Book Reviews

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Clown Girl by Monica Drake

Zermatt by Frank Schaeffer

Poor, poor Calvin. Raised by extremely conservative Christian missionaries who have lived in Europe since his parents had "been called by God to save European youths from papacy, secularism, liberal theology, and Roman Catholic superstition." Obsessed by sex and keeping his mother from checking his sheets in the morning, Calvin gets quite an education by a generous Swiss maid when she brings his breakfast trays in the morning. Seriously funny and with just enough substance to make it memorable. A great summer read.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

Stieg Larsson’s debut novel features some incredible characters which navigate you through what I consider to be the most riveting suspense/thriller/mystery that I have ever read. Lisbeth Salander is a genius, anti-social computer hacker who despite being a ward of the Swedish state on account of her ‘mental deficiencies’ is in fact the best freelance private investigator in all of Sweden. Her back ground is complicated and the reasons why she is considered incompetent are a fascinating part of the story which I will not divulge here.
Mikael Blomkvist is a middle age journalist who loses a libel case against a huge corporation when he publishes a piece exposing massive embezzlement, only when push comes to shove his sources have mysteriously disintegrated. Facing a few months in prison as well as massive fines Mikael takes a job from an old man who wants him to write the history of his family, and to help him make one last effort at his thirty-six year old obsession; investigating the murder of his sixteen year old niece.
The plot is thick and tight with characters so flawed and human that the international schemes, horrific family secrets, meticulous revenge and fantastically prolific serial killers fit perfectly into this novel.
Larsson died in 2004 of a heart attack without seeing the success of his novel, but luckily for us he finished three manuscripts before he died, the second which is currently out in paperback and the grand finale to be released in the US at the end of May.

The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson

The Gargoyle tells the story of a beautiful, shallow porn-star who is horribly burned in a drug and alcohol induced car wreck, and how in his new skin, with no defenses left, he learns how to love for the first time in his life. The woman who draws him out is a frequent guest to the mental ward of the hospital, who believes that they were lovers in 13th century Germany.
She lives a charmed life (immensely wealthy, artist, lives in what looks like a castle) and manages to bring an other- worldly pathos to his life which she peppers with stories about love and suffering. Perhaps my favorite part of this book is how Davidson manages to make the medieval Catholic devotion to suffering something admiral and beautiful instead of perverted and masochistic like most modern writers.
The Gargoyle has created quite a whirlwind of publicity, granted most of this has been drummed up by the publishers who have spent a whole lot to buy this Canadian authors debut novel. I have listened to rants that describe it like it was written by a 15 year old girl who read Twilight too many times. I have also heard people describe it as a supernatural romance that inverts the meaning of beauty and brings back your faith in the power of love.
I have to admit that I fall somewhere in between. I liked it. However, I didn’t love it. It is a great first novel, and the writing is clean and engaging and takes you right into the story. It is perhaps the story that I have issue with; there are so many little ancillary tales and characters, minor plots that you expect to be pulled expertly together in the final pages of the novel…at least that is what I expect from a book that has gotten the amount of press that this one has. “Spoiler” there is NO pulling together. And while a book doesn’t have to be completely mapped out, with all loose ends neatly tied off, this book feels unfinished, hurried. It could have been a little more tightly edited for my taste.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

This is a frustrating book since I so desperately want to Love it and yet I am merely able to Admire it. Mantel writes so very well, she has a fantastic talent for turning words into images like where she describes a tapestry of Wolsey's: "Down come the cardinal's hunting scenes, the scenes of secular pleasure: the sportive peasants splashing in ponds, the stags at bay, the hounds in cry, the spaniels held on leashes of silk and the mastiffs with their collars of spikes: the huntsmen with their studded belts and knives, the ladies on horseback with jaunty caps, the rush fringed pond, the mild sheep at pasture, and the bluish feathered treetops, running away into a long plumed distance, to a scene of chalky bluffs and a white sailing sky." Just say that aloud - it is a beautiful sentence.

The book is chalk full of them. But the same qualities of description that give a life glow to the tangibles, drain the people that she tries to portray. Cromwell, arguably the subject of this book, is as much a mystery to us at the end of the book as he is in the beginning. I felt as if I followed his shadow through 500+ pages and while you get the impression that he was a man of action who always had a plan - it is an ephemeral impression at best.

At one point a character describes beauty as something proportional (anything that is precise is beautiful, anything that balances in all its parts, anything that is proportionate) and there is a type of beauty in this book, the prose is often breath taking (like Cranmer with "his eloquent eyes and his pale praying hands") but I never once got swept away in this book and felt no attachments by the end outside of Wolsey who slowly became my favorite character as he was the only one who had a drop of life blood in him and as Mantel writes "if you are without impulse, you are, to a degree, without joy" so I find Wolf Hall to be a book entirely devoid of impulse but perhaps contain something subtler than joy.

A Trinity of Happiness

Reviews by Kaisha Jaques

The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun by Gretchen Rubin

The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World by Eric Weiner

Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Todd Gilbert

Trying to stave off a bout of seasonal affective disorder I decided to read the current popular books in Happiness Studies. All take various approaches to finding a bit more delight; from Gretchen Rubin's hands-on, do-it-yourself approach to getting more happiness into an ordinary life or Eric Weiner's travel schematic, to the tours through the brain with Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert.

Rubin's book probably made a better blog than it makes a book, but that said, she gives a person a very intimate look at how an average mom/wife/worker might try to step up her bliss in the coarse of a 12month program. She dedicates one month to working on her marriage and one month or organizing her closet etc. Rubin includes several studies and anecdotes and on the whole the book is extremely approachable even if at time her advice seems a little obvious.

I found the social and anthropological tours of self professed grump, Eric Weiner to be far more interesting. Who doesn't want to know where and how other people are happy, especially when their notion of happiness is so very different than ours. Yes, all those uber-liberal, unapologetically "socialist" Norther European countries make his list but several Asian countries also make it. Just to balance out all this joy, Weiner also takes us to arguably the most miserable country in the world (minus obvious countries who suffer from war, poverty or famine which Weiner discounted since their misery was external, and hopefully fixable) and we get to indulge in a bit of schadenfreude, which being pleasure derived from the misery of others certainly has a place in a book about what makes us happy.

Gilbert's book about the brain doesn't examine the how and whys of happiness, but more the why we can't trust our own memory of our own experiences because memory is almost always a construction of our present, so we remember we were happy if we are happy and we remember being sad if we are currently sad. And just to confuse you more, our predictions (or imaginations) are just fantasies built off of our memories so the same problem with memory apply to our distant futures, and therefore we have absolutely no idea how to plan our future happiness or learn from our past mistakes.

Gibert's conclusion is not quite as nihilistic as it sounds and actually pokes a hole into the essential crisis of the modern experience, Gilbert argues (with much double-blind testing) that we are not unique, but in fact all very average; therefor the best way to know how happy something will make us is to ask someone who is having the experience we want to have. "The self considers itself to be a very special person" and it is because of this that we often overlook our greatest indicator of our future or potential happiness in any given situation: other people.

While each of these authors pursue their own angle in the happiness debate, at some point or another they all hit on the Buddhist philosophy of "be here now" though none of them give you very good guidelines on how to actually become better at that. So you could in fact by pass all of these and just read Thich Nhat Hanh, everyones favorite Zen Master. Which would be practical, but not quite as much fun.

Blindspot by Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore

Review by Kaisha

“Blindspot” is a historical fiction

masterpiece! I loved this book. Co-written by two professors of
American history, it is incredibly rich in historical detail and the
political atmosphere that prefigures the American Revolution. It is a
love story, a murder mystery, and an all out thought provoking and sexy
tale. The story centers around three main characters. Stewart Jameson
is a Scottish painter that finds himself chased out of England on
account of a monster debt (you will love him even more when you learn
WHY he accrued this heavy debt) and is trying to scrape out a living as
a portrait painter in small, provincial (and frugal) Boston.

Fanny Easton is a young woman who having fallen on hard times decides
to live as a boy and find employment as a painter’s assistant.
Alexander Ignatius (the Sherlock Holmes and All-purpose Genius of the
story) is the son of a slave who was bought and raised to prove a
point. Can a black man best a white man if he is raised with the same
excellence of schooling and opportunities? All three of these
characters must come to terms with their own passions and longings for
freedom, love and justice in the end.

The authors collective background
in the subject matter for this novel made the accuracy, and detail
completely effortless…it just rings of authenticity without the authors
having to try too hard. Which, gave them plenty of leeway to make the
book incredibly ENTERTAINING. The characters are funny, foul, feisty
and lusty. If you are a fan of Diana Gabaldon’s “Outlander” series you
will love this book. It you aren’t, you will probably still love this
book.

Vancancy by Suzanne Burns

Lovely prose poems by Suzanne Burns one of my favorite local authors. She has taken infamous events that have taken place in famous hotels throughout history and spun lyrical narratives, often taking the voice of the famous individuals around whom the events have unfolded.

The Curse of the Blonde Bombshells is written in the voice of Anna Nicole Smith and begins "I was only half as dumb as everyone thinks, and the other half made me a star". In Wise Men at Their End striking lines such as "There was no middle to her night so you'd never catch her dreaming" and "While the rest of the world is sleeping and a famous poet is overdrinking" are captivating and original.

Hauntingly morose and surprisingly empathetic this short chapbook is a definite must read.

Loving Frank by Nancy Horan

Do you ever read a book and even if it isn't the best book you have ever read, there is a passage in it that sticks with you where ever you go? I read a book this past summer that did exactly that. It was Loving Frank by Nancy Horan which is historic fiction about the affair that Frank Lloyd Wright had with Mamah Borthwick Cheney. I love Frank Lloyd Wright and had never heard about this affair which was apparently an "American Scandal". The story itself was interesting but it was a passage in the "Afterword" that really stuck with me and I feel compelled to share it with you so here it is:

" Mamah Borthwick Cheney was an intellectual, a mother, a feminist, and a translator. In the midst of her tumultuious affair with Wright, she translated from Swedish an essay by Ellen Key titled, "The Torpedo Under the Ark- Ibsen and Women." In the essay, Key analyzes the female characters created by Henrik Ibsen, whose 1879 play A Doll's House shook the theatrical world when its lead character, Nora, departed her marriage rather than continue to be treated by her husband as a compliant doll. Key notes that the playwright took pleasure in portraying the precise moment when his women characters, feeling confined by their milieu, revolt and struggle for freedom. ("With joy I lay my torpedo under the ark," wrote Ibsen.) Key pointed out that the playwright found it more interesting to explore in his plays the organic, evolving character of the woman rather than the determined, already-defined character of the contemporary male.
"It is the woman who has wholly desired, wholly loved, yes, often wholly sinned." wrote Ellen Key. "Almost invariably it is the woman who breaks out of the cage, or the ark, or the dollhouse. And (Ibsen) believes that she, without the barriers, will find her right road, led by a surer instinct than man. For Ibsen there is no higher moral...law than the devotion of the personality to its ideal." In Ibsen's view, Key went on, the proof of a person's greatness is "the power to stand alone; to be able, in every individual case, to make his own choice; in action to write anew his own law, choose his own sacrifices, run his own dangers, win his own freedom, venture his own destruction, choose his own happiness."

First of all the words "women characters confined by their milieu" are beautiful, especially to women of such circumstances. In addition to that the idea that there is "no higher moral...law than the devotion of the personality to its ideal" is amazing. I suppose it could go either way depending on the individual's "ideal". Serial killers be damned. Hopefully the ideal is not ten human feet in your closet. Ugh. Honestly though, for the altruistic person who may consider the opinion of other people over the devotion of the personality to its ideal, it could be a disappointing and unfulfilled life. The part that grab's me the most is "the power to stand alone; to be able, in every individual case, to make his own choice; in action to write anew his own law, choose his own sacrifices, run his own dangers, win his own freedom, venture his own destruction, choose his own happiness", this is powerful stuff and I take it personally. I believe I may have lived in A Doll's House for a short time without realizing it. I also believe that I broke out of the cage and found my right road and it led me here, to the bookstore. Now I spend my days conversing with people who love words as much as I do. Tonight while I was working, I came across a greeting card that says "It's not how many breaths you take, but how many moments take your breath away." I have had some breathtaking moments this past year and not all of them were the good kind, but some of them were, and all of them have been a process of the devotion of my personality to its ideal. I have made my own choices, written anew my own law, chosen my own sacrifices, run my own dangers, won my own freedom, and ventured my own destruction, but most importantly, I have chosen my own happiness.
This is a great thing.

Best summed up in the New York Times book review

"Mamah Borthwick Cheney wasn’t just any woman, but Horan makes her into an enigmatic Everywoman — a symbol of both the freedoms women yearn to have and of the consequences that may await when they try to take them."

I say "cheers" to Henrik Ibsen. He was ahead of his time and he was a genius, and "cheers" to Nancy Horan for telling this story and including the important stuff.