Major Pettigrew reminds me of a man standing on the edge of the advancing Nothing in The Neverending Story.  His wife has passed away, his neighbors are abandoning the British gentility which has always guided him through interactions with them, and his son is such a man of the modern age that he may as well be a different species.  On the passing of his brother, Major Pettigrew’s family erupts into a display of poor behavior and entitlement unlike anything he has ever seen, particularly over the matter of his brother’s hunting gun, which is one of a pair owned by the men’s father and split amongst them to be passed down through the family.  They are a birthright, and it seems that the Major is the only one who still regards them thus.  As he struggles to make sense of this disappointment and retain control of the heirlooms, he must too manage a fledgling romance with Mrs. Ali, a beautiful, quiet widow who runs the shop near his home, and deal with the ugly striving of his son.

For what is essentially a romance novel, Major Pettigrew takes on a truly impressive number of difficult topics, and explores each in remarkable depth.  The overarching theme is one of cultural dynamics and how they shift.  Pettigrew’s father’s guns were a gift for his service in colonial India, and the Major’s golf club wants to throw a colonial-India-themed gala to celebrate the event.  Not only do many of the members fail to understand why this is not really appropriate (white people glorifying colonialization!  Hooray!), but Simonson also shows us several ways that non-white people involved with the event choose to deal with the situation – one family sees it as a business opportunity, while Mrs. Ali is clearly uncomfortable, and so on.  The gala shows the hazards of glorifying times and behaviors that were dominated by the domination of other people, and it’s easy to look down on those behaviors from our current time, and to brush off all of the old monarchic traditions that produced them.  But Simonson is not ready to let us discount tradition entirely.  Pettigrew’s little village has caught the eye of developers, and their proposed atrocities would stabilize the shaky fortunes of the local Lord, whose economic footholds have grown less sure as modernity sweeps in and redistributes wealth from the aristocracy.  In view of the fuckery of the gala, one might be prepared to cheer this development as sweeping away the rotting vestiges of an oppressive structure, but Simonson shows us that doing so also threatens the community bonds built under the system, which tie people together and encourage them to care for the land and buildings and people amongst which they live.  It’s not all bad, Simonson is telling us.

There’s also an interesting look at the dynamics of Muslims living in England, as well as the differences in generations within the religion itself.  Mrs. Ali is a modest woman who is mindful of her religion even as she takes soft little steps outside some of its more hardline positions, but she must contend with her nephew, who comes to the shop to deal with the woman who is mother to his child.  He is extremely rigid, and has a difficult time dealing not only with his own family’s trespasses but the behavior of those in the community at large.  This is all before we get to the mother herself, who is a rebellious, punky woman lashing out at both the restrictions of her religion and the prejudice that she encounters in the world around her.  It’s a rich and lovely portrait of the decisions we all must make as religious people, and Simonson seats it beautifully in the context of English society, adding yet another layer of consideration to our view of these characters and the qualities they represent.

I don’t want to tell you how it turns out for all of these people, because you should read the book on one of our remaining summer days, outside, in the sun, with a glass of iced tea.  It is in turns hysterically funny, incredibly sweet and crushingly sad, and the overall effect is of a beautiful story about the way we lived and live our lives.

Bossypants is a combination of memoir and general observations about life in comedy.  I appreciated that it didn’t lean too heavily one way or the other.  It seems like many people feel like a memoir has to Say Something or have some kind of self-help-y underpinning to it, and that seems silly to me if the author isn’t an actual self-help-dispensing person.  If some publisher thinks you’re saleable, it’s because people like you and want to know about you, and I don’t think that necessarily means they want to know how you got to be you.  Tina Fey has written a kind of memoir of her young life and the progress of her comedy career, and the advice she does give is not about how to make it in comedy necessarily but how to apply the lessons that she gleaned from comedy in your life.  I particularly liked her descriptions of her youthful awkwardness, because for once – for once! – it was framed as “man, everyone is so awkward when they’re kids,” which is true, instead of that stilted “don’t hate me because I’m beautiful” apology-cum-compliment-fishing way so many famous beauties tend to lean towards.  It might just be better writing, but it’s nice that the “…so we’re cool, right? I’m just like you!” tone is absent there.

I really enjoyed hearing a woman who I think most people see as very together and balanced as she Does It All explain that it is incredibly challenging to do It All, no matter how it comes off to observers.  She’s not bemoaning the challenges of being a mom in a competitive and time-consuming field, but rather acknowledging that those challenges exist.  She is obviously happy with her choices even though they certainly contribute stress to her life, and I think that’s a healthy thing to show people.  Not to return to the “other memoirists are doing it wrong” place, but I do think people often breeze over big and persistent challenges without admitting that they complicate and strain their lives, and that makes the reader feel inadequate, like they should somehow feel bad about feeling pressure from challenges in their life.  I don’t think celebrities exist to make people feel good about themselves or anything, but I think that too much pretending success is just a walk in the park is what has given us a world where children say they want to be “a celebrity” when they grow up and where we have deranged programming like Jerseylicious.

This is a great read, and Fey’s writerly voice is wonderful.  This would be a great pick for a short day trip, and I think it would also be a good audiobook to pick up.  It would be a good choice for young people, too.  Fey does a great job of stressing the value of continual striving and hard work, and she’s so relateable.  I think it would really help a lot of kids realize that they can do what they want, but that the world is not just waiting outside their door to hand success over without a fight.  Pick up a copy!

After these revelations, I thought, “well, I don’t know much about this Brand fellow besides his relationship with my new BFF and his propensity for wearing ridiculous pants,” and checked out his autobiography.  I hate when reviewers get all existential about book covers, but the title really does tell you a lot about Brand: this isn’t some serious tome about his grind to the top, but a serious and surprisingly objective look back at the imperfect life of someone who doesn’t take himself seriously.  Brand is refreshingly open about his myriad fuck-ups, and he doesn’t attempt to glamourize them, even as he admits the charms of that lifestyle.  He freely admits that he was kind of a shitty person for an extended period of time, and I really liked his willingness to stand up, now ostensibly having gotten his act together, and say “look, this was fun at the time but it made me a legitimately bad person and that is not a good thing.”

Brand also talks about being a smart and talented person and what knowing that did to wreak havoc on his life.  I really related to this; while I’ve avoided fucking up on Brand’s scale, I know what it’s like to decide you can coast on your natural talents and then have that come back to bite you.  He rolled through drama programs and schools and environments, getting bored and resisting direction throughout, and in the end, that cost him opportunities and friendships.  It’s a good warning to anyone feeling those pangs of boredom.  This is a problem that is tough to articulate, and Brand really handled it well.

This is a great summer read.  Brand is a funny bastard, and as is the case with so many great comedians, much of his best humor can come from sadness or tragedy. I’m not sure how much of this book he wrote, but my impression is actually that most of it is his work, and while that in and of itself is admirable in a time when it’s much more popular to hire a ghostwriter, it also represents the gift of a talented voice.  It is always hard to understandhow someone becomes famous, because most famous people take careful note of those they knew on their way who were just as talented and even sometimes harder working, but didn’t make it, and Brand’s discussion of theweirdness of fame is fascinating and deftly relayed.

Side note: Russell Brand recently posted a truly beautiful and insightful tribute to Amy Winehouse.  It is worth a read.  You can check it out on his website and I highly recommend that you do.

What I like about Richard Russo is his ability to appreciate everyone for their quirky fucked-upped-ness, academic or no.  The tension between the two worlds is ever-present in Nobody’s Fool, as the main character, Sully, works to deal with the demented sensibilities of the more “educated” powers that be around him.  He’s a laid-back man who has made his life on his strength and on being able to help people, and in the latter half of his life, he’s searching for direction while being weighted down by his past.  These shackles take the form of the decaying house he inherited from his father years ago and the reappearance of his son, a failing academic being unceremoniously booted from academe after failing to get tenure.  Nobody’s Fool is a celebration of the everyman and the rich wisdom available to him.

Much like Empire Falls, another favorite Russo book of mine, Nobody’s Fool features a wonderful array of small town characters who bear up and wear down Sully’s spirits.  His sometimes-boss is an overbearing jerk who continually belittles him, he has a faltering flirtation with several of the local ladies, and his landlady is an older woman who talks to her dead husband.  I could outline the plot for you, but as with so much of Russo’s writing, the specifics of the plot – though hysterical and sweet – are less important than the one essential truth at its core: that life grants wishes and dashes hopes whimsically, no matter what you try to do to prevent it, and the only defense against this trauma is to love the people in your life who are worth it.

Frankenstein is written in a similar style to Stoker’s book, as a sort of conversational journal referred to as “epistolary form.” The story is a lot more thoughtful and philosophical than what you tend to get in modernizations of the tale – the few villagers-with-pitchforks scenes are almost throwaways, and pale before the larger project of asking what makes a human. I was really impressed with the beautiful treatment of some really complicated questions in this book. The Frankenstein monster is no lurching green guy here, but a man simply constructed from parts by a man who realized the tragedy of this half-human’s existence.

This is relayed by Frankenstein to Captain Walton, who has found him half dead, chasing the monster over an icy ocean. Frankenstein explains that he pursued knowledge with such abandon that he was driven to create this monster, which he immediately realized was an affront to nature. The creature, however, is driven by a desire to be human and to pursue wisdom in his own right. After Frankenstein abandons him, the monster travels the countryside, learning to read and speak in the process. Unfortunately, people cannot get beyond his horrible appearance, and he is eventually shot at after rescuing a small girl from drowning by a man who sees the two of them; after this incident, he swears vengeance on mankind. Once he has figured out the problems of his creation, he returns to kill several of Frankenstein’s family members out of vengeance. He demands that Frankenstein build him a companion, so that he can live out his life in social exile in companionship. Frankenstein begins the project, but ultimately destroys it, unable to face having brought TWO such beings into the world. The monster vows revenge, and kills Frankenstein’s fiancee right before their wedding, touching off a pursuit which both vow can only end with one or the other dead. It is in the middle of this pursuit that Walton finds Frankenstein.

There is yet more to the story, but I think it would be best for you to read it yourself. The whole book is a consideration of what it means to be human: is it the human body? Language? Speech? Social interaction? Through Frankenstein’s tale, we are able to consider each, on our own and through the reactions of the characters in the book. It’s really an exceptional story, and the writing is beautiful. I highly recommend this one, to be read when you have plenty of time to consider it. Mary Shelley is an interesting story in and of herself, too – she published this in 1816, when suffice to say, not too many women were publishing. She came up with the idea during a vacation with Lord freaking Byron and her husband, when they were stuck indoors by rainy weather brought on by volcanic eruptions. Yes really. They spent the time discussing things including galvanism or animation, and reading German ghost stories. I don’t know about you, but that seems like a guarantee that the product of such a vacation will be awesome!

One of the things that I kept thinking about as I read was the fact that this book was on the New York Times Bestseller List for an extended period of time.  Maybe I don’t have enough faith in today’s reader (Cannonball Readers exempted, of course), but I have a hard time imagining such a book returning to the NYT‘s Bestseller List.  It’s basically a collection of case histories, and can be quite technical.  Though they do have the Wow Factor, I can’t imagine a book that is so technical gaining so much popularity.  That’s a shame, because I found this to be a really interesting read.

Dr. Oliver Sacks has assembled this collection of 24 stories, which deal with various “weird mental things.”  The book is roughly chunked into sections by affliction, so there’s a section on the brain doing too much of something, one on it doing too little (or none) of something, and one the deals with more universal perception issues.  Supposedly there are four sections, but I find that the latter two are much of the same type.  This might just be because I am not a psychology enthusiast and thus don’t have the appropriate vocabulary and knowledge to make the distinction.  This includes all kinds of things, like the titular man who was unable to distinguish things as things, people with phantom limbs, problems understanding parts of their bodies in relation to other parts, Rainman-like fixations with naming massive prime numbers, etc.  All of the studies are interesting, and Dr. Sacks provides a great explanation of his thought process in each one.  It’s kind of like a non-dickbaggy, non-Vicodin-addicted House.  I really liked seeing how he drew connections between known disorders in an attempt to figure out where the damage or malfunction might be in the brain, and then how he was able to take that info and extrapolate it out into an understanding of the patient’s problem.

One of the things I liked about Dr. Sacks’ accounts of these folks is the way he is clearly concerned with their quality of life.  For all I know, he’s a callous jerk looking to make a buck off publishing these stories, but the way he talks about his patients and works through the problems for the sake of their improved lives suggests the opposite.  Some of the problems aren’t even crippling – several of the patients arrive at Dr. Sacks’ office with coping skills already in place – but Sacks works through the problems with his patients regardless.  It’s nice to see such compassion on display, especially in a field where there’s a lot of stigma and misunderstanding.

I’d definitely recommend this book to people interested in how the brain works and the weird stuff it can do.  It’s a good read, and Dr. Sacks’ voice is clear and entertaining.  He appreciates some of the goofiness these challenges present and admits it with gentle humor, keeping the book light and pretty entertaining for a fairly technical accounting.  It’s a great read!

I would like to be nice about this book, particularly since the concept is a neat one and it apparently was an Amazon.com Best Book of the Month for January of 2011.  Unfortunately, this distinction only serves to make me nervous about the mental health of my fellow Internet denziens, because this book is just not…best anything.

I thought a little bit about that last paragraph, went back and wrote the first one, and then came back here and I wonder if I’m being a little harsh.  I’m sure there are some things that The Weird Sisters is in fact the best at.  Let me see if I can come up with a few.

Best Random Smattering of Shakespearean Naming Conventions

The three sisters are named after Rosalind (As You Like It), Bianca (The Taming of the Shrew) and Cordelia (King Lear).  Brown references Rosalind’s in-play disguise as a male by putting her in what Brown appears to consider a male profession – college teaching – and putting her in the masculine role in her marriage according to tired gender roles.  Bianca is a temptress character who always seems to get her way with men.  Cordelia is distant and has trouble taking her father’s advice.  But of course Brown wants to get tricky with this, so Rosalind winds up taking a more feminine role and moving to Oxford to join her husband, Bianca sees her powers of seduction fail and must find a way to cope without them, and Cordelia winds up learning the true meaning of family.  Why Brown picked these three characters and pulled in three plays when she was already overtaxing herself with the weird sisters conceit is beyond me.  Oh!  And the actual weird sisters are from Macbeth, so there’s literally no connection anywhere.

Best Frequency of Tense Shifts

Thanks to the weird sisters first person plural concept, Brown is forced to engage in some truly horrendous tense shifts.  Though the period of time that the story covers is not large – several months, plus some flashbacks – there are some truly awe-inspiring tense shifts that make the whole enterprise a convoluted mess.  It makes it difficult to track the progress of the story and quite frankly the idea sounds a lot more interesting theoretically than it IS in practice.

Best Heap of Bullshit About a Family’s Interaction

The girls’ father is a renowned professor at the local university – though the college is pooh-poohed as being somewhat podunk and not that prestigious, so it’s hard to say what the hell a professor of his apparent world-class status is doing at a piece of shit college, but whatever - and apparently we are supposed to believe that he speaks almost entirely in quotes from Shakespeare.  I have a healthy respect for Shakespeare’s incredible linguistic talents and the breadth of his catalog, but I’m sorry, you do not transact your life in Shakespearean verse in the 2000s, and you certainly don’t do it without your family murdering you and hiding your body in the woods.  Oh, and of course we’re also supposed to believe that the professor’s wife and three daughters have all memorized Shakespeare’s complete works as well so that they can communicate and toss off vague witticisms.

Apparently my “bests” aren’t really that besty.  I found this book incredibly pretentious and irritating, all in the service of a plot that was cribbed from the latest and greatest Lifetime movies.  It’s a shame, because I think in the right hands, a book written in the voice of the weird sisters would be interesting.  Unfortunately, Eleanor Brown decided to take up the project.  I’m not actually saying she’s a bad writer – there’s good work hiding under the crap in this book – but this simply exceeded her grasp of Shakespeare and her ability to execute.

In The Woods is ostensibly a crime novel about the murder of a young girl, but in reality, it’s more about the relationships we form and the way our past affects us.  The detectives investigating the murder are Cassie Maddox and Adam “Rob” Ryan.  Ryan was the sole survivor of a mysterious incident in the same woods in which the murder victim was found, and has come a long way from that incident to his current position.  He has totally excised the incident – of which he remembers nothing – from his life, only to have it forcibly dragged back in when this case comes to the department.

French’s intermingling of the two mysteries, past and present, heightens the tension in both, and her handling of the plot is really spectacular.  Still, the centerpiece of the book is actually the friendship between Maddox and Ryan, a strange connection between tomboy and shy man that continually dances the line between solid professional partnership and romantic interest.  One of the things I appreciated most is that French has Ryan – in whose voice the story is told – engage in the same kind of self-justification that we all do from time to time, telling someone that everything is copacetic when in fact you’re trying to convince yourself.  The relationship is clearly beyond the bounds of their professional partnership, even though that aspect of their relationship certainly benefits from their closeness.  I think it’s a more honest look at the way people occasionally wind up at work when they’re employed in very intense environments; certain jobs just demand that you involve more of your humanity, and being able to do that well is contingent on having people around you who you can reveal that to and whose humanity will align with your own.

To unravel the plot of In The Woods would really be unfair to you as a reader, because there is absolutely no reason for you to pass this one by.  Whether you like good writing, mysteries, police novels, psychological drama, romances, you name it…this is just a damn good book, and you should pick it up.  French’s writing has that beautiful quiet tone that you sometimes find in Irish writing, and the world in which she sets her story is lush and incredibly tactile.  You feel like you have been to these towns and offices and woods – but always as an outsider.  Holding you at an arm’s distance maintains the fog of mystery over the whole situation and makes for an incredible reading experience.  I highly recommend this book and hope you’ll pick it up!

The Ruins is a pretty simple story: a bunch of dumb kids go out into the jungle and run into insidious forces that ultimately lead to bad things.  But there’s more going on than just that somewhat typical trope.  For one, not all of the vacationers know each other or even share a language.  The danger they face isn’t simple either.  There’s the general danger of being out of their element, but there are also menacing, mysterious villagers surrounding them and imprisoning them on the ruins, and then, of course…there are the vines.  The vines turn out to be the biggest problem of all.  As it turns out, the vines are sentient, evil plants (don’t laugh), and the longer the kids stay on the ruins, they more then understand how dire their straits are.

It is a mark of Smith’s ability that this premise doesn’t wind up utterly ridiculous in practice.  The book is full of tension and genuine horror, far more than a book about evil death plants should be.  Part of this is because he plays on the other factors threatening the characters’ survival to produce the overwhelming effect people in their situation would likely feel.  There are problems with water and food supplies, since they cannot leave the ruins and the vines exude a stinging sap.  They don’t understand why the armed villagers have the ruins surrounded and won’t let them leave, and they don’t know if the person they followed to the ruins made it or if others are likely to follow.  They have to deal with sunburn and with some massive injuries as a result of falls down an open shaft and other accidents.  On top of all of this, Smith has produced a set of realistic characters, which is to say that there are some that are bossy (though knowledgable), some that are panicky and helpless, some that are straight up jerks.  Having realistic characters in play makes everything much more appealing and much more tense.

Then there are the vines.  They are truly creepy in all they do.  They grow incredibly quickly and are drawn to blood, even snaking out to suck up pools of it.  The characters eventually realize that the vine has eaten several people, including the ones they followed out to the ruins in the first place.  They also are able to make noise, mimicking voices to turn the captives against each other and making other unnatural sounds to trick them.  It’s a great effect and of course you can read as much “Nature’s Revenge!!!!” into it as you want to.

Overall, a surprisingly great read.  It’s not long but it packs in the tension and is a creative concept handled really well.  I’d definitely recommend this one!

Chanel and her clothing were remarkable for their time.  Chanel was the one who ushered women out of the restrictive, ornamental age of frippery and into casual clothing that allowed them to actually function as active human beings.  Once you read a little more about her, you understand how she came to be this person – she was a tempestuous woman who rode horses, had affairs, and fought societal conventions tooth and nail. As are so many movers and shakers, she also appears to have been truly unpleasant and obstinate, which must have been somewhat startling for the delicate clients who sought out her work.   I kind of enjoy that, frequently uninterested in making nice as I am.  It’s also nice to see a biographer hit a strange mixture of fangirldom and appreciation of her idols numerous flaws.  She doesn’t shy away from addressing Chanel’s business mistakes or her personal ones, like dating a Nazi during World War II.  It’s almost BECAUSE she notes these problems that Chanel’s successes seem so impressive, particularly when you consider the endurance of the Chanel name.

This is a light little book that’s packed with a surprising amount of information about Chanel and her era.  The author can get a little trying – I found an incident where she and a friend took a picture they’d been expressly forbidden to take (of a dog, no less) particularly childish, unprofessional and stupid – and her idea of a life manual as directed by Chanel’s chutzpah is a little clunky, because the sectioning she sets up at the outset of the book gets further segmented more or less at random.  That said, I’d definitely recommend it, particularly for those interested in fashion generally.  I think it speaks well to the way social conventions affect the way we look at fashion, which I always find interesting.