Minnesota Reads

I don’t read young-adult fiction. It’s just so beneath me. I only read big, important books because I am so intellectual.

The Hunger Games? Yeah, I’ve heard of it. A modern gladiator tale about teenagers from a post-apocalyptic America pitted against one another in a fight to the death? Please. How pulpy can you get?

I definitely did not stay up way too late several nights in a row finishing it in an embarrassingly short amount of time because the grim, sinister plot was so gripping. There’s just no way I could find a tough-as-nails heroine like Katniss Everdeen compelling. The plotline about her taking her younger sister’s place in the fight is too gooey to really do anything for me emotionally – or it would be if I had read this book, which I haven’t.

I’ve heard it has Ray Bradbury-esque touches, like a “1984″-style government and genetically engineered creatures designed to do its nefarious bidding. That sounds so Sy-Fy Channel. And the whole part about Katniss not knowing whom she can trust, including her love interest Peeta Mellark and all his shifting loyalties – how juvenile! It isn’t like love stories and mystyeries like that have interested people since the beginning of the written word or anything.

Oh, there’s a movie adaptation coming out next month? No, I’m not excited to see that. Not at all.

If I recall correctly, the window for reading My Antonia closes around the time a high school student gets a learner’s permit. Read old time-y novel filled with chores and wind burn. Write essay about what makes this title character such a big-league muse to the protagonist. Earn a B, no plus, no minus, just B. Shelve novel next to The Red Pony, and put another notch in your American Canon head board. Buy a braided keychain. Fill car with yelping teens crunk on blue Mr. Misty Freezes and forget this ever happened.

Yeah. This wasn’t on my high school reading list for whatever reason. But it recently landed on my radar, a hole in my coming-of-literary-age, so I went with the whim and downloaded a free version for Kindle. (Old book. Free! Thanks, Project Gutenberg!)

For those of you who had mono the Willa Cather semester: My Antonia is the story of a young Czech girl and her family who arrive in a small Nebraska town at the same time as the narrator, Jim Burden, who has gone to live with his grandparents. Turns out they’re neighbors! Jim’s grandparents are faring well financially, but Antonia’s family is new to farming and they struggle through their first winter.

The kids forge a long lasting friendship, through matching moves closer to the city, a crazy summer of dance parties and their eventual split when Jim goes off to Lincoln for college and Antonia stays closer to home. Lots of coming-of-age, lots of colorful Old West visuals, prairies and red waving fields and the like. All told from the perspective of an adult version of Jim, remembering back to this fiery, hard-working, awesome dancing, lovely toughie who captured his interest. Blah, blah, blah. It’s nice.

But. Lena Lingard is where it’s at. This just-slightly-more-than-fringe-character, a friend of Jim and Antonia’s, is my favorite. She’s a recent immigrant, too, and when she starts to develop, there isn’t a prairie wind strong enough to carry away her dizzying pheromones. Lena also moves to town to hone her sewing skills, working so she can send money back to her family on the farm.

Oh, Lena, with man tornadoes in her wake, moving toward an unconventional goal. There, friends, is your enigma. Even young Jim falls into the flytrap briefly. Lena is the character I want to follow to California, the one I want to see nipping sweets, a business woman with a casual way, stylishly dressed in original creations. What a great book: “My Lena.”

At the mention of their names, we probably all have the same images of Snow White and Cinderella in our heads, and those images come from Disney. In the Disney fairytales, women are either ugly and evil or dainty and in need of rescue by really boring men. With the help of a man, Snow White escapes into the arms of seven men, and in the end another man rescues her with his kiss. Sleeping Beauty is also rescued by a man’s kiss. And poor Cinderella is taunted by ugly, cruel women and at the ball she loses her shoe, because when I’m running I typically just fall right out of my shoes, but not to fret, a man finds her shoe and rescues poor Cinderella.

Fairytales suck. At a young age we’re fed the idea that a woman’s value is contingent upon whether or not a man loves and rescues her, because without a man we’re either in danger or an evil, old shrew.

But thank god for fairytale retellings. Cinder by Marissa Meyer is the latest Cinderella retelling, and in this one Cinderella is a smart, kick-ass cyborg. She does have an evil stepmother, two stepsisters, a sidekick who is not a singing mouse but a girly, fashion-obsessed android, and there is a ball, but that’s pretty much where the similarities end. This is a story that stands on its own, far from its fairytale inspirations.

Set in the distant future in rundown New Beijing, the world is full of humans, cyborgs, and androids, and they face a threat from the lunar people, the people living on the moon. Cinder is a cyborg, so she’s part human part machine, and cyborgs are seen as second class citizens, almost viewed with more disdain than all-machine androids. But even with being shunned, Cinder thrives in the marketplace as one of the best mechanics in New Beijing, and that’s where she meets Prince Kai.

Prince Kai is the gorgeous, charming heir to the throne and he makes girls like Cinder’s stepsisters swoon. His father, the emperor, is ill with the flu-like virus that’s sweeping the planet, killing millions. When Kai’s android, which is full of secret information, breaks down, Kai is directed to visit the best mechanic in New Beijing, and he has no idea she’s a cyborg.

Kai and Cinder’s paths will continue to cross, and I couldn’t help smiling at how charming Kai is. Seriously, I felt like one of Cinder’s stepsisters, so it was easy to see how Cinder slowly starts to blush when she sees him.

But this story is so much more than Cinder and Kai. It’s about the virus sweeping the planet, the potential for a cure, the tension between Cinder and her stepmother, the threat of the lunar people, secrets and lies, and the ball. I can’t give you a summary of it all, but I can say that I loved it. I really thought this was a great book.

What’s so great about it is Cinder. She’s a strong lead character, one who has every reason to give up, but she doesn’t. She’s independent, works hard, fights for what she believes in, and the situations she gets in made me cheer and sometimes broke my heart. She also never acts like a dainty woman in need of being rescued. If anything it’s her who does the rescuing. That’s how I like my fairytale heroines.

There are other strong characters, like Prince Kai who is definitely the hero to Cinder’s heroine, but smaller characters are interesting, too. One of the stepsisters is nice to Cinder and they have a really close relationship, but my favorite sidekick was Cinder’s android. It’s weird saying an android is well-developed, but she is so quirky and completely different than Cinder that I found myself loving their interaction. I want an android like that.

The story that moves these characters is quick and really hard to put down, but some of it isn’t all that surprising. There’s an element to this book about a missing lunar person, and you’d have to be an idiot not to figure this out pretty easily, but I can’t tell if it was supposed to be obvious to us or if it was meant to be a shocking moment. If I was supposed to be awed by it, that didn’t get pulled off too well, but I was okay being in on the secret even if it took the characters too long to figure it out.

Another thing that I wish was a bit better was the ending. I wish it had more of an ending. It’s the first in a planned series called The Lunar Chronicles, and the ending really isn’t an ending at all, it just sort of ends. I like reading series, but I want to have either a satisfying ending or a huge cliffhanger. This has neither.

But my criticisms aside, I really did like this book. Cinderella as a cyborg. I would never have thought of that, but I’m glad Marissa Meyer did. The next one will be called Scarlet, which I’m assuming will be about Little Red Riding Hood. I wonder what she’ll be?

It shouldn’t be an awkward thing to explain to my hair guy the plot of Helen Dewitt’s novel Lightning Rods. For one thing, he has just spent the trimming process going into moderate detail about his current dating life and the highlighting process talking about the time when he was 27 and fell into a relationship with a woman nearly twice his age who confessed to him that she hadn’t slept with anyone in 10 years.

But here I am, backed head first into a sink, my face Prude Purple. The team one sink away is just a little too close, the sound system’s music a little too quiet, for me to comfortably get to the key plot points: A man who invents a Workplace Sexual Harassment Deflection system that goes like this:

• Businessman sits in his cubicle working on his computer.
• Notification pops up on screen inviting man to the handicap accessible stall of the workplace bathroom.
• Once inside, a panel opens in the wall and here comes the bottom half of an anonymous naked woman, dubbed a Lightning Rod. Condoms are dispensed nearby.
• Said man then has sex with the anonymous woman.
• Woman is rolled back to the women’s bathroom side, panel shuts, man returns to his workspace invigorated by the sexual release.

The outcome: Higher productivity, less sick leave, no threat of sexual harassment suits from randy men, out of control with sexual urges, dishing unwanted advances to the women on staff. As if explaining the plot isn’t awkward enough, explaining why this book isn’t shit — that it is in fact funny, satire, akin to The Canterbury Tales in some ways — is another animal. Most people don’t want to listen to book talk long enough to hear this part, I’ve found. Book plot summaries as casual conversation with casual readers have an interest time limit similar to the amount of time allowed to deconstruct a dream. I’d be better off just saying: “It’s about a guy. An ‘idea’ man. It’s funny.”

Joe is an encyclopedia salesman who eventually shifts to vacuum cleaners and finds himself in a Florida town recently ravaged by a hurricane where all the residents already have and love the machine he is trying to sell. When he goes door-to-door trying to sell the cleaner, he is invited inside, fed pie and the owners of the vacuum wax lovingly about their relationship with the Electrolux. In between non-sales, Joe chills in his trailer mentally engaged in an elaborate fantasy involving a woman half clothed, half not, leaning over a table or out a window. The naked part is being penetrated, while the clothed part is doing nothing to reveal what is happening. He takes it even further, turning the scene into a game show that plays in his head. That’s when he realizes he could use this interest, turn it into a reality. A real service.

He finds women that are proficient in office duties, women who can type a lot of words per minute and understand the details of working as a personal assistant or secretary. The women form a sort of temp agency. They are swapped into the staff, paid well, and throughout the day they might leave their chair a few times to service the faceless dudes, then return to their office work. One woman, who is saving up money to go to Harvard Law School, considers it just an extension of going to the bathroom. No bigger deal than flushing a tampon. It’s just a body, right? And she’s making a lot of money. Another Lightning Rod uses the time spent in the stall to read Proust in French. She, too, is saving for law school and building a bigger brain.

Complications arise, of course, and Joe tweaks the system. He solves the problem of Equal Opportunity Employment and he comes up with a way to make bathrooms accessible for people of all sizes. Meanwhile, he’s got other inventions in the works.

A few years ago during NaNoWriMo I tried to write something in the genre of Funny Porn for Smart people and while this isn’t exactly porn, it is the exact pitch I had hoped (but failed) to hit. This somewhat absurd, but also not very absurd, bit of satire. Dewitt has done something really interesting with this novel and it’s original concept, quirky character sketches and thorough round of the “What if-skies.”

I have a pack of friends who write books for young-adult and middle-grade readers (all of whom you should read). This is not just because I’m incredibly blessed to know smart, talented people, but also because this is Minnesota and you can’t throw a lutefisk without hitting someone who writes books for people who aren’t yet considered grown-ups. Seriously, this state is filthy with young-adult, middle-grade, and children’s writers*.

Because of this I hear about a lot of fabulous young-adult writers both old and new. However, none of them have ever spoken about one of my very favorite young-adult writers, M.E. Kerr.

As a teen and young-adult, I gobbled up every M.E. Kerr book I could find. Some of my favorites include Him She Loves, Gentlehands, and I’ll Love You When You’re More Like Me. But my all-time favorite is I Stay Near You: One Story in Three, which along with The Count of Monte Cristo was my favorite book until I read A Prayer for Owen Meany.

Oh, I get all teenaged and sigh-y when I think about I Stay Near You, a book that follows three generations of the doomed Cone-Powell family. I’ve probably read this book four or five times in my life. I recently reread it as part of the Re-evaluating Personal Artifacts project I’ve started as a ramp up to my FORTIETH! birthday.

The book starts off in the pre-war 40s of upstate New York where we meet Mildred Cone, a poor, harp-playing loner who is shunned by most the kids in her class not just because she’s poor and she plays the harp but because Mildred’s a pit prickly. The only thing Mildred hates more than when her peers shorten her name to Millie are the super rich Storms who live on top of a hill in a mansion called Cake.

But things change when Mildred falls in love with the youngest Storm, Powell over the summer. She returns to school beautiful and exotic. She wear an expensive gold ring around her neck with Basque writing that says “I Stay Near You.” Love changes Mildred and she reads scandalous poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay in English class and plays popular songs on her harp during the recital. The kids are mesmerized and Mildred takes Laura into her confidence. It’s Laura who tells us the tragic love story of Mildred and Powell that ends as WWII breaks out.

Next, the book jumps to the sixties where we find Vincent Haigney, Mildred’s teenaged son who longs to be a rock and roll star. Vincent’s in love with the girl whose family runs the local pawn shop. Mildred’s not a fan of the girl she dubs trashy. But Vincent doesn’t let his mother’s distaste stop his relationship and he promises Joanna the mysterious gold ring in his mother’s drawer as soon as he gets it on his eighteenth birthday. Things don’t end well.

Finally, we land in the eighties where Powell Storm Haigney, Mildred’s grandson, is writing a letter to his dad, rockstar Saint Vincent (huh, I wonder if St. Vincent ever read this book). P.S. is a little pissed off and chronicles the ways in which his father has let him down time and time again. This last third, is easily my favorite part of the book not only because it features a lot of pop culture, but also because Kerr slowly reveals what happened to Vincent and Mildred through P.S.’s eyes.

It’s really smart and clever and probably why I loved the book so much as a teenager and why I still appreciate it now. Though I do have to admit there was a bit of eyerolling when Vincent said about his mother, “She still looked good, too, even at thirty-four.” Yeah.

When you spend most of your teen years reading the predictable pap that is Sweet Valley High (not that I didn’t love that pap), I Stay Near You was so wholly different I couldn’t help but fall for it.

*As I was writing this I saw the link for The Loft’s 2012 Children’s and Young Adult Literature Conference float across Facebook and if you have any interest in writing for not-yet-grownups, you should check out the conference.

My personal Top Five Favorite Books lost scientific credibility years ago when I realized there were at least three times as many books crammed into this personal category of honor. I hadn’t re-evaluated what I had loved in many years, so instead of swapping out, say, The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood for, say, A Visit From the Goon Squad, I just kept stacking titles and hoped a literalist never asked me to recite the list.

Jodi and I were iTalking about Minnesota Re-Reads, doubling back to some old favorites to see how the longtime faves fared a decade, at least, since they were first dubbed best of the best. She agreed with the younger version of herself and still got misty over A Prayer for Owen Meany. I decided to reconsider Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

I’ve read the novel at least twice and I’ve seen the movie. All I remembered was adoring it and the image of Sabine, an artist, dressed in little more than a bowler hat and walking across a mirror laid on the floor of her studio. I liked the scene enough to one year wear a bowler hat for Halloween.

Kundera’s story centers on the super-sexed Tomas, a Czech surgeon, and Tereza, a woman he meets by chance, who he imagines came to him like Moses: A baby in a basket sent down a stream. Though he is in love with her, a rarity for him, he continues a relationship with Sabine, a woman who favors fiery flings over domesticity, and after Sabine, countless others. Body and soul are separate things, he tells his wife who smells the scent of other women in his hair. His infidelity gives her nightmares and damn near breaks her. But he refuses to smother the impulse for the sake of her sanity. On the sidelines is Franz, a man out of his head in love with Sabine, who confesses his affair to his pretty awful wife and subsequently gets dumped by Sabine, who no longer finds the relationship interesting in the light of his confession. At the same time, the Soviet Union has invaded the Czechs and the aftermath is pretty grim for people protesting communist rule. Rooms are bugged, people are killed and Tomas is pressured out of his high-falooting gig as a renowned surgeon when he has a political piece published in a newspaper.

More than 10 years after I read and loved this book my new response is: It’s kind of a drag. Or more like a drag sandwich. Parts that interest me between slabs of stuff that didn’t.

I know what I liked long ago. I liked Sabine. I liked the idea of this woman making art and eschewing husband-wife scenarios and signing on dotted lines. I liked the idea of her painting things that rankled the art world and booting dudes from her front door and, worse case scenario, changing her address if things got too out of control. I probably thought I would like to live like that, which I now see would never work for me.

It’s the voice of this all-knowing third person narrator that bugs. It’s repetitious and philosophical and I had a hard time making my eyes take in every word. Right around the time I would start to glaze over with the blah-blah-blahs, the narrative would pick up again. Tereza decides to have her own fling! Or Franz takes up with a young mentee! and I’d get sucked back into it.

The verdict: I think I can safely eject this one from the Top Five.

Perhaps the worst thing that can happen to a book is to be nice. Nice is boring. Nice is forgettable. Nice is something you continue reading in hopes that it will get un-nice, it will either turn vile or ascend to greater heights.

Nice is a drag.

I can remember with exacting detail why I loathed American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. The reasons for abhorring Downtown Owl or The Wedding fall easily from my lips. The same can be said for the books that I love. Do you really want to hear me go on again about my love for A Prayer for Owen Meany? Because I will.

Sadly, Ms. Hempel Chronicles by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum is neither loathsome or lovely. It is okay. It is a readable series of linked short stories about Beatrice Hempel a junior high English teacher and some things that happen in her life. The things that happen in her life are pretty big. Her father dies, she calls off her engagement, but most of this happens offstage and we only learn about it in passing in a story about something else. Instead we get stories about helping her younger sister write an essay, a teacher returning from sabbatical, and a weird one about visiting a historical re-enactment site. Kind of boring. However, the writing is good. If there had been any plot whatsoever, this would have been a beautiful beautiful book.

I was always taught that fiction, specifically short fiction, thrives on tension. That it’s the conflict that moves the story forward, compels the reader to keep reading. That’s what’s missing here. There is no conflict, there is no tension, and there is no reading to keep turning those pages. I think the only thing that kept me from quitting was that by the time I got through the requisite 75-100 pages I give most books, I was halfway through it.

This one felt like a big bowl of missed opportunities. We learn at one point that Ms. Hempel was a teenage punk rocker. I was curious how she went from that to mild-mannered English teacher. What happened on that journey? And did she give up all her punk rock ways? And that fiance. . . what happened there? And why wasn’t she upset about it?

What’s sad is that I think I learned the most about the house she grew up in more than any character in the book. The house is described in intricate and wonderful detail about rooms and knick-knacks and bedrooms at the top of the house filled with sunlight filtered through trees. It was wonderful. However, and this gets at the main problem of the book, I could not tell you where that house was located. For most of the book I thought it was taking place in some nameless sunny, warm California town, but later there’s talk of snow and cold.

So I guess that’s why I muddled through this one. There were some really beautiful, specific details but they were about all the wrong things.

The characters in Dan Chaon’s short story collection Stay Awake are quiet. They have experienced loss: a person, themselves, or a ring finger that popped off after a nasty spill from a ladder. Maybe they are leaving something. Or maybe they aren’t even aware yet of the loss, like baby Rosalie, born with an additional head, part of another baby that did not form and has been surgically removed. Her father, in traction after a car accident, imagines for her a time in the future when she will wake and hear a voice in her head say: “Hello. I’m still here. I’m still with you.” The characters in Dan Chaon’s collection are all haunted, whether they know it or not.

In one, a son was the first one on the scene — so early he actually heard the clomp of the finale — when his parents both committed suicide in their bedroom. They’ve left a note on the door instructing him to call the police, but not go into their bedroom. He holes up in a single room of the house, wrapped in a rind of his necessities, and in a rapid state of mental decline.

Teenagers lose a baby and all around them the grief of others is tinged with the relief that they have dodged a life-long anchor. Except the male half of the couple, who had already re-imagined life in this new way, married, jobs, a child. A man, fresh from a heart attack, returns to all of his bad habits on a business trip gets caught in a lonely spiral that takes him far from anything he knows. In another, a man kidnaps his meth-head girlfriend’s child and then pulls the unimaginable encore.

In my favorite story, Critter’s wife has died and he and his young daughter are staying with his sister in Ohio. He keeps finding handwritten notes fluttering in the wind or left behind places. He finds a note on the sidewalk after his wife’s funeral: “To psychic underworld: stop astral traveling to molest/deceive (animals too). Animals are not made of hate. Cease and desist.” This is just the sort of thing his wife would have enjoyed. His sister has a collection, too, including: “Hi. I had cyber sex!! With a guy named Eric! I love sex!!”

“Something had happened to him now that Beth was gone, he thought — there was an opening, a space, a part of his brain that had been deaf before was now exposed, it was as if he were a long-dormant radio that had begun to receive signals — tuned in, abruptly, to all the crazy note-writers of the world.”

These stories are all so similar in tone, a low level of creepy and the kinds of summer bonfire tales you sink into so hard you forget you’re reading and the scenes just act out in your eyeballs. These characters seem all seem a little bit related, like distant cousins different towns with the same shaped nose and vaguely recognizable mannerisms.

They are tinged with good humor and intrigue and unpredictable wrenches. And they are all a little psychologically eerie if not downright spooky: like ghost faces in the window or hearing a nose in another room of your empty house.

Today is Valentine’s Day so it’s only appropriate that I’m here to talk about John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars the sweetest love story I’ve read since, well probably Steve Brezenoff’s Brooklyn, Burning. I thought it would be a longer period of time between sweet love stories. I was wrong. Again, that’s fitting because so much in The Fault of Our Stars could have gone wrong. Horribly, horribly, unforgivably wrong.

But it doesn’t, which is a testament to John Green’s writing and sense of humor. Here you have a book about two cancer-stricken teenagers falling in love. I know, right? It sounds like a prime opportunity for saccharine-y sentimental pap and bullshit Hallmark philosophy about seizing the day.

Instead what we get is a captivating and funny and devestating story about two teenagers making the best of a shitty situation.

Sixteen-year-old Hazel Lancaster was on her death bed at 13, saying goodbye to her parents, and ready to give up the ghost when a miracle drug brought her back from the brink. She’s still gravely ill but gets by with a portable oxygen tank. Hazel’s illness has turned her into something of a recluse. She doesn’t attend high school, opting to get her GED, and spends a lot of her time watching America’s Next Top Model, reading, and occasionally attending poetry classes at the local community college.

Hazel’s mom makes Hazel attend a cancer kids support group in the “literal heart of Jesus” (a church shaped like a cross where the support group room is where Jesus’ heart would have been while he was nailed to the cross), where she meets Augustus Waters.

Oh, Augustus.

Augustus/Gus is the dreamy, one-legged former basketball star who is instantly smitten with Hazel the moment he sets eyes on her at group. Hazel is a little more cautious about Gus and his affections. After all, she’s the sicker of the two. But the two bond over books, videogames, and helping their friend Issac who is about to lose his remaining eye get over the girl who dumps him right before his surgery. The book that brings them together is called An Imperial Affliction, a one-hit wonder of a book about a young girl with cancer written by Peter Van Houten. The book captivates the duo because it ends, in the middle of sentence without any sort of resolution whatsoever.

It’s the book that spurs Hazel & Gus to travel to Amsterdam in search of the reclusive author and answers to their questions. It sounds a little ludicrous, but it works. Trust me, most everything in this book works.

I don’t know why it works. Maybe it’s Hazel’s voice, sweet and scared and sassy. Maybe it’s that Gus is just so damn dreamy. Maybe it’s because both characters feel genuine and not as though they are puppets in service to make a point about making the most of life or the gravity of cancer. They’re teenagers they do stupid things, they rebel against their parents, and even when their acting “normal” there’s that undercurrent of fear.

You know from the outset that Hazel & Gus’s romance is ill-fated. It does not end well. However, the knowing of that fact does not make the experiencing of that fact as it unfolds in the book any less painful. I can’t imagine what kind of stone you have to made out of to not shed a few tears reading this book. I’m a crybaby and the last third made me cry gulping, heaving, very unattractive sobs with lots of snot. I was a wreck.

And yet I loved this one so much that I will surely read it again before my bookclub gets together next week to discuss it. It’s a good one.

Today, it’s rare for me to read a romance novel, but when I was a young teen I immersed myself in the scandalous bodice rippers. I even had a favorite author, Minnesota’s own LaVyrle Spencer. My favorite book was Vows, a historical romance about a tomboyish girl who works in her father’s stables and the town’s new businessman who makes fun of her tomboyish ways. They hate each other; they love each other. They hate each other; they love each other. Can you feel it?

But I’m long past the bodice ripping romance novels, unless you count my yearly Pride and Prejudice reading. It’s not really bodice ripping; it’s more will they or won’t they, but it probably still counts.

Knowing how much I love Pride and Prejudice, a few years ago a friend recommended I read a romance novel called Austenland by Shannon Hale. I have steered clear of Pride and Prejudice remakes (I made it to page ten of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) because I don’t want them to ruin Jane Austen’s creation. My friend promised that this wasn’t so much a remake as it was an examination of a woman obsessed with Pride and Prejudice.

I read and was charmed by Austenland, and I just found out that there is a new book by Hale called Midnight in Austenland. I’m on the hold list for it at my library, and since I will read and review it, it’s only fair that I review Austenland first.

In Austenland, Jane Hayes is obsessed with Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice, but not the Mr. Darcy from the book, the Colin Firth portrayal of Darcy in the brilliant BBC “Pride and Prejudice” mini series from the mid-1990s. No man can hold a candle to Colin. Jane is so obsessed with Colin Firth’s Darcy that she is ashamed and hides her DVD, like normal people do with porn.

Before she dies, Jane’s old, rich aunt sees Jane’s hidden DVD and in her will she leaves Jane an expensive trip to Pembrook Park, what Jane later refers to as Austenland. Pembrook Park is a Pride and Prejudice lover’s dream. Actors who work at Pembrook Park and vacationers all dress in period pieces, speak and interact as if they are in Austen’s time, including flirting and courting, and most modern conveniences are gone. It’s like Jane is back in Austen’s jolly old England.

But it’s all an act. Or is it? At first Jane is excited to be at Pembrook, even if she is a bit clumsy with the customs and clothing, but slowly she starts wondering if the subtle advances, the ones by the actors and the cute groundskeeper, are real or fake.

Austenland was a really cute book, bordering on too cute, and it was also pretty funny. It’s funny seeing Jane, who is Miss Jane Erstwhile at Pembrook, trying to fit into yesteryear. She struggles with the language, clothing, lack of conveniences, and she battles the strict rules of Mrs. Wattlesbrook, the guardian of prim and proper at Pembrook Park.

I also couldn’t help but smile when Jane finds herself caught in a Pride and Prejudice-like love-and-hate relationship with one of the actors. He at first shuns her like Darcy does to Lizzie in Pride and Prejudice, but maybe he misjudged her at the beginning? I couldn’t help but love to watch him grow closer to her, but, of course, it’s all an act…or is it? The back and forth, is it real or not, between Jane and the actor and Jane and the groundskeeper, will keep you guessing until the end.

Austenland is a quick beach read and a great escape. It’s perfect for those times when you just need to read some fluff. I devoured this fluff and I’m excited to hear there is more to the story in Midnight in Austenland.

The first thing you should know is that I’m a pussy.

When I imagine pitting myself against another adult human being in combat, I imagine my own arms flailing, missing targets, a sort of bird-like noise coming from my throat. If I found myself in a situation where I was on an island with 41 of my peers and an assignment to kill each other off, big prize going to the last one standing, a washer and dryer, a new car, I would hide. I would hide somewhere high and hidden with a wall I could lean against and a view of the land. I would sit quietly and only move enough to soil myself twice daily. If pressed to fight, say someone snuck up on me, I’d probably do it with my eyes squeezed shut and giggling nervously to cover the sound of bruising.

This is the sort of thing you think about when reading the Japanese novel Battle Royale by Koushun Takami. Your own personal method of battle. You’ll dream about it.

For a reason that doesn’t seem to translate from Japanese to English, each year a class of 15-year-olds are selected randomly to participate in The Program. They are taken by bus, seemingly headed on a field trip, then gassed unconscious. The students wake in a classroom wearing electronic ID collars on an island that has been cleared of its inhabitants. They are given instructions: They must kill, winner is the last one — and there can only be one — standing. They are given a pack that includes some food and water, a map, and a weapon — in some cases a gun, in other cases a bullet-proof vest, in another case an electronic device that helps its holder locate other students. Then they are released in 2-minute intervals to run and hide or stick around and engage in immediate combat with their former friends.

First the obvious: Yes, the premise of The Hunger Games, written later, is similar. But where The Hunger Games is seemingly a vehicle for a strong female protagonist who never begs a vampire to please take her virginity, there are relatively few heroic pretensions in this version. There are 42 characters and a sadistic puppet master goading them along with four daily updates on dead classmates and zones on the island where they can no longer hide or hunt. Some of the 42 characters aren’t actively competing, some are confused about their role and some are painting the island blood red, unflinching sociopaths. Some form teams, including a cute collection of high school girls who have set up something slumber party like in a lighthouse. And some stumble into teams, like the main character Shuya, a nice guy, athlete-turned-musician, who feels it is his duty to watch over his friend’s crush after his friend gets offed in the pre-game. Some go completely nuts, like an unstoppable force with a machine gun and no remorse.

I remember a few bleak death scenes in Suzanne Collins’ first book. But in this one, Takami at times rivals Japanese horror master Ryu Murakami with his scenes of eyeball gouging and a machine-gunned head looking like meat sauce in a broken bowl. Hatchets bisect faces. Bodies are blasted apart.

Mostly the story is a multi-layered murder sandwich, gruesome scenes followed by lulls of movement and character development, followed by more murder. It is deliciously fun. It’s hokey. It’s gross. It’s exciting. Each chapter ends with the number of students remaining, which can be a bit of a spoiler to a person who likes to flip around and check out the length of a chunk.

One of the best parts about reading Battle Royale is the opportunity to play the Battle Royale home game. To look around every time you walk into a room and imagine this is the competition.

That guy over there, he’s a wild card. Hard to say what his approach to the game might be. He might prefer hand-to-hand combat or cyanide in your campfire coffee. Or maybe he would lay low, watch others get offed and then stand up, brush off his pants and challenge the winner with a burst of previously unseen strength.

Her? She would win. She’d never lose. It’s impossible. Lose isn’t in her vocabulary.

And her over there? She’d scratch your eyeballs out and make a necklace from your teeth. This game never gets old.

Many people put Divergent by Veronica Roth on their best lists last year, with a lot of them saying it was the new Hunger Games. I really should stop listening to praise like this, claiming something is as awesome as my Hunger Games, because they almost inevitably let me down. Divergent was good, and when the second book in the series comes out this year I will read it, but I did have some problems with it.

In Divergent, people are put into factions based upon their personalities. It takes place in a future, rundown Chicago, with no information on what has happened to the rest of the world. I have no idea if Chicago is all that is left or if they are just really secluded, but in this Chicago everyone is placed into one of five factions and each faction runs a different part of society. Those in Candor are honest, so they take care of judicial positions. Dauntless are the fearless so they are the warriors. A person in Abnegation is selfless which is why they are the ones who govern. The Erudite are the teachers because they are intelligent and crave knowledge. And Amity, well, I don’t remember what they do, but they are the peaceful ones. Maybe they grow the food? I remember some scene where a truck was bringing back food from the Amity.

The Amity didn’t take up much space in Divergent, so for now it doesn’t really matter what they do. In Divergent we follow Beatrice, an Abnegation-born-and-raised girl who doesn’t feel like she fits in with Abnegation. Luckily she is 16, the year she chooses which faction she wants to continue with, Abnegation or another. She and the other 16-year-olds are given a test to help them figure out where they may best fit, but ultimately it is their choice. The only problem with the test is that it is inconclusive for Beatrice, which means she’s Divergent, someone who doesn’t fit in just one faction but could be in many. Divergent people are dangerous, she is told, so her Divergent test result is hidden and she is told to hide this aspect of her personality.

This was probably my biggest problem with Divergent. Factions based upon personality? So those in Candor can’t lie and would not be good teachers? And those teaching Erudites don’t want to be warriors? And those warrior Dauntless never just want to be peaceful? The factions were so strict. They are one thing and nothing else, and having tendencies of being something else is dangerous? I just had a hard time with these personality-based factions and the fact that everyone goes along with this, even the “factionless,” those who don’t fit in any category. Since they don’t fit in, they are shunned and homeless and starving, and this is just how it is. Really? I get that this is supposed to be a different, future world where society is transformed from what it is now, but I don’t think I have a good enough understanding of how they got to this point, so I couldn’t buy into it as much as I should have.

But I didn’t stop reading Divergent because it was still good, even with my reservations and questions, and the last half of the book was really exciting.

Back to Beatrice. You could probably guess that she doesn’t choose to stay in Abnegation. She chooses Dauntless, but becoming Dauntless does not happen by mere declaration. She goes through brutal training, involving fighting and mind control, and at the end of training those with the worst scores will be out. They will be factionless and living on the streets. Her training was hard to sit through, but by the end of it, this faction-based world is starting to crumble and it gets very action packed. I was hooked.

So is Divergent the new Hunger Games? Maybe that’s not the question we should be asking. Maybe we should all just stop saying something is the new something else. It really puts a lot of pressure on the new something, and it makes people like me compare them too much when I’m reading. So I won’t say that it’s the new Hunger Games and I won’t say that it’s not. It’s just Divergent, a dystopian novel that had me flipping the pages really quickly by the end, even if I didn’t completely buy into everything. And that’s okay because I can still say I enjoyed it. Just not as much as some other books I’m not going to mention anymore.

I had to pay a fine for keeping A Prayer for Owen Meany two weeks past its due date. This was in the last days of 1990. I was eighteen and had yet to grow into the book quitter that I am today.

Back in 1990 I did not care so much for the first hundred-ish pages of OWEN MEANY. It was a strange time in my reading life. I was adrift. Out of high school but not yet enrolled in college due to an oversight by my poverty-stricken parents, I was a self-guided reader and wandered around the Chippewa Falls Library checking out anything that looked remotely interesting.

I could feel myself growing out of young adult books, and yet I was totally disappointed in what I thought were the grown up books. Until I discovered John Irving, grown up books consisted for Judith Krenz, Danielle Steele, and Jackie Collins. Those were, after all, the kinds of books my mom read. Well that, and true crime books by Ann Rule but even then I knew non-fiction was not my thing.

I only picked up OWEN MEANY because it sat on the shelf next to The World According to Garp, and I had fond memories of the movie. So with that in mind I gave OWEN MEANY a shot. I wish I could remember why I didn’t like those first hundred pages, what made me drag my feet so. What I do remember is that once I hit a tipping point I could not be separated from OWEN MEANY and I spent every waking moment immersed in the world of Gravesend, New Hampshire.

Re-reading the book twenty years later, I didn’t have the 100 pages problems. In fact, the moment I opened the book I fell in love all over again. I like to say that Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin shows us the power of point of view. In that novel we’re so entrenched in Eva’s point of view that we start to think, “yeah, yeah that infant is totally sabotaging her!” It’s crazy and amazing.

OWEN MEANY, to me, shows us the power of foreshadowing. It’s so brilliant. From Watahantowet’s armless totem to OWEN’s dream to the armadillo and the dressmaker’s dummy and about everything else that happens in the book, Irving drops the reader all kinds of clues to what’s going to happen.

So what’s it about? It’s about Johnny Wheelwright the, for lack of a better word, bastard son of Tabitha Wheelwright, the charming, charmed daughter of the wealthy Wheelwright family and his best friend OWEN MEANY, a strange, small kid with an unusual voice. A voice that makes people take notice and sometimes gives them the SHIVERS. Throughout the book OWEN’s dialog is rendered in all caps to get across the unusualness of his VOICE.

It’s so hard to sum this one up, not only because my thoughts about it are clouded by my love for it, but because it’s about so much. The book follows the boys from their childhood in New Hampshire through high school and college, and how the Vietnam War tears them apart. Johnny as a forty-something adult living in Toronto tells the story in flashback, and interspersed are scenes of Johnny’s life now (now being the late-80s, the waning days of Ronald Reagan’s reign).

Gah, that makes it sound so dry, but it’s not. It’s a big, beautiful book about love and friendship and fate and faith and spirituality and politics and Vietnam and the Iran-Contra scandal and it’s all infused with Irving’s humor and engrossing writing. It’s filled with surprises and passion and mystery.

It really is everything you’d want in a novel. Reading this book changed my life. Sounds like an exaggeration, I know, but when you had been reading a steady diet of shitty romance John Irving is a revelation. A Prayer for Owen Meany is the first book that really showed me how beautiful and wondrous and wonderful literature can be.

P.S. Christa, now it’s your turn to read one of your golden oldie favorites.

When Ursula Le Guin praises someone’s work, it’s time to take notice. On the cover of Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor, Le Guin is quoted as saying: “There’s more vivid imagination in a page of Nnedi Okorafor’s work than in whole volumes of ordinary fantasy epics.” I’m happy to say that Le Guin didn’t exaggerate. Well, maybe a little, but Akata Witch was really great.

Akata Witch refers to lead character Sunny, a Nigerian 12-year-old girl who is bullied and called “akata,” a derogatory term for an American-born person of African descent. Having moved to Nigeria with her family when she was nine, the bullies constantly call her “akata,” but her looks also generate taunts from them. Sunny has African features but she’s albino with blue eyes. Her skin even keeps her from being outside to play soccer, her favorite sport.

But Sunny’s days get brighter when she is befriended by a couple of kids who think Sunny is special, and not just for her looks. They help her find out that she’s a “free agent,” a person born with magical powers even though her parents don’t have any. Soon Sunny learns of another world, intertwined with ours, and all of its dangers, especially from a powerful magician who is kidnapping children.

Akata Witch was hard to put down. Sunny is a sympathetic, strong character, struggling with bullies at school and at home, but her discovery of a new world, where she is accepted, is touching and the friends she makes along the way are really entertaining. But sometimes I did get confused as to which friend was speaking. Not that Okorafor doesn’t say who’s who, like Hemingway does for pages and pages of dialogue, but some of the friends seem similar that I had to stop and figure out who was speaking. I did read this when I was sick so you could probably blame my fever-induced, cloudy brain for this, too.

Besides the characters, I also loved the magical world Okorafor built. My favorite thing in the magical world is that money is gained by learning. The more you learn, the more money you receive, so when Sunny learns new magic tricks, money just falls from the sky in front of her. No one knows where the money comes from, but it’s clear that knowledge is how to receive it. And with a world where knowledge is valued, they have a pretty kick ass library, too, which this librarian loved.

As far as I know Akata Witch is a standalone novel, but I could really use more books with these characters and this world. There is so much more to explore and I’d love to follow Sunny and discover it with her.

I no longer actively seek out books I know I will hate. The anaerobic thrill of speed reading through adjective abuse and gender stereotypes has lost its thrill and now I simply prefer to read things I like and not read things I don’t like. Goodbye, Tao Lin. Adios, Stephenie Meyer.

On the other hand, I will still commit to something I’m dubious about. Meet Alison Espach’s The Adults. It has a real chick lit walk and talk, as though chick lit was stopped in the bathroom by a tall woman with an British accent who licked a Kleenex and scrubbed at chick lit’s excess blush. This is my presumption from staring at the cover and reading the jacket flap.

“You need to read The Adults,” said a friend I prefer to get music advice from more than book advice. “I think you will either love it or hate it.”

The verdict: Love. Or, love-ish.

This is one of three coming-of-age stories I’ve recently crossed with, a bundle that includes a young God-fearing Jewish boy torturing himself in the face of pornography, a young Iranian girl getting lippy with the man, and this: a financially unimpaired Connecticut girl with an ever-shifting family life. They’re all different and they’re all good.

The Adults is the most traditional of these three, the standard sassy lass, witty banter, sexual awakenings, crises modes, early adult onset ennui. But, The Adults is also an example of how a story can be about anything and a real writer, a writerly-writer, a clever writer can make it work. Espach has such a great voice.

It all starts with a backyard party for Emily’s father who is turning 50. Her father is planning to move to Prague for work, a move that is coinciding with her parent’s looming divorce. They are keeping things status quo until the natural split happens after the holidays.

Emily, 14, has hot pants for the next door neighbor boy, Mark, and they’ve taken off into the woods for the kind of secret language verbal play that besties have. She’s pretty sure he’s leaning in to kiss her, but instead he has noticed that some other party-goers have snuck off for some heavy petting. Emily is practically puckered when they realize that it is her dad and his mom and they are going at it.

In that instant everything changes. Mark, whose father is struggling to medicate his depression, resents Emily and her father; Emily wants to scream about what she knows while riding in the backseat of her parents car. Soon after, young Emily witnesses Mark’s father’s pretty public suicide because she happens to be looking out the window when he hangs himself from the tree. And then Emily begins a sexual relationship with one of her teachers.

The story is told in three parts: Emily as a high school student, Emily after college living in Prague with her father, Emily living in New York City with her boyfriend. It is the high school setting that packs the biggest punch and is the most unique and fully developed, while the other segments are less fine-tuned, but better than passable.

Espach’s strength comes in moments of chaotic dialogue, an area in which she crafts funny one-liners, but she does it infrequently so each one really stands out. A student has posted fliers around school for a forum in which black students can talk about attending a predominantly white school.

“‘Everybody is invited,’ it said. ‘Even white and Jewish people.’ Jewish students walked by the signs offended, explaiming, ‘What, are we not white? Are we not black?’

Martha walked by and said, ‘I don’t get it: Is being Jewish the opposite of being white? Is it?’

One of the girls said we should start a white people club.
‘Our whole life is a white people club,’ one of them said.
‘Sometimes I wish we had a black friend.’
‘Guys,’ one of them said, ‘I’m black.’
‘Shit.’
‘Sometimes we forget.’
‘It’s not like you’re, like, black, you know. I mean, you wear Sketchers.’
‘And you want to be a pastry chef.’
‘And you take French.’

Mostly this book is a fresh look at people being people. Children acting as adults and adults acting like children. How things that happen can make or change you and what you might have been had those things never happened. It’s good stuff.