Defined By Books

The Year of the Flood - Margaret Atwood

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood is her most recent, brilliant novel. Ms. Atwood continues the journey she began with Oryx and Crake by giving us an alternative view of the events that took place that we learn is referred to as the "Waterless Flood" by a cult called God's Gardeners.

We are introduced to two survivors of the plague, Toby and Ren. Toby is living her days after the Flood in a popular spa called AnooYoo. After having to go into hiding and losing her identity when she was young, Toby is rescued at a fast food joint in the pleebands (areas of the city) called SecretBurgers by the Gardeners. She has been a victim of sexual abuse by the manager, Blanco the Bloat, by whose own proclamation he never lets a woman live. Toby joins the Gardeners with their strange rooftop gardens, basement mushroom growing and refusal to eat any sort of animal product with a face. They are a back-to-nature cult who teach their followers about God's love of animals and humans and their respect to their surroundings. Toby begins teaching an herb class and eventually becomes the bee keeper. However, Blanco's obsession with finding Toby never wains, bringing terror to the Gardeners. Toby gets an identity change, complete with new hair and plastic surgery and begins managing the AnooYoo Spa until the plague begins to spread quickly across the world. Per the Gardener's teaching of the "Waterless Flood" that God has planned for them, she has a storage of food and supplies hidden away that she lives upon after sending all the Spa girls to their families and locking herself inside.

Ren is a trapeze dancer at the local sex joint, Scales and Tails. Her BioFilm suit that she wears while "performing" is torn and she is locked into an isolation room, escaping the terror of the plague. She spent her earlier life among the Gardeners, when her mother brought her there.  She left in her early teen years, when her mother went back to her father in the Compound. Through a series of unfortunate events, she ends up at Scales and Tails as a high end prostitute and truly enjoys her job.

The story follows Ren and Toby's narrative, painting a brilliant picture of their pasts and how it lead up to their present situations. I believe the most intriguing part of this novel is where the overlapping of characters occur. Jimmy and Glenn, from Oryx and Crake, appear repeatedly in the novel, cleverly entwined with our current characters and others from their past, whom we wonder if they are alive or dead.

Ms. Atwood introduced us to many new concepts in Oryx and Crake that she refers to as "speculative fiction" versus science fiction. The world is full of genetically engineered animals, foods and diseases. Everything is based off of the scientific progressions occuring within the Compounds with the pharmaceutical companies. In Oryx and Crake, Ms. Atwood introduces to the scientific side of the plague. In The Year of the Flood, she introduces us to the more human side. 

I can't write much about this novel without giving anything away, not that it's a great secret! Read Oryx and Crake to get a little background and understand what the words "liobams", "pleeblands" and "Crakers" actually mean. Read Oryx and Crake to wonder what the world would be like if we were completely wiped out by a plague and there were few human survivors, if any Then read The Year of the Flood and figure out what could happen next if there were survivors of the plague.

Vanishing Acts - Jodi Picoult

Vanishing Acts contains Jodi Picoult's typical complex, yet tearjerking formula. The main character, Delia, has a child out of wed-lock, with her fiance, Eric, who is both the love of her life and her best friend. Her best friend, Fitz, is also Eric's best friend, all three growing up directly next to each other. Delia's father, Andrew, works with the local senior citizen center in their small New Hampshire town. He has not only raised Delia since her mother passed away when she was four, but also became a father figure for her two, inseparable friends. Shortly into the novel, we find out that Eric's mother was an alcoholic, which he too suffers from. Fitz is a genius with words and works for a small, local newspaper and he's thoroughly head over heels in love with Delia, even though he knows her heart belongs to Eric.

After a string of strange recollections that seem more like dreams than memories, Delia recalls them to Fitz, who takes it upon himself to look into it with his journalistic ties. One thing leads to another and suddenly, Delia is standing at her front door letting the police in, who arrest her father in front of Sophie, her daughter. He is charged with kidnapping Delia at the age of four and fleeing from Arizona with her to live in New Hampshire. Eric becomes, more by association than anything, Andrew's attorney.

The novel touches upon alcoholism, child molestation, kidnapping, and a plethora of other moral actions that adults make while dealing with themselves and children. As I stated above, Ms. Picoult uses her usual suspects in this novel: an attorney suffering from some sort of underlying issue (Eric's alcoholism), a parent having to make a life-changing decision for their child that will affect the way that child grows up (Andrew taking Delia away from her alcoholic and therefore, neglectful, mother) and a close friend having to deal with their own moral decision. Just to give the dish a little flavor, she throws in child molestation, a neighborly friend with her nose stuck in the family's business who also happens to introduce them a little Hopi tradition and a long-lost mother who delves into old Mexican witchery.

I'm sure that each one of us has known, or know now, of someone who is an alcoholic, current or recovering. Unfortunately, it's one of those diseases that more people know about than should. By writing about a subject that many of us can relate, Ms. Picoult can make us more sympathetic to her plot, or rather, to Andrew's plot.

I enjoyed this novel, as I do most of Picoult's novels. I guess I need to take a short break from her novels as I know her formula so well, I can nearly guess what will happen in the end. Too much of a good thing? For now anyway...

Handle With Care - Jodi Picoult

Jodi Picoult's latest tearjerker, Handle With Care, lives up to the Picoult tearjerker theme in every way. She includes the usual personal ethics and morality theme with medical aspects. This time, she chose the subject of osteogenesis imperfecta. In laymen terms, it's brittle bone syndrome, which means that people who suffer from this disease can do very little and break tons of bones.

Willow is born with osteogenesis imperfecta. By the time we meet her in the novel, she is 5 years old and has already broken some many bones that her mother, Charlotte, has lost track of the exact number, although always recalling where and the pain she felt with each break. Charlotte and her husband Sean are beginning to see how having a child with such a complicated disability affects them financially and as a family. When Sean seeks an attorney after another incident at Disney World involving Willow and multiple breaks, their relationship begins to break apart along with their family. The attorney offers Charlotte a way to get out of her family's bleak financial future by claiming a wrongful birth suit against her ob/gyn, who also happens to be her best friend. Finally, to add misery to even more misery, Charlotte's older daughter, Amelia, begins to have her own problems dealing with bulimia caused by her own self hatred.

When I can't decide what I want to read, I check out a Jodi Picoult book. I can guarantee a few things when I finish one of her books: 1) I will feel much better about my life and whatever negative situations I am dealing with and 2) I will cry and thus, probably just feel better in general. I also know that I will read an "impossible to put down" book and that I will thoroughly enjoy it, even though I will probably be morally against the end decision. She often deals with children, rare diseases and crazy law suits that have to do with those children. Parents often make absurb decisions in Picoult's book but when I think about it and whether I would make that same decision, I sometimes stall. Would I be able to do the same thing?

I am always intrigued by Ms. Picoult's novels. She pulls together a number of provocative issues and makes one question our own morality. I will say that this particular novel of hers did not make me cry. I thoroughly enjoyed the book until the end. I felt it was contrived and Ms. Picoult just wanted the reader to react to her rash decision without any thought to how well we paid attention to the novel. Willow is so much smarter than Ms. Picoult makes her out to be in the end, she would never have acted the way she did after all she had been through. I also felt the same about Charlotte's character. Would a mother who claimed that she loved her daughter that much do what she did and believe that her daughter would truly recover emotionally?

So, if you want a tearjerker, read a Jodi Picoult novel. Just don't read this one...read The Pact or even better, the original and more believable tearjerker, My Sister's Keeper.

Surfacing - Margaret Atwood

Surfacing follows a young woman's journey back to her childhood home in Canada to discover what became of her missing father. She makes her journey with her lover, Joe, and a married couple whom she considers "friends" even though she has only known them for two months. They have a car and are, therefore, her ride back to her secluded village. She grew up on an island many miles away from the village without electricity or running water, which intrigues her city friends.

We learn quickly that she doesn't want to see her missing father, but to only make sure that he is safe. Through her inner monologue, we also learn that her mother has already passed away some time before and that she herself was married but is no longer, hence why she hasn't visited her childhood home.

I'm done with that narrative only because it's so much more complicated than that. For such a short novel, it's incredibly full of unfinished thoughts and convoluted memories. We are initially led to believe that the narrator married young and had a baby, which she says was never her own but was always "his." Then, the subsequent divorce, which we are also told led to her estrangement from her parents. However, as the story moves forward, she (has no name) discovers that she has been supressing the truth within her own mind. Instead, she had an affair with a married professor at her art school and got pregnant. He, in turn, "helped" her get an abortion, claiming it was the only way. Broken-hearted and broken-minded, she creates a false story in her mind and begins to believe it.

At this point in the novel, our narrator begins to go crazy and that's where Ms. Atwood lost me. The narrator tells the reader that basically she is metamorphosing into some other being, an animal, with fur and no longer understands language. Of course, this also stems back to her secluded childhood growing up in a French speaking community where her parents spoke only English - an obvious barrier for her language skills to develop as she developed into an adult. Our narrator becomes a crazed animal trying to become one with her surroundings, refusing to have anything to do with man-made items of any sort. Finally, she begins to come back to her senses and grow back into her own skin, so to speak.

I have enjoyed many Margaret Atwood novels. She also creates an intriguing plot and narrative. She rarely repeats herself on the subject matter directly, although she may revisit science fiction, feminism, etc. as a whole throughout her novels. I never know what to expect from her and that makes me enjoy her work. When I read Oryx and Crake for the first time, I didn't really like it. The second time I read it, I loved it. I enjoyed The Handmaid's Tale the first time around. This time, I'm going to have to admit that I doubt that I will read this novel again.

I disliked all of the characters who accompanied our narrator on her trip. No wonder she went crazy! They used sex as a manipulative tool, spoke of those "Yanks" (they were Canadian) in an aggressive, yet uneducated way (obviously, keeping up with the times of the novel). They were loud-mouthed and stupid and rarely acted in a way that made them likable. Sometimes, I caught myself feeling sorry for Joe, the narrator's lover. He was able to show emotion but to me, he was much like a grown man with teenage angst emotions instead of matured emotions.

Then of course there is the narrator herself and her repression of her early young adult trauma, i.e. abortion. She tells us that "he" claimed it was legal. I understand her repression of the truth and her inevitable break down when she realized what really did happen. What I don't understand is her belief of the story she made up in place of the truth. I can understand completely forgetting what happened, but fabricating a lie in her mind that she based her entire existence on shows that she was emotionally unstable long before she ever left the island to begin her grown up life. I just don't find her a believable character, unless of course she's a mental patient...which she may very well be after her incredulous metamorphis.

Sorry Ms. Atwood. Your second published novel leaves me feeling empty and not quite right inside. Maybe that's what you wanted?

Twilight series - Stephenie Meyer

That's right. I read 'em. All of 'em. I read Twilight on Tuesday, November 10th, New Moon on Wednesday, November 11th and Eclipse between Friday & Saturday, November 13th & 14th. I read Breaking Dawn on Monday & Tuesday, November 16th and 17th. The last two took longer because I was doing other things besides reading. Darn.

I can't deny that I thoroughly enjoyed the books. I flew threw them like a little kid eats his candy on Halloween night. No guilt either. Okay. Maybe a little.

Here is what I have to say in general about the books:

Bella freakin' drives me crazy. She's an idiot. I felt like I figured things out half the book before she did. Which makes me go to my next general point:

The books were too obvious. I realize that I am a fairly observant person but jeez. I could have nearly stopped reading the books halfway through and would have been just fine figuring out what happened.

My next point will be a positive point: I loved the characters. Well, I loved the vampires. More like, I just liked the Cullen clan. The werewolves were considerably annoying but I dealt okay with them.

The imprinting thing was so obvious with Jacob it made me sick that it actually happened.

However, like I said, I can't deny that I LOVED these books. I loved it the most when Bella FINALLY became a damn vampire and stopped being so annoying and started being useful.

So I'm not really going to give a review of these books because I'll just be annoying and you would hate me for all of my negativity. But, I will say, if you get a chance, read the books. They are addictive and interesting and will make you feel happy after reading them. Like you've accomplished something directly related to true love. With vampires. And werewolves. And weird half breed children.

Twilight - Stephenie Meyer

When I was 12, I was over at Brandy Weaver's house (she was Keffer than I think and is now) and saw a book in her bedroom. I picked it up, curiosity getting the best of me. It was Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice. I had been reading various "scary" books for a year or two so I had no problems with the idea of reading this book. Brandy and I were the type of girls who were happy to sit in the hammock out in the yard and read books "together." I was a bonafide nerd in those days and once I got my hands on a book, I couldn't put it down.

Before I was 15, I had read nearly all of Stephen King's published works. I had delved into Ira Levin and pre-Jurassic Park the movie Michael Crichton. I have ventured into the world of Bram Stoker and had singlehandedly checked out and read every single Young Adult suspense thriller in our sad little library. I had easily finished any suspense, vampire, horror and similar book I had put in my eager little hands. I was a fiend when it came to reading. I was nearly always curled up with a book somewhere in our creepy 1.5 story, so engrossed that I wouldn't even notice when day turned to night.

By the time I went to college, my obsession with the supernatural had practically subsided. Well, with the exception of my need to read every single Dean Koontz book published. Hardly an easy task since he's apparently written well over 100 novels. Whew. Vampires and the appeal of their lifestyle, regardless of who made it up and what myths went with that character, were a thing of my past. I no longer needed my collection of Fear Street books, R.L. Stine and crew were too young for me.

I tried with every part of my being to ignore the Twilight series. I knew I could easily be sucked into the excitement of a new vampire chronicle. Louis and Lestat weren't that far from my memory. I didn't want to get dragged down by the obsessions that come with a series like this. I know them well, first hand. Much like the Harry Potter syndrome, even after finally getting my hands on the final novel, I would crave more.

Yesterday I gave in to my crumbling willpower and bought Twilight, the first of the series at Barnes and Noble. I began reading it around 2 pm. I stopped for a bit to clean the dishes and the living room and vacuum and watch the news and eat dinner and all that, but yesterday was a blur. By 10:40 pm, I had finished the 450 plus page book.

Damn.

Fe and I had watched the movie last Friday evening. Like every movie made from a popular book, it wasn't all that you wish it to be. But that's life. I learned that after I read Alive and then watched the gory movie. Gross. But it was enjoyable. Intriguing. Which is why I chose to read the book.

Vampires have always been a human obsession. They are beautiful and surreal and unlike humans in every way that they are just like humans. Stephenie Meyer did what Anne Rice did some many years ago, she made us fall in love deeply with them. We care for them and don't see them as savages or animals. We feel their cold emotions as our own. We want to be near them. To touch them. To kiss them.

It's an amazing ability for an author to be able to transport a reader into the character. I'm not sure if in my mind I was a careful watcher, narrator or one of the characters themselves. Either way, I was part of the story, part of the intensity.

I remembered while reading Twilight why I enjoy reading so much: I DO become involved. It's so surreal to put down the book after reading a brilliant chapter and realize that my life is just as it was before I read that chapter. Nothing interesting has happened to me in that time except the story provided by someone else that I was reading. However, something DOES change. The power of reading, of a great novel, is felt all through my mind and body. I am physically MOVED by a great book.

Now, I will stop myself and say that when I read Twilight, I do feel a lot like I've been dumped back into my late teen years and that's not really a good thing. But besides that, the story is appealing. It's not so believable anymore after reading hundreds of books on the subject, but it is easy to let your mind go into fantasy world, even for just a few hours, and wonder what it would be like to be Bella or Edward or Alice or even Mike.

So, I am addicted to the Twilight series. I will be borrowing the remainder of the series from Lisa this afternoon. Since I am leaving tomorrow, after I pack tonight and for the rest of the weekend and during my dad's surgery, I have a feeling I might just finish the series before the end of next week. Grrr...

Like Water For Chocolate - Laura Esquivel

Like Water For Chocolate tells the doomed love story of Tita and Pedro. Doomed only because Tita, the youngest of three sisters, finds out when she tells her mother that Pedro is going to ask her mother for her hand in marriage that she is destined to live her days without children and marriage. According to family tradition, the youngest daughter must take care of their mother until her death, forgoing any attempt to create a life of her own.

The book itself is written in 12 chapters or "monthly installments" by Tita's niece. Each month she brings to life one of Tita's recipes all the while telling the reader of Tita's love for Pedro and cooking, Pedro's marriage to her older sister Rosaura, arranged by their mother and the disappearance of their middle sister, Gertrudis.

I was hoping that there would be at least one recipe that I could make from this book. Um. No. I'm not that good. The recipes are incredibly in depth. And complicated. Plus, according to the novel, most are affected by the emotions of Tita while she prepares them.

I was a little surprised in the soft core porn aspect of this novel. For such a short little book, it sure does pack in the sexuality of the characters. Tita's love for Pedro, and thus her lust for him as well, become somewhat overwhelming to me at times. Although we are drawn a beautiful image of Tita both inward and out from the book's decription, Pedro seems a bit like a underdeveloped character to me. Her character is so strong and full of emotion and his is like a dead fish. I never feel that he lives up to her vivid personality and presence.

Um. Total slacker here. It's been over a month since I started this post. Doh!

I guess I'll sum up and move on since it's been that long since I've even read anything!

I liked this book but at the same time, it was a little over-the-top unbelievable for me. Woo!

Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

The year is somewhere in the future after World War Terminus. Rick Deckard works as a bounty hunter on Earth where the planet is nearly uninhabitable due to a release of toxic nuclear dust years before. Animals and humans are nearly extinct on the planet, either having died from the dust or emigrated to Mars. Androids are not allowed on Earth and are killed or "retired" without most of Earth's population even realizing that they are a problem.

To own an animal on Earth is a sign of status. Rick Deckard had a real sheep that died and now owns an electric sheep. His goal is to collect enough bounty money to buy another real animal.

Rick "retires" androids that look and have intelligence as human beings. Their own true identifying character is their lack of empathy, something all humans, no matter their intelligence level, possess. In order to "retire" an "andy", Rick must perform a test on them called Voight-Kamff test that analyzes empathy based on a series of questions.

His most recent job is to find and retire a group of 6 Nexus-6 type android, the latest in technology. They are so human that it's nearly impossible to distinguish them from actual humans. The novel follows his adventures tracking down and killing the illegals.

A secondary plot follows a man named J.R. Isidore who leaves in a nearly uninhabitable suburb to San Francisco. Isidore drives a truck for an artificial animal hospital disguised as a real vet. He has a substandard intelligence caused by the dust and cannot emigrate off of Earth. He is doomed to live his meaningless and uneventful life in filth and dirt. However, he meets a beautiful young woman new to his apartment building and his life quickly becomes much more exciting.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. It was short and was easy to read. The plot never really slows down and after reading it, you realize that the story takes place in about a day. At first I was apprehensive about the book, thinking that I may not enjoy the story because of androids and their lack of personality - it seemed like the last thing I wanted to read about was some stupid robots. I was wrong. In fact, the best part of this novel is that it's based on empathy - our ability to express emotion. By following Deckard while he interviews an android, we begin to understand what it is that makes us human and them unemotional.

Dick creates beautiful characters in this novel and paints them in two different categories: human and android. We can imagine what it might be like to meet an android and never realize that they aren't human but at the same time it is difficult to understand how they can be so in-human without our senses and fears and sympathy.

This story is a study on human nature. The science fiction helped to make the story more "realistic." It was easy to imagine the novel taking place in a little spot in my head. It was very enjoyable.

Okay. I'm definitely getting WORSE at reviews.

My next review will be on Like Water For Chocolate by Laura Esquivel...I'm two chapters away from finishing it!!

The Secret History - Donna Tartt

The Secret History is narrated by a young college fellow named Richard who leaves his California roots and transfers to a small liberal arts college in Vermont called Hampden College. Richard has a fair knowledge of Greek and when he tries to get into the Greek class, he learns that it is full. He later learns that that class only offered to a selective group of students, five in particular. After one failed attempt to get accepted into the class, he later impresses the head professor, Julian, after carefully watching the five students. He gets a little more than he bargained for...

Julian's small group of students: Henry, Francis, Bunny and the twins, Camilla and Charles, take only classes offered by Julian or allowed by Julian in the classics. At first, Richard's acceptance by his classmates is awkward. However, he eventually gets to know them well. So well in fact that after 4 of them are involved in the mutilation of a local farmer during a bachannal, they confide in him. As time wears on, Bunny's acceptance of the murder, which he was not a part, becomes a heavy burden for him to bear. As a means to an end, the others decide the only choice they have in keeping the farmer's murder a secret is to kill Bunny.

Many moons ago, I was in a book club in memphis. We read The Little Friend as one of our monthly novels. Although Donna Tartt is an excellent writer, I was not a fan of that novel then, nor am I now. There was nothing enjoyable to me in The Secret History. I chuckled a few times here and there, but reading this novel was a chore. There's something so ridiculously fake about her characters and their actions that I just can't seem to ignore the fact that they are made up.

I enjoy reading fiction mainly because in most novels, I can become part of the main characters. Or at least I can relate to them and feel as though I am part of the story. Tartt's novels seem to alienate me. I feel like all of the characters are so far away from being able to be a real character that I can't grasp what they are even doing in a novel. I know it seems odd that I say then when talking about fiction...even science-fiction. However, most books I have read in my lifetime, even the ones that are so far out there in truth, have been easy to imagine because the characters are so intriguing and believable. Even the craziest ones. Not so in my eyes for Tartt's novels. Her characters are so well thought that they seem completely imagined.

That being said, I found it hard at all to relate to the story. Sure, I read it but there was never a point where I was on one side or another. Richard's character actually goes into a narration describing how awful Bunny was acting at one point. Then goes on to say that he still loved him and maybe he wasn't really that bad. Minus the whole killing Bunny part, an emotional decision was never made in the novel. No right or wrong. No hate or love. Nothing. And maybe that's the part that I dislike and the reason I can't relate to her characters: they have no soul.

Tartt writes beautifully. The novel is graceful and reads easily. She desribes things in detail and it's easy to imagine the things she writes about. But going back to those soulless characters. I just can't get past the fact that there is little emotion to them. They are stagnant to me.

Maybe it's Tartt's way of being politically correct by not really defining right or wrong, love or hate. I have no idea. I do know that this will be the last novel I will read by Tartt.

Alias Grace - Margaret Atwood

Alias Grace is a novel about a murderess named Grace who is being interviewed by a young doctor in an attempt to determine her innocence, sanity and general state of being at the time of the murders of her employer, Mr. Kinnear and the mistress of the house, Nancy Montgomery. Several years have passed since her incarceration and she works in the prison Governor's house as a seamstress and general servant. Grace tells of her early years as a child up to the time of her arrest, never truly remembering the murders. Or so we are to believe. Her story contains a recollection of astonishing events including abortion, adultery and murder: the recipe of a perfect novel?

I have been a fan of Margaret Atwood's for years. I enjoy her inventive tales that sometimes mesh science fiction with the ordinary. She's a weaver of intricate detailing in her novels, sometimes causing you to read a passage or chapter a couple of times, or even going back a few hundred pages to recall something that you had read that now made complete sense. I am usually shocked and occasionally appalled by her climax and/or endings. Yet, she draws me in. I am hooked.

Alias Grace was an exception to the rule.

I bought Alias Grace several years ago when I first read A Handmaid's Tale and The Blind Assassin (which I have read at least three times since). I should have known when I added it to my 1% Well-Read Challenge that nothing had changed since the first time I read it. Of course, I tried for three years to read The Fountainhead and after finally becoming engrossed in it after the first 100 pages, I became an Ayn Rand addict, Atlas Shrugged still being on my top ten fave books of all time. So why not Alias Grace?

First off, part of the novel is written in letters. I hate letters. I hate trying to recall formal names and trying to remember who is who and the dates and what not. I hate it. That's what made me put the book down the first time.

Second, the story is based off true events that DID indeed occur in the 1800s. Fine. I'm fine with that. I love history. However, a climax or even a little bit of a buildup in the story would be nice. Nothing. The novel was flat. She describes the characters in intricate detail, as always, making it easy to imagine exactly what they would be like if we met them in person. She elaborates and somewhat embellishes Grace's story that she is telling but it never seems like she strays much off the beaten path. We are forced to assume nothing definitive. Did Grace kill Mr. Kinnear and Nancy Montgomery in cold blood? In a moment of insanity? We are given a story at one point but even for Atwood and her tall tales, it doesn't seem plausible.

I will continue reading Margaret Atwood because I love her stories. I can handle a disappointment every once in a while as long as she still produces crazy love stories such as Oryx and Crake. My suggestion would be to never pick up Alias Grace and read The Blind Assassin instead if you want to read about abortion, adultery and murder.