book 14

on beauty, zadie smith
rating:


this book was really good. i've never read anything by zadie smith, and i was a little wary because her books always get so much hype, but i enjoyed this. the characterizations were really excellent, and i really liked the way things came together. i hated the father. yeah, a good book. smart without being too pretentious.

something else i've missed: curtis sittenfeld has a new book coming out. i really liked her first novel, prep, even though there were some definite lulls and lags in the story. i guess i'm a sucker for coming-of-age books. so the new one interests me as well, but i'm a little torn, because, after reading, enjoying, and highly praising prep, i read a few of her articles and reviews and realized that she has a tendency to be (or at least to come off as) a raging, pompous bitch. i guess i can avoid an ethical dilemma by checking it out from the library and not officially supporting the author.

book 13

neuromancer, william gibson

i can't even rate this book because i spent so much time during my reading of it being completely confused. it was science fiction/fantasy week in popular materials, and i read this book on matt's recommendation. it's really well written, and there's lots of cool stuff that happens, but i just couldn't really get that into it. i'm not good with cyberpunk science fiction, i guess. apparently i have no imagination. i think i'll have to reread this when i have more mental energy to devote to it.

oh, snap! check out the hot dudes from whom dan brown (allegedly) stole the da vinci code. one can only hope that a representative of the "royal bloodline of jesus christ and mary magdalene" is going to step forward and make a statement.

and another thing...

my head just exploded.

how did i not know that jennifer egan, whose most recent book, look at me, pretty much rocked my face off when sarah made me read it back in 2002, is coming out with a new novel? i should really read the NYT book page more often.

my newest reading project.

maybe you thought i was joking about reading romances, but you were DEAD WRONG. in fact, i purchased my first romance today. it's interesting that the bookstore on campus doesn't seem to have a romance section, though there are sections for other genre fiction categories, like mystery and sci fi. and by interesting i mean DISCRIMINATORY.

i actually located my desired romance in the "literature" section.

anyway, i bought diana gabaldon's outlander, because 1) it costs $3.99 2) it's very popular 3) there is time travel in it 4) i saw at least five women reading these gabaldon books on the flight to switzerland last summer, so i'm sure they are worldly and sophisticated novels and 5) i've heard there's lots of sex in it. i tried to buy it unapologetically, though i was secretly ready to explain to the cashier that it's part of a personal investigation of why romance novels are so massively popular (i.e., the "it's a cultural studies thing" excuse). sure, i could read all the scholarly studies that have already been done and draw some conclusions that way. but there's almost never any time travel in scholarly literature. or sex.

(side note: buying this book was actually significantly less embarrassing than checking confessions of a video vixen out from the library. it was on the recently returned bookshelf and the title sounds so unseemly to me that i actually whispered it to the kid working the circulation desk. actually, first i whispered "i'm looking for the video vixen book," which, in retrospect, sounds like some sort of terrible code phrase.)

i probably won't actually read this until the semester's over. i'm currently breaking my own rule of reading, and i'm in the middle of three different books. so this whole romance thing is really on the back burner. i think i'll make it a summer project, and call it "reading outside of my range."

don't worry; i'll keep you posted.

book 12

bet me, jennifer crusie
rating:


i'm getting really bad at this whole book blogging thing. i finished this book like four days ago. anyway. we have to read romance novels for popular materials this week and i chose this one b/c my textbook said that jennifer crusie is also accessible for non-romance readers. this book was fun and fast, if totally improbable. it's all about a guy who is bet 10,000 dollars that he can't get this chubby chick in bed within a month. to make a long story short, they fall in love! crusie is a pretty funny writer, and the characters were quirky enough for me to avoid totally barfing all over the place. also, romance novels are really good at getting you involved. i kept thinking "of course they're going to get together. they have to get together. oh my god, what if they don't get together???" and so on.

did you know that romance novels account for approximately 50% of all book sales in the united states? that astounds me. (edit: it turns out it's really 50% of paperback book sales. still, i'm astounded.)i think i'm going to read some more. maybe a good boddice-ripper next time.

You're To Kill a Mockingbird!

by Harper Lee

Perceived as a revolutionary and groundbreaking person, you have
changed the minds of many people. While questioning the authority around you, you've
also taken a significant amount of flack. But you've had the admirable guts to
persevere. There's a weird guy in the neighborhood using dubious means to protect you,
but you're pretty sure it's worth it in the end. In the end, it remains unclear to you
whether finches and mockingbirds get along in real life.


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

i've never been so happy as i was when i read that people perceive me as revolutionary and groundbreaking! i'm also flattered about the weird guy. show your face!

book 11

a bad boy can be good for a girl, tanya lee stone
rating:


this cute little book is part of an emerging trend in the young adult book market: novels written in verse. sarah loaned me this back in september, but i didn't get around to reading it until monday, when i was having trouble concentrating on anything because i was laid up with a back injury sustained from an afro-latino dance workout. it's written from the perspective of three different teen-aged girls, josie, nicolette, and aviva, all of whom fall for this love 'em and leave 'em jock guy. i don't know if it's just because i have a galley copy, but it has all these neat little notes and things tucked into it, so it's really cute. and it only took me about an hour to read.

book 10

foreign babes in beijing, rachel dewoskin
rating:


there's no reason that it should have taken me almost a week to read this book. sadly, i spend too much time getting stressed out about things that don't really matter, and not enough time reading. it's sort of my plight. i think.

anyway, this book was really good. matt and i saw it somewhere a few months ago, and we were both intrigued by the title/subject matter. it's about a woman who graduates from college and goes to work for an american pr firm in beijing. she ends up acting in a new chinese soap opera called foreign babes in beijing, which is essentially about the clash between china and the west, and portrays american girls as vixens and homewreckers. this memoir is about more than the show, though. it's about the author's whole experience as a foreigner in china, and it's really well done. dewoskin does a really good job of incorporating cultural and historical context without slowing things down or sounding too teachy. my favorite part in the whole book is when she talks about the success of who moved my cheese? in china, and explains that it spawned a bunch of spin-off books, with names like whose cheese should i move? and i don't bother to move your cheese.

book 9

TWO IN ONE DAY I AM A BEAST!

the ritual bath, faye kellerman
rating:


next week is mystery/detective fiction in popular materials, and i've never read faye kellerman, so i decided to try this out. it's the first in a series (according to my sister, the rest aren't very good), and it's all about this detective, peter decker, who has to investigate this rape that occurs in "jewtown" in l.a. ("jewtown"? isn't that kind of offensive? i mean this book is from the late 1980s.) anyway, it won a macavity award for best first mystery and i liked it pretty well. the story was pretty compelling and i liked the main characters, decker and rina lazarus, this widowed jewish woman. there's this weird love thing going on between them that's completely ridiculous, though. and the "mystery" was totally weak and i had it figured out as soon as the guy who turns out to be the perpetrator was introduced as a character. hence only three point five robots. still, it's a lot better than most of the mysteries i checked out from the concord public library when i was fourteen.

book 8; other orders of business

give me (songs for lovers), irina denezhkina
rating:


this book was supposed to be my reward for finishing the da vinci code but it turned out to be really blah. it got all kinds of ridiculously good reviews but i guess it was just too cool for me. i'm not that into suburban russian punk rockers i guess. there was one story that i really liked, about russian kids going to summer camp. but that was really cancelled out by this other story where death comes into this woman's house and sits at her computer, talking to people in a chat room. and this other story where little green men rape and murder little old ladies. sweet! also, there were a lot of characters who had the exact same names but seemed to be different people.


onto the other orders of business:

it's really just an order of business, singular. i need a new digital camera because mine is broken, and if i don't get a new one soon i can't take pictures of my new stuffed miffy doll. would anyone like to recommend a camera that is nice, dependable, sturdy, compact, and also inexpensive? that'd be great. thanks!

book seven

the da vinci code, dan brown
rating:


i know, i never thought i'd be blogging about this book either! so this is my post-1990 bestseller and what it tells me about society is: "society has a short attention span and a deep love of ellipses." though i found the writing style lacking in a number of ways, i was actually enjoying the story before it got so incredibly convoluted that literally nothing made sense to me. i am pretty fascinated by the fact that this book, which has been an NYT bestseller since 1984 or something, basically centers on the idea that jesus christ and mary magdalene were like, a thing, and had a baby and a royal lineage. and that christianity is all a lie (actually, according to my mom, my dad refuses to read this book because he "can't get past the jesus and mary stuff"). but what was really interesting to me was that there was no code actually written in the cracks of paint on mona lisa like there is in the movie trailer. i think i've been duped!

actual book 6

uh oh, i'm already getting behind on my reading. oh, library school. how you conquer me.

and now tomorrow, rachel field
rating:


for my popular materials class, i have to read a bestseller from before 1950 and one from after 1990, then write a paper about why each was a bestseller, and what it reflects about its society. this was my pre-1950 selection. so i guess this book says: "society likes it when strict gender stereotypes are nicely reinforced. society likes it when NOTHING EVER HAPPENS." the story is all about this young woman who tragically goes deaf right before she's supposed to marry the love of her life. while she's busy trying to get treatments, he falls for her sister and the narrator is too stupid to figure it out. then she gets involved with this doctor who tries to cure her. the whole thing takes place in a mill town during the depression, but all of the poverty and labor organizations get pushed into subplots, subordinated to the TRAGIC TALE OF DEAFNESS AND LOST LOVE. it drives me crazy that she could start reading lips immediately, and that she speaks normally enough so that people who don't already know can't tell she's deaf.

my paper's due pretty soon and i still have to read my post 1990. at home i've got four blondes by candace bushnell and da vinci code by whoever wrote da vinci code. that one's a large print version so it's a little unwieldy, but it looks fast. thoughts? opinions? which should i choose????

book 5, abortive attempt at book 6

baker towers, jennifer haigh
rating:


i ran across this book on the browsing shelf the same day i checked out brick lane. i liked mrs. kimble, jennifer haigh's first book, but somehow i didn't know that she had a second novel out. this is one of those books that i really liked, but that i can't really explain why. the story centers on one family who lives in bakerton, a mining town in pennsylvania. it starts with the death of the father and follows the rest of the family up through (i think) the early sixties. i had some trouble figuring out when things were happening, because the narrative transitioned from one character to another frequently, and it sometimes seemed like a lot of time had passed. but, regardless of temporal confusion, i really liked it. i got pretty involved with the family, particularly the youngest daughter, lucy.


which is much more than i can say for chloe does yale by an author whose name currently escapes me. natalie something i think. i read an article about it last year, and was intrigued by the origins of the book, a sex column in the yale daily news (obviously, there's a nice gilmore girls connection). so i was excited to see it on the new books shelf at the public library, and i picked it up thinking it would be a nice, fast, fluffy read. BLECH. i hated it from the first page. i stuck with it for two chapters and i just don't think i can go back. and i am not the kind of reader who can stop a book once i've started. so maybe i'll go back to this painful pink book, but i think i might have to stick to my guns this time.

book 4

case histories, kate atkinson
rating:


thanks to alicia for loaning me this sweet read. it's about three "cold cases" and the private investigator that gets involved with all of them. a very nice mystery, and well-written. i liked the set-up a lot: the book starts with the three cases and ends with them, but the final pages, of course, reveal much more than the first did. i found myself actually surprised on more than one occasion, which is always nice in a mystery. i can't quite give it five robots, though, because there was some subplot stuff that i didn't really care about and found distracting. a solid four and a half, though. i may have to check out some of kate atkinson's other books, if i can actually manage to keep up my pleasure reading when classes begin in earnest.

book 3

brick lane, monica ali
rating:


i read a lot about this book when it first came out, and i always meant to pick it up. i randomly saw it in the UL browsing collection the other day, and i decided to give it a try. it's about a woman from bangladesh who get married and moves to london with her husband. for some reason, it took me a while to get into it. the first 75-100 pages didn't grab me too much, but after that, i really liked it. especially the chapters that consisted mostly or entirely of letters written from the narrator's sister, who ran away from home to make a "love marriage" and still lives in bangladesh. i also liked when the narrator started having an affair with the young, radical bangladeshi stud who brings her sewing work from a sweatshop. good all around, but i only give it three and half robots since it took me so long to get into the story.

book 2

wolf whistle, lewis nordan
rating:


i liked this book pretty well. lewis nordan grew up relatively near the town where emmett till was murdered, and this book is basically a re-telling of that story. so, of course, race takes the center stage in the story, but there are also all of these really fascinating characters who are only tangentially related to the bobo, the emmett till figure. the main one seems to be alice, a white teacher who envisions bobo's murder in a raindrop the day before it happens, but doesn't understand what she's seeing. this book has a really nice pace, and is a quick read, but it's really southern, so if you're not into that sort of thing, you might want to skip it.

excitement, adventure, and 2006 BOOK 1!!!!

the names, don delillo
rating*:


i completely resisted don delillo until last summer, when matt somehow convinced me to read white noise and i ended up really liking it. the names turned out to be pretty good as well. there's an interesting thread that goes through about cult murders related to names and letters and stuff like that. i also really liked the narrator's relationship with his estranged wife. one thing i really hate is that delillo doesn't use a lot of tags when he writes dialogue, so i'm constantly counting back to the last "he said" to figure out who's talking when. and if the conversation involves three characters, forget about it; i'm totally lost. still, there were parts in the book where i got lost in the narrative in a good way, so i guess it all evens out.


*henceforth, ratings will be based on a scale of one to five robots. one is the worst, five is the best. half robots are also considered to be valid.

okay, let's get down to business:

JENNY'S 2005 READING LIST

legend:
*=school-related reading
**=re-read

1. This Boy's Life, Tobias Wolff*


2. Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld


3. Gal: A True Life, Ruthie Bolton*


4. The Ruby in the Smoke, Phillip Pullman


5. Shadow in the North, Phillip Pullman


6. Autobiography of a Face, Lucy Grealy*


7. Lost in Place: Growing up Absurd in Suburbia, Mark Salzman*


8. Emerald City and Other Stories, Jennifer Egan


9. In Cold Blood, Truman Capote


10. Light Before Day, Christopher Rice


11. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon


12. Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett*


13. Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book, Gerard Jones*


14. Comic Book Nation, Bradford W. Wright*


15. At Home in the World, Joyce Maynard*


16. The Quality of Life Report, Megan Daum


17. The Manor and the Estate, Isaac Bashevis Singer


18. Perfume, Patrick Suskind


19. The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger


20. Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton


21. That Was Dachau, Stanislaw Zamecnik


22. White Noise, Don Delillo


23. Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, Amy Krouse Rosenthal


24. Special, Bella Bathurst


25. Circling the Drain, Amanda Davis


26. Leaving Brooklyn, Lynne Sharon Schwartz**


27. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick


28. The Wonder Spot, Melissa Bank


29. Underworld, Don Delillo


30. The Myth of You and Me, Leah Stewart


31. Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhool, Koren Zailckas


32. Love Invents Us, Amy Bloom


33. Tenth Grade, Joseph Weisberg


34. The Invisible Circus, Jennifer Egan


35. The Whole Story and Other Stories, Ali Smith


36. The J.A.P. Chronicles, Isabel Rose


37. Hometown, Tracy Kidder*


38. A Northern Light, Jennifer Donnelly


39. The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things


40. The Field Guide, Tony DeTizzerli and Holly Black*


41. The Book of Three, Lloyd Alexander*


42. Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women who Created Her, Melanie Rehak


43. Bad Girls, Cynthia Voigt*


44. Number the Stars, Lois Lowry*


45. Snakes and Earrings, Kanehara Hitomi


46. Wickett's Remedy, Myla Goldberg


47. Shade's Children, Garth Nix


48. The Drowning Tree, Carol Goodman


49. Lying Awake, Mark Salzman


50. Josie and Jack, Kelly Braffet


51. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer


52. The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett

okay, so that's an average of 1 book a week. let's see if i can't step it up to 1.5 a week in 2006. so that's 78.

CAN...

SHE...

DO IT??



more importantly,

DOES...

ANYONE...




CARE??



more to come concerning a complicated rating system and my reading from the first week of 2k6.

really quickly, because we're leaving for the beach in mere moments-

MY 2006 RESOLUTIONS
1. read more books.
2. watch less 90210

easier said than done, i'm sure. but really, the second shouldn't be so hard now that they're at the point in the series where brandon is gone and has been replaced by some dimply, abercrombie model-esque, snoozefest lawyer guy. and if the second is easier, the first should be as well. i think it's really time for me to get back to my roots and start book blogging.


happy new year!

hey, way to go chapel hill/carrboro city schools! finally someone in north carolina has the guts to teach kids how to properly use the condoms they've had stashed in their wallets since they turned eleven.

i really like that the featured teacher advises kids to stay away from lesser-known brands, like the kind you can get at truck stops. i've never shopped for condoms at a truck stop, so i'm wondering what these lesser-known brands are. and aren't truck stops supposed to be centers of sex and iniquity? or is that rest stops? are they the same?

(i also like that the classroom pictured features a poster for the o.c. it makes me feel a little nostalgic for last season, that special time before the show made that final transition into total trash.)

i'll never be elected state pride princess or anything, but i do get excited when north carolina is positively represented at the national level for something other than not being dead last in end of course testing or whatever. i was happy to find the link to this article in my new favorite blog, salon.com's
broadsheet. it's a women's issues blog (get it? BROADsheet??????) with a good sense of humor. so check that out. you might learn something that you didn't already know about, say, elective vaginal reconstructive surgery.

isn't it fascinating that, now that i'm done with my semester, there's nothing new on television? i'm stuck with more old episodes of 90210, where donna steals this other girl's designs and then takes an overdose, and the new guy's brother "rufed" valerie and then let the new guy take the blame for it.

it's been sort of emotional for me.

i desperately wanted some donna martin graduates merchandise for christmas, but i don't think that's going to happen. i may have to break down and buy some myself.

instead of television, matt and i have been taking full advantage of 3-at-a-time netflix. we've got an excellent turnover rate right now.

we watched the first disc of the cancelled television show wonderfalls, and i was disappointed. actually, matt was the one who was really disappointed, because the show came so highly recommended to him. i don't usually go for the whole inanimate objects suddenly starting to talk and then ordering people around. it's a little too joan of arcadia for me. except that actual people spoke to joan, and she often wore really great sweaters.

we got the second disc, but sent it back without even opening it. that's how discouraged we felt.

the real gem was mad hot ballroom, which we watched last night. those kids were awesome. my favorite quote, from this really annoying white girl:

i read in this book, it's called why it's great to be a girl, that scientists actually say that women are the more advanced civilization.

that's not exact, but you get the gist of it.

i don't think anything new is coming today, so i may actually have to, like, read or something tonight.


i'm off now to start my newest professional endeavor- (hopefully) designing a website for the duke's sallie bingham center for women's history and culture. there's talk of my actually getting to correspond with sarah dyer, whose zine collection is the focus of this project.

oooooohhhhhh.

aaaaaahhhhhh.