzling handful. I'll leave you all with it:

After Years

Today, from a distance, I saw you
walking away, and without a sound
the glittering face of a glacier
slid into the sea. An ancient oak
fell in the Cumberlands, holding only
a handful of leaves, and an old woman
scattering corn to her chickens looked up
for an instant. At the other side
of the galaxy, a star thirty-five times
the size of our own sun exploded
and vanished, leaving a small green spot
on the astronomer's retina
as he stood in the great open dome
of my heart with no one to tell.

Recommended? Depends very much on your own tastes. I can't say I'll go back to this book fondly over the years, but it's high-quality, whether or not you like his style.

Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)

Genre: Historical fiction (with a touch of fantasy)
Year Published: 1991

Never again, I swear, will I joke about a book being upwards of 800 pages. Clearly the bluestocking gods decided that for my insolence, I would actually have to tackle such a book: namely, the bestselling Outlander.

Outlander clocks in at 850 pages, and I could not for the life of me tell you why it's so damn long. It doesn't have appreciably more detail or plot than a normal-length novel. You would think that the sheer heft of the book would turn away casual readers, and yet it's the first book in an enormously popular series.

Probably the book's popularity is due, at least in part, to its fairly easy, predictable path. Our heroine, Claire, is a WWII combat nurse who is hurtled back in time to 1743. Imagine any cliché of upscale historical romance novels and it is present here: the woman healer, the gallant warrior husband, the gruff seasoned band of brothers, the unbelievably over-the-top villain, a forced marriage, accusations of witchcraft, ancestors recognizable even six generations removed, multiple incredible escape missions, multiple torrid sex scenes, multiple brushes with death . . . you name it.

And yet . . . and yet Outlander is one of the more compelling books I have ever read. I truly could not put it down, and for someone like me who flits from book to book, that's saying something. Gabaldon never lets the plot drag; there's always a strong pull forward, aided by her style of rather short sections within medium-length chapters. She doesn't waste time transitioning between scenes, but instead trusts her readers to fill in between section breaks. And nothing happens that doesn't in some way contribute to the plot. In a more literary work, this would be a huge detriment, but in a plot-driven tome like this one, it's for the best.

This is not great literature. I'm not even sure it's good prose. It's not fluff exactly -- it's too well-researched and well-paced to be rightfully assigned that epithet. It's a tough novel to pin down. But it's deliciously addictive, and surprisingly educational about life in the given time period.

Recommended? If you don't mind spending the time and effort on 850 pages that won't really enrich your life or change your perspective, I recommend it wholeheartedly.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Anne Brontë)

Genre: Classic fiction
Year Published: 1848

Sorry it's been so long, dear readers, but Victoriana is a trifle . . . bog-tastic. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is only about 400 pages long, but in terms of how long it took to read, it felt like about double that length.

That's not to say I didn't enjoy it. I did, surprisingly so. (I read it out of sympathy for my little sister, who has to read it for a college English class.) The narrative was far more engaging than I could've hoped. Sure, it suffers from the same malady that I think most classic literature does, that is, it could've really used an editor to prune some of the most overblown passages, but that's not too much a problem here. Brontë, thankfully, has a higher proportion of dialogue to description than Austen does (don't get me wrong, I love me some Austen, but girlfriend needed to trim down some of that prose), but there are still some places that could be cut to the betterment of the novel.

Wildfell Hall is the first feminist novel, or one of the first. But it's hardly about a strong woman kicking ass; it's about a dutiful woman whose horrible husband emotionally and spiritually tortures her. He's a dissolute, hateful drunkard, as are his friends, and the poor wife is stuck in the marriage because of a woman's inability to file for divorce. Now, everyone says that Brontë was arguing in favor of a change to that law, but I have to say, I didn't see it. Wildfell Hall is so imperturbably Victorian that it doesn't seem like any sort of instrument for social change.

Incidentally, its sheer didactic Victorian-ness is where I feel the real fault of the book lies. Obviously, the author was a product of her time, but there is an inherent contradiction in the values Brontë seems to espouse and the place that her narrative ends up: on the one hand, her heroine is extremely religious, in the old Protestant God-fearing way, and seems to endure all her suffering with the calm knowledge that she will win Heaven at the end of her life. On the other hand, everyone in the book gets exactly what they deserve: the pious achieve happiness, while the sinners are mired in the unpleasant aftereffects of various vices.

It seems to me you can't have it both ways. Either Heaven really is the only thing that matters, and thus (if Brontë were to be honest with her readers) sometimes, while on Earth, the sinners gain while the pious lose out. Or, if you'd rather, life on Earth is in fact very important, and characters (both religious and not) must act in ways that will win them the greatest happiness, even if their actions are not as scrupulously moralistic as perhaps they'd like to be. To have people act in precise accordance with such strict moral codes and then achieve earthly happiness seems like a terrible cop-out to me. If Brontë is making any sort of radical statement, I would venture to guess that it's less about a woman's right to divorce and more about the absurdity of a religious/moral system that would order a woman be subjugated to her husband (even if she eventually extricates her own heroine from those chains). But then again, I may be reading my own displeasure onto her narrative. It's very tough to tell.

Recommended? It's certainly good for its time period. Pick it up, read a chapter or two; if you're not driven crazy by the description, you'll make it through just fine.

Beware of God (Shalom Auslander)

Genre: Short stories
Year Published: 2005

Have you ever read the Old Testament and thought to yourself, "Goodness, that God character is one homicidal, psychotic jerk"? Then this is the book for you.

In a passage typical of the book, a man who's being "stalked" by God is consulting his therapist for assistance.

Most stalkers, explained Dr. Herschberg, are lonely, isolated members of society, seeking intimacy or friendship. The stalking is simply a partial satisfaction of their voyeuristic, sadistic tendencies.

"That sounds like Him."

"You need to stop responding," said Dr. Herschberg.

"That's what my wife said," replied Schwartzman. "He's not easy to ignore."

"Are you afraid he might become violent?"

"If history's any indication."

The whole book is filled with similar indictments of the Jewish God (Auslander was raised Orthodox, and all his characters are Jews, some religious, some otherwise), executed with brilliant black humor. In pieces where God is actually present, He is universally depicted as a world-weary, out-of-touch braggart with little mercy and no answers.

You might think this would make for a terribly depressing read, and for the most part, you'd be correct. Interestingly, though, the truly difficult stories in the book are the ones in which God is not a character. There are a few allegories, which are obvious almost at the level of political cartoons with labels, but they manage to work anyway: two hampsters, one who believes their owner will return, the other a doubter, debate; the characters of Peanuts divide themselves into inventive religious factions; a man makes a golem and realizes he has no idea how to treat his autonomous creation.

However, the story that is saddest and perhaps most telling of Auslander's obvious distaste for certain aspects, at least, of religious Jewish culture is entitled "Holocaust Tips for Kids." It is long -- for Auslander, at least, whose stories tend to fall short of the 20-page mark -- and written in the unmistakable voice of a child. The child in question, never named, is a young boy, perhaps nine or so, who has been taught things about the Holocaust and religion that (the reader begins to think) should have been saved for later years.

Kevin calls my yarmulke a beanie. I am Beanie Boy.

If Kevin becomes a Nazi, the first place he'll tell the SS to look for me and Deena is in his attic. But we'll be in Florida.

Anne Frank was murdered in Bergen-Belsen after someone reported the family to the Nazis, so really -- don't tell anyone where you are going.

They're not really showers.

They'll probably make New York City into a ghetto, like the Warsaw Ghetto. If you live in a big city where there are Jews and one day there's a Holocaust, you should leave right away.

This line of thinking is, unfortunately, pretty familiar to any Jewish kid exposed to the facts of the Holocaust at an early age. But what differentiates this story from the typical Jewish kid's musing on that subject are the voices of his mother and rabbi, who tell him, respectively, "[Kevin's] mother is a no-good anti-Semite" and "the Holocaust happened because the Jews assimilated" (among other things). Beyond the terror of imagining that the Holocaust could happen in modern-day America, the child is made to doubt and fear the non-Jews around him, and to believe that his religion is less about joy and faith, and more about guilt and punishment. Auslander skewers this attitude, not only in this story, but throughout the collection.

Recommended? This might be a for-Jews-only read. Hey, Christians can have Left Behind; we can have our own unique brand of dark satire.

The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories (Susanna Clarke)

Genre: Short stories
Year Published: 2006

If you haven't read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, dear readers, I tell you now in no uncertain terms: go find it. Pick it up secondhand, find it at a library, I don't care. Find it and read it.

All done? (I imagine you've been gone for several weeks, dear reader; the book does loom on 800 pages. How are you? How's the family been? Good? Good.) Now we can talk about The Ladies of Grace Adieu.

As you now know, England is a magical place, and fairies are capricious beasts who meddle in human affairs without compunction. This collection of seven short stories illuminates seven different occasions upon which the world of humans and the world of fairies clashed, and with what results. (The author seems to be quite biased towards humans, thankfully.)

(Even as I'm composing this review, I'm cognizant of how Clarke's impeccable British faux-eighteenth-century diction has crept into my writing patterns, leaving me to get my point across with big words and complicated grammatical structures. But no matter: if need be, I will sacrifice my newfangled prose in service of praising her.)

The Ladies of Grace Adieu is not flawless; I didn't even enjoy all the stories. The title story was all right, but I thought it was too oblique to hold the opening slot, and it was disappointing to see Jonathan Strange himself given such a bit part. I was not particularly fond of "On Lickerish Hill," the second offering, which cast back in time before the Jonathan Strange era, so the reader must parse words like "alwaies" and "owd" ("always" and "old," for those not well-versed in Elizabethan English). That would be forgivable were the story not an utterly predictable retread of "Rumpelstiltskin," and not the most amusing one, at that.

But the collection picks up nicely in the middle. We get work that's more original: though "Mrs Mabb" hearkens back to the second (less dark) half of "Tam Lin," it's different enough that it works on Clarke's terms. "The Duke of Wellington Misplaces His Horse" is an absolute delight, and "Mr Simonelli or the Fairy Widower" (the longest of them all) is fun, since we experience a realization that there are fairies, and that they are mostly malevolent, through the eyes of an entirely average clergyman. "Tom Brightwind or How the Fairy Bridge Was Built at Thorseby" finishes off the middle section with a bang: it is the only time in the volume we see fairies and humans at anything approaching equal footing, and the magic that Tom Brightwind utilizes is very funny to watch in action.

The book peters out a little disappointingly: there is a short tale about Mary Queen of Scots that doesn't amount to much, and it ends with "John Uskglass and the Cumbrian Charcoal Burner," which, as it's about the Raven King, is certainly interesting, but it's supposed to be a fairy tale (in the usual sense), and as such is a little too simplistic (though it is funny).

If there's anything that really made me sad about the collection, it's that we are not given even a hint of resolution on the issues that were left unsettled at the end of Jonathan Strange. I have no desire to spoil anything for those who haven't lived between those covers yet, but suffice it to say that the uncertain circumstances at that novel's end are made no less uncertain by this book. We can only hope she writes more on that subject in the future.

I will say this: Grace Adieu desperately made me want to reread Jonathan Strange. So that's what I'm doing now, though I imagine I'll have to intersperse other books if I want to keep up any sort of regular schedule on this blog. One of the bluestocking's superpowers is being able to read many books at once, though, so I'll be fine.

Recommended? Only as a follow-up to Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell; if you've read that one, then make this your next read!

Hey Nostradamus! (Douglas Coupland)

Genre: Fiction
Year Published: 2003

I suppose every American born before, say, 1990 remembers the Columbine massacre. It may have hit especially hard for those who were in high school at the time, as I was. But I never much immersed myself in the findings of those who investigated Columbine; I watched the regular news coverage at the time, but I never delved too much into the whole thing. I'm not sure why, but maybe when you have to file into a cafeteria every day to eat your sack lunch, you don't want to have to think about kids who died in theirs. And while awareness of the circumstances of that time and place are more or less necessary, knowledge of the details might be more distressing than educational for anyone.

So let me just say right out that if you're the kind of person who gets upset easily, who'd never want to have to think about the Columbine massacre or anything like it, Hey Nostradamus! is not for you. I understand that impulse, but the summary of the book intrigued me, plus it was recommended by the hostess over at 50 Books, so I picked it up at the ol' library.

Coupland is Canadian, so the book is instead set in Canada, but his inspiration for his school shooting, the event that kicks off the book, is the Columbine massacre. The book is told in four parts: first, by a girl who is killed that day; second, by her secret husband, 11 years later; third, by that man's girlfriend three years after that; and finally, by the husband's father a year after that.

In the hands of another writer, it may have turned into a very moving and/or mundane portrait of grief. But Coupland's gig is disaffection, the world-gone-wrong thing. The thrust of the book is, more or less, how the shootings that day ruined various people's lives, one by one, even fifteen years down the line. He doesn't waste too much time on emotions; instead, he chronicles, in first person, his characters' thoughts and actions, trusting the reader to fill in the emotional blanks. And their actions are often destructive: there is a lot of abuse of drugs and alcohol, a lot of separating themselves from other people, a lot of pain.

The other main theme -- besides violent death and its domino effect on the living -- is religion and belief in God/fate. The girl who dies belonged to a group of young fundamentalists, and while her spiritual cohort is portrayed as pretty morally bankrupt, she herself is a true believer who seems to be narrating from heaven, or something like it. Meanwhile, her now-widowed husband, who had been a believer, spirals into apathy; his girlfriend consults with a so-called psychic under desperate circumstances; and his father manages to drive away nearly all his friends and family with his obsessive adherence to religious strictures. Belief doesn't seem to quite work for anyone, not even the dead girl, who distanced her family in her acceptance of religion.

In the end, Coupland seems to be saying, all we can really believe in is the human race, and look what we humans are capable of. Children can walk into a cafeteria and kill other children. It's a tough message to swallow, but when it's encapsulated in Coupland's straightforward, often hilarious prose, you find yourself accepting it, at least until you close the book for good.

Recommended? Sure, if the above didn't scare you off.

Deerskin (Robin McKinley)

Genre: Fantasy
Year Published: 1993

Inspired by my success with Sunshine, I decided to pick up another of McKinley's books at my local library. I knew I was headed into completely different territory with Deerskin, but I thought I might as well give it a shot.

It was, indeed, very different territory. I still am not sure exactly what to make of Deerskin. On the one hand, the entire book was written in the highhanded, faux-old-fashioned, semicolon-heavy style of a modern author attempting to write something that feels like a fairy tale, and the broad arc of the story was telegraphed almost from page one, like a fairy tale would be. On the other hand, I was genuinely gripped by the narrative, once it progressed past the rape.

Yes, the rape: the entire book is centered around our heroine (Lissla) coming to terms (or, more rightly, failing to come to terms) with her rape by her father. The book is divided into three parts; the first is an introduction of sorts and then a long, long descent for Lissla until, at the end of the section, the rape occurs. The first part is permeated with dread and buckets of foreshadowing, which makes it awfully difficult to read.

The second part forms the meat of the book, but it doesn't begin promisingly: McKinley spends four full chapters with Lissla in a dissociative fugue, the existence of which forms the bulk of the narrative. Every other sentence is about her lack of memory, and it gets very old very quickly.

Finally, by the middle of the second part, the story becomes engaging and not impossible to bear -- not coincidentally, this is where Lissla's new life begins to shape itself. Things follow in a way that are fairy-tale-like, mostly, and even if it's a little thorny at points, it's very interesting and worth having struggled through the previous parts.

Where it all falls apart again, in my opinion, is the last chapter. I won't give away the plot by any means, but McKinley, in her more straightforward fantasy books (e.g. Spindle's End) is given to magically histrionic conclusions that are uniformly overlong and confusing. I had thought I'd escape that tendency this time, but no such luck. There's all sorts of nonsense about flame and blood and reflections and it 1) makes no sense and 2) is drastically different from the rest of the book (which relies only the faintest bit on magic).

I also want to mention, though I feel a bit petty doing it, that McKinley has a terrible habit of endowing her heroines with serious obsessions that seem to coincide with whatever she herself is obsessed at the time. Rose Daughter dedicates an enormous amount of narrative to tending roses; unsurprisingly, McKinley had just picked up the hobby herself. Deerskin, meanwhile, centers around sighthounds; McKinley's profile in the back concludes with, "She lives in Hampshire, England, with her husband, the writer Peter Dickinson, and three whippets." There is, of course, something to be said for writing what you know; however, there is also something to be said for pushing your own boundaries a bit.

Recommended? Meh. I think I would recommend it for a college-level class on "Rape in Literature" or something, but the average reader can give it a pass.

Middlesex (Jeffrey Eugenides)

Genre: Literary fiction
Year Published: 2002

When I told my good friend I was in the middle of Middlesex, she remarked, "Oh, good book. The pacing on that last third will kill you, though."

Alas, my friends know me quite well, and she was perfectly correct. The book begins with the following sentence:

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan.

In reaching the first birth, Eugenides has to give us about forty years' worth of family history, beginning with the fraternal grandparents of our narrator, Cal, in their native land of Greece. Then we move into America in the Roaring Twenties, through the Depression, World War II, the Korean War, the Detroit Riots, etc. Eugenides' characters are marvelous -- you believe in every single one of them, and you care so much about them that you can't wait to read each of their stories in turn. Additionally, his prose is usually fairly straightforward, but occasionally he throws in gems like this:

. . . I like to imagine my brother and me, floating together since the world's beginning on our raft of eggs. Each inside a transparent membrane, each slotted for his or her (in my case both) hour of birth. There's [my brother], always so pasty, and bald by the age of twenty-three, so that he makes a perfect homunculus . . . . Right nest to him, there's me, his sometime sister, my face already a conundrum, flashing like a lenticular decal between two images: the dark-eyed, pretty little girl I used to be; and the severe, aquiline-nosed, Roman-coinish person I am today. And so we drifted, the two of us, since the world began, awaiting our cues and observing the passing show.

Eugenides works in ideas about masculine and feminine prose, Greek superstition and religion, growing up a hermaphrodite in a time of sexual revolution, race, industrialism, family, and everything else you could want in an epic novel. (It clocks in at 529 pages . . . not quite up to Possession, but damn close. Why have I been choosing all these long books recently? Oh, right, to sufficiently space out the battles in my ongoing war with L.M. Montgomery.)

However, as we move closer and closer to the second birth mentioned in the novel's first sentence, time slows nearly to a halt. We know that Cal will be fourteen when the rebirth occurs, and s/he stays fourteen for . . . a very long time. I lost track, but it had to have been a hundred pages at least. Eugenides teases the reader with canceled OB/GYN appointments and weird sexual encounters -- all of which are very well-written and engaging, but when the reader begins to feel that the revelation is being delayed just for the sake of being delayed, it's not pleasant. You feel as though Eugenides has violated your trust, that he gave you a map ahead of time and neglected to let you know how wacky the scale is.

All this having been said, though, it's really an amazing book, and I'm glad I read it. I must give credit where it's due: Eugenides clearly put a lot of thought and effort into Middlesex, and it shows. Grief about pacing aside, it's a wonderful narrative, and I'm the richer for having read it.

Recommended? Yes. Get ready for a long ride.

Anne of Ingleside (L.M. Montgomery)

Genre: Period fiction (takes place around 1900 in Canada)
Year Published: 1939

One of the interchangeably adorable children of Ingleside had a fancy, a brilliant, whimsical fancy. This child did not tell anyone, not the other children of Ingleside, nor the grown-ups (Mummy, Daddy, and Susan the Live-In Cook/Maid/Nanny).

Oh, the fancy of that adorable child! It was full of fairies and wonderment. Or perhaps it was full of ghosts and terror. But in any case, it truly was such a fancy as had never been heard of on all of P.E. Island.

But then the Cruel, Real World intruded upon the child's fancy. Oh, how could it be borne?? The poor little child thought the world would come falling down.

In the throes of agony, the child went to Mummy and told her all about the fancy and subsequent demolishing of said fancy. Mummy didn't laugh -- she never laughed at her dear, lovely children! -- but instead said something so understanding and kind that the child felt that the world was just after all. Ah, Mummy was the best mummy in the world.

Lather, rinse, repeat. Three thousand times.

Recommended? If you can stand the above, then by all means, go for it.

The People of Sparks (Jeanne DuPrau)

Genre: Children's literature
Year Published: 2004

Yes, I picked up The City of Ember and its sequel simultaneously at the library. What can I say? I'm a fan of sequels. (Although, to continue yesterday's analogy, I didn't much care for The Giver's sequels, Gathering Blue and Messenger. I could honestly continue the comparison, as The People of Sparks resembles Gathering Blue in some ways, but I don't want to beat that horse to death.)

The People of Sparks picks up where The City of Ember left off (so if you're interested in reading the latter, you may want to stop reading this review now): the people of Ember, having received a message from Lina and Doon aboveground, make their way to the surface as well. They wander for a few days before finding a small settlement of people who agree to take them in for a short period of time until they can get onto their own feet.

The circumstances of the world we know are made clearer in Sparks: there has, in fact, been a "Disaster" (three plagues and four wars) that has wiped out most of humanity. People are just starting to build viable settlements again, devoid of electricity, gasoline, telephones, or much understanding of the past.

The problems start immediately: there are more Emberites than Sparks people; Emberites are, on the whole, unused to manual labor; the people of Sparks begin to resent the Emberites' drain on their jealously guarded resources. Soon violence erupts, and the future of both groups of citizens is very uncertain.

It's probably a mark of how good the premise of this book is that I wished I were reading the same novel, but for adults. The possibilities floated through my mind as I read: women would prostitute themselves for more food. Inevitably, romantic entanglements between the two groups would occur. Emberites, never having been exposed to most human illnesses, would be highly susceptible to deadly diseases. The lack of privacy in the Emberites' quarters would lead to quarrels and dissatisfaction. The social customs (e.g. for marriage, childbirth, death, etc.) of the two groups would be highly disparate, and so would cause consternation among the opposite people.

But it's a children's book, and DuPrau has to navigate within those constraints. And with that in mind, she does a very good job of showing what could go wrong under those types of circumstances. My only problem with the book is that at times it feels more like a cautionary tale or parable than it should. The "violence is bad" message gets hit a little too hard at times -- although what seems blatant to an adult may seem more subtle to a child. (But I doubt it.)

Recommended? Yes. (Same age constraints as the original.)

The City of Ember (Jeanne DuPrau)

Genre: Children's literature
Year Published: 2003

The great dystopian children's novel is, of course, The Giver. I consider myself privileged to have been born at just the right time to read that when I was just the right age for it.

The City of Ember is similar to The Giver in many ways: in both cases, the reader is dealing with a futuristic civilization (that may or may not have been founded after some sort of apocalyptic event) that is utterly isolated and also idiosyncratic in its traditions and daily life. Both civilizations lack history, most arts, and non-human creatures. The main difference is that while The Giver is all about human life without humanity (e.g. love, sex, choice, death), The City of Ember is about human life without natural light.

If that sounds like a flimsy premise, reconsider: think about what life would be like if the only light we had access to was electric light. And Jeanne DuPrau does an excellent job of imagining a city without the sun: electric lights go on and off at preordained intervals; buildings are built low to the ground so as not to block light; anywhere outside Ember's boundaries is absolutely dark, and thus unpassable (as the people of Ember do not have "movable lights"). In the introduction to the book, we are told that 220 years after the city's founding, a box will open with instructions on how to leave the city. But within the first couple chapters, we know things have gone awry: 220 years have come and gone, the lights that create daylight are faltering, and food in Ember's storerooms is running low.

Of course, because this is a children's novel, it is two children who eventually find and believe in the instructions. And because it is children's literature, few of the grim possibilities imaginable in a city like Ember are carried out. But not everything is smooth sailing for Lina and Doon, our protagonists: as the city-dwellers' time is clearly running out, some of the more powerful adults in Ember take it upon themselves to get theirs while the getting is good -- utterly predictable, to an adult reader, but interesting to see through the children's naive eyes.

DuPrau excels in two things that very much helped this book: 1) the imagining and subsequent description of Ember, and 2) the creation of believable and evocative suspense. I often have a difficult time picturing places that are only described to me, but Ember was very clear in my mind as I read the book. And as Lina and Doon got closer to solving their puzzle, I was genuinely eager to know how all the problems were going to be resolved.

Certainly The City of Ember raises none of The Giver's existential questions, and its prose is nowhere near that level. But it's an enjoyable read, and I think that these kinds of books open up new avenues for kids' imaginations -- always a good thing.

Recommended? Yes. (Reading level: maybe third grade at the youngest, if they can get through a book with twentyish chapters, and seventh grade at the oldest, if they haven't already moved on to adult post-apocalyptic literature.)