Author: Tina Fey
Dates read: September 7, 2011 - September 12, 2011 (6 days)
Pages: 275
Genre: Non-fiction, memoir, humor
This book was a quick read that I would’ve gotten through much quicker if I wasn’t constantly stopping to tell a friend about whatever hilarious thing I had just read in this book. I picked it up because I’ve always liked Tina Fey’s sense of humor and figured it’d be interesting to hear her perspective about her life and career.
When I started reading this, I was expecting a memoir tinged with humor. What this book actually turned out to be was more of a 50/50 mix of the two, almost like reading all of a comedian’s stand-up routines if their jokes were predominantly autobiographical. Yes, it has passages that are more traditionally memoir-ish portions of Fey’s life, like her recollections of a particular post-collegiate job, her interview for SNL, and her ill-fated honeymoon. But it also has chapters that are straight-up comedy, like her thoughts on photo shoots, faux beauty secrets, and her responses to several specific negative opinions about her written by trolls on various websites (including one that refers to her as a troll and to whom she has the best reply ever).
Finding I was wrong in my expectation about this book was both bad and good. I was definitely bummed out when I realized that the comprehensive career chronicle I’d anticipated wouldn’t be included (though many major steps are touched on). But I was also laughing more than I expected to, which is always nice. What it essentially boils down to is being more anecdotal than I’d imagined, hence the constant relaying to friends snippets that I’d just read. I’d still be interested to read a more in depth examination of Fey’s life if she ever decided to write a memoir of the kind I’d originally imagined this would be, but I certainly wasn’t disappointed with what I got from this book in the end.
And now that I’ve finally finished writing about all the books I read in August, here’s the August calendar. Behind schedule (sigh), but not woefully so, at least.
"The seconds pass. I know what’s going on because it’s the same thing that always happens: give me something nice, something I love or want or need, and I’ll find a way to grind it into dust."
Author: Jennifer Egan
Dates read: August 28, 2011 - September 6, 2011 (10 days)
Pages: 240
Genre: Fiction
Yikes, I just can’t seem to get back on schedule. I thought this book would be a quicker read than it turned out to be, but it took a little while for it to really hook me due to a slow starting pace. But I’ll get into that in a bit. I picked this book because I’d heard good things about Jennifer Egan from several people recently and realized I’d had this book for a while but just hadn’t gotten to it yet.
I think the book jacket description does a better job than I could of relating what this novel’s about without giving away crucial components of the story, so here it is: “Two cousins, irreversibly damaged by a childhood prank, reunite twenty years later to renovate a medieval castle in Eastern Europe. In an environment of extreme paranoia, cut off from the outside world, the men reenact the signal event of their youth, with even more catastrophic results. And as the full horror of their predicament unfolds, a prisoner, in jail for an unnamed crime, recounts an unforgettable story that seamlessly brings the crimes of the past and present into piercing relation.”
My impression of this novel is almost entirely derived from one aspect of it, the pacing. This book is one of those rare cases in which I wasn’t sure how much I’d like it when I initially started reading, but once I got through the slow build at the beginning and into the real meat of the story, I very much enjoyed it. Part of the reason it took a little while to hook me is that the first few times the narrating perspective flipped to the prisoner character, I was less interested in his storyline than the cousins in the castle. I was also looking for the connection between these two portions of the book immediately, but the answer to the question of how they’re linked is something that develops throughout the entire book. My attempt to unravel the connection between the two was admittedly premature, perhaps brought on too strong too early by an inaccurate understanding of the book I had when I started it. In any event, it drove me nearly to the point of distraction from the content of the prisoner’s sections, which left me wanting to put the book down whenever the perspective changed from Europe to the prison (and of course this always seemed to happen just as something really exciting occurred at the castle!). However, as the line connecting the two portions slowly became clearer, I found myself devouring the last chapters voraciously. I was extremely satisfied with the conclusion, which answered all my major questions but also left just enough leeway for interpretation about certain elements to make me keep thinking about the book for several days after I’d finished it. Other than that, all I’ll say is that the voice becomes very dynamic as the book progresses, and I couldn’t help but think that Jennifer Egan managed to find the cleverest way possible to tell this story. The feeling of rightness you’re left with about how everything unfolds is actually kind of remarkable.
Author: Lev Grossman
Dates read: August 21, 2011 - August 27, 2011 (7 days)
Pages: 400
Genre: Fiction, fantasy
This novel is a sequel to one of my favorite books of the past few years, The Magicians. Given how much I loved the first book, the sequel moved immediately to the top of my reading list and I bought it the day it came out.
Since I don’t want to potentially spoil aspects of the first book for anyone that hasn’t read it, I’m not going to discuss what this novel is about. If you’d like to see what The Magicians is about or read my thoughts on that book, here’s my entry on it from my first round of reading. Suffice it to say, if you’re interested in this series (which you definitely should be!), read the first one and I’m sure you’ll be on to this installment as soon as you’re finished.
This novel completely lived up to my very high expectations. The depth of character was pushed even further, and the scale of events heightened substantially as well. Interestingly, the one bone I had to pick with the first book, an aspect of the conclusion I found a little convenient and perhaps too upbeat, is explained and explored in great detail in this sequel, revealing it to be much darker and better justified than it initially appeared. I was actually surprised to find this book getting even darker than the first because I probably wouldn’t have thought it possible, but oh man, darker it does get. There were some moments where I thought things were a little contrived for the sake of plot progression this time around, but the book overall is just so good that this barely registered as a complaint. The ending leads me to believe there will be a third installment to make this a series, leaving me even more excited for the next one than I was for this novel.
Author: Neil Gaiman
Dates read: August 4, 2011 - August 20, 2011 (17 days)
Pages: 461
Genre: Fiction, fantasy
I ended up a couple weeks behind schedule with this book, again wishing I wasn’t quite so busy so I would’ve been able to get through it more quickly. I picked this book because I’ve read a handful of things by Neil Gaiman but somehow never this particular novel, which seems to be one of his most well loved.
The book follows a newly released convict named Shadow as he comes to terms with the news that his wife died days before his release. Feeling he has nothing particular to live for without her, he takes an odd job with a mysterious man who identifies himself as Wednesday. As Wednesday travels the country with Shadow visiting various acquaintances and rallying their support for an upcoming war of some kind, Shadow slowly realizes he’s in the employ of a fading god. With so few people in America truly believing in the old religions that originally brought various gods to the country in the first place, they have little choice but to stand off against the new gods of technology if they hope to stay alive. But Shadow also slowly realizes that Wednesday’s motivations aren’t entirely what they seem, and his own role in the conflict is much larger than Wednesday initially led him to believe.
I really liked the concept behind this book, but at times found the narrative a little too meandering for my tastes. Of course I realize that to encompass all the aspects a tale like this demands, there needs to be a lot of give and take in the plot, but I found myself often more entertained by the small vignettes about people and gods from times past than I was by Shadow’s storyline in the present. Perhaps it wasn’t that the story was too meandering for me (since I’m generally more drawn to things with complicated, vast narratives than I am to simpler, more linear tales), but that I found myself thinking a good amount of the time that Shadow’s part in everything wasn’t the most interesting thing happening in the world of the story. At many moments in the book when I was following Shadow, I’d rather have had a window into the events and characters elsewhere. That being said, the concept at the heart of the book is so compelling that I’d still recommend it even though I thought some of the passages were notably slow. And even though I saw the twists of the last few chapters coming, I was still very entertained by them, probably mostly because they left me thinking, “Yes, of course this is how things resolve. There’s no other way this story could have ended.”
Author: Stephen Chbosky
Dates read: July 30, 2011 - August 3, 2011 (5 days)
Pages: 213
Genre: Fiction
This was a much quicker read than my last, and had I not been pretty busy while I was reading it, I probably would’ve been done with it even quicker. My roommate loaned it to me a while back when I was about to travel because she thought it might be a good read for the plane, but like a jerk I completely forgot about it until randomly coming across it on my desk months later and going, “Shoot, I was gonna read this ages ago.”
This novel chronicles an introverted boy’s journey through high school through a series of letters he writes to an unknown person. The letters read almost like diary entries in which he examines not just the strange events of his teenage life, but moreso the strange feelings all of his forced growing up brings about.
There’s something beautiful about the way this short book manages to evoke so much of the emotional experience of growing up. It’s never precious about the protagonist’s feelings or the things he goes through, and I think this is the main factor in the great ease of relating to this book despite the protagonist being more socially awkward and (as you really only discover near the very end) damaged than most teenagers I knew when I was his age. And though a specific trauma is revealed near the conclusion that was very affecting and sheds an entirely new light on everything that preceded it, most of my impression of this book is just a remembrance of how emotionally raw you can be as a teenager. The book is meditative without pretension, the kind of thing that seems like a good novel to pick up in autumn if, like me, you find yourself remembering every fall the feeling of returning to school despite having been done with it for years.
