Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

Book trailers work, folks. I saw the Super Sad True Love Story book trailer and liked it because it mentioned my alma mater and was pretty funny. And then Shteyngart came to Politics and Prose and I figured, "Why not?"

Verdict: I liked the book but didn't engage with it emotionally.

Love can be difficult to define but love, like pornography, is something I think I can recognize when I see. In Super Sad True Love Story, I don't see love. I see desperation, selfishness, delusion--which is sad, but hardly super sad. An argument could be made that it's not Shteyngart, but rather, the people in the book who deem this story "super sad" and that their lack of emotional depth means that this is the deepest sadness they are capable of comprehending, but in our world, I dispute the assertion by Mary Gaitskill that the "love" story is "super sad."

Even though I find the "love story" designation to be emotionally false, I think the book is well-written. Shteyngart invents phrases that are both surprising and familiar. Irony and satire in the novel are so tightly bound and balanced that even though I find myself unmoved, I also think that everything that happens in the book is how it should happen. The story isn't fixable. There's nothing that can be done to it to make it better. It's perfect the way it is. Which is sad.

Basically, if you like good writing, liked the structure of The Handmaid's Tale (Super Sad True Love Story is also diary-based, with the conceit that the diary was published subsequent to the events of the book and was considered at the time of publication to be emblematic of a fallen society), and feel like spending hours in the company of neurotic, superficial, unreliable narrators, then read this book.

Karen's Revised List

So here's the thing: I've been on this project for a year and a half and I've made diddly progress. And I keep buying books. Why do I keep buying books when I have a list of a hundred books to read, all of which I could find at the library? That's a good question. I'll answer it after I get my next paycheck.

Currently, I have TWENTY SIX unread books on my shelf. So I'm changing my list, because I consider not having read Mathilda Savitch a more pressing gap than not having read Predictably Irrational. Blogs exist to save me from having to read non-fiction.

In the past year, my interests have shifted, and it has become more important to me to read certain types of books and less important to me to read other kinds of books. FORGET MARK TWAIN.

My 19 additions.
1. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, David Wroblewski. (Read it, refuse to review it, as I spent too much time on it already.)
2. The Children's Hospital, Chris Adrian
3. Super Sad True Love Story, Gary Shteyngart
4. Bad Marie, Marcy Dermanski
5. Aurorarama, Jean-Christophe Valtat
6. The Tower, the Zoo, and the Tortoise, Julie Stuart
7. Mathilda Savitch, Victor Lodato
8. Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert
9. The Forest of Hands and Teeth, Carrie Ryan
10. Olive Kitteredge, Elizabeth Strout
11. A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore
12. The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood
13. Outfoxed (Foxhunting Mysteries), Rita Mae Brown
14. Thoroughbred Tales: An Anthology of Fiction
15. Some Horses: Essays, Thomas McGuane
16. The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Philip Pullman
17. Losing Charlotte, Heather Clay
18. Fairies and the Quest for Never Land, Gail Carson Levine (shut up)
19. Southern Vampire Mysteries Boxed Set, Charlaine Harris



The Original 100:
Bolded books are currently being read or are finished. Books italicized with the word SPLAT after it are books that I have decided not to care about.

1. A Book of Common Prayer, Joan Didion. SPLAT
2. A Circle of Quiet, Madeleine L’Engle
3. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Mark Twain, Abandoned
4. A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolfe
5. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
6. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. LeGuin
7. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain (Forget Mark Twain except for where it concerns my boyfriend, Tom Sawyer)
8. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
9. Animal Farm, George Orwell. SPLAT. Read 1984.
10. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand. SPLAT. Read Fountainhead.
11. Atmospheric Disturbances, Rivka Galchen (ABANDONED)
12. Baudolino, Umberto Eco
13. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
14. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley. SPLAT. Was only on the list because I was trying to come up with 100.
15. Cannery Row, John Steinbeck
16. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
17. Changing Places, David Lodge. SPLAT.
18. Crossing to Safety, Wallace Stegner. SPLAT.
19. Death in Venice, Thomas Mann. SPLAT.
20. Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak
21. Dune, Frank Herbert
22. Eve’s Diary, Mark Twain. SPLAT. FORGET MARK TWAIN.
23. Faust (Goethe)
24. Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
25. House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski
26. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Julia Alvarez
27. Hyperion Cantos, Dan Simmons
28. Ilium, Dan Simmons. SPLAT.
29. Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
30. Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer
31. Ishmael, Daniel Quinn. SPLAT. This books is falling way out of favor, huh?
32. Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott. SPLAT.
33. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
34. Lady Chatterley's Lover, D.H Lawrence
35. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
36. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
37. Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis. SPLAT.
38. Madam Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
39. Middlemarch, George Eliot (ABANDONED)
40. Moby Dick, Herman Melville
41. My Antonia, Willa Cather. SPLAT.
42. Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs
43. Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen
44. Old Man’s War, John Scalzi
45. Olympos, Dan Simmons. SPLAT.
46. On the Road, Jack Kerouac
47. Once Upon a Time in the North, Philip Pullman
48. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
49. Orlando, Virginia Woolfe
50. Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood
51. Out Stealing Horses, Per Patterson
52. Peyton Place, Grace Metalious. SPLAT.
53. Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth
54. Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely. SPLAT.
55. Rabbit, Run, John Updike
56. Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier
57. Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane
58. Revolutionary Road, Robert Yates
59. She's Come Undone, Wally Lamb
60. Sophie's Choice, William Styron. SPLAT.
61. Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust
62. The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
63. The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
64. The Best Day of Somebody Else’s Life, Kerry Reichs
65. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
66. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
67. The Call of the Cthulhu, HP Lovecraft
68. The Call of the Wild, Jack London
69. The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science, Natalie Angier
70. The Coast of Good Intentions, Michael Byers
71. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon
72. The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery (Read it, didn't review it, didn't like it.)
73. The Eustace Diamonds, Anthony Trollope. SPLAT.
74. The Gravedigger’s Daughter, Joyce Carol Oates. (Read it, think I didn't review it, didn't like it.)
75. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
76. The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
77. The Irrational Season, Madeleine L’Engle
78. The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Umberto Eco
79. The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
80. The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemmingway
81. The Once and Future King, T.H. White
82. The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan
83. The Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follet
84. The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
85. The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
86. The Screwtape Letters, CS Lewis
87. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
88. The Summer of the Great-grandmother, Madeleine L’Engle
89. The Time Machine, H.G. Wells
90. The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides
91. The Widows of Eastwick, John Updike
92. The World According to Garp, John Irving
93. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
94. Tom Jones, Henry Fielding
95. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne
96. Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage, Madeleine L’Engle
97. Ulysses, James Joyce
98. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
99. Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen. (Read it, didn't review it, LOVED IT.)
100. Watership Down, Richard Adams

Karen's Review, *The Widows of Eastwick, *John Updike

Oops, just realized that I forgot to review The Widows of Eastwick. It was a few weeks ago, so here are my surviving impressions:

--John Updike has a funny relationship with commas, which he later proves is a deliberate style choice by putting in an "excerpt" of Suki's novel.

--Updike is funny, but you have to want it. I find that I have to be actively imagining a robust character, otherwise I'm unaffected by the story. It's like you have to choose to BE in Eastwick with the characters of your own accord, because they don't give enough of a shit about you to convince you.

--Even a legendary author is not immune to bad jacket copy. The widows weren't railing against conformity in any way. Sorry, but no, they weren't. If anything, they were trying to find their way back to conformity, helping people procreate, fixing body parts, trying not to die (seeking equilibrium and a conformity in their physical selves!), trying to make amends in their own way. There are two sides to conformity: there's the square peg/round hole aspect of conformity, which is bad, and there's the moderation and normalcy side of conformity, which can be good; it's how we know whether we've got a problem. Conformity can be where we seek balance, and I think the desire for balance is one of the themes of the novel.

Karen's Review *Jane Eyre, *Charlotte Bronte

Upon finishing and reflecting on Jane Eyre, I think that it would have been a pivotal book in my intellectual development no matter when I had read it, but I'm kind of glad I waited so long. If I had read Jane Eyre as a junior high school-er, I think I would have bonded too fiercely with Jane. I would have imagined her struggles as my own and raged against my teachers and parents even more than I already did. As a high school-er, I would have already been polluted by romance novels and would have been annoyed with long passages that didn't even have the courtesy to be about sex. It would bother me to sit through 520 pages for the prissier version of stories I had read dozens of times before. At 25, the timing was just right!

I was drawn in from the start by the voice, and more so because I wasn't expecting a strong voice in Jane Eyre. Honestly, I didn't think writers had invented real voice yet. My assumption was that Jane Eyre was going to be a chore, and I was going to have to search for the least-dull character in which to invest myself. Not so. She was feisty, observant, and, as was mentioned in the notes, rebellious. She stunned and seduced me in just three pages.

Speaking of pages, I was a bit horrified by the page count.I was sure it was going to go the way of Middlemarch, abandoned halfway through while I convinced myself I was "busy." I had no idea how I was going to get through 520 pages of Victorian-era prose without losing all interest in this project, but here's where Bronte taught me my second lesson in writing: That woman's chapters are tight. There's a beginning, a middle, an end, foreshadowing, conclusion, and a lingering question about what comes next.

That said, Jane Eyre is not going on my "Favorites" list in Amazon's Books application on Facebook. I found Jane Eyre readable and educational, and it made me think about writing and character development and what it means to be a writer, but it didn't make me giggle, it didn't make me cry, and it didn't make me want to tell everyone to go read this book. Maybe every writer ought to, but certainly not every person. While I liked her voice and personality, I found her lack of interest in her inheritance to be wholly implausible, because Jane Eyre is actually a pretty prideful and self-interested character; she's quick to judge, assess, and rank herself against household members--usually highly. Much is made of her humble traits, but she's not, not really.

Bronte erred in allowing Jane to become aware of her inheritance so early in the book but then NEVER DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT. By the second mention of her inheritance without any action on Jane's part, I lost interest completely in what happened to her, and started to read the book with the firm belief that this was merely masturbatory writing; that the book kept going on and on and on pretty much because Bronte just felt like writing.

I'm sure I'm coming at Jane Eyre very much a product of my generation. If I'd been alive and able to read in 1847, I can see how I would have had a different perspective. Which brings me to my last point. I wasn't an English major and I'm no literary scholar, but the long, convoluted, hyper-literary passages and dialogue got me thinking:

1) Did people really talk like that?

2) Wouldn't I have written like that, too?

3) Holy crap, class warfare.

By that I mean: Who the hell has time for all the literary references, the passive voice, and the "hide the ball" story-telling in which the characters indulge? Probably people of leisure and academia. The governesses and the clergy have time to read enough books to refer to them subtly in their everyday speech, because book learning is their, you know, JOB, and Mr. Rochester can because he's got nothing better to do, owing to being loaded and not having to do any real work at all, but the servants speak plainly. They're direct, to the point, and don't pussyfoot about with being coy--well, ok, they do, but they do so much more quickly.

Before getting too rankled, I tried to put myself into a Victorian era woman's perspective. If I'd been fortunate enough to be wealthy, what would I have done all day long? I'd have read. And it would have been the greatest joy of my life, and it would have infected everything I did or said. The same would go for writing.

In a slower-paced world, I think there's a lot more room for literary fiction. Active, direct language is more conducive to moving along a plot, but I wonder if Charlotte Bronte, her peers, and her readers, didn't take a greater joy in the act of deciphering and understanding language than I do. Maybe they loved language for its own sake, while I'm more concerned with what it can do for me. I keep expecting books and writing to change my life, make me think new thoughts, entertain me, DO something. Maybe that's the wrong way to think about it. Maybe I should be changing my life, thinking new thoughts, and, through being an active, engaged reader, I should be entertaining myself.

So. That's what Jane Eyre did to me. You?

PS: Love, love, love Ellen Page of Juno being cast as Jane Eyre. She's perfect for it.

*Karen, *Wally Lamb, *She's Come Undone

I'm back! Finally reading from my list again.

I found She's Come Undone to be a very easy read, but it was one of those books where I wasn't sure what the plot really was, anyway. If I were to sum up the book, I would say that the point of it seemed to be to find an excuse to go crazy, fake being sane, and then finally get to be sane again. It is my main complaint about novels that span a lifetime. If you're not very attached and interested in the character, there's no point in reading the whole thing.

This is uncomfortable to admit, but I think the reason I kept reading--sometimes unhappily--was because the main character, Dolores Price, reminded me a lot of myself. Fat, blaming the weight for my bad attitude, prone to lashing out, deluding myself, holding the world responsible for my pain, lack of boundaries . . . the list goes on. So, at times, while reading it, I wanted to bury my head under a pillow and cry over being so damned obvious myself.

But I got over it. Why? Because Dolores's therapist is so absurd, that the ridiculousness of a grown man insisting to his patient that he is her mother was just so alien to my own experiences with therapists that it jolted me out of myself and into the story.

Dolores's major emotional shifts are marked by the death of aquatic creatures. She kills her would-be lesbian lover's pet fish out of rage at being molested twice in one night, and a third time in her lifetime (fourth if you count her dad's tweaking of her boobs, which she never takes him to task over but I'm disinclined to let him off the hook so easily), then runs off to hang out with some suicidal whales, looks a dead whale in the eye and decides not to off herself, goes into a home (with the Mommy Therapist) then all seems to go swimmingly for awhile, even though the reader knows better, then she loses her shit again, accidentally kills her pet goldfish, then gets her life together and sees a whale.

Was Wally Lamb using the fish as a metaphor for raw, primitive emotion, and whales for empowered decision-making? Are whales, being mammals, more like humans than fish? Or am I obsessing and nit-picking over nothing? Would I understand this book better if I read Moby Dick? Is there something I'm missing about whales and fish that is a well-established principle in literature?

*Karen, Book Review *The Two Princesses of Bamarre, by *Gail Carson Levine

Victory. I've managed to read, a little. Even though they aren't on my list, I thought I'd let you all know that The Two Princesses of Bamarre and The Fairy's Return, by Gail Carson Levine, were delightful.

The Two Princesses of Bamarre was a bit dull, but I loved the final plot twist. I didn't see it coming at all. Though I'm sick to death of the anti-hero--yes, yes, true courage is doing something you're afraid of, the hero is the one who perseveres, blah, blah, blah--I found Princess Addie to be quietly forceful and not as trite as I feared she would be.

I absolutely loved The Fairy's Return. It's a revisionist collection of fairy tales. All of the short stories are about "princesses" in the kingdom of Biddle throughout many centuries. As always, Levine's twist on familiar fairy tales is fresh, charming, and at times, totally unexpected.

Gappers, Help Me

I've been woefully lax in doing my reading. I don't know what my problem is. Or rather, I do, I just don't know how to get back on track.

My grandma died right as I signed up for this blog. Telling her about making my list was one of the last conversations we ever had. I added War and Peace to my list just because she lit up when I told her that I was thinking about it. Her funeral was only two days before I went to Hawaii, and I did do some reading on planes; but it's been a month and a half since then, and I've barely picked up Atmospheric Disturbances, let alone Middlemarch. I don't know if I can't read because I'm afraid to move on, or if I can't read out of depression alone--I have been spending an awful lot of time on Netflix, which is usually a sign that I'm about to go cry to my therapist about sucking at life.

I'm sorry to hijack this blog, but I figured if anybody knows what it's like to have your reading plans interrupted, it's people who've managed to come up with a list of 100 books they always meant to have read, and yet, haven't. Plus, my own blog still hasn't launched, which is my fault . . .

Ideas, suggestions? I went to BN today after work, and picked up some books by Gail Carson Levine that I never read . . . Ella Enchanted was one of my favorites as a teenager, and I enjoyed reading Fairest even in college. Maybe some light, fun reading is what I need to jump-start this project. What do you think?

Karen, Book Review, *The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, *Mark Haddon

The Curious Incident of the Dog in clearly the Night-time, by Mark Haddon, absolutely stunned me. It's about a kid with an unspecified (the author has said in interview that it's Aspergers, but it's not mentioned in the book) autism spectrum disorder. He stumbles across the neighbor's dead dog and decides to solve the mystery of who killed the dog. His investigation unearths all sorts of family secrets that just beg for a resolution. The autistic boy, Christopher, narrates the story, and the narration at times took my breath away.

Amazon reviewers have disputed the authenticity and the treatment of the main character, but I found his naive and sage insights into our world magnetic and precise. Once Christopher explained even the most mundane things to me, I would suddenly become convinced that this was the only reasonable way to talk about it. I especially liked his treatment of white lies.

Though I expected The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time to be a challenging read, what with the main character's autism and all, I actually found it to be one of the easiest reads of my life, if you don't count things like the Baby-Sitters Club.

Normally, I don't like any kind of mystery. It's nearly impossible to satisfy me, because if I guess the ending, I feel bored and like I wasn't challenged, and if I don't guess the ending, I think that the writer did a bad job. I'm impossible to please with most mysteries. Even if the book isn't shelved with other mysteries--if it's just some random piece of literary fiction where you're supposed to be shocked that it turns out everyone's life sucks because some old dude molested somebody and you're supposed to feel all emotional and whatever about it--I'm still not crazy about mysteries. I don't think I'm jaded, I just think that I don't like being manipulated, and that's all mysteries seem to be about, in the end. But that's how good The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time was: I didn't guess who killed the dog, and I didn't mind; I was too caught up in enjoying the narrator's voice and in taking the story one page at a time to worry about who killed the dog or to bother with my own ego.

In other words, if you're looking for a book that will take you out of yourself completely, read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.