Caitlin Moran Readalong: How to Build a Girl

Welcome to the first week of discussion for the Caitlin Moran How to Build a Girl prepublication readalong!  Thanks to the generosity of Harper Collins USA, a whole bevy of book bloggers will be giving you a blow-by-blow discussion of this book, which will be published in the US in September.  (What ho, you lucky UK folks already have access to it!).

This week we're discussing part one, Blank Page, and I confess that I read part one about a month ago and neglected to take notes, so let me just turn to the dog-eared pages and see what I can come up with. Already on line one, page one, I'm stopped in my tracks.  Her brother is named Lupin?  What?  Is this a case of all roads leading to Harry Potter, or are little boys *actually* named Lupin in England?  Ridiculous.

Moving on.

Um. We arrive at the first moment where the main character and I diverge in a wood and I definitely take the one less traveled.  This teenage narrator is talking about masturbation.  In a rather open and matter of fact manner.  Um, I'm still pretty shy about saying the word out loud, but when I was a teenager, I don't think I ever even thought about it. It was the rural South and a different time and Southern Baptists were ready to run you on a rail out of town for any little transgression. There's a whole lot of wanking in this book, and I mean, bully for her and all that, though it's a little strange that she mentions she's sharing a bed with her little brother at the time.  And while I'm on the subject, maybe my usage is off on this one, but I thought "wanking" was a decidedly, erm, male form of activity.  That gerund just sounds like it's describing a particular hand gesture, and that gesture is not one that I associate with the female anatomy.

Yup, that's the one.

Then again, it worked in that episode of Buffy...

Or not...

Okay, enough with the crude gifs for a little while.

What I think is actually sweet about Johanna is the utter lack of embarrassment she seems to feel for her family, particularly for her parents.  I mean, when her dad roars home drunk from the pub and puts on his agonizing music show for the dude, Johanna isn't all *cringe* and *eye-roll*.  She's more, like, aw, Dadda's at it again. As someone who was pretty much perpetually embarrassed of my own parents for no particular reason, I find that rather sweet. She's so earnest, she even likes his music, though it's clearly awful.

And then when the nurse arrives and confuses Johanna with her postpartum mum, my heart just kinda aches for her when she launches into this:

This is all because I am fat. If you're going to be a fat teenage girl, it becomes hard for people to guess how old you are. By the time you're in a 38DD bra, people are just going to presume you're sexually active, having rough, regular procreative sex with alpha males on some wasteland. Chance would be a fine thing. I haven't even been kissed yet. I want to be kissed so much. I am angry I haven't been kissed.  I think I would be really good at it. When I start kissing, the world is going to know about it. My kissing is going to change everything. I'm going to be the Beatles of kissing (20-21).

Or where she's launching into what she wants in her life:

There isn't a word for what I want to be yet. There isn't a thing I can gun for. The thing I want to be hasn't been invented. Obviously, I know some of what I want to be: primarily I want to move to London, and be hot...I want everyone -- men, women, Minotaurs; I read a lot of Greek mythology, and I'm out for whatever I can get -- to want to have absolute, total sex with me, right in my sex places, in the most sexual way possible. Sexually. This is my most urgent mission (28). 

I'm not judging.

So angry and flippant, yet earnest and full of yearning for what she has yet to experience.  That's adolescence right there, kiddo.

In between Johanna's adolescent diatribes, I also love how she sneaks in wry political commentary, like the industrialization, and then the failed promise of that industrialization, of Wolverhampton: "the city died on their watch, and there is a communal sense of misplaced culpability about it. This is what dying industrial cities smell of: guilt and fear. The older people silently apologizing to their children (22)."

And then, the buildup for her television appearance...I thought any number of disasters were going to happen.  That she might forget her poem at home.  That she might clam up in front of the cameras.  I thought Johanna was home free when she quipped to the tv host that it would be inappropriate for them to go on a date.  BUT WHO COULD HAVE PREDICTED THE SCOOBY DOO BITS?

Scooby always pops out of nowhere

Not I.  And I'm pretty sure I actually threw my book on the floor so that I could indulge in some serious cringing on Johanna's behalf.  Because by now, I'm naturally feeling protective of her and I cannot imagine how this story of hers can possibly end well. Bring on part two, I say!

True story: on an only tangentially-related note, there is a persistent idea in pop culture that the five main characters in Scooby-Doo (my favorite childhood cartoon) are based on the five colleges in my area: Smith (Velma), Mount Holyoke (Daphne), Hampshire (Scooby), Amherst (Fred), and the University of Massachusetts (Shaggy).

Blog-alongers: please leave a comment and add your blogpost to the linky list.  Hope y'all are having as much fun as I am!

Reprise: Where'd You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple

I'm off to Nashville, y'all. Home of the imitation Parthenon, country music and my husband's extended family, among other things. I'm trying really hard to post twice a week to the blog, so what follows is my original review of Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette, which I first read book back in August 2012.  I'm updating this review to include some information about the audio book, which I have recently listened to.  When I first read Bernadette, which I really liked, I claimed that it was the right book for me at the right time. Now, however, I might go so far as to say that it was simply the right book, full stop.  A book that I liked a couple of years ago has now become one of my favorite audio book experiences.  I absolutely loved it and I had several moments where I lingered in my car long after reaching my destination, just to stay immersed in the story.

Summary (from Goodreads): Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom. 
Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette's intensifying allergy to Seattle--and people in general--has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands. A trip to the end of the earth is problematic. To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret correspondence--creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter's role in an absurd world.

Oddly enough, I don't think this summary does much for the book, but two of the blurbs on it really work for me. Garth Stein says that it is "a compassionate look at family dysfunction, the paralysis of genius, and good old-fashioned parental love" and Jonathan Franzen "tore through this book with heedless pleasure." I had just finished reading a slew of YA books, I was hungry for some adult fare, and I had just a big enough gap of time to let myself indulge in some bookseller's guilt. That's right. I read a book that was already published, albeit recently (two weeks ago). 

Structurally the book is cobbled together, ostensibly by 15 year old Bee, from various emails, letters, and notes, with occasional first-person interjections from Bee to give a sense of cohesion. Usually I hate this kind of narrative structure, but the informality of the novel makes for a surprisingly good pairing. The epistolary excerpts are all written to, from, or are tangentially related to Bernadette, and my favorite parts were either those written by the heinous Audrey Griffin, Bernadette's neighbor and gnat-nemesis, or the ones Bernadette herself writes to Manjula Kapoor, the woman in India whom she hires to be her outsourced personal assistant.

You know how sometimes a book can come to you at just the right time and you really click with it?  And that same book, if you'd read it a month ago or a year in the future, might not have resonated with you at all?  That's how I feel about Where'd You Go, Bernadette. For whatever reason, I read this book at the right time and had so much fun doing it, but I also had the sense while reading it that if I'd come at it another time I would have simply put it down, unfinished.  Parts of it are incredibly funny, and I loved the send-up of the Seattle scene, that certain brand of parenting characterized by the "gnats," east coast elitism, Microsoft, the MacArthur genius grant, people's deep earnestness to be PC and inclusive, and everything else.

Is it realistic? Heavens, no! But I can forgive a book a good many things if it makes me laugh. There were lots of parts that I enjoyed but oddly enough I only dogeared one section. It's from a letter Bernadette has written to Manjula, asking her to make a Thanksgiving dinner reservation for her family. Clearly Bernadette realizes that it's pretty outlandish to email a person in India to call a restaurant in her own neighborhood for a reservations, so she gives equally outlandish reasons for doing so:

"There's always this guy who answers the phone...and he always says it in this friendly, flat Canadian way. One of the main reasons I don't like leaving the house is because I might find myself face-to-face with a Canadian. Seattle is crawling with them. You probably think, U.S./Canada, they're interchangeable because they're both filled with English-speaking, morbidly obese white people. Well, Manjula, you couldn't be more mistaken.

Americans are pushy, obnoxious, neurotic, crass--anything and everything--the full catastrophe as our friend Zorba might say. Canadians are none of that....To Canadians, everyone is equal. Joni Mitchell is interchangeable with a secretary at open-mic night. Frank Gehry is no greater than a hack pumping out McMansions on AutoCAD. John Candy is no funnier than Uncle Lou when he gets a couple of beers in him. No wonder the only Canadians anyone's ever heard of are the ones who have gotten the hell out. Anyone with a talent who stayed would be flattened under an avalanche of equality. The thing Canadians don't understand is that some people are extraordinary and should be treated accordingly. 

Yes, I'm done (26-27)."

Bernadette is full of rants just like that. I kind of love her, and I kind of want to slap her, but I don't see those things as being mutually exclusive. This book is both wry and funny with a postmodern, sly humor. I can't think of any truly great comps, but it falls somewhere along the spectrum of Kevin Wilson's The Family Fang, Jonathan Tropper's This Is Where I Leave You, and Rachel DeWoskin's Big Girl Small. It's not a book that has tremendous lasting power, and I'm a little surprised that it clicked so strongly with me in the moment, but like the Stones said, if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need.

(end of original review)

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The audio book is read by Kathleen Wilhoite, and I'll be honest with you: I didn't like her at first. Not at all.  By the time I came to the end, however, I was very impressed with Ms Wilhoite's rendering of the various characters (a few New Zealanders not withstanding). I laughed out loud so many times when listening to this book, which I expected since I laughed many times while reading it.  What I wasn't prepared for, however, was the number of times I wanted to cry while listening to it, since the book didn't have that effect on me at all. I was also completely caught up in Bee's excitement over things, and with Bernadette's anguish over the Twenty Mile House (you'll just have to read/listen to know what I mean) and the sheer ridiculosity, for lack of a better word, that just keeps on building and building until that particular bubble bursts. 

Seriously, I ended up loving this book on audio, to the point where I actually gave it a 5-star rating on Goodreads. I rarely do that. Hachette has recently lowered the price on the unabridged audio to just $14.99, so I bought one for myself and I encourage everybody who loves audio books to rush out now and buy it for yourself at that price. 

The only caveat I have for the audio is that if you're listening to it without having read it first, you will have to really pay attention to the epistolary parts: in other words, who is writing to whom. I occasionally skimmed over that in the book and had to go back to look things up, which is clearly more difficult to do with an audio.  

So, I'm curious.  Any of you readers have different experiences when reading vs listening to a book?  I know I read differently when I'm reading an e-book vs a physical book, so I guess it shouldn't come as quite the surprise to me that listening and reading engage different parts of the mind. 

A little Valentine's Day book fun: The Rosie Project and Words for Worms

Despite my intentions to blog at least once a week, it's been difficult to keep up with it this year and we're only in February! I'm about 50-100 pages into more than a dozen novels and thus not ready to review anything, and I've already posted about Rosie here, so today I am going to take the easy way out by participating in a group book survey for The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion, sponsored by Words for Worms. I'd never heard of that blog before, but I saw that Sarah Says Read participated in it and that inspired me to check it out. Warning: ahead there be spoilers!

1. Pop culture question here: did anybody get a serious Sheldon Cooper vibe out of Don? Well, after I looked up who Sheldon Cooper was, I can say, quite definitively, no. I've only watched a couple of episodes of The Big Bang Theory and didn't think it was particularly funny or good.  But when the author was at my bookstore last fall, he said that he gets questioned about that all the time. To me, Sheldon Cooper came off less a quirky genius and more of an asshole, and Don Tillman, awkward though he may be, is no asshole.

2. Don's social interactions are awkward at best, but his logic and adherence to routine give him some interesting habits. What's your favorite Don-ism? Oh, so many of them. I laughed so many times at his rigorous adherence to punctuality, timing everything in his life down to 30-second increments.  His anti-vegetarian stance. His learning to dance by watching videos and practicing with a skeleton. His learning to have sex by reading the Kama Sutra and practicing with a skeleton. I could go on and on, but I won't.

3. Don's "Wife Project" involves an elaborate questionnaire designed to weed out unsuitable matches. Have you ever made a list of qualities that are important to you for a potential partner? Do you think it's realistic to expect one person to live up to all of them? When I was a teenager I probably did compile actual lists with my friends for things I wanted in my boyfriends. Looking back on my various romantic affairs, I can see that I don't have a physical type, but I do most certainly have a type: smart, can make me laugh, and with a creative bent (musicians, writers, and artists). Now that I'm older and have a better idea of what works in a mature and lasting relationship, I can add some more must-have qualities to my mental list: emotionally available, supportive, and generous-spirited. Luckily my husband qualifies on all of those counts. While I don't think it's realistic to expect one's romantic partner to fulfill every need one has, I do think it's realistic (and healthy) to expect emotional availability, support, and a generous spirit from one's romantic partner.

4. What is is about Rosie that manages to break down Don's defenses? Do you think that love requires a certain abandonment of logic? Funny, but I didn't see that Rosie broke down anything about Don.  She was perceptive enough to understand that he was different and smart enough to value his differences as much as she valued his more obvious gifts. For his part, Don had to unlearn what he thought was required for love: identical doesn't always mean compatible.

5. What was your favorite scene in The Rosie Project? I have a few favorite scenes: the ice cream debacle on his first date in the beginning of the book, echoed near the end playing out a similar ice cream scene with Rosie; his argument with the maitre d' about the superiority of his outerwear jacket over a dinner jacket; the bartending scene with Rosie, where his quirks turn out to be his strongest selling points; giving a lecture to the Aspie kids and describing himself without realizing it. Really, there are so many.

What about you, gentle reader?  Have you read The Rosie Project?  Did you love it like I did? 

Weird Things Customers Say in Bookstores: US edition

I've been a follower for a long time (and by "long" I guess I mean about two years or so) of Jen Campbell's This Is Not the Six Word Novel blog. She's a poet, writer and antiquarian bookseller in the UK, and earlier this year she published a book called Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops. Since bookish people love reading about bookish things, the idea spread across the pond and soon there was an open call for American and Canadian booksellers to submit some of their bizarre encounters with customers. Overlook published it just this last week, and they were kind enough to send me a complimentary copy of the book.

 Jen's original contributions comprise most of the US edition, but it's interspersed throughout with new scenarios from the New World, including two out of the three that I submitted.  One of them was entirely too long to print, but it remains one of my most frequently read blog posts (read it here if you're interested). Here's the more interesting of the two they included:

     Customer: Do you sell swimming goggles?
     Me: No, I'm afraid we do not.
     Customer: And you call yourself a full service bookstore?
     Me: ...

I kid you not.  Now, it's true that we've branched out a good bit, particularly over the last five years, and we sell quite a few non-book items. Some are more of the usual non-book like journals, stationery, and calendars, but we also carry toys, boardgames and locally- or regionally-made crafts. Still, asking for swimming goggles seemed a little, well, weird.

Here's a call I took last week from a customer on the phone. I've submitted it for the next installment of Weird Things Customers Say in Bookstores:

    Customer: Yes, hello, do you sell drumsticks?
    Me: Umm...do you mean the kind you eat or the kind you play drums with?
    Customer: The kind you play drums with.  Does that mean you sell them?
    Me: No, actually we don't carry either one, but I was curious which variety you thought a bookstore        might sell.  Try the music shop just up the road.

This is a very funny book, and if you've ever worked retail then I'm sure you'll find yourself nodding along to more than one of these bizarre scenarios.  It's a nice little package, and at only $15 for the hardcover, it makes a great impulse purchase or gift.  

Book Review: Where'd You Go, Bernadette?

Summary (from Goodreads): Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom. 
Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette's intensifying allergy to Seattle--and people in general--has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands. A trip to the end of the earth is problematic. To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret correspondence--creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter's role in an absurd world.

Oddly enough, I don't think this summary does much for the book, but two of the blurbs on it really work for me. Garth Stein says that it is "a compassionate look at family dysfunction, the paralysis of genius, and good old-fashioned parental love" and Jonathan Franzen "tore through this book with heedless pleasure." I had just finished reading a slew of YA books, I was hungry for some adult fare, and I had just a big enough gap of time to let myself indulge in some bookseller's guilt. That's right. I read a book that was already published, albeit recently (two weeks ago). 

Structurally the book is cobbled together, ostensibly by 15 year old Bee, from various emails, letters, and notes, with occasional first-person interjections from Bee to give a sense of cohesion. Usually I hate this kind of narrative structure, but the informality of the novel makes for a surprisingly good pairing. The epistolary excerpts are all written to, from, or are tangentially related to Bernadette, and my favorite parts were either those written by the heinous Audrey Griffin, Bernadette's neighbor and gnat-nemesis, or the ones Bernadette herself writes to Manjula Kapoor, the woman in India whom she hires to be her outsourced personal assistant.

You know how sometimes a book can come to you at just the right time and you really click with it?  And that same book, if you'd read it a month ago or a year in the future, might not have resonated with you at all?  That's how I feel about Where'd You Go, Bernadette. For whatever reason, I read this book at the right time and had so much fun doing it, but I also had the sense while reading it that if I'd come at it another time I would have simply put it down, unfinished.  Parts of it are incredibly funny, and I loved the send-up of the Seattle scene, that certain brand of parenting characterized by the "gnats," east coast elitism, Microsoft, the MacArthur genius grant, people's deep earnestness to be PC and inclusive, and everything else.

Is it realistic? Heavens, no! But I can forgive a book a good many things if it makes me laugh. There were lots of parts that I enjoyed but oddly enough I only dogeared one section. It's from a letter Bernadette has written to Manjula, asking her to make a Thanksgiving dinner reservation for her family. Clearly Bernadette realizes that it's pretty outlandish to email a person in India to call a restaurant in your neighborhood for a reservations, so she gives equally outlandish reasons for doing so:

"There's always this guy who answers the phone...and he always says it in this friendly, flat Canadian way. One of the main reasons I don't like leaving the house is because I might find myself face-to-face with a Canadian. Seattle is crawling with them. You probably think, U.S./Canada, they're interchangeable because they're both filled with English-speaking, morbidly obese white people. Well, Manjula, you couldn't be more mistaken.

Americans are pushy, obnoxious, neurotic, crass--anything and everything--the full catastrophe as our friend Zorba might say. Canadians are none of that....To Canadians, everyone is equal. Joni Mitchell is interchangeable with a secretary at open-mic night. Frank Gehry is no greater than a hack pumping out McMansions on AutoCAD. John Candy is no funnier than Uncle Lou when he gets a couple of beers in him. No wonder the only Canadians anyone's ever heard of are the ones who have gotten the hell out. Anyone with a talent who stayed would be flattened under an avalanche of equality. The thing Canadians don't understand is that some people are extraordinary and should be treated accordingly. 

Yes, I'm done (26-27)."

Bernadette is full of rants just like that. I kind of love her, and I kind of want to slap her, but I don't see those things as being mutually exclusive. This book is both wry and funny with a postmodern, sly humor. I can't think of any truly great comps, but it falls somewhere along the spectrum of Kevin Wilson's The Family Fang, Jonathan Tropper's This Is Where I Leave You, and Rachel DeWoskin's Big Girl Small. It's not a book that has tremendous lasting power, and I'm a little surprised that it clicked so strongly with me in the moment, but like the Stones said, if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need.

NB: I picked this book up from the ARC pile in my store after hearing generally good buzz about it. The ARC cover, which I photographed here, is slightly different from the finished cover. Rather than the blue triangles (mountains and/or icebergs) in the background, we get the same face with a yellow headscarf and no blue triangles.

Book (P)Review: The Last Dragonslayer by Jasper Fforde

This is the UK cover, not the US one

Full disclosure: I love Jasper Fforde's novels for adults, and if I happen to love the Thursday Next series and merely like the Nursery Crime series, then love trumps like and I can still say that I love his books.  (Did you follow that?) So I was already predisposed to like his first book written for the YA market when my coworker Marika pressed it into my hot little hands.  What ensued, however, was not mere liking.  My friends, this book provided me with the most enjoyable reading experience I've had yet this year! 

For those of you who have already read Jasper Fforde and grappled his books to thy hearts with hoops of steel, you know exactly what I mean.  For those unfortunate souls among you who have not yet discovered his genius, please imagine the literary offspring from the unholy union of Lewis Carroll and Terry Pratchett. It's difficult to imagine higher praise or a more precise comp.

Jennifer Strange, foundling, temporary caretaker of Kazam Mystical Arts Management, and non-magical being, is two weeks shy of her sixteenth birthday when she learns she is, in fact, the Last Dragonslayer (it must needs capitals to differentiate from merely the previous, or last, dragonslayer). She drives a beat-up Volkswagen that's more rust than orange, she loves a queer and fearsome little animal by the name/species of Quarkbeast, and she mentors another foundling by the name of Horton "Tiger" Prawns. They both hail from the Sisterhood of the Lobster, you see. 

If you're like me, then you're already nodding to yourself and saying, "Yeah. I *totally* dig that.  Where can I get my hands on a copy?"

If you're a little slower on the uptake when it comes to grasping Fforde's genius, I'll add that this book is funny and layered and clever and wildly inventive.  It slyly lays waste to things like commercialism, merchandise endorsement, double-crossings, and other treacheries. There's no reason I can think of *not* to read this book. 

Now I want a Quarkbeast.  Though I suppose my mastiff is as a reasonable facsimile as I'm likely to get.

The Last Dragonslayer, first book in the Chronicles of Kazam series, is already at large in the UK.  US readers will either have to order it internationally or wait for October, when Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will release it here.  I can't speak to other, international rights.