October reading list

Tags

books, chick lit, feminist novels, reading

Lethal White, Robert Galbraith

Robert Galbraith is JK Rowling’s detective-writing pseudonym. I quite liked the first book in this series, but it’s increasingly going downhill. This one took the cake.

The rather cliched attraction between Strike and his assistant Robin has been getting terribly annoying. Sometimes this kind of chemistry works; in this case, I just wanted to slap the two of them and get on with the mystery.

I’m beginning to wonder whether I have just turned into a grumpy old crone because I find descriptions of romantic angst stupid. For example, at the last of this book, Strike shows up at Robin’s wedding, and Robin just has to know whether she’s getting her job back or not, thus basically disrupting the proceedings. And I’m like, FFS get a room. Or not. But get on with the mystery please.

Even more annoyingly, Strike keeps thinking about his ex Charlotte, making one long for the days of Hercule Poirot who barely had a personal life. And then, we are constantly told how much they all drink, as if we are teenagers and this is of interest.

The mystery itself was decent, but this book can be one third shorter without all the romantic mooning around.

Die A Little, Megan Abbott

Abbott’s forte is creating a dense creepy atmosphere, and she does this in 1950s suburbia as well as she does in her teen novels.

The One Memory of Flora Banks 

Is it me or do a lot of these YA books (except Megan Abbott) have kids with some kind of disability? This one is about a girl who has no short term memory. Ultimately, though, it is about parents of teenagers needing to let them go.

The twists were quite unexpected – except the one related to the boy.

The Dry, Jane Harper

Finally a well plotted thriller featuring good old detective work. The mystery here is intensely personal – the detective goes back to his roots and must face his own past. The narrative is set amid Australia’s drought that makes its rural areas a tinder box and shatters then image of village life as kumbaya.

I’ve found another thriller series yay.

In a Dark Dark Wood, Ruth Ware 

The title itself tries too hard, and I can’t say I loved this one. I kept reading it to know what happens, but I didn’t really care about the characters, partly because they struck me as stupid. Here are some ways not to be stupid:

Don’t go to a hen weekend if you haven’t seen or been in touch with the bride in years

Or if you didn’t get a wedding invite

Don’t play stupid drinking games if you don’t want to (why do people play drinking games in their 30s?)

When you’re cautioned by the police, don’t keep talking without getting a lawyer

Meh. Anyway, I read a few reviews because I was astonished at how bad I felt the book was, and I have to say that the resolution was not unexpected but not as expected as a the critics said either.

The Interestings, Meg Wolitzer 

Wolitzer is not the opposite of Sally Rooney but the synthesis of Rooney and some chick lit writer, say Sophie Kinsella (or someone who writes about entirely ordinary people). She tends to write about precocious kids, but in a self-aware way without taking them entirely seriously.

Take the title itself. The group in the camp decided to call themselves “the Interestings” because each of them was in some way. While they tried to be ironic about life, they also believed their own hype at some level.

When Jules was inducted into their midst, she wasn’t sure what her thing was. This pressure to find one’s thing ,do we all feel it? I certainly did.

I loved this book. Maybe I will return to it as Jules returned to her camp.

Anthony and Cleopatra,Colleen McCollough

My general knowledge of this pair came from the Shakespeare play. What Shakespeare makes out to be a great love story is basically politics.

It’s a massive tome. I learnt a lot, but skimmed through the wars.

One curious character in the novel was King Herod, who those of us steeped in Christian lore know of as the baddie who ordered the first-born sons of Jews to be killed so that he could weed out the future messiah. Turns out – surprise surprise – he too was a complicated character, and not necessarily the bit player I had thought he was.

The thing about these Roman books is that I didn’t realise – silly me – how much Christian history was intertwined. I mean, the Roman emperor is mentioned a lot in the Bible, heck it was a Roman governor who ordered the Crucifixion, but again, I didn’t realise how significant Judea was, or maybe it’s made out to be because these novelists are, like me, steeped in Christian lore and can’t resist playing up that connection.

Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, Becky Albertalli

Why did I read this? Because a girl posted on an FB group about its sequel (coming up next) which I wanted to read, so I picked this up.

Of course, I enjoyed it. But questions.

I’ve been wondering about YA as a category. What is a young adult?

I’ve always categorised YA as books 13-year-olds read but 13-year-olds are not even close to being adult. Or even 16-year-olds.

But the voice in these books sounds about that old, or rather young. Is this how adults think kids sound?

Also is it necessary to be into music if you’re in a teen? Because I’m going to fail to relate as a parent.

Leah on the Offbeat, Becky Albertalli

Obviously, I loved this, but perhaps because I read it right after Simon, I was a little less enamoured of the teen angst. Also, the obsession with coming out – what’s with that? I get that telling and who one tells is significant especially to teenagers but making that the plot point of two novels in succession is a bit much. And all the need to have everyone happily paired off.

The End of Everything, Megan Abbbott

I speed read this in one evening, not in a good way. I did not love it, I just wanted to know the end.

There were twists but they were not entirely unexpected.

I love Abbott’s spooky writing but I felt this one was trying too hard.

Love in the time of Affluenza, Shunali Shroff

Read my thoughts on the chick lit blog here.

Fear of Flying, Erica Jong

This is the first in a triumvirate of feminist novels from the 70s that have long been in my list. This one’s claim to fame is its concept of the zipless fuck. I quote:

The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game . The man is not “taking” and the woman is not “giving.” No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one

Lovely. Thing was this concept was the best thing about the novel and it came early. It’s ostensibly about a single woman trying to find herself, but the way she seems to do this is to have lots of no-strings-attached sex (even as she sorta wants a string) and I don’t care to read about sex that much in novels (except in Judith Krantz novels, she does sex so well). Also, I get the whole sex-as-liberation thing, but seriously it cannot be the only thing, can it?

Read Vogue’s take on whether the zipless fuck has become quaint in our era here.

Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann

Feminist 70s novel no 2. Liked this one a lot better. It’s surprisingly contemporary. Three women take Manhattan, then LA, trying to make it and find love as they go along. Sound familiar? Except that this novel makes no bones about how difficult it is to do this while being female, even if you’re pretty.

 

September reading list

Tags

books, reading

Okay, before we get started, I read a lot this month mainly because I was unwell a lot. Have been wondering if these monthly lists are two long and I should be breaking them up. Let me know if you have thoughts on this.

Now onto the books:

The End of the World — Again: Why the Apocalypse Meme Replicates in Media, Science, and Culture, Barry Vacker

This is a semi-academic book which, as the title suggests, tries to account for the popularity of apocalyptic memes – that is, doom-and-gloom predictions that the end of the world is nigh. The answer:

1. Because we can wipe the slate clean and start over
2. Out of some instinct to fast forward to the end
3. To know what’s coming

Vacker points to the failure of philosophy to provide a metameme that accounts for our new scientific understanding of our place on the fringes of the universe. The result is an ever more ardent clinging to religion and superstition. That’s the part I liked.

The part I didn’t like so much was his use of Baudrillard – a very cool philosopher whose work I want to read more, because I’m convinced that the Kardashians are exactly what he’s talking about (having read only a summar of his work) – to rant about people staring at their screens (booooring!) and reinforce some kind of authenticity that the contemporary world is apparently lacking.

In Big Trouble, Laura Lippman
The Sugar House, Laura Lippman
In a Strange City, Laura Lippman
No Good Turn, Laura Lippman

As you can see, I binged on the Tess Monaghan series this month. I liked all of these but I had to google the first two before writing this, which just goes to show. What impresses me about Lippman is how the cast of characters remains vaguely the same but the mise en scene as it were shifts quite a lot in each book, so that one is exploring an entirely different area or theme – Texas (which is a state bordering Maryland weirdly),  Baltimore politics, Poe and antique collecting, and crime among youth African-Americans. With regard to the latter, I was a little uncomfortable with how white people, on both the good and bad sides, were both the evil and the saviours behind the scene of black people’s deeds, but Lippman mitigates this somewhat with self-reflection on the part of the white saviour at least.

Daisy Jones and the Six

This came highly recommended. I didn’t love it initially, but it grew on me.

I did like the format of each character offering their own perspective on the events. What I loved: three women – the manic pixie dream girl, the one of the guys, the Madonna – and sultry sidekicks. They could have been chicks who hated other women and defined themselves according to men. But no. They were that, but supported other women. This is becoming one of those must-haves in novels for me.

Anna of Kleves, Alison Weir

I love Weir’s take on events, but I’m getting rather tired of unwanted pregnancies as a plot point.

While a lot of attention has been paid to Holbein’s over flattering portrait of Anna, which may or may not have disappointed King Henry when he saw her in person, Weir focuses on Anna’s reaction to him.

Her take on their relationship is different from the usual one, which claims that Anna inspired disgust in him. Instead, Weir proposes a more nuanced reading of their relationship, which accounts for Henry’s growing illness and perhaps that somehow (believably) she was not to his taste. Apart from Katherine of Aragon, Henry seemed to get on best with English women, whom he had courted himself.

While I liked the parts which were grounded in historical fact, I found some of the fictionalised parts quite trying.

Sleepwalking, Meg Wolitzer 

Along with Curtis Sittenfled and Megan Abbott, Wolitzer is my third newly discovered favourite authors. This is her debut novel, and I loved it.

Like Sally Rooney territory, Wolitzer’s subject are three precocious girls who march to their own drum beats. Each of the “death girls” as they are called are obsessed with a different (death-obsessed) poet. This is right up my street; I like to think that had I grown up in an American high school I would have been a goth (though I probably would have been the coolish nerd aka Andrea in Beverly Hills 90212). Let’s just say I’m an aspirational goth.

I tend to be a little impatient with these too cool for school types, but Wolitzer saves her novel my not taking them too seriously.

Children of Jocasta, Natalie Haynes

The thing I have always wondered about the Oedipus myth is how could he sleep with his mother. The answer, Haynes provides, is that she was much younger than his father.

This book is a repudiation of superstition, a pragmatic explanation of where the myths came from even as it brings the characters in the myths alive.

Also, while Antigone has been recuperated as a heroine recently, especially in feminist work, Haynes focuses on Ismene.

The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas

This book has been all over the interwebs – a young adult novel about a teenage black girl who witnesses a friend being shot by the police. I did not love love it initially because many of the issues the book deals with are not new to me but it does a great job of putting them across in a simple and engaging way.

However, weeks after reading it, the characters and plot points have stayed with me, so I guess it did find its mark. The part I liked the most was how it shows a black community which has its flaws but also where families and neighbors are loving.

Wonder, R.J. Palacio

This book was reccomended to me by my teenager niece and her friend. I asked about it while driving somewhere with them and they started telling me so enthusiastically even though I had just been trying to be polite.

I felt I should read it for my niece. I resisted because I knew it was going to be sad and it’s a kids book

I loved it.

I did cry a lot. It touched a nerve because my kids may be in a new school next year and while they do not have any disabilities, some of the cruelties inflicted in this book could be on just about anyone.

It has a happy, quite scripted for the screenplay-type ending though, so rest assured you’ll come away on a positive note.

Queenie, Candace Carty Williams

Loved. Read my review here.

The Gendered Brain, Gina Rippon

“What are you reading?” asked Mimi

“A book about the brain. Some people think that men have different brains from women.”

“Whaaat?”

“Yeah, but this book says that’s nonsense.”

“We already knew that.”

Yeah we did. But the book shows the lengths that different fields of knowledge – including science/ have gone to prove otherwise. Apart from definitively showing how the evidence for gender differences in the brain is almost non-existent, there is lots of interesting info about, well, the brain.

For example, just after we bought Nene his coveted Nintendo Switch, I came upon this: “30 minutes a day of playing Super Mario over a period of 2 months also proved to be a brain changing experience, with increases in gray matter volume in the hippocampus as well as the frontal areas of the brain”

Also this: Hits to self esteem are registered in the brain as strongly as  as physical pain. It made me wonder: is this why we seek romantic love? We need that unconditional anchor to our self esteem. Maybe this is why the love meme is so attractive – the idea of being chosen as an adult.

I ended up falling sick and not finishing this, but I intend to pick it up again once my brain is back to normal.

The Uninvited Guests, Sadie Jones

This is a really well written Downton-Abbeyesque Edwardian novel. Except that there’s a paranormal element. This novel proved to me – as if I needed proof, but the fact is, no matter how many fantasy novels I struggle through, I still keep hoping I’ll get into them – that I am not cut out for anything fantasy or paranormal related. Harry Potter was an anomaly.

I ended up speed-reading towards the end, just to know what happened so I could give it up. I later came back and read it through, but nope, no more paranormal for me.

The Forest of Enchantment, Chitra Banerjee Divakurani

Hmmm, okay, so I don’t like fantasy, but I love mythology. Heh.

In the Preface, the author notes how many people wrote to her after The Palace of Illusions asking when she was writing her next book and she promised one on Sita very soon. Then, she found it was harder than she thought to write a Sitayan and it was ages before the book came out.

I didn’t write to her inquiring, but I was one of those Palace of Illusions fans waiting for the Sita book. And it just about lived up to my high expectations.

Sita has been the subject of much feminist criticism – though there is a famous essay by Madhu Kishwar about how Sita holds feminist potential – so this book can be seen as part of the enterprise to rescue Sita. The underlying argument is a fictional articulation of Kishwar’s thesis – that Sita was a strong woman and a rebel in her own way, in her own context.

Apart from rescuing Sita, however, Divakurani also rescues Ram. I did not have a very favourable impression of Ram with his obsessions with abstract ideals of right and wrong (although for a long time I myself was obsessed with these). However, Divakurani humanises him and makes him, well, hot. If that is not a feat – for those of us who grew up on the Doordarshan version of Ram – then what is?

She provides a modern interpretation of the rakshasas and asuras as tribals. Not surprisingly, she provides a sympathetic reading of the Suparnakha story, but she also offers us a Kaikeyi we can admire. Unfortunately, she chooses to blame the hunchback for the whole Bharat-first debacle, when the physically disabled were often blamed in ancient times for all misfortunes because physical deformity was equated with moral baseness.

My one problem were the explicit meditations on the nature of love – though I guess the point was/is to reestablish the Ramayana as a love story – but overall enjoyed this one.

 

 

 

August reading list

Tags

books, curtis sittenfeld, jane Austen, megan abbott, reading

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, Jon Ronson

This book should be in a media literacy 101 class that every single person should be made to think. We are now in the era of “cancelling” people, so it’s more relevant than ever. Yes, people could benefit from their erroneous views being pointed out, but does it need to be public and aggressive?

The logic goes that in some cases this is the only thing that works. But when the online shaming becomes relentless, whose purpose is being served? What do we get out of online outrage?

Love in a Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford

Guess I’m just sold on Mitford and going to leisurely go through her entire oevre. Another book that I cannot quite articulate the point of, except that its la di da depiction of aristocratic life is just what the doctor ordered.

Some of the attitudes that Mitford holds would be exactly the target of the virtue signallers that seem to abound these days and who Ronson points to in his book. And yet, one can’t help but giggle because Mitford’s narrator Fanny does point to the shocking prejudices, but also points out that there is more to people that their unpalatable foibles.

Sula, Toni Morrison

Morrison died and everyone was putting up inspirational quotes and it made me question whether I have ever actually read a Toni Morrison book. I have long been convinced I have as part of this mammoth summer reading list we were given and told to write one-page summaries of if we wanted to have any chance of being admitted to an English major.

But then, I began to wonder.

I’ve kind of put off reading Morrison because I just assumed that was going to be too much pain in her writing for me to handle. But I figured that I was going to use her death to just bite the bullet.

And now I wonder, why on earth did I wait so long. Sure, there is pain and trauma but rendered so that one is not left aching from it. If anything, one comes out of this book with a slight smile on the face.

Sula is basically about female friendship, so exactly my thing. The writing is so stupendous that I can only say, sometimes though accoldades are well deserved.

If you have been holding back on reading Morrison like I was, don’t.

Mansfield Park, Jane Austen

In my quest to become a true Austenite (ian?), I am going through her oevre. I have only Northanger Abbey left. I think.

Anyway, this one. Fanny Price is Jane Eyre without the spunk. Austen explains why she is like she is, but I wanted to slap her on more than one ocassion (Fanny, not Austen). Edmund is the white guy who gets major credit for doing little. Wanted to slap him also.

Ms Crawford is most interesting especially her spiel on the chapel and how boring it might be for everyone to attend a daily mass (greeted by Fanny and Edmund with a big hawwww) and her entreaties to Edmund not to please become a lawyer and not a parson (#sorrynotsorry).

In order to justify condemning her and her brother to being the villains of the piece, Austen somehow artificially makes them commit the worst of sins. Whatevs. Not impressed, Jane.

The Fever, Megan Abbott

Abbott specialises in teen drama, but I think it works better in highly intense groups of girls, like the gymnastics and cheerleading teams of her earlier novels. But maybe that’s how things are, now anyway. I know the teen years have always been a period of angst, but it seems to be on steroids now. Is it social media? Do today’s teens have more hormones coursing through their veins.

Later on, I realised that there were some subtle reversals of expectations – some of the very dramatic things that I assumed happened because of the writing turn out to have been much lesser events. Like the characters in the novel, however, I was part of the hysteria that grips the school in the story.

What’s different about this book is that it presents a boy’s view (of his sister and of other girls) and that of the parents.

Not an encouraging read for a parent with kids on the cusp of adolescence.

Nine Perfect Strangers,  Liane Moriarty 

I once met a woman at a friend’s (very chilled out) bachelorette and when I told her I was studying chick lit novels for my PhD, she said that a very close friend of hers wrote chick lot. “Her name is Liane Moriarty,” she said. “Have you heard of her?” “Of course!” I said.

Though I had never read anything by her except this one. I’m not even sure Moriarty is a chick lit writer, by my strict definition of it, but her books would have been put in the “for women” shelf of the library. This was before she hit the big time with Big Little Lies.

I’m glad I started with this book, though, because it’s super clever. It plays with the expectations of the detective genre – nine people trapped in a house leads one naturally to expect a murder. A key character, however, is a romance writer in decline. If one expects romance writers to be, well, romantic, Moriarty points out through Frances Welty that one can’t write romances without being a perceptive judge of character.

The house the nine strangers is a new-age sort of retreat. It makes the outlandish though not uncommon promise of changing the lives of those who commit to its practice. The novel is a critique of these retreats but ironically also an endorsement. The lives of the nine strangers are changed by what they encounter in the house, though not in the way they expected. At some points, I felt like I was in therapy myself.

Therein lies Moriarty’s skill. Even as the narrative expresses skepticism about the possibility of transformation, there are some practices that do seem to work, and ironically, in the end, all the lives are indeed changed, though not quite in the way they expected.

Fashion Victim, Amina Akhtar

Read my thoughts on the chick lit blog here.

Man of My Dreams, Curtis Sittenfeld

I love everything by this writer, though I probably liked this one least. I liked the structure where it doesn’t stick to one time period too long. Henry, the titular “man” is a lot like the Wickham character in Eligible which I felt a bit cheated about.

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Michael Wolf

I never felt a great need to read this book because is there anything we don’t know about the Trump White House? I feel like we bombarded with information about it already. After some intense reads, I felt like would be a topic I felt sufficiently detached from to find it relatively calming.

And it was strangely calming and more interesting than I expected. Apparently, there is method to the madness – a triangular structure around the president struggling to pull him in both ways. It was also fairer to Trump than I thought – it takes the view that there was no Russia collusion of the devious sort, even there might have been collusion of the clueless sort. It also points out that there is unfairness to the media towards the president. Heck, it makes out Steve Bannon to be almost sane.

I might even read the Bob Woodward book.

Too much happiness, Alice Munro

I’m not a fan of short stories, though the title of this one attracted me, apart from the fact that Munro is a legend. It’s like Munro knows the reader is thinking this.

In the opening story itself, the protagonist picked up a collection of short stories:

How Are We to Live is a collection of short stories, not a novel. This in itself is a disappointment. It seems to diminish the book’s authority, making the author seem like somebody is just hanging onto the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside.”

***

And finally, The Zoya Factor movie, based on Anuja Chauhan’s Indian chick lit novel, is finally here. Share your thoughts on the chick lit blog.

 

 

 

 

July reading list

Tags

books, chick lit, reading

This was the month I got back my chick lit mojo, kickstarted by rereading the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy on my Singapore trip.

Man of her match, Sakshama Puri Dhariwal.

I’m a fan, even though her work veers sometimes into Mills and Boon territory. Read my thoughts on my chick lit blog here.

The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children, Alison Gopnik

The central thesis is that we should be parenting (the metaphor of which is a carpenter shaping  a chair according to a prefixed vision) but being parents (which is like bring a gardener providing space to flourish)

The book provides answers to some questions: Why do children take up so much energy? Why is human childhood so long? Why do we love as we do? Why do kids play?

The basic thesis: Parents, leave those kids alone.

She won by heart by being one of those rare experts not to mouth-froth over screens. On the effect of screen time on kids, she basically says, “we don’t know”. But points out that people had very similar anxieties over books, which can also be addictive (don’t I know it).

Baltimore Blues and Charm City, Laura Lippman

These are is the two novels in Tess Monaghan series, and it looks like I’m going to follow this one.

One problem I have with it is the protagonist’s seemingly adversarial relationship with women. It’s not obvious, but there’s a subtle sneering. If you’ve read the series, did this strike you?

Still, it’s well written and plotted, and I figure I’ll keep reading them.

Manspotting, Ritu Bhatia

This is about the kind of single life that is probably more common but gets less narrative attention – the divorced single woman with kids. Read my thoughts on the chick lit blog here.

The Seven and a Half Lives of Evelyn Hardcastle, Stuart Turnton

Almost gave it up but then it started to grip me. The third book I’ve read now which plays with the idea of time. Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life asked “what if you could live your life again and again till you got it right?” This one asks:  “What if you could live it again and again in a different body till you discovered the truth?”

It’s plays with the idea of the classic detective story – a group of people gathers for a party and there’ll be a murder” – by allowing the protagonist to get to know another person from the inside and himslf from the from the outside.

Unmarrigeable, Soniah Kamal

One of the best Pride and Prejudice rewrites I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. My thoughts here.

Reading list – June

Tags

books, reading

Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld

Is there any Curtis Sittenfeld book I don’t like? The best boarding school novel I’ve read since Malory Towers

Shrill, Lindy West

This is a series of essays type memoir by the outspoken feminist writer who I first encountered on Jezebel . I didn’t expect to enjoy this book as much as I did. I thought I’d read it in fits and starts, but I read it through.

West talks about fat shaming, rape jokes in comedy, online trolls, romance. I loved this line: “feminism is just the long, slow realisation that the stuff you love hates you” and this: “privilege means that those of us who need it the least often get the most help.”

There were parts that were downright funny, like the note from her landlord about complaints “about creaking and vocalisations late at night (3am) and there were parts that were powerful, like her letter to Dan Savage on his war on fat.

Bel Canto, Anne Patchett

This book is like a jewel. You do not need to love opera to read it. There are terrorists but it is not sad except a little.

Ms Pym Disposes, Josephine Tey

I liked the first novel by this writer, so I tried another. The thing that irked me about the first novel also irked me in this one – the prejudices of the English. There is a Brazilian girl “affectionately” called “Nut Tart” (because of her skin colour and her attitude to men), Scot and Irish people are marked as different and a South African girl had “a flat primitive face”.

However, this book had something that drew me, it’s set among a community of women, a boarding school, but not just any – a vocational school that trains women to be physical education teachers. The youth of the girls and their worship of their teachers is emphasised.

The lead character, Ms Pym, is single by choice and has little interest in mending that state. The principal of the school, Henrietta, is unlike Ms Pym one of those unattractive women destined to be single as a result, but who found her niche and flourished.

What struck me was how prejudice and liking the popular ones plays a role in British justice. Still, the end could have gone either way and the way it did was interesting.

Persuasion, Jane Austen

Objectively, her best novel, though Pride and Prejudice remains my favourite. With Sense and Sensibility and Emma, there were points at which I felt the novel was going on too long. The final couplings were also clear from the beginning. This was not not the case with this novel. I also liked how it was about an older woman and how Austen  tried something different in making Anne the loner and runt of her family.

The Uncoupling, Meg Wolitizer

Wolitzer does feminist novels par excellence, and each one is different. This one is almost a parable, taking its premise from the Greek play Lysistrata, in which the women of Athens go on a sex strike to stop the men from engaging in war. In a suburban town in New Jersey where the local high school is staging the play, the women suddenly go “off sex”. This is a novel about relationships, sexual and otherwise, between adult and teen romantic partners and between parents and children. Apart from this, I liked the way the relationship with tech – again both adult and teen – is woven into the story.

Wallflower at the Orgy, Nora Ephron

The title of the book refers to a line in the introduction – “Because working as a journalist is exactly like being a wallfloewr at the orgy. I always seem to find myself at a perfectly wonderful event where everybody else is having a marvelous time, laughing merrily, eating, drinking, having sex in the back room, and I am standing on the side taking notes on it all” – which I realised could be the credo of my life, though Ephron did not remain a wallflower. I read this book of essays at a time when I had been trying not to be  wallflower and got crushed. It reminded me of my place.

Hot tip: all the essays are enjoyable, but skip the Mike Nichols one.

Life after life, Kate Atkinson

The novel is premised on a twist of Nietzsche’s amor fati dictum: what if you had to live your life again innumerable times in exactly the same way? Would you embrace it? Instead, the epigraph proposes through a character in the novel: “what if we had a chance to do it again and again, until we finally did get it right?”

The central character Ursula has this chance. The novel tweaks crucial moments – the moment of death – in her life to explore other possible endings.

Apart from the experimental plot trajectory, there is a sheer delight of upper-class English country life, with characters that one wants to see more of.

The Pursuit of Love, Nancy Mitford

I fell into this craving more of the English aristocratic country life that Atkinson detailed, not expecting much more except that Nancy Mitford had been an author I had wanted to read for a while. I experienced that very specific pleasure of thinking you’ll like an author and it turning out so.

It’s hard to say what happens exactly in terms of plot, but the whole thing hinges on the tone that you either love or hate.

Reading list – May

Tags

books, feminism

The Wife, Meg Wolitzer

OMG this. This is how you write a feminist novel. The feminist thesis here is that women’s work is often unrecognised, and sometimes basically stolen. The idea of the wife as slave. But with enough personality there to become enthralled in the story.

Nick of Time – Elizabeth Grosz on  Nietzsche 

This is the second part of the Grosz’s book on space and time. I realised that I’m not that interested in space and time. Heh. At one time I wanted to make these two concepts the frame of my PhD thesis and maybe it would have been cool if I had except that I resisted because I felt that it would be pandering to the desire to use concepts that male philosophers take seriously. Instead I landed up with tired old tradition/modernity but at least that was a natural fit.

Anyway, some interesting points in this book:

a. Nietszche’s view of history and it’s usefulness of feminist protect – that the past is important but must not overwhelm, that one must take from the past what is useful and move on – to “remember what one needs in order to move on”.

b. The “will to power” is not just one, but many competing wills, it is the synergy of different wills that makes something happen

c. The eternal return: Given the infinity of time and the finite nature of matter and possible combinations, there will be repetitions.  “In the long run, probability become necessity” Grosz says.

Normal People, Sally Rooney

I had the same problem with this book as I did with Conversation with Friends, only with the latter I got over it and the book won me over overall, and that didn’t happen in this case.

With Conversations with Friends, I started out skeptical but by the end of it, there was enough complexity there.

What irritated me was the rather juvenile game-playing and lack of communication between the central couple, and this became acute in Normal People. Here, I loved the initial section of the book, but after the second section gets under the constant misunderstandings and breaking up and (not quite) making up just felt silly to me.

Maybe they would resonate with a twenty-something but I guess I am too much of an old lady to have much patience with it. Not that I am over game-playing but please, people with this much intelligence should also be clear-eyed about what they are doing.

I was also uncomfortable with the presentation of masochism. Not that I’m an expert on S&M, but I don’t think it’s supposed to be a person who has low self-esteem in her life asks to be manhandled in the bedroom. Rather, the opposite, I would think. Instead, a woman who seemed to be fairly rebellious in the beginning is basically turned into a craven mess by the end. And we are supposed to be charmed.

However, this book was almost universally loved by critics. I don’t get it. Tell me, what am I missing?

The Woman at the Window, A.J. Finn

I’m turning into a grumpy old woman but I really didn’t get into this. I guessed about the protagonist’s  husband and child do it wasn’t really a surprise. I found her  irritating – I know, I know, she had a disorder, but there is only so much of a person saying how much they drank and (inexplicably) how many times her robe fell down. The surprise was a bit of a surprise but I didn’t really care.

Funeral Games, Mary Renault

This is the final part of the Renault’s Alexander trilogy. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to read it, because I didn’t really see what the point was to reading further after the central character died in the previous book.

However, it was strangely engaging. Not just the wrangling over the throne, but also characters like Euridike who married Alexander’s half brother with intellectual disabilities. I liked it so much, I went on to another historical fiction novel.

Helen of Troy, Margaret George

This was a super read in general, though Madeline Miller remains my favourite in this genre. George invents  a character Gelanor, a wizard, who follows Helen to Troy and remains one of her friends from her hometown there. I’m quite sure what the point of him was and it stretched credibility that a queen would be allowed to go off here and there with this man.

There are some episodes that I found less convincing, but I could see why George did them as she did. For example, one ambiguity in the myth of Helen is the love between her and Paris. George attributes Helen’s abrupt attraction to Paris as Aphrodite’s revenge on her for a slight – for not praying to her for her blessing on her marriage to Menelaus.

Also, George shows Helen as seeing Menelaus with a slave girl, thus mitigating her decision to run off with Paris, but really given the age in which those events were taking place, a king’s dalliance with a slave girl, especially given that Helen was supposedly off Menelaus by then, would not really be seen as in any way equivalent to the queen running off with a prince from another state.

The part where the travel to Troy is super boring and generally I wanted to slap them both, but I guess that is often how the moony-in-love come across to others. The relationship I found more interesting was Helen and Menelaus’. She chose him, although she was not 100 per cent sure of her choice, there was attraction there. And then after it all, she lived with him.

I remember a reviewer noting how George emphasises that Agamemnon is simply looking for an excuse to attack Troy in order to use his weapons and also to annex a profitable land , and that this might be a commentary on the present-day US. This strikes me as apt, though I’m not sure her intention was that specific.

In contrast to Miller’s unforgettable portrayal, Achilles here is a sullen, almost deranged man-child.

The book dragged on a bit, but the tragedy of the war is really well drawn. I cried at certain deaths – Troilus’ sticks out.

In the end, George gives Helen back her daughter Hermione, which is not a small consolation

You think it, I’ll say it, Curtis Sittenfeld

A measure of how much I love this writer that I would read a collection of short stories. Ironically, my copy didn’t include The Nominee, the story I downloaded this book for. Nevertheless, I enjoyed all the stories in the book, though I cannot actually recall even one of them now. That’s the thing with short stories, I think. They are so fleeting, like dreams. They will come back to me, again like dreams.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Jane Sherron de Haart

I did not think I was fangirl enough to read a massive tome on the US Supreme Court judge, but I learnt a lot from this book. For example:

1. Her nickname was/is Kiki

2. She studied English literature under Nabokov at Cornell

3. There were quotas for women – only about 5% were allowed in, and all the Jewish girls were assigned one part of the dorm.

4. She married as an undergraduate and her in-laws were very supportive. Harvard retracted her scholarship when she married (the logic being that her father-in-law was wealthy so she wasn’t a needy student anymore) so her father-in-law paid her tuition. Her mother-in-law offered to look after her baby so she could study further.

5. The dean of Harvard  law school asked the nine women in her class why they  were taking a seat away from a man. The periodicals library could only be accessed by men

6. Her husband Marty shared the shopping and cooking and chores while they was at Harvard law school. Then he got cancer and she arranged for his classmates to lend him their notes which she would spend all night typing up.

7. They moved to new York and she transferred to Columbia because he got a job. The reason she couldn’t stay back was because she was scared of losing her husband to illness. But why couldn’t he have stayed back? Yet she did leave him later to write a book on Sweden’s legal system

8. Tied top of her class and edited both the Columbia and Harvard review but didn’t get a job offer when she graduated. A former teacher had to lean heavily on a judge to get her a clerkship and she overcompensated by working harder than anyone else.

9. Was paid less than men in her first teaching job at Rutgers

10. Got back to work a month after giving birth to her second child

11. Surprisingly,  she started her career in acacdemia, teaching and then running the first women and the law course at Columbia.

12. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was her aha moment on feminism

13. Her first test first test case was sexual discrimination – against a man. Her second test case – a woman who wanted to give birth but was dismissed by military in case she had an abortion. Both test cases were the opposite of what one would expect a feminist activist to pick  – a man’s right, a woman’s right not to have an abortion. She was being strategic, showing  judges that even men suffered under sex discrimination

14. Her friendship with conservative justice Antonin “Nino” Scalia – when her husband died, she remained stoic but he cried during the Court tribute

15. The case of the strip-searched 13-year-old making her feel the need for another woman on the court

16. A run through of some of the sensitive cases of our time – gay marriage, abortion rights, the Florida election of George Bush, the rights of Muslims detained without trial after 9/12.

Ginsburg joined the court when Clarence Thomas had already been appointed. She now witnessed the appointment of Brett Kavannaugh (not in the book). I wonder how she feels serving with these men. (Edit: just read this) So much changes, so much remains the same.

April reading list

Tags

books, feminism, reading, Tudor

Feminism is for Everyone, bell hooks

A great intro to feminist positions now as well as how they got here.

A little boring for me as I know most of this.

Still useful to see things clarified so clearly – for example, she is adamant that there is a place for men in feminism and the early feminist movement erred in not envisioning men’s place . How feminism is not about equality but about ending sexism.

How having a domestic helper is not implicitly wrong but that feminism must grapple with how to make the employer-employee relationship more fair.

How feminisms retreat into the academy meant that popularizing the feminist message through feminist television, feminist schools etc failed. I dunno though there seems to be plenty of popular feminism around, some crap and some pretty good, thanks to the advent of blogging. So maybe feminism did not get popularised in the institutional way she envisioned but we’re getting there.

Leave the Grave Green, Deborah Crombie

Why do I keep reading these? The mystery itself was better this time.

However, just when I thought liked Kincaid better, he goes and sleeps with a suspect and I’m like really? Then, the ending with Gemma. Again, whatevs.

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World, Hans Rosling

Confirmed my view that we present things too simplistically: our misplaced nostalgia for the past (things are getting better, not worse), the idea that India and China are the world’s biggest polluters and the threat of climate change rests on the them, that income inequality is worsening.

He stresses the importance of data, of comparing numbers sensibly not just throwing one big number out there, of not going for the big, sexy, simplistic narrative.

And finally how the media is rarely a good source. As someone who works in news, who tries my best to counter the worst excesses and to fact check, my biggest professional takeaway from this: do your best but lower your expectations.

Eligible, Curtis Sittenfeld

My thoughts on my chick lit blog here.

Mating in Captivity, Esther Perel

I really needed to read this book right now. The central question: can the death of sex in marriage be avoided?

Some insights: stop trying to quantify sex (the number of times, the number of orgasms), (too much) intimacy can (sometimes) kill sex, the danger of monogamy sliding into celibacy, the tension between fear of abandonment and fear of being engulfed that we bring to sex.

She also has a podcast which is very interesting. Her insights are great. I feel like I have never had a therapist in her league.

A Man called Ove, Fredrick Backman

This is like a male version of the Eleanor Oliphant and I didn’t love it as much. It’s a more than decent read but I weirdly didn’t take to Ove. He was so … manly. And even though he overcame his prejudices, or that they were just a smokescreen to begin with, I never really forgave him them? Like we are always supposed to congratulate these white dudes for befriending foreigners of learning that women are not stupid (admittedly Ove thinks everyone is stupid) and I’m like whatevs.

But read it yourself and see what you think.

Rivers of London, Ben Aaronovitch

Don’t usually like fantasy but quite liked this one. Maybe because it weaves modern-day London and policing quite convincingly with wizardry. Though I was not particularly into the more ghoulish parts of the mystery, I liked the mythology of the rivers and how they were personified.

I will probably go on to book 2.

Scoop, Evelyn Waugh

I have been wanting to read this forever, given that it’s supposed to be a classic and the premise is journalism.

But seriously so much gratuitous racism. Okay, maybe, this was the prevailing attitude and not Waugh’s attitude but so much description of blackness and pink hands and very white teeth and natives, who are either slovenly or sinister. Admittedly the white dudes are hardly paragons but I just found the whole thing pretty unbearable.

I googled after to see if this book had fallen out of favour, but nope, people are still falling over themselves to praise it with just the odd mention of the racism.

Brief Gaudy Hour, Margaret Campbell Black

Not the best but maybe because it’s Anne Boleyn and her story is overdone. Still, some of the transitions in the novel were abrupt. The end was moving – Why do all these women die?

Their unhappy endings notwithstanding, their fascination as strong and ambitious women is the draw. Each new telling offers new facets to their minds, new takes on the same broad events – in this one Anne is clear eyed about her own flaws (unlike Henry). Percy is presented as her one true love and her disappointment in that explains her motivation for what followed.

Nick of Time, Elizabeth Grosz

I loved Grosz’s work when I came across her in a French Feminism class. Here, she reads and attempts to redeem three thinkers who have fallen out of feminist favour (Darwin, Nietzsche and Bergson – or at least she tries to rescue the first two, I am not familiar with Bergson and haven’t got to his part of the book yet).

Her interest is their treatment of time, but in the Darwin section that I will talk about here, I was more interested in sexual difference. One of the many splits in feminist theory for some time has been between those that insist on difference (i.e. what Grosz terms the “irreducible” difference between the sexes), a position I associate with Luce Irigaray, and those, in the Judith Butler school of thought, who argue that sex/gender is a  construction. The latter group is not saying that there are no differences in genitalia and reproductive organs, just that these differences are not as significant as they are made out to be by all the meaning that is layered onto them.

Intellectually, I am of the Butlerian school. Butler advocates making “gender trouble” and I am attracted to her vision of disruption and blurring of binaries. Emotionally, however, I find myself in the Irigarayan mode, instinctively feeling feminine difference. (This instinct should not be overstated, because instinctively one also feels that the earth is flat). However, I am one of those women who is mainly interested in and attracted to women, and I do find myself falling (out of convenience) into essentialised statements about women, even though I know and accept that “woman” is a construction, but the people I am speaking to often do not. I also love Irigaray’s writing, and I see some sense in her argument that trying to erase sexual difference is not going to benefit the feminist cause. Grosz follows on from Irigaray (while Butler explicitly breaks with her).

Darwin has been roundly critiqued for presenting a deterministic universe in which what happens is apparently inevitable, and in some sense, the best possible outcome (the survival of the fittest). Grosz’s reading of Darwin makes him much more contingent. He does not argue for only one possible outcome, she points out. He also explicitly states that the lines between variations, species, etc is blurred.

She also finds useful his explanation of sexual difference. Darwin proposes, and Grosz concurs, that the sexes split into two for evolutionary reasons – to allow further cross-hatching of the gene pool. Once reproduction involved two sets of genes – X and Y – to be swapped and mixed, and the sexes existed, sex selection further came into being, whereby each sex in each species developed secondary sexual characteristics that would attract a mate. Thus, the differences between the sexes in each species became pronounced for evolutionary reasons.

Fine, but I don’t understand why these differences should be “irreducible” even in the 21st century. Grosz notes that Darwin says evolution never reverses itself, so presumably, now that we have two sexes they are bound to stay. But, I’m not convinced. What is to prevent a further split in the future? What is to prevent a fading of differences due to sexual selection?

When I was a teacher, I found it quite difficult to distinguish male from female when students did not particularly dress to highlight their sex. There are definitely people that conform to the feminine or masculine side of the spectrum, but most people do not. Their reproductive organs account for less of their behaviour than their upbringing and experiences.

I did find Grosz’s reading of Darwin interesting. She made a good case for how he is less conservative than he is made out to be – even if he did see himself as a descendant of the thinkers of his time, Malthus, Smith, Ricardo et al.

Jane Seymour, The Haunted Queen – Alison Weir

Clearly I gave into my Tudor craving in April.

Alison Weir is my favourite prolific Tudor writer because she is a historian so I find her takes more believable, but also because her writing style is less la di da than say Philippa Gregory. My absolute favourite in terms of style is Hilary Mantel, but she has only a trilogy unfortunately.

I am hardpressed to choose between Henry’s wives – I even read a really good novel on Anne of Cleves and Katherine Parr – they all sound like exceptional women in their own way, but Jane Seymour is provably by least favorite after Katherine Howard (and I have some respect for the latter’s daring).

Given that Jane was such a mousy and devout soul, it’s hard to imagine her inspiring passion in the king, who tended towards strong women. However, that she was the opposite of Anne is sometimes put forward as her attraction. The other possibly more interesting question is how she felt about Henry. Was she essentially strung along by events or was she a woman in love?

In this telling, Jane comes across as deeply conflicted – she disliked Anne because she was faithful to the old queen and religion, but she also knew that Anne was essentially not unfaithful and that she was doing to Anne the very thing she condemned Anne for. Apparently in some twisted religious way, she convinced herself that Anne was not really Henry’s wife. Also as someone who has very little attention from men she couldn’t help being flattered by this attention from the highest quarters.

Still overall she struck me as such a milk toast towards the end – a woman who could see injustice taking place but who wanted to convince herself that what she wanted was right.

 

Reading list – March

Tags

books, reading, uplit

All Shall be well, Deborah Crombie

This is the second Crombie mystery I’ve read. It’s better in terms of the actual mystery than the first, in the sense that I did not quickly guess whodunnit. There was an Indian connection in the plot – the murdered woman had grown up in India – and I expected the usual British-centric cliches but thankfully, it avoided that pitfall.

However, it coalesced my irritation at the detective Duncan Kincaid, who keeps calling on his junior Gemma to do unofficial (read: without pay) work for him. Being attracted to her does not excuse this. I also do not find it credible that Gemma would bring her toddler son along to do detective work. Not that I object to it, but I find myself irritated at these portrayals of raising children, as if it’s possible to just take them along at that age and they’ll cooperate. I have come across such children but they are rare, and portraying them as cooperative without comment propagates the fantasy that having children is something that can just be tacked onto your life. To be fair, the book does talk about Gemma’s anxieties about child support and child care, but that does not stop Kincaid from leaning on her to help him. Bah.

The Persian boy, Mary Renault

This is the second book in the Alexander trilogy. Surprisingly, I loved this one. I did not expect to be enthralled by a novel told from the perspective of a eunuch (though I have actually read and enjoyed Wilbur Smith’s Egypt trilogy with a eunuch protagonist), but Bagoas is actually a historical figure. Moreover, I realised that, like Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles, the reason the secondary character (in that case Patroclus) had to narrate the story was because he could then function as a third-person narrator. How could Alexander/Hercules praise himself without appearing conceited, for example?

But actually, I found even the non-Alexander parts, the parts about Bagoas’s boyhood, interesting, and I came to care for his fate as much as Alexander.

The book gave an impressive account of everything that Alexander achieved, the syncretic culture he cultivated and what drove him, his motivation for war.

I haven’t read the synopsis yet, but I wonder what the next book could be about considering that the hero is no more.

Daughters of the sun, Ira Mukhoty

I first encountered the women of the Mughal court in Indu Sundaresan’s amazing fiction series, and I remember being stunned to realise that the historical details were pretty accurate. That is, that these extremely cultivated, accomplished and ambitious women existed in the Mughal court and that they had made such important contributions to history. Why had we never heard of them?

I devoured Mukhoty’s historical account as if it were fiction, and omg I’m totally a Nur Jahan fangirl. Also, if I had another daughter I’d name her Jahanara.

Conversation with Friends, Sally Rooney

This is one of those books I wanted to read badly enough – just based on reviews – that I ordered it from the library and read it in hard copy.

Initially, while I liked it, I didn’t see what the hoopla was about. But then I realised, I was copying down passages of it, something I used to do a lot, and don’t do so much now.

In some ways, I feel like I am Frances but without the tendency to self-harm and the sense of lacking a  personality

On the other hand, I was struck and a bit impatient by how young they were. For a super intelligent and hyper-aware young lady, Frances in love still plays the kind of stupid games one only does in possibly one’s teens and twenties. Like instead of clearing the air, stewing. You want to give her a little shake.

At some point, I thought it should have been called “conversation with myself” instead of “with friends” because so much of it is in her head, but then I realise a compelling part of the novel is her friendship with Bobbi and also with Melissa and Nick. Frances and Bobbi are precocious, the kind of intelligent, arty people, the too cool of school type that usually strike me as trying, but for some reason did not annoy me, maybe because they actually had intelligent things to say and were genuinely vulnerable.

In some ways, the novel could have been set anywhere but the Irish bits come through in the oblique ways – alcoholism, Frances’ fears that she might be pregnant, her relationship with the church.

This is a novel about a friendship or rather a queer relationship between two young women, but also about marriage and the complicated nature of things. It’s probably a sign of my age and general situation that I found Nick and Melissa’s marriage as interesting as the young people’s relationship(s)

Chaos, James Gleik 

This is a book about chaos theory. It is one more book I’m reading thanks to  (?) an annoying columnist who makes references or paraphrases quantum/chaos theory and I have a sneaking suspicion he’s talking through his hat. So I’ll admit my descent into this particular rabbit hole is partly motivated by my need to prove this guy to be the idiot that he is (okay simply wrong), but I also feel like physics was thing I was almost as afraid of as maths, and I am at the stage at which I want to confront that fear.

So basically, what I got from this book is that “chaos” in the chaos theory sense is unpredictability. And also that there is order in chaos.

I was struck by how badly scientist crave and want to prove that order exists. Feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray traces this impulse to what she calls Plato’s “dream of symmetry”. I could see this so clearly in this book.

So, basically, a theory of chaos turned into a theory about how chaos is not really chaos in the ordinary sense. Calm down people, order has been restored.

This book also fell into the Anglo-American trap. It acknowledged that many of these discoveries had been made by Soviet scientists, but that they did not reach the English-speaking world because of the cold war. While one of the strengths of the book is that it humanises the scientists by telling us about them as people, it fails to do this for the Soviet scientists who were really the pioneers. It would have been harder to access information about the Soviet scientists or to interview them, but by not doing so, the book again glorifies Americans/Brits while side-lining those who got there first.

I’ll admit I struggled through this book and there were parts I didn’t fully understand. I read less in March because I was plodding through this one. It kindled an urge in me that I never thought was possible – the desire to do math.

I realise that being an adult, out of school, who does not have to do something, where there is no pressure to excel is the best way to learn. I want to go back to some of the harder math I did in high school and college, and relearn it, this time just for the joy of it.

Scary.

Less, Andrew Sean Greer

There is so much good literary fiction around, yougaiz! The thing with (contemporary) literary fiction (okay or just literature) is that unlike the stuff that one studies for a Literature degree, it is from one’s own period, the words are easily understood, so one can just enjoy the writing without having to decipher it so the speak.

Also uplit! I recall the legendary Eunice De Souza, poet and teacher, once telling us that if we were looking for happy endings, modern literature was not going to provide it – he only exception being Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera (rushed out to buy that book, only to be unable to finish it for years until I was older and then just inhaled it, thus proving that there is a time for every book).

So this is basically a Ulysses redux (but so much more accessible than James Joyce’s version, so don’t worry), a gay man’s long-winded journey (across the world) to return home. Like the Penelopiad, it gives us a different tra

I identified with Less’s social anxiety (okay, I realise that I identify with something about the main character in every book I enjoy, which is a really trite observation to make, because isn’t that the point if skillful writing, but I guess the point of this blog is to shamelessly make trite observations, so there), but not with his humility. The guy is put down at every turn – a comment on how basically obnoxious most people one meets these days are – and he just takes it graciously, without hissing and spitting back, heck even internalising the shitty descriptions of himself (that are said to his face!). I need to be more like that, without the internalising part. Or maybe it is the internalising that allows him to not fight back, in which case, no.

I want to face people’s crappy opinions (including of myself) with equanimity, but not believe them.

Something about this book reminded me off Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, but I liked it much better. I’m so happy we can once again have books with happy endings. There, if that doesn’t motivate you to read this, what will?

An American Wife

So I must be the most thick reader in the history of reading, but I didn’t realise this was loosely on Laura Bush until after the half-way mark. Admittedly, I didn’t read any review/synopses of the book. It vaguely registered on my radar because Glenn Close did not win an Oscar for a movie based on this book (just checked, and it turns out that movie was a different one, based on a different book and now I have to find that book too).

I never thought much about Laura Bush. She only registered on my consciousness when Michelle Obama was compared unfavourably to her and I was, like, what? George Bush, obviously, could not not registered seeing as he was the most idiot president one could imagine, until Donald Trump came along and bested him. Still, Trump has not started a war based on made-up evidence. Yet.

At the end of this book, I not only came to admire Alice/Laura, I wanted to emulate her. That’s how awesome it is. I never in my life would have imagined that I would see Laura Bush as a role model. I think the trick here is that I realised Alice was Laura Bush too  late to dislike here. The backstory had already shoved me into her corner.

Apart from Alice herself and of course her feisty grandmother (apparently we are not supposed to use the word feisty to describe women because it’s never used to describe men, but I can’t help myself sorry), there is the portrait of her marriage. In some way, I identify (there I go again) with Alice’s marriage – an intellectual woman marries a not very intellectual man. But Alice’s approach to marriage is the opposite of mine, even though her dilemmas resonate. It is, I love this man, we have great physical chemistry, there are parts of him that annoy me no end, but I’m not going to fight this, because living without him is worse. The not fighting part is where Alice and I differ, but I do admire her ability to keep calm and carry on.

Weirdly, I have come across Curtis Sittenfeld on the chick lit racks and never picked up her novels because they didn’t seem like they would be chick lit enough. They wouldn’t. But I am basically going to read anything she writes, I reckon.

February reading list

Tags

ayaz akhtar, books, chloe benjamin, detective stories, gillian flynn, jasmine guillory, megan abbott, michael pollan, reading, tara westover

The Flood, Ian Rankin

This book was given to me by friend who was offloading books. I’m always shocked at the pristine condition people’s old books are in. This was also the book that taught me that if a book is not something I’m not dying to read and is not on my Kindle, it is likely to languish on my bookshelf out of the sheer inconvenience of reading it in its physical form.

However, I pushed myself, and well. This is Rankin’s debut novel so apparently it’s not a classic representation of his work. A detailed portrait of a Scottish town in decline, it was interesting but not amazing. The sensitivity with which the poverty and the superstition – and the branding of a woman as a witch – are handled was well done.

An Education: A Memoir, Tara Westover

OMG, what a life. Westover grew up among hard-core Mormon parents, with a bat-shit crazy dad, an enabler mom, and a violent brother among other (nicer) siblings. The kids are homeschooled in the school of hard knocks and a couple of them, the author included, turn out to be brilliant in spite of, or because of her parents would say, the lack of schooling. What struck me though was although Westover’s childhood was non-traditional to say the least, and there is stuff she went through that is outright wrong, there is still affection for her parents so that one can understand the power of these families which cannot entirely be explained away by brainwashing. When her father is not being cray cray, he is affectionate and possibly a good dad. Her mother in a quiet way is supportive, until Westover makes a far-reaching choice, and then she’s not. This is a coming of age novel in the most eye-popping sense.

Disgraced, Ayaz Akhtar

This is a play that completely captures the zeitgeist of our time – the post 9/11 stigmatisation of Muslims, the prejudice underlying even the most liberal communities, the tribalism inherent in us all.

It struck me while reading this:  How did Muslims become the hated ones? When did it become so pervasive?

The Immortalist, Chloe Benjamin

This is the story of four Jewish siblings in New York, who receive a prophecy that will change the course of their lives. It traverses the domains of both magic and science and the idea of magic and art as two sides of the same coin, San Fransisco in the heydey of gay pride and the coming of the AIDs outbreak, and family bonds. The only part that strikes me as off was when Klara met this Indian man – from Dharavi no less, and he had somehow come to US through a cousin who had got into an American university, and this struck me as unlikely. Hard to describe what it’s about exactly, but it’s well worth reading.

Turbo Twenty-three, Janet Evanovich

Entertaining as ever. Also, the Ranger/Morelli thing is never going to get resolved, and while that is silly, it is also satisfying because what would life be without both of them.

The Penelopiad, Margaret Atwood

After my brief encounter with Penelope in Madeline Miller’s Circe, I wanted more of her. This is an interesting take on the myth, from Penelope’s point of view. I still feel like I want more of her.

A Share in Death, Deborah Crombie

This is the first in the Duncan  Kincaid detective series. On the positive side, it’s one of those Agatha Christie type stories, a group of people in a confined space (a time share), one gets murdered and a detective just happens to be on the scene. The problem was that I didn’t quite take to the detective. Two things turned me off: 1)  his calling Gemma, a single mother with a young son, to do unofficial work for him 2) his description of a 15-year-old girl as someone he wished he could put across his knee and spank. I mean, ew. I’m also a bit confused about the time period we are in, it all seems a bit throwback in sensibility – people have mobile phones but not smart phones, but they still seem to behave exactly like people in Christie’s novels.

You Will Know Me, Megan Abbott

This is my second Megan Abbott – another thriller set in the intensity of a young female setting – and I have entered fan territory. Both books I’ve read so far not only deal with teen girls but athletic teen girls. The first one cheerleading, this one gymnastics, both smashing the stereotype of girls being frivolous. These girls are tough, hard-core, driven, obsessed with their bodies in the pursuit of sport, not men. The actual mystery part is not as amazing as the way Abbott conjured up the sweaty, sinister, coven-like atmosphere of school sports.

I read these books riveted like a junkie, convinced I will need to read another right after, but then I realise it’s too much and I need a break to recover from the fever of reading.

Sharp Objects, Gillian Flynn

I read this after Flynn’s more famous Gone Girl, and was in fact reluctant to start it because I wasn’t sure I wanted to go down another Gone Girl type of traumatic cliffhanging. I loved this one though. I get the problems with it – another Flynn novel with damaged women at its core – and unlike Gone Girl, the kahaani mein twist was not as … twisty … but I think I liked Camille, I liked the way it ended, I recognised the over-the-topness of the Southern creepiness she evokes and yet I think it falls on the right side of parody. I could probably re-read this thing.

One quibble – too much description of houses. We get it, everyone has a mansion.

Flynn has been criticised as a misogynist for repeatedly portraying women with an evil streak, she counters that this is a feminist act – showing that women need not always be good girls (thing is, is there really a shortage of the Black Widow/dangerous woman thing?)

I dunno, I’m undecided. I think Gillian should keep doing her thing though, she is excellent at her creepy vamps. Your thoughts? Should Flynn switch to male villains?

That said, I take issue with Flynn’s statements on chick lit. Read my takedown here.

How to Change your Mind, Michael Pollan

I really did change my mind. Wasn’t sure what it was about when I picked it up, and then realised it’s a book about LSD. Within a chapter, I had changed my mind about LSD, which I had considered a “hard drug” as opposed to magic mushrooms, when it turns out they’re in the same category. Apparently, I was harbouring under the ‘natural is better’ fallacy that I generally roll my eyes at.

Who would have thought I could actually sit through reading descriptions of people’s trips, when I find it quite boring when people try to tell me their dreams (mainly because I pretty much always remember my dreams and so I am never amazed at the weirdness of a dream the way some people seem to be).

Obviously, I found the neuroscience of it the most interesting. Not only how the chemical works on the brain but how it challenges the idea of the self itself, therefore touching on how the self/consciousness is constituted.

It is very long though.

The Female Persuasion, Meg Wolitzer

This book deals with the becoming of a feminist. Greer (whose name immediately brings to mind Germaine Greer) encounters Faith Frank, the archetypal white second-wave feminist, and is drawn to her basically like a groupie. Greer’s trajectory is basically in this second-wave feminism, though even in the novel’s time frame, we are already in the third wave. She feels more drawn to the more edgy, confrontational feminism of her contemporaries, but cannot shake off the allure of Greer, and also I think the idea that she is not edgy or confrontational enough herself.

In this, I identify with Greer, which is why this novel resonated with me, even though I was impatient with Greer and also the feminist revelation of the novel was not really the revelation to me that it might be to someone unfamiliar with the women’s movement.

As others have said, ironically, Greer’s boyfriend Cory’s journey is much more compelling. I also liked Greer’s friend Zee’s story.

I like that Greer in the end wrote a book that she herself felt might not go far enough and yet, she has made peace that she can only do the best that she can do, and maybe that’s okay. Hmmm I think I’m talking to myself here.

The Wedding Date, Jasmine Guillory

This chick lit/romance novel registered in my consciousness when feminist Roxanne Gay tweeted about it. Read about it on my chick lit blog.

Brat Farrar, Josephine Tey

Speaking of throwback novels, this one is actually written in 1949 and yet is so beautifully written that it remains gripping, in spite of or because of its Downton Abbey aura. Again, the mystery is not that mysterious and, in fact, given that one can guess the identity of the criminal, what one would want to know is how and why exactly the crime happened and that this is not explained is quite a flaw. Nevertheless, it is beautifully written that I would want more of this author.

That said, I am incapable of encountered British upper class crap, such as boarding school and sons inheriting and blonde, fine-boned Ashby genes and a lineage of uncles that died in India (so colonialists basically).

Also, the title is basically the name of the person, and is not something that would inspire one to the pick up the novel.

Just read – in January

Tags

books, jane Austen, reading

Emma, Jane Austen

Found myself thinking and marveling at Clueless throughout. Amazed at how cleverly the film is done. Turns out that I was reading the book on the anniversary of its writing and New York Public library had done a post comparing it to Clueless.

One thing that struck me was the radical nature of Knightly’s sacrifice – to love a woman so much to leave one’s own estate and castle because she will not move out of her home because of her father.

Austen’s work is always about class but in this one, the critique about adherence to class strictures without attention to inner qualities is more pronounced. As ever, we have a high model of what constitutes the good person – the gentleman or gentlewoman – in Knightly.

Fire from Heaven, Mary Renault

This book is part of a trilogy on Alexander the Great.

Knew almost nothing about Alexander except that he was “the great” so it was a good intro. Vaguely remember Aristotle was his teacher, enjoyed that part the most – how he was influenced by Aristotle’s Hellenic ideal.

The other striking thing that our school history textbooks do not tell us but that is otherwise common knowledge is the queer relationship between Alexander and Hephastion. The strong parallel between this relationship and the Achilles-Patrocles myth is stressed here (so it would be good to be familiar with that myth to get its full resonance. I recommend Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles). What annoyed but also intrigued me was the author’s decision to keep the relationship unconsummated.

Polite Society, Mahesh Rao

I actually read Emma as a prep for reading this book, which is a redo of Emma set in Luyten’s Delhi. Read my thoughts on it on my chick lit blog.

By Invitation Only – Dorothea Benton Frank

At some point, V got into downloading bestsellers for me, and that’s how I landed up with this one. I struggled to get into it. On the one hand, I can get onboard with a good wedding drama story. It was told from the perspective of the Southern mother of the groom, and the writer has a sense of humour.

It tended to, however, valorise the Southern lifestyle – people exclusively by white people as far as I could tell – and turned into something of a morality tale on how the superficial New Yorkers learn some good Southern values. Oh wait, there was one person of colour in the novel and it turned out he was a crook.

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Carlo Rovelli

I started reading about quantum mechanics after a columnist made some sweeping statement that I was convinced was factually incorrect (and three books down, I am right). While trying to fact check his “quantum physics says that chaos always precedes a transition” schtick, I tumbled down the rabbit hole.

Let me just say that physics was my bete noir. I pretty much failed the physics part of the aptitude test I

Yet, physics is the most philosophical of the sciences, and so, some 20 years after I closed by school physics textbook, I am trying again.

This book is probably the one I’d recommend you read first, as a taster. It is collection of beautiful essays that breaks down as simply as possible some of the big questions that physicists have grappled with since Einstein.

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, Gail Honeyman

Oh my lord, I loved this novel. How does one write a novel about a single, awkward, lonely woman without making her pathetic. How does one write an uplifting story about her life, without taking the edge of the loneliness? One gives Elinor a scathing voices that comically cuts through the bullshit of contemporary life. Some have critiqued this voice as being unrealistically naive, and while this is a fair point, I still loved it.

Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji, Manu S. Pillai

One of my pet grouse’s about our history textbooks in school was that they started with the Aryans, skipped ahead to Shivaji and ended with Indian independence, with a little detour to encompass the world wars in between.

I remembers characters such as the Adil Shah of Bijapur and Aurangzeb, but in so far as they were the enemies of the great Maratha warrior Shivaji. It all came back to Shivaji in the end.

So actually reading the rich history of the Deccan was a revelation. The Adil Shah was not just some evil king from a substandard province, but a number of people who headed a rich state, where the confluence of Hindu and Muslim culture ebbed and flowed, with other influences. What was fascinating was the presence of not just Persians but Africans in positions of power.

There were so many threads, so many kings and kingdoms that one got mainly snippets of each ruler and kingdom. There was also a repeated stress on how Hindus and Muslims got along to the extent that it seemed a bit like Mr Pillai doth protest too much. And he still ended up with evil Aurangzeb trope which was a disappointment.

some

There there, Tommy Orange

This is a powerful book about the American Indian experience. It was searing but also too much. I took ages to read it because I kept hoping that the thing that was supposed to happen in the beginning did not happen. A bit like Rebel Sultan,s I thought that there were too many characters, I struggled to keep track of them. What stuck with me was the

Don’t get me wrong, this is worth reading. Just tough.