Book #14: Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell

I've heard so much about this book (and others by Rainbow Rowell) that I felt like it had a LOT of hype to live up to. And to just get this out of the way: it did. I started this book today and finished it this evening because I just couldn't put it down once I got into it. This is Eleanor and Park's love story, two unlikely high school misfits who fall in love on the school bus. They end up sitting next to each other almost by accident, but they eventually start talking and become friends and then more-than-friends. They bond over their mutual love of punk rock and comic books (and their commentary and conversations on both of those are really entertaining to read, even though I'm not even familiar with most of the bands or comics they talk about). The story is told alternately from each of their perspectives, so that you feel like you understand each one of them. I felt like the most beautiful and relatable part of this story was how you could hear their thoughts, so undiluted and pure, coming through the narrative, and how those thoughts just seemed so real and true to their characters and so . . . cute. Let's be honest here--these two lonely misfits were so dang cute when they were falling in love with each other. They both were extremely honest with themselves (if not always with each other) about how they felt about the other one and how serious and quick their falling-in-love felt. I couldn't help but fall a little bit in love with each of them as I got to know them and I couldn't help but remember what it felt like to be that age and stage and remember what all that felt like. Rainbow Rowell did an amazing job of conjuring up this entire story and it left me wanting more at the end. (Really--I couldn't believe that it ended the way it did. To not be a huge spoiler, they weren't in the same place at the end and I wanted to believe that they were reunited but it was definitely up in the air.)

Fair warning: There is a bit of swearing and profanity and some pretty heavy scenes. Also, this is technically a YA novel but didn't feel like one. It was definitely about teens but not only for teens.

Book #13: Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick

I feel almost embarrassed to admit how little I know about North Korea. I knew that Kim Jong-il died a few years ago and his son, Kim Jong-un, succeeded him as the dictator of the country. And I knew that it was a Communist country and that there's been a bit of discussion about their nuclear weapons. But really, I had no idea what the conditions were like in the country. I'd somehow missed out on information about North Koreans not having enough food and living in a totalitarian regime. This book was a good introduction to someone like me about the lives of ordinary people in North Korea (like the subtitle says). Demick worked as a reporter covering all of Korea, but journalists are not allowed to go to across the border and talk to regular people there. So in order to find out what it was really like there, she interviewed and got to know several North Korean defectors from the same area of Chongjin, who were living in South Korea. She basically interweaves their stories about their lives growing up, living through the terrible famines in North Korea in the 1990s, and their individual decisions to defect from the country.

Reading these people's stories makes it seem unbelievable that these sorts of things are still going on TODAY. (This book was only published in 2010.) In some ways it sounds like stories you read about Germany just before WWII, where people are carted away in the middle of the night for prison camps, and as horrible as those stories are, there's the distance provided by the seventy-plus years that have passed since then. It seems like, "Well, at least this stuff is over and won't happen because we are more civilized and won't let it happen again." Well--obviously not. It was heart-wrenching to read about the children starving to death and the terrible circumstances people are forced to live in, when there is food to spare in much of the world, but it's being kept from them because of their government and its policies. (Of course, I know there are starving people everywhere, but it just seems so terrible that there was practically no food in the whole country for years and years.) Despite how sad it was, I was very glad to have read it to have learned more about it and be (a lot) more aware of another part of the world. I felt like the book was very well-written too; it was easy to follow the stories and keep them straight, and easy to care about the people she was writing about.

Book #12: Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder

I read Little House in the Big Woods before we left for Christmas and I was planning to read all the rest of the series after we got back. I may still get to the other books, but I have so many other books I keep getting from the library that I might not get to them very soon, so I might as well write down this one so I don't forget about it. I feel like these books are the written equivalent to chicken noodle soup or a hearty lasagna--they're comfort food as opposed to a super fancy dish that you spend hours slaving over to impress company. Reading this book is mostly delightful because of the impressions it made on me when I was little, more than the joy it gives me now. It is so fascinating to read and to think that this really was just a few lifetimes ago--some really old people today may have known people who were really old who'd lived this way on the prairies, you know? And now the whole area where the Ingallses lived is probably covered by suburbia or industrialized farms or something like that. It was so cool reading about how Pa just built up the entire house and a barn from absolutely nothing and how they built an entire life out of this random spot on the prairie that they chose, and then how they just left it after a few years to start completely over somewhere new.

I'd been listening to a "Stuff You Missed in History Class" podcast that mentioned a different book by Wilder, The Long Winter, and one of the things they mentioned was the "problematic" depiction of Indians in that book, and how it was so stereotypical and painted Indians to be just the way white people thought they would be (I'll just say "Indians" here because that's what the book called them). And I think it's a little unfair to hold Laura Ingalls Wilder up to today's standards of political correctness (she was writing her books some seventy years ago), but I did notice that a lot in this read-through of this book. There's a lot of discussion of the Indians and what they were doing, and a few times Pa said things about how the soldiers would make the Indians pack up and move to another reservation so that they could have that land (which today we clearly think was unfair). But really, I thought the presentation of Indians in this book was pretty positive and fair, compared to how potentially negative it could have been. Laura as a child was clearly fascinated with the Indians and always loved seeing them, even when she was afraid of them, and mostly the Indians treated the Ingallses very well and warned them of dangers. So I thought it was a pretty positive depiction of them from the 1800s, in my very limited understanding of it all.

Book #11: Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

This was yet another of those books that I saw a lot about on different people's book blogs and in lots of book lists for 2013. I wasn't totally sold on it, but I was trying to pick from the piles of books I have out from the library right now (seriously, I need to work through them fast) and I started this one, and I ended up not being able to put it down! The story is about Bernadette, a former famous architect who's run away from L.A., where she was working, to Seattle with her husband, and become a stay-at-home mom after having a premie baby with a serious heart problem who demanded all of her time for years. This baby has now grown up to be an incredibly smart fifteen-year-old and Bernadette has become an antisocial hermit whose genius has been channeled into huge rants about Seattle and Microsoft and the terrible weather and people who live there. She eventually disappears and her daughter tries to track her down by going through her old emails and documents that might help her find out where she went. The book is made up of those emails sprinkled in with commentary by Bee, her daughter.

I feel like this book was perfect for me. First off, I love epistolary novels, especially ones that have been modernized to today's technology and include emails and IMs and all sorts of fun stuff like that. (I had a huge weakness for a lot of YA romance novels written in that format when I was in high school!) But also, this book was hilarious. It's a huge commentary on Seattle and Microsoft, and although I've never been there, I feel like I can understand a little of what it's like. Some of the characters whose emails you read are just killer; they're so hilarious and puffed-up and full of themselves. And then Bernadette herself is this bitter, angry person who hates them all and basically hates everything except her daughter, and she's so funny in her bitterness and her creative drought that you can't help but love it. One of the quotes on the back of the book (by Jonathan Franzen) says, "The characters in this book may be in real emotional pain, but Semple has the wit and perspective and imagination to make their story hilarious," and I think that is 100% true. It could be a really depressing and pathetic story--about a woman who's lost her creative outlet and is literally withering away in her suburban prison and whose marriage is falling apart--but she makes it funny and gives it a great and happy ending that gives you the hope that things will be better for everyone from here on out. I totally loved this book, and it went by really fast, which felt great.

Book #10: The Monuments Men by Robert M. Edsel

I picked up this book because I'd seen it on some list like "Books to Read before the Movie Comes Out," and it really sounded like a fascinating topic. Plus, the all-star cast of the movie makes it look like it's going to be a great one to catch. And after reading the book, I am definitely going to see the movie. The story is just fascinating, and I feel like I learned so much about WWII history through this book. One of the lesser-known parts of the German occupation in other European countries was that Hitler commanded his officers to commandeer basically any and all of the artwork they could get their hands on, particularly those owned by Jewish people, and take it back to Germany for him to keep for himself and for a giant Fuhrer museum. He planned to (and did, for some) destroy anything done by lesser artists (like Jewish artist) and keep everything done by anyone else. This included everything from illuminated manuscripts to paintings to sculptures to stained glass windows from churches. All of these things were taken from their places and stored in unknown storage houses, in less-than-ideal conservation circumstances. So there was a group of Allied soldiers, most with art or museum backgrounds, who were assigned to recover and restore these priceless artworks to their original owners, as best they could. This book tells the story of where they looked and what they found--and the whole story was just amazing. The numbers of priceless pieces of art they found and saved were absolutely staggering: definitely in the tens of thousands (although, sadly, probably that many were lost as well).

The one thing I didn't really love about this book was the semi-fictionalized writing style. Maybe I'm just boring and like dry, objective writing, but it just seemed weird to me how the author must have made up entire conversations and thoughts that people had. This whole book is based on historical documents--stuff like the Monuments Mens' letters home and the army reports about their actions--so I don't see how he could know stuff like "Robert walked around the countryside, feeling the wind ruffle his hair, thinking about how sad it all was and how much he missed his family" (that's a made-up example of what's in the book). I think it makes the book very readable, but it seems too fake for me to fully accept it as a true retelling of what happened.

Book #9: The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer

I feel like I have seen a LOT about this book, lots of reviews and people talking about, enough that I decided that I really had to just get around to reading it. The cover is so distinctive that you recognize it when you see it, which is probably why I think I've seen so much about it. Anyways, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It was interesting reading it so soon after Crossing to Safety because it's about kind of the same topic--how friendships last and change over decades. The Interestings throws in the aspect of one set of friends becoming really, amazingly successful and wealthy and famous while the rest just stay as normal, struggling financially people. The group of friends meets at an arts camp while they are in high school, and they all believe that their life calling is in the arts and in making art--and they ironically name themselves "The Interestings." But only two of them (who marry each other) actually make anything of themselves in the arts world, while the rest have to put aside their dreams and make money to survive in the real world. Jules, the main character, becomes a therapist, and is eaten with envy while watching these friends (who she loves) being feted and making tons of money while doing what they'd dreamed they would do. It makes you want to shake her, to say, "You have a good life!" but when she constantly compares it to what they are doing, she feels inadequate. But you also get into the heads of several of the other Interestings and you get to see what's really going on for everyone and how they really feel about their lives and what secrets they're keeping and who they're telling them to. So it's all in all a very interesting book, and it seems so real and all the characters seem so human and flawed and striving in some ways (except Ash--she kind of seems fake and I never really quite got her). I especially liked how it seemed so ambitious for Wolitzer to try to cover four decades worth of time in American history and in her characters' lives, but it really worked well for me. The characters stayed the same over the years but they also grew up and changed a lot too.

I really enjoyed Wolitzer's style. She gave you great insights into the minds of her characters and I loved how she interspersed flashbacks into the current action. It seemed like they were all seamlessly integrated into the full story, with very smooth transitions back to the action instead of making there be a jump or a chapter break or something, and I really liked that part of her writing. I also liked how there was a kind of layered reveal of the secrets and things that happened over the years--you might find out something bad had happened here but weren't sure what for a few chapters, etc. All in all I really enjoyed this book and even though it was 450+ pages, I sped through it in a couple of days without even noticing how fast I was going because I was so absorbed in it.

Book #8: At Large and At Small by Anne Fadiman

Okay, here's book 3 by Anne Fadiman that I've read (Ex Libris and Rereadings are the others). And oh man, I have really enjoyed her writing style. And I totally and completely love this genre that she's writing in in this book--the familiar essay. I actually took a class called The Familiar Essay when I was at BYU--it was an English elective class that I took for my major, and I just signed up for it because it fit my schedule and it sounded interesting, not because I really even knew what a familiar essay was. But man oh man, I was in luck that semester because I just loved the whole idea behind the familiar essay. Fadiman describes it like this: "The familiar essayist didn't speak to the millions; he spoke to one reader, as if the two of them were sitting side by side in front of a crackling fire with their cravats loosened, their favorite stimulants at hand, and a long evening of conversation stretching before them. His viewpoint was subjective, his frame of reference concrete, his style digressive, his eccentricities conspicuous, and his laughter usually at his own expense. And though he wrote about himself, he also wrote about a subject, something with which he was so familiar, and about which he was often so enthusiastic, that his words were suffused with a lover's intimacy" (x). It's a cross between a critical essay and a personal essay, where there is equal parts brain and heart, where you get to know your author as well as your subject as you read. That semester in the Familiar Essay class, I read plenty of historical familiar essays, by Thomas de Quincey and Samuel Coleridge and Charles Lamb, but it was really a pleasure to read some current familiar essays from today's time period and with a modern writing style that was very intriguing and engaging. In each of her essays, Fadiman wove a beautiful story, interspersing her own background with information from other sources, so that I really did feel like I got a good balance of brain and heart while reading her.

The other thing I did in that Familiar Essays class was write my own familiar essay about me. Now I kind of want to go back and revisit it and try it again.