I'd Rather Be Skydiving

Why, oh why does the weather have to be beautiful on weekdays and never on the weekends? Tuesday and Wednesday were gorgeous: clear, sunny, warm, with minimal wind. Saturday looks like doom: scattered thunderstorms. Dammit. However, on Sunday it promises to be good skydiving weather. If only I could figure out how to get down there. Oh, Bear! I knew I didn’t like this month-long cross-country road trip for a reason! (He spent the night in a parking lot in Chicago last night and will hit up the Badlands today.)

I have many things to catch up on since my return from holiday, actual work-for-a-living work notwithstanding. I think I wrote all of two words on my novel last week, although I did read a whole helluvaheapuvalotta books:

• Once Upon a Time in the North by Philip Pullman
• Looking for Alaska by John Green*
• Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale by Holly Black
• The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold*

*Highly recommended

In addition to those books, I reread:

• A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll

I have also bought and intend to read:

• The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon
• Lady of Quality by Georgette Heyer

Yesterday morning I happened to catch my lovely roommate Wicked Cool Riley before we had to hurry off to work and chatted over coffee as I got ready. I showed her all the books I had amassed and we discussed our reading habits and the reading habits of others. Both she and I (and most of my friends, really) devour books, whereas people like my father tend to read one or two books a year at most. I believe this past year my dad read On the Road by Jack Kerouac, the year previous was A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby, and the year before was Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper. We marveled at their slow reading pace, but Riley said that she discovered later that perhaps some don’t visualise the events of the novel while they read which is why they find the act of reading so dull.

People have often asked me whether or not a movie adaptation of a book I’ve read affects my mental image of a character. The answer is: not in the slightest. The easiest example I can think of is Harry Potter. While Daniel Radcliffe does not clash with what Harry looks like in my head, my Harry is taller and lankier, more awkward and gawky, with a thinner face and hair that looks like mine in the mornings before I’ve showered. As long as the spirit of the character is embodied, I don’t necessarily mind if they look different from how I’ve conceived them. Most people cast brunettes (or dye blondes as they did with Jennifer Ehle) as Elizabeth Bennet, but my Lizzy is actually fair-haired.

The only time I’ve ever envisioned an actor when I read a book is Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby, or rather, the movie pretty much ripped him out of my imagination because I read it before I saw the film. I mention this because I picked up The Great Gatsby to reread on the subway in the mornings and I keep seeing Robert Redford (incidentally, one of the few blond men I’ve ever fancied) and his tragic face when he utters, “You loved me too?” God, this book breaks my heart into a million pieces in so many different ways and F. Scott Fitzgerald makes me bash my head against the wall because the beauty of his prose pretty much destroys any pretension to authorhood I have. Lyrical, yet spare. Maximum emotion expressed with an economy of words. I don’t believe in perfect books, but this one comes damn close. It’s the most perfect of any book I have ever read.

None of the books I tore through on holiday are quite the level of almost-perfect as The Great Gatsby, but I think the closest was John Green’s Looking for Alaska.

Review of LOOKING FOR ALASKA by John Green

Looking for Alaska by John Green

This book won the 2006 Michael L. Printz Award for excellence in young adult literature and rightfully so. It is a beautiful novel all around and incredibly poignant and affecting. I do not use that word lightly. Green is quite adept at creating a believable and real male teenage voice (look, Ma, a first-person narrative that didn’t annoy me!) like J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, but without the slightly satirical and condescending veneer that thinly coats Salinger’s work. Green pokes fun at Miles a bit (there is a hilarious attempted fellatio scene), but for the most part, he respects adolescence for what it is: a period of transition and maturing.

Miles Halter is obsessed with famous people’s last words, in particular François Rabelais’s supposed ones: “I go in search of The Great Perhaps.” He thinks his opportunity to find his own Great Perhaps will come from going to boarding school in Alabama, his father’s old alma mater. Once he arrives, he becomes drawn into the whirlwind world of the “hot” and enchanting Alaska Young, the girl down the hall who is good friends with his roommate Chris “Colonel” Martin.

That is the synopsis of Looking for Alaska in a nutshell, but it doesn’t do justice to the book. It deftly touches on such subjects as human suffering, adolescent angst, guilt, philosophy, religion, sex, and the boarding school genre. Miles, newly christened with the ironic nickname “Pudge” by the Colonel, falls into the madcap pranking world of Alaska and her friends, accepted for the first time as a part of something. He is, quite simply, infatuated with Alaska, who has a sparkling, alluring quality that goes beyond her attractive looks. Manic one moment, depressed the next, she is changeable and self-destructive, intense about her passions, and The Ultimate Tease. I’m half in love with her myself.

The book is roughly “divided” into two sections: each chapter is “X Number of Days Before” or “X Number of Days After.” The event around which the book divides is the narrative climax but Miles’s emotional nadir. In many ways, I tend to view this book as a valley rather than a mountain when it comes to emotional arcs. The real turning point in the book is not Alaska’s death, but the sloppy, one-night hookup they had in the moments before, preceded by his sliding descent into obsession and followed by his climb out of it. As Miles struggles to understand why she died, he gradually sheds any romantic hope he has about her (something Gatsby couldn’t do until it was too late) and “grows up.” An excellent example of a bildungsroman (one of my favourite genres!).

There isn’t much I can really say about this book because it really is that good. I wholeheartedly recommend it to everyone.

Looking for Alaska is by far the best book I’ve read in a good long while. Once Upon a Time in the North is a companion story to His Dark Materials, which I was obligated to buy and read as an avid fan of the books. It’s a small bit of fluff really, but satisfying in the way a snack-sized dark chocolate Milky Way is: a short story about Lee Scoresby when he met Iorek Byrnison for the first time. I enjoyed the other two a lot as well, The Lovely Bones more than Tithe.

Review of TITHE: A MODERN FAERIE TALE by Holly Black

Tithe by Holly Black

I had tried to read Tithe last year but was deterred by the “faerie” aspect of it. I was never one of those girls who hung Brian Froud paintings up on her walls or anything like that, and for all that the Joneses are part-Welsh, Celtic myths about the Sidhe never interested me. I don’t know why I find modern versions of fairies extraordinarily boring, but I do. I actually picked up this book again while I was in Brick Township because the story takes place somewhere in southern New Jersey by the shore, which is where I was on vacation.

Things I know about Tithe: 1) it is a retelling of the fairy tale Tam Lin, 2) it was at the forefront of the “new wave” of urban fantasy, and 3) I liked Valiant better. The story of Tam Lin is a bit of an obscure fairy tale, in which a mortal girl rescues her lover from the clutches of the fairy court with her wits. It’s also a hard sell to me because of the fairy aspect of it. Despite the name, most fairy tales seem to have few fairies actually in them. My favourite story, Beauty and the Beast has an enchantress and a monstrous beast, Rumpelstiltskin has a gnome or dwarf (gnomes and dwarves I like), and Snow White and Rose Red has a talking bear. Perhaps because most of the fairy tales I know originate from Germany via the Grimm Brothers, whose folklore is a bit more Viking-esque with sorcerers and raging animals and ugly little twisted men, I tend to forget about fairies. Or otherwise, I like French fairy tales, which also have anthropomorphic beasts and a sort of undefined “magic” or “enchantment.” Native British/Celtic tales that I can list off the top of my head are few and therefore the Fey are unfamiliar to me.

Unfamiliarity is not necessarily a bad thing. Tithe is quite readable with an interesting cast of characters, but I think my ambivalence to it arises from the fact that there is a fairy protagonist and a fairy romantic hero. These are immortal beings whose thoughts and emotions are alien to humans, hence why I can’t seem to sympathise. I do think Valiant, which is set in the same universe, is superior to Tithe because its a human story. How does magic affect humans? It makes us high and addicted. I really loved that conceit, not to mention fairies are kept to a minimum and there is a hot troll I loved. Tithe is not a human story. It’s a story about a girl who finds out she’s a changeling. I’m immediately disinterested by that. I’m not sure why.

To be fair, Holly Black writes quite well. Her prose isn’t purple and she doesn’t rely on cheap gimmicks to tell the story. I think it’s just the story that falls short for me. Even though it has one of the funniest gay coming-out scenes ever.

The Lovely Bones was better than I had expected it to be. It had been hyped up forever, so I had been wary of reading it, but I was pleasantly surprised.

Review of THE LOVELY BONES by Alice Sebold

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

This is the book famously narrated by a dead girl, who is raped and murdered in the first few chapters. Ordinarily a book narrated by a dead person would irk me because character development in a person who can no longer develop is silly (see my reasons for being annoyed by Death’s narration in Marcus Zusak’s The Book Thief) but after my initial hesitation, I got sucked right into this book. To the point where I was reading this in the car on my way to the lighthouse in Cape May when I KNOW reading in the car makes me sick. To the point where Bear and I would be getting ready for bed and I’d say, “Let me finish this chapter and I’ll join you” and read three more before I could be pried away from it.

I can’t quite say why I think this book is so cracktastic because it is. Certain books I can pinpoint the reason. The Da Vinci Code? TELL ME WHAT THE BIG SECRET/CONSPIRACY IS. City of Bones/City of Ashes? ARE JACE AND CLARY REALLY SIBLINGS? Twilight? OMG THIS IS A TRAIN WRECK AND I CAN’T TEAR MY EYES AWAY. Books are bestsellers for good reason, even if the literary merit is only sub-par. Thankfully The Lovely Bones is not only readable, it doesn’t leave that bad taste in my mouth the way more commercial books do. It’s a lovely, elegant story about a family and how they deal with the aftermath of a tragedy in their household.

All right, books reviewed, now I must get back to working on my own novel. Do not think about skydiving, JJ. Don’t you dare consider buying a car for the sole purpose of getting down to the dropzone. Don’t think about it. Don’t.

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