Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay

There are some books I just never think I'm going to read. I read about them online, I see them all over the bookstores (this is especially true for airport bookstores), they're written by Mitch Albom, etc. Everyone's read them, it seems, and yet I take one look and say, nope, not for me. You know what's good at ruining these plans-to-not-read-specific books? Book clubs. Sarah's Key was one of those books, but one of my buddies picked it for book club, and since I believe that one of the most important things about book clubs is forcing me to read things I never would otherwise, I took it as an omen and picked up the trade paperback a few weeks ago.

I get why people are so into this book. For one thing, it's set in Paris, and who doesn't love a book set in Paris? Also, it's a Holocaust novel, and while you'd think that would turn people off, what with the horrors of those years and the general human tendency to avoid looking pain and suffering in the eye, but as we all know that's not the case. The Holocaust is an event (event is the wrong word, but it's late and I'm tired) that we in the Western world cannot look away from, as we shouldn't. There are as many stories to be told as people who lived (or didn't) through that time, and even though writing books and movies and poems about the Holocaust is an act of processing as well as an act of remembrance, I don't think we will ever quite come to terms with it.

But mostly, I think Sarah's Key has caught on so well because it's a story told through an extremely feminine lens. I didn't even accidentally type "feminine" instead of "feminist"! It's simply a story about two women and the way in which their stories grow together despite time and geography. And it's an interesting story, one that comforts even as it horrifies. I think that's because it's all about remembering the past so that it won't be forgotten, which is a very basic human idea. Preservation of identity, celebration of story...we've been doing this for eons and we won't ever stop, because our greatest fear, I think, is not necessarily of death, but that nobody will remember us when we're gone.

The novel begins in 1942, with the story of the Vel'd'Hiv. I--probably like most people--am not very well acquainted with the particulars of what happened in Nazi occupied France during World War II, and wasn't aware, like most of the story's modern day characters, that on July 16 of that year, the Vichy government and the French police rounded up thousands of French Jews and locked them inside the Velodrome d'Hiver, a sports arena, for several days before transporting them to Nazi concentration camps. The first half of the book alternates chapters between the story of one little girl (unnamed until much later in the story, she is the titular Sarah, which isn't too hard to figure out) during the Vel'd'Hiv and Julia Jarmond, a forty-five-year-old journalist in modern Paris writing an article about the anniversary of the Vel'd'Hiv for an English-language magazine. Back in 1942, Sarah takes a few moments while her family is being rounded up by the French police to hide her brother in a secret cupboard in their apartment, thinking she'll come back for him. Years later, Julia's family is about to move in to Sarah's old apartment, which was acquired by her husband's family after its Jewish residents had been sent to Auschwitz, and it is through this connection that Julia learns of Sarah's story and sets about trying to trace her through the years.

I feel like saying more about the plot would betray some vital twists and important moments, but I will say that, interesting as it turned out to be, I found Sarah's story difficult to sink in to. I think this has to do with the way her portions of the novel were written; Julia's parts were in the first person, which made her more immediately compelling, and while the third person feels right for Sarah, the fact that she went unnamed, as did her parents, for nearly all of her chapters was distancing. I get that names are very vital to this story, and not just particular names but the idea of naming things, the way in which names are tied up in identity, but when people are mostly referred to as "the girl" and "the woman" and "her father", it's a bit difficult to identify with them as people rather than storytelling vessels.

Sarah's Key definitely loses steam as Sarah's story comes to its climax (halfway-ish through the novel) and Julia takes over entirely, weaving the plot threads toward their inevitable tidy ending (because it is tidy, almost too much so). But it's a fascinating introduction to a little known (at least by me) facet of some of the darkest years in recent human history, and the themes of human connection, individual value, and remembrance are deftly juggled and explored in an interesting way. I don't know that I would recommend this book to just anybody (ironic, since it seems just about everyone has already read it), but I can see why it's become so popular, and why it will probably continue to be read for many years to come.

The book was actually made into a movie that is apparently already out on DVD. Trailer looks pretty good, so if you're not a huge reader, I suggest checking it out. I definitely will be.

The Luxe by Anna Godberson

I don't like to think of myself as a book snob, but, like most of the things I don't like to think of myself as but often do, I am one. I try really, really hard not to be, because for many years it has been my position that there's no such thing as a "guilty pleasure", or at the very least there shouldn't be, and that I'm proud of everything I read/watch/listen to (hello, I'm probably the only person on God's green goodness who is very open about loving Hanson, don't get me started). I just believe in sincere and earnest enjoyment of things and have no interest in ironic entertainment--it sounds like a lot of work.

But I have prejudices. I can't pretend I don't. And ever since I even heard of The Luxe I've been like, absolutely not. It's a packaged book, and I'm not such a huge fan of book packaging, and the Gossip Girl meets Age of Innocence comparison makes me want to jump off the goddamn roof because GOSSIP GIRL and EDITH WHARTON in the SAME SENTENCE SHUT UP PLEASE. And then there's the highly commercial cover, which I just took offense to on principle; what, you think you're going to make a teenage girl pick this book up just by putting a pretty dress on the cover? (Answer: yes. Also: it works. In addition: What a pretty dress.)

So I was pretty surprised/horrified to discover that The Luxe is exactly that: Gossip Girl meets Age of Innocence. And also, it does what it sets out to do (be Gossip Girl meets Age of Innocence) so incredibly well that I actually found it frustrating I hadn't thought of this idea myself. Although, let's be honest, the book has a pretty nonsensical title.

The Luxe begins with a funeral, the funeral of teen socialite Elizabeth Holland, who plunged to her death from her buddy Penelope's carriage into the icy cold waters of the Hudson River (?? but just go with it). In attendance is the whole of turn of the century New York high society, because Elizabeth is the beloved eldest daughter of the Holland family, but two people are particularly conspicuous: Elizabeth's fiance, Henry Schoonmaker, and her sister, Diana. Henry, because he doesn't seem that bereaved though ostensibly Elizabeth was the love of his life, and Diana because she's smiling. Wait, what? I know. It gets good.

Then the book flashes back to months before, and as the secrets behind Elizabeth's disappearance begin to unravel (because they never did find her body) and all the young gossip guys rotate through the bedrooms of all the young gossip girls, things start to get AWESOME. Secret trysts abound, schemes are hatched, guilt trips are laid, people are laid, and then people are killed. It's GREAT. The period detail is also pretty good, all things considered, but the book is still way accessible without feeling like it was written for idiots, all the characters are fairly sympathetic in their ways, and if I hadn't cheated and read the descriptions of the rest of the books in the series on Wikipedia I would actually want to continue (let's just suffice to say I'm annoyed by what happens to some of my favorite couples and I just won't put myself through that).

Anyway, HIGHLY recommended. I wouldn't even really call it fluff, because the historical detail, the pacing, and the deftly handled multiple POVs make it good, engaging fun. It's good that I read this, and loved it, because sometimes my snobbery needs a beat down, just like everybody' else's.

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

I have to confess, I've only read one Ray Bradbury novel in my entire life, and it is, of course, Farenheit 451, which I read in high school with everybody else. Now, I haven't read Farenheit 451 in a long time, so I barely remember the writing or narrative styles, certainly not in any detail, but when I picked up Something Wicked This Way Comes, hoping to find it to be a spooky read perfect for Halloween, I was a little surprised at it.

Now, don't get me wrong--Something Wicked is actually quite spooky. The story centers around two young boys named Will and Jim who are about to turn fourteen and, thus, become real adolescents. They have innocence to lose, and lose it they will, because the carnival is coming, a Dark carnival--literally, a carnival run by a man named Mr. Dark. Away from the melee of the town's new attraction, tucked deep in the library where he serves as the janitor, Will's father, Mr. Halloway laments his old age and feels unconnected to his son, whose youth he envies. Will and Jim quickly discover that the carnival is evil, and that the townspeople are being lured into giving up their souls in exchange for their hearts' supposed desires. Knowing that Will and Jim are hip to their jive, as it were, Mr. Dark is determined to do them harm, especially Jim, who is much more enticed by the carnival's offerings and clearly in danger of being drawn into Mr. Dark's web.

Also somewhat in danger is Mr. Halloway, who has desires only the carnival can fill. The boys, running from Mr. Dark, come to Will's father for help, and this is where the book goes a little off-kilter. For, at the end of the day, there are two things about Something Wicked that struck me as unexpected when I was reading. First was the strange rhythm of the language; it's more poetry than prose in places, and though not in verse it does give you the frenetic sense of wanting to be read aloud. And second, Something Wicked is a straight up allegory and, in its worst moments, a boring morality tale. By the second half of the book, Bradbury really makes no bones about telling you that. There's an entire scene (long scene) in the library where Mr. Halloway lectures Will and Jim on the history of evil, and the rest of the narrative is quickly consumed by Mr. Halloway's struggle to defeat Mr. Dark and his horrific carnival cronies and save the soul of his son (and his son's friend, although sometimes I wonder if he cares so much about Jim).

Everything ends on a happy note; Mr. Dark and his carnival are banished (at least for now, Mr. Halloway makes a point of saying (READ: EVIL NEVER DIES)), and Will and Jim are none the worse for their brush with darkness, except that, due to a magic merry-go-round that makes you age or become younger depending on which way it spins, Jim is now like sixteen or seventeen and Will is fifteen. Because their experiences have made them mature beyond their years or something. It was sort of confusing.

Anyway, I don't mean to dismiss this book; it's actually pretty great, if you can get into the rhythm of the writing (which some people in my book club found to be a struggle) and you can either buy into or ignore the straightforwardness of the good vs. evil allegory. I actually liked that bit, but it can be something of a distraction. The book could also be like 50-75 pages shorter. But it was a fantastic Halloween read; I devoured it in its entirety on a London to New York flight and it kept me turning pages the whole way, and it gave me, if not nightmares, then very strange and ominous dreams, which means it definitely did its job in scaring the pants off me. Mission accomplished, Bradbury, mission accomplished.

(Coda: You know what I could have done without? The humble-brag author's note in the back that explained why Something Wicked This Way Comes is dedicated to actor Gene Kelly. Didnt notice, Bradbury! And don't care.)

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

Here's something I've discovered about myself within the last year: I love being in book clubs, but I actually don't love choosing the books all that much. Both of my book clubs operate under the same rule: each month, one member picks the book, then hosts the book club at her (no boys allowed! Well, no boys want to be in my book clubs, but anyway) home. I happened to have to pick both of my book club books at the same time, and you know what? It's a lot of pressure! You want to choose something people will like, because you crave approval from your fellow book nerds, but you also want to pick something you yourself want to read, and also something that will be discussable--if everyone loves a book, there's rarely enough to talk about.

It occurs to me now that the smart thing to do would have been to PICK THE SAME BOOK FOR BOTH CLUBS, but why take the easy route? I chose How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu for one of them, and Swamplandia! for the other. I actually had very specific reasons for this; I consider one of my book clubs "edgier" than the other, which is so stupid, but anyway, both of the book clubs had pretty poor attendance. I'm not sure my taste in books is quite in line with book club sensibilities.

So: Swamplandia!. I'd actually heard some pretty awesome stuff about this book, so I was excited to read it, but when it arrived in the mail from Amazon I was a little concerned about the heft of it. It was a thick paperback with thin paper and very small font and even I, reader that I am, can be intimidated by these things. And my suspicions were not unfounded--this book was WAY too long. But before I tell you why, let me first tell you what it's about.

Swamplandia! chronicles the adventures of the Bigtree family, specifically twelve-year-old Ava, but also, to an extent, her brother Kiwi and her sister Osceola as well. The Bigtrees live on Swamplandia!, one of the Ten Thousand Islands off the coast of Eastern Florida, which are largely uninhabited besides a few dozen TOTAL WEIRDOS, some of which Ava comes into contact with throughout the story. Swamplandia! is also the name of their alligator-themed amusement park (for lack of a better term); the Bigtrees own nearly one hundred of the swamp monsters (all of whom are named "Seth" for some inexplicable and somewhat unsettling reason), and the main attraction at Swamplandia! is an alligator wrestling show featuring Ava's mother, the infamous Hilola Bigtree.

But by the start of Ava's tale, Hilola has already passed away from cancer, and the family is reeling without her. Swamplandia! is falling apart, crushed under a mountain of massive debt, Ava is lonely, Osceola is clearly losing her damn mind, and Kiwi is desperate to go to the mainland to maybe make some money and perhaps get himself an education. When the kids' father, Chief, heads to the mainland under mysterious circumstances, claiming that he's going to save Swamplandia!, the remaining Bigtrees scatter to the four winds. Kiwi also goes to the mainland, to work at World of Darkness, Swamplandia!'s much more successful competitor; Osceola heads off to get married to her ghost boyfriend (more on this later), disappearing into the wilds of the Everglades; and Ava goes looking for her sister with the help of this Birdman dude who is mad sketchy, because she is a CHILD who has been ABANDONED by EVERYONE IN HER FAMILY.

So let's get back to Osceola and her ghost fetish. Long story short, Ossie finds a book that convinces her she can conjure spirits, and she has numerous romantic dalliances with all sorts of long-dead personages, none of which are very serious until she and Ava find a dredge boat, its crew long dead, and Ossie begins "dating" Louis Thanksgiving, a young man who died on the dredge back in the early twentieth century. What was strange about this aspect of the book is that by all appearances, the reader is supposed to believe that Ossie is actually communicating with spirits. Ossie performs several feats she could not do without specialized knowledge (which Louis has and she doesn't), and all signs point to she was probably definitely seeing ghosts. HOWEVER--this is the book's only real magical realist element, if you don't count some stuff Ava purportedly sees while she's running around the Ten Thousand Islands, starving and half-crazed with thirst and probably hallucinating like whoa. The entire element struck me as strangely out of place in an otherwise relatively normal narrative, which wouldn't be such a problem, except that basically the entire second half of the book (which was SO LONG and full of beautiful, unnecessary descriptions of the swamp that I just wanted to beat my head against a wall) was predicated on the notion that Ossie had taken off to get married to her dead boyfriend and Ava had to search for her. By the time I got halfway through that section, I neither wanted Ava to find Ossie, nor did I particularly care if either of them survived, which is not really the reaction I think the author was going for.

The sections that described Kiwi's experiences on the mainland, however, were much more interesting, despite the fact that they were hella sad and pathetic. He was by far the most compelling character for me; Ava and Ossie were TSTL, and the Chief was the WORST. FATHER. EVER. But Kiwi had a lot of depth, and I don't even think it's necessarily because his experiences were more relatable than anyone else's (although they were, as they did not involve ghost husbands or trusting creepy drifters for no apparent reason, AVA), but because he was the one person who was trying to do the absolutely right thing, even though he kept running into obstacle after obstacle.

And, I mean, clearly Russell has an enormous talent. The novel was beautifully written, if not entirely compelling. I think its main weakness (and this is entirely subjective of course) was that it depicted a world that I had no interest in, and in which I did not want to spend any time. Everyone was SO poor and unhappy, everything was SO gross and frightening, that I had no interest in allowing the world of Swamplandia! into my headspace for any longer than necessary.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

It turns out that this book is actually quite controversial, which I guess I might have been able to expect. The movie has turned out to be even more controversial, which makes sense since who reads anymore? But people love to go to the movies!

There’s probably no way you haven’t heard of The Help, or at least gotten a cursory glance at the purple-and-yellow cover that screams LADY BOOK!, but you might not know what it’s about. The Help chronicles a couple of years in the lives of three women in Jackson, Mississippi during the Civil Rights movement: Aibileen, a black maid for a middle-class family whose love for the children under her care is only made more poignant by the recent loss of her only son; Minnie, Aibileen’s friend, also a maid, whose smart mouth loses her every job but whose cooking is the best in the county; and Skeeter, a twenty-one-year-old woman fresh out of Ol’ Miss who feels like an outsider amongst the Jackson elite despite her pedigree.

The villain of the story is the awful ingrained prejudice of the post-Civil War South as exemplified by one Hilly Holbrook, Skeeter’s childhood friend and the president of the Jackson Junior League (?? Isn’t she a little young to be president of the Junior League? But anyway). Hilly prides herself on being able to destroy lives and force people to install bathrooms for their colored help. She gets Minnie blacklisted from all Jackson homes so she can’t find a job, and she routinely bullies Skeeter and their other childhood friend, the cold, cowardly Elizabeth. Hilly is almost unbelievably the worst, which I justified in my reading of the book and viewing of the movie by accepting her role as an embodiment of a whole range of societal ills.

Skeeter, who wants to be a journalist or an editor or something wordy, gets a job at the Jackson Journal as the Miss Myrna columnist, writing about house cleaning tips. Since Skeeter, having grown up on a plantation and everything, has never cleaned in her life, she asks Aibileen, Elizabeth’s maid, for advice and a tentative friendship grows. When Skeeter gets it into her head that she wants to write a book about the experiences of black domestics, she goes to Aibileen, who discovers, after an initial hesitancy, that she has a lot to say. Aibileen draws Minnie into the project, and Minnie draws in a bunch of other maids, and suddenly they have a pot boiler brewing.

Because of the Jim Crow laws, what Skeeter, Aibileen, and Minnie are doing is technically illegal, and as racial tensions grow, their enterprise becomes more and more risky, and the publication of the book has consequences for everyone involved.

The Help is, in all ways, a coming of age novel. Skeeter’s story is the most obvious one about growing up, learning to fight, getting your heart broken, and becoming a person of value in the world. But Aibileen comes of age, too, as does Minnie, as does Jackson, MS.

Other People We Married by Emma Straub

So it’s official: I’m sick of short story collections. This was another book club selection, and while I didn’t dislike it, I’m so fed up with short story collections that I have to really work at reviewing it objectively. Here we go—let’s see if I can do it.

Emma Straub is apparently an Internet blogstar? I don’t know, my friend who picked Other People We Married as her book club selection said that she is, so we’ll trust her on that. It seems plausible! Anyway, aside from blogging and Twittering, she published this collection of short stories called Other People We Married. It has a great cover and was very poorly copyedited. I read it a while ago, so I don’t remember a lot of the particulars, but here’s what I do remember: All of the short stories are varying degrees of fine, but there is one that, as I was reading it, caused me to think over and over again, “This should be a novel. It should be five times the length and just be a novel.”

That story is called “Abraham’s Enchanted Forest”, and it’s about a teenage girl who lives and works in this weird amusement park her parents own. Her father (Abraham) is this larger-than-life character who leaps out of the page and paces around your living room while you read. His daughter, Greta, feels trapped in her small, strange, lonely (not-so-enchanted) life, even though she loves her parents and, to an extent, the park that forms her cage. One day, a young man and his friend visit the park, and over the course of an evening Greta has resolved to leave everything behind and run away with him.

Actually, I was just re-reading the last few pages of “Abraham’s Enchanted Forest”, and now I’m not so sure that she actually left. She’s standing with the boy who’s about to take her away, watching her father perform, for an audience, Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”, and the last line of the story is: “There would be better times to go.” So does she leave? I don’t know! I thought she did. I thought I knew what the story was saying and now I’m not quite sure.

But what I am sure of is that it ought to be a novel, and it ought to be a YA novel, and it would be great. As it is, it’s the best short story in the collection and the only one I can recall without looking at the table of contents. I guess the only other thing I have to say is that a lot of the short stories seem like they might have an element of autobiography to them, but don’t all stories, short and long, written and acted and sung?

To answer my own question: Yes.

Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion

Reading Warm Bodies has taught me a valuable lesson: I don’t like zombie stories. I just don’t, I’m sorry, world-that-has-decided-zombies-are-a-thing. The only zombie story I’ve ever liked was Zombieland, and I think that was mostly to do with the casting. So maybe I’ll like Warm Bodies, the movie. It’s going to have Nicholas Hoult in it, who played Beast in X-Men: First Class (and also, I just realized, Marcus in About a Boy, one of my all time favorite movie/book child characters); he’s pretty cute. Then again, he’s playing a zombie, and there is only so much make-up can do! So I don’t know. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

I don’t mean to imply that Warm Bodies was a bad book. It wasn’t, actually. The writing was really, really lovely, and part of what makes Warm Bodies interesting is that it takes a monster (because, for all intents and purposes, that’s what a flesh-eating formerly-alive person technically is) that, on the outside, is a single-minded beast, a being of destruction and darkness, and gives him a lush inner landscape, an articulate and poetic interior life.


I'm here to eat your braaaaaaaaains!

This monster calls himself “R”, which (he thinks) is the first letter of the name he had when he was alive, an experience he only members in wisps. He’s spending his post-life life in what can only be described as a zombie commune in an abandoned airport. R is a sensitive soul, but he’s still a zombie, so he goes on a hunt with a bunch of other zombies in which they attack a group of teenagers and R eats one of their brains.

The brain belongs to a young man named Perry, and as soon as R bites into it, he starts to experience—in a real, visceral way—Perry’s emotions and memories. So much so that he falls in love with Perry’s girlfriend, Julie, and manages to keep her alive long enough to get her back to the airport. Though they establish a strong bond, Julie eventually runs away from him, and R sets out to find and protect her from the zombie hoard that is threatening to descend upon the repurposed sports stadium in which she lives.

Since this will probably get made into a film, I don’t want to ruin the ending for you, but I will say that I find the conclusion of the novel highly unlikely. Poetic, sure, but not at all realistic, which I realize is a funny word to use when talking about a zombie apocalypse novel in which a woman falls in love with a rotting corpse, but there you go. I couldn’t tell you a better way to end it (just halfway through, all I kept thinking was, “This is nice and all, but how is he going to end it?”), but I am just not sure, you guys.

Nevertheless, the writing is beautiful. It feels all wrong for film, because so much of it is internal—necessarily, because for a long time in the book R can’t speak out loud, being a zombie—but I’m reserving judgment for a later date. The romance was not entirely convincing (again: rotting corpse!), but the ways in which R deals with, in varying ways, Perry’s residual feelings and memories, and Perry himself (as R imagines him) are probably the most intriguing parts of the book. That’s the real relationship of Warm Bodies--the hopeless young man and the zombie who ate him.

Now, what other book can say that?

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender

This book is one of the ones that sneaks up on you. I wouldn’t go right out and say that I loved it, but I definitely grew to feel some sort of moderately deep affection for it towards the end. This is a personal preference, but I don’t really like adult novels (especially literary ones) written from the POV of children. Or, rather, I don’t like it when you can’t tell if it’s actually the child’s POV, or the POV of that person when they’re an adult looking back on their childhood. When I first started reading The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, I thought it was being told from the POV of the main character, Rose, as a child, but the farther I got, the more I realized that it was actually being told from the POV of Rose as an adult, sometime in the future, although it was unclear to me when I finished exactly when in the future that was. So, some demerits for confusion right off the bat.

The story is a fairly simple one. When Rose is nine, she discovers she has a heretofor unknown secret ability—she can taste people’s emotions in the food that they make. She realizes this after eating a piece of lemon cake her mother baked and tasting her mother’s despair and loneliness in it, which, as you can imagine, is fucking terrifying for a nine-year-old. Because this is a literary novel and not a paranormal romance, nothing really happens because of Rose’s ability; she just has it, and for the next eight years she does the best she can to live off prepackaged foods (which are so processed the emotions, if they ever existed, are masked) and avoid her mother’s cooking, although occasionally she slips and finds out something she probably shouldn’t know.

The real thrust of the novel is contained in the—what else?—relationships between its main characters. There’s Rose’s mother, who is a sort of free spirit looking for her purpose in life (spoiler: it’s not “being a mom”); Rose’s father, who goes through his life like it’s one long checklist (Get Married: check; Have a Son: check; Have a Daughter: check; Buy a House: check; Get a Law Degree: check) and doesn’t manage to really know his family; Rose, aforementioned emotion taster; her brother, Joseph, whose strange on-the-spectrum behavior eventually resolves itself in an unexpected way, which was actually the reason I ended up liking the book; and George, Joseph’s best friend and the only person who takes Rose’s ability seriously for a long time—obviously, she’s desperately in love with him.

Look, this is not a long book, but it felt long. The prose is lovely, sure, but for some reason, even though it’s written in this intimate first person style, I felt very distanced from the characters, especially Joseph. I understood that you were supposed to feel distanced from him because Rose did, and find his behavior odd because it was odd, but I literally had to reread several pages to figure out exactly what was going on at some points, and that’s unnecessary. Given the muddiness of the premise, it’s not surprising that the book lacked clarity, but it’s also not an excuse. Right?

Okay, but also this book contained my BIGGEST PET PEEVE EVER: no quotation marks. I’m sorry, stop it. How pretentious. This book is literally quiet, because, at least punctuationally speaking, nobody ever talks in it. Every sentence seems hushed, and even if that was the intended effect, it wasn’t compelling and it was a distraction. After I finished Lemon Cake, I actually read yet another book without quotation marks, QUITE by accident I assure you, and I was further offended. What is up, writers? Get over yourselves.

It shouldn’t shock you that this book is pretty damn sad, since it has the word “sadness” in the title, but I was a little taken aback that I actually felt sad at the end, since for a long time it didn’t really matter to me what happened to any of the characters. But the end had that sort of gut-wrenching hopelessness that I love in doses, and while I wouldn’t run right out and tell everyone to read this book, I can see why, in the end, it’s done as well as it has.

Brazzaville Beach by William Boyd

When I found out that it had monkeys in it, I thought I was going to hate this book. I really, really don’t like monkeys. I mean, the little fruit-eating ones are sort of cute, but chimps and gorillas and orangutans and what not are just not my scene. I think it’s because they’re eerie simulacra of human beings and I just can’t take it. Makes my stomach upset. And Brazzaville Beach revolves around monkeys, specifically two groups of chimpanzees living in the rainforests of an unnamed/fictional African country in the 1980s and the human beings who observe them.

Our main character is Hope Clearwater, an English woman in her twenties who has come to Grosso Arvore, a research facility in the African jungle dedicated to the study of chimpanzees, after the disastrous end of her marriage to brilliant mathematician John Clearwater. In Brazzaville Beach, author William Boyd deftly braids together three narrative threads: Hope’s present-day life on Brazzaville Beach; Hope’s past life in England with John; and her experiences at Grosso Arvore, the bridge between those two stories.

Hope’s experiences in Grosso Arvore start innocently enough, but quickly divert into thriller territory when Eugene Mallabar, the director of Grosso Arvore, gives her the gaslight treatment after she sees chimpanzees—up until this point considered peaceful and gentle creatures—engaging in infanticide, cannibalism, torture and murder in the midst of territorial wars. Mallabar works effortlessly to make Hope doubt her own experiences and scare her off of telling anybody else about the chimpanzees’ frightening behaviors.

Meanwhile, Hope reflects on her marriage and life in England. Her husband, John, was an ambitious mathematician, hungry for discovery and fame. Though Hope had very few goals of her own, she was able to find surprisingly satisfactory work mapping hedgerows on an estate in Dorset, having gotten her Ph.D. in botany. But as she began to take more and more pleasure in her work, John became increasingly frantic, terrified that someone else will make the discoveries he is desperate to make and put his name on. John’s mental breakdown and the gradual decline of their marriage as a result is a mystery in and of itself, as the reader begins to wonder how Hope came to live at Grosso Arvore without her husband.

Although I loved the parts in England, especially the short, italicized explanations of mathematical concepts and their application to human experience, the most fascinating bits of Brazzaville Beach were the chimpanzee wars. I didn’t know this before I read the book, but apparently Hope’s experiences are somewhat predicated on those of celebrity primatologist Jane Goodall, who made similar discoveries regarding the calculating, aggressive nature of chimpanzees, challenging the previously held notion that they were peaceful vegetarians.

Much is made of the fact that chimpanzees supposedly share 97% of their DNA in common with human beings, and the behavior of humans and chimpanzees in the book (there is a civil war going on in the fictional African country where Grosso Arvore is set) is compared and contrasted over and over again. Except for a small detour toward the end of the book where Hope and one of her colleagues are kidnapped by a roving band of boy soldiers and their volleyball coach Dr. Amilcar (don’t ask), the book does its work deftly and engagingly and I highly recommend it.

One small note about this novel: I read it for book club, and because it’s a little bit older (published in 1990) it’s gone through several packaging incarnations. Thus, some of our copies had different covers. Mine was the one up at the very top—stereotypically African design, not much more to it. Then there’s the very literary version to the right, and THEN there’s the Harlequin romance version below--God, I wish the photo was bigger so you could get the full effect. (There are other versions, but these are the three we had at book club.) And, as you might expect, the way a book is packaged affects how you read it. Those of us who had trade paperbacks with reasonably literary covers read it as a literary novel; our friend with the mass-market edition, not so much. She read it as a trashy romance, and liked it much less as a result. So. For what it’s worth, the cover matters.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Remember back in the day (February) when I said that there’s nothing that makes me more nervous, as a reader, than the words “novel in short stories”? I do! It was in this review I did of Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists. I went on to say that The Imperfectionists is the exception to this; I called it “the most superb example of a novel in short stories that I have ever read.” You know what doesn’t fit that description? A Visit from the Goon Squad.

Now, I’m not saying that A Visit from the Goon Squad is a bad book. It’s not. It’s really well written and ambitious and quirky. I don’t think it deserved the Pulitzer Prize, but I’m not Professor Pulitzer Prize, so what do I know? As for plot (insofar as there is a discernable one), A Visit from the Goon Squad is about a recurring cast of characters who are involved in the music business, either through their own musical ambitions, or those of their friends and family. The stories cover a lengthy span of time, from the emerging punk scene of the late seventies/early eighties to a somewhat dystopian future.

A Visit from the Goon Squad contains a lot of the pitfalls that The Imperfectionists managed to avoid. It, too, is a collection of interconnected short stories, but I found, as I made my way through Goon Squad, that I would rather not know anything about a lot of the characters. Each of the stories is told slightly differently—some are in the third person, some are in the first person, one is in second person, one is in the form of a PowerPoint, some are past tense, some are present tense, and many of them are various degrees of not that interesting. This is probably personal, but still.

Every time I think of this book, I think of a Saturday afternoon a few weeks ago in which I had brunch in Brooklyn and then walked home across the Williamsburg Bridge. The clouds in the sky were dark and it had started drizzling as I descended the Manhattan side of the bridge onto Delancey Street, then suddenly the sun came out. Which sounds great, but actually it was already humid, the sun made it uncomfortably hot, and if you’ve ever been there you know that the Lower East Side looks better in darkness and shadow. Direct sunlight just illuminates the filth and ugliness of the neighborhood. I’m sure one of the reasons I think of that afternoon when I think of Goon Squad is because I was reading it at the time, but also it’s sort of how the act of reading A Visit from the Goon Squad actually felt. Some of the stories were a cool, pleasant, albeit slightly ominous walk across the Williamsburg Bridge, and some of them (LOTS of them) were hot, starkly lit Delancey Street, smelling of Burger King and human urine.

Most likely that made zero sense (and was pretty gross). I guess what I’m trying to say is that, while most of the stories were very accomplished (I really, really hated the last one), it was all scumbags and unrequited love and snorting cocaine and people missing teeth and kleptomania and stuff. There seemed to be very little that was redeemable about the people in Egan’s stories. And while the characters were connected through time and space and many of them did recur throughout the book, there didn’t seem to be anything tying them all together, other than the devastating effects of the unrelenting passage of time (the “goon” of the title). Which, I’m sorry, isn’t enough!

One of the things I loved most about The Imperfectionists was that the paper was the hub of the story and all roads led back to it in the end. Goon Squad had no such hub, or even a central narrative, and I finished the novel with no idea what Egan was trying to communicate to me (it doesn’t help that the last story/chapter is so terrible that I ended up feeling resentful of the book overall). Maybe asking, “But what does it mean?” is as fruitless as yelling at the moon for being out during the day, but I think it’s an important thing to consider. “Time makes fools of us all”? Is that it? Well, no offense, Ms. Egan, but duh. What else? What do we do with the time that we have? How do we live? Etc. I don’t think I’m the only person who’s having trouble sussing that out from this story. The New York Times review is sort of scattered, though fawning.

I had a professor in graduate school, probably the most brilliant professor I’ve had or ever will have, who would always counter any argument you made with a big “SO WHAT?” I guess that’s my question here: SO WHAT? Why should I care? What makes these people worth reading about? What’s important about this story? I don’t have the answer to that. I wonder if the author does.

*A note about the format: I bought the newly released paperback (repackaged cover above), because when given the choice I always buy the paperback, and was disappointed to find that it's not very sturdy. It's got an extremely flimsy step back that weakens the physical structure of the book, because the paper stock is heavy. Nobody else cares about this but me, I'm sure, but it annoyed me a lot.

One Day by David Nichols

Book to movie adaptations. Let’s face it, most of the time they’re pretty terrible. And how could they not be? A movie adaptation has to strike a pretty fine balance between telling the story of the book (since, ostensibly, that’s the reason the movie is even being made) and telling a new story, one that’s more cinematic, less internal, and probably shorter. The adaptation also carries the burden of having to physically manifest the reader’s idea of how the characters look and sound into a real life person, which is more than a little difficult. That said, sometimes filmmakers really get it right—Atonement, for example, is an amazing adaptation, and that had to be an incredibly difficult book to adapt, considering that there’s almost no action and the drama is mostly internal.

I have no idea how the One Day movie is going to go, to be honest. I’m at the distinct disadvantage of having seen the trailer before I read the book, guaranteeing that I would see Anne Hathaway as bookish, solitary Emma (and hear her irritatingly bad British accent every time Emma had a line of dialogue) and Jim Sturgess as charming, philandering Dexter. I guess this is okay. It’s not ideal, at least when it comes to Emma, but my real doubts come from the conceit of the book. One Day tells the story of two college friends once a year over the course of about two decades—on July 15th, St. Swithin’s Day (did you know there was a St. Swithin, let alone a St. Swithin’s Day?), the anniversary of their first romantic encounter.

So, basically, you miss a ton of stuff that happens in their lives. Sometimes there are flashbacks that fill in the gaps and other such devices, but mostly you just have to make intuitive leaps about what’s happened to them during the intervening 364 days since you last saw them. Usually this was all right, but sometimes it was very, very annoying. And if it’s annoying in the book, it’s going to be 10 times more annoying on screen, where it could very well kill the continuity of the narrative. Imagine a movie told entirely in jarring flash forwards—that’s basically what this will be like.

But was the book good? Well, it was and it wasn’t. I’ve never read any David Nichols before, but he wrote the novel Starter for 10, which was made into a very funny movie starring James McAvoy and Dominic Cooper and Rebecca Hall, so I’m inclined to think he’s great. However. I had some very mixed feelings about One Day.

There are competing theories about this novel. Lots of people think it’s a step above chick lit in its portrayal of Dexter and Emma’s “romance” (which is, in the end, not incredibly romantic), while some people consider it highly literary. It falls somewhere in the middle for me. I thought the writing was very good, which isn’t to say that writing in chick lit can’t be very good, because it can. And the book is insanely commercial and sold very well. Both the main characters and their supporting cast are intricate and well-rounded, if not always likeable (or sympathetic!), but that premise! It’s so contrived, and by the end I really started to resent it. The book is overly long and poorly paced, which is inevitable, since we check in with Dex and Emma every single year and they’re not always doing something interesting, or even speaking to each other.

There’s also something fundamentally wrong with their relationship. By the time they actually (spoiler) do get together, it feels tired and forced and unnatural, and desperate on Emma’s part. She’s spent the last two decades in love with Dex, who feels a lot of affection for her but treats her terribly and is never shown to actually want to be with her before he shows up at her flat in Paris after a bitter divorce and tells her he’s finally ready to get together. In fact, he’s pretty dismissive of her as a romantic partner, and when he reflects (during one of the few years they’re actually in a relationship) that he now has a partner who he loves and makes him happy, I kind of didn’t believe him. I kept thinking how badly I wanted, after reading this book for 300 pgs, to feel their happiness, but I never did, which was a let down.

And then there’s the end. The controversial end. I didn’t have the strong reaction to it that a lot of people have, probably because I knew it was coming, but I’m not going to lie: it is completely manipulative and cliché and extremely bothersome. Being the pop culture aficionado that all Blogulator readers are, you’ve probably already figured out what happens. It feels cheap after such a long slog.

I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to see the movie. Since I could pretty much pick out each scene from the trailer, it’s probably going to be a faithful adaptation, which could be good or bad. I guess I’ll have to wait and see. I haven’t decided yet if I would recommend this book, either. I did enjoy the experience of reading it; it’s funny and interesting and sweet in parts. The characters feel real, and though that often times means that you don’t agree with them or their choices and if they were real flesh and blood humans you would probably want to punch them in the face, it also means that their experiences are often painfully real and relatable, which is the whole point of fiction.

I suppose I would say that you shouldn’t read this book if you want a nice feel-good romance. It’s no Anna and the French Kiss, that’s for sure. But it has other redeeming qualities, and is largely deserving of its success, if only because it sets an ambitious goal for itself (figuring out every single detail of someone’s life over several decades is not child’s play) and achieves that goal in a mostly enjoyable way.

Braniac by Ken Jennings

Okay, yes, I'm about to review a book by Ken Jennings, who won 74 games of Jeopardy! in a row, the longest winning streak in the game's history. But here's what you should know first: Ken Jennings might just be the coolest guy on the planet. I didn't know that two months ago. I didn't know much at all about Jennings two months ago, only that he was on Jeopardy! for a long time and was Mormon. I thought he was your typical nerdbrain egghead, because back when Jennings was on his long run on Jeopardy! I was, I don't know, getting drunk on the Force in the garage of my sorority house or something. But now that I'm an "adult" I DVR Jeopardy! every night and watch it with my roommate, and a month ago, we all got a nice Valentine's Day present in the form of Jeopardy!: The IBM Challenge, a.k.a. Jeopardy!: MAN VS. MACHINE!!!!, in which Ken Jennings and Jeopardy! all-time money winnings champ Brad Rutter (who has gotten HOT since he was first on Jeopardy!, but is kind of rough to listen to when he's talking--be quiet and just look pretty, Brad!) faced off against IBM's supercomputer, Watson, who was built to do one thing (for the moment): beat humans at Jeopardy!.

I don't know if any of you guys caught that game (or, really, it was two games over three days, with the gaps filled in by an extended IBM commercial a bunch of really interesting clips explaining how Watson works and was created), but the humans got CREAMED! Like, Watson won by a lot. And his swirly thinking avatar thing was really adorable, so he got extra points for that, which is UNFAIR, but anyway. There are lots of reasons why Watson won, like because he was really well programmed, and also because so much of Jepoardy! strategy involves buzzing first, which is actually much harder than it looks (actually, from all the flailing around people do on that show, it looks pretty hard to me), and to paraphrase Ken Jennings it's hard to have better reflexes than a supercomputer.

But anyway, we're not talking about MAN VS. MACHINE!!! We're talking about this book, which came out in 2006 and thus has nothing to say about the 2011 game in which Ken and Brad got their asses kicked by a computer. Moving on!

It turns out that Ken Jennings is actually the awesomest (not an exaggeration). First, he has a funny blog that he updates sometimes (probably more than I write reviews for this site, actually), and also he recently did an IAmA post on Reddit that is far and away the funniest thing I've ever read. He wrote a few interesting articles about the Watson experience, and he wrote this book, Braniac, almost five years ago in 2006 (holy shit you guys, 2006 was five years ago).

Braniac is a memoir/nonfiction hybrid that takes the reader on a journey through the back rooms of the Jeopardy! studios and also gives you a rundown on all the various geeky ways you can be a trivia buff in this day and age (and days and ages past). The whole thing is incredibly pleasant to read, and even the driest bits are still peppered with the affable Jennings' notable quotables. I vastly preferred the portions where Jennings talked about his Jeopardy! experiences, not least because every once in a while he told a little story about the human metronome Alex Trebek, with whom I have a love/hate relationship. "A riddle wrapped in an enigma dressed in a Perry Ellis suit," as Jennings would say. But Jennings is such a likable guy that the best parts are the ones where he just talks about his life.

But buyer beware: this book is for trivia lovers. There's a lot of the history of trivia in its pages, including the interesting fact that trivia crazes often preface economic disasters, and the text itself is peppered with trivia questions that are answered at the end of each chapter. I picked up about 100 shiny new-to-me facts without even trying. I just dare you not to read this book and be utterly charmed by Jennings. My first sign that he might be the real deal was when he wrote "I for one welcome our new computer overlords" beneath his (correct) FInal Jeopardy answer at the end of the second game of MAN VS. MACHINE!!! I said to myself, "Self, that is a man you could have a beer with." If he drank beer. Which he doesn't. So maybe cheese fries instead.

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman

There's nothing that makes me quite so nervous, as a reader, as the words "novel in short stories." Writers love to write interconnected short stories; I think it's their clever way of getting around the problem of the short story collection, because short stories are all people seem to write in those fancy, expensive MFA programs like the Iowa Writers' Workshop, but short story collections aren't exactly the most commercial of enterprises these days. I actually like short stories a great deal, and there are some people, like Alice Munro (okay, maybe just one person), who make their livings off short story collections. But novels in short stories usually fail on one big point--the narrator is, necessarily, constantly changing, so not only are you never able to settle in to one person's point of view, but also the fact is that not all the characters are equally as compelling, which means that only a handful of stories out of the novel are actually enjoyable to read.

But that's most of the time. There are always exceptions, and The Imperfectionists is one of them, the most superb example of a novel in short stories that I have ever read. The hub of the novel is an international newspaper--called only "the paper" throughout the book--headquartered in Rome, and indeed the newspaper is the book's most enduring character. With some extremely close reading and in depth analysis, you could probably make the argument that the newspaper is the novel's narrator, but that sort of esoteric wandering is not really the point of this particular review (Brigitte, feel free to get on that, though). The only story I had trouble with was the first one, and that was because--since it took place in Paris and not in Rome, and the paper had not been previously established--I was sort of lost as to how the main character, Lloyd, would fit into the tapestry of the novel's overarching narrative. But Lloyd's tale (you could probably also make some sort of argument about The Imperfectionists being The Canterbury Tales for the 21st century or something--university students of the future, you are welcome for all these great paper topics!), "Bush Slumps to New Low In Polls" (the novel is set in 2007, btw), is so affecting that it didn't matter--I was already hooked.

It's amazing what Rachman manages to do in not so many pages. Every character in the story is described exactly enough to give you a sense of who they are and what is special/interesting about them, and then he punches you in the stomach by giving them all a moment of quiet pathos that beautifully captures the way human beings move through the deeply sad periods of our lives. I have been known to complain about books that, as I call it, "fetishize grief", books that make grieving over the loss of a loved one into this beautiful, transcendent, deepening process, when really, as everyone knows, grief is usually ugly and monstrous. But The Imperfectionists finds a place almost perfectly balanced between these two extremes, and Rachman manages to present the reader with sadness, loneliness, grief, fear, anger, and humiliation without drawing too much attention to it or making it the melodramatic zenith of the story. For instance, the focal character of the second story, obituary writer Arthur Gopal ("World's Oldest Liar Dies at 126") experiences an extremely life changing tragedy near the end of the story, but the reader never gets the details. This would normally be frustrating, but Rachman does it so neatly (the short story form probably helps with this) that you don't feel cheated, but you still feel the weight of what has happened to Arthur.

He also does an excellent job of answering the readers' questions about previously introduced characters in later stories. If a short story ends on a question, with the character poised between possibilities, a later story will, in a passing way, illuminate the outcome. Every time I finished one of these stories I thought, how can he possibly top that, eventually some of these will bore me to tears, but that never happened. Even when I thought I might be getting bored with a person, Rachman would insert a twist that shone new light on the character and their circumstances in a way that made them instantly more compelling. Nothing felt contrived or unnatural, and every story and character was distinct. I really cannot praise this book enough. It was a pleasure to read and hard to put down in order to accomplish things like sleeping and going to work. I'm looking forward to discussing it with my new! book! club! later this month. I'm also relieved that I can still read an adult novel without rolling my eyes every five seconds. Progress!

Galveston by Nic Pizzolatto

I've probably used this Henry James quote before in one of my posts, but I'll say it again because it bears repeating:

In the arts, feeling is always meaning.

I really subscribe to this theory. The way I feel about a book always tells me what the book has meant to me. And by feeling, I don't just mean emotion; sometimes it's an actual physical sensation brought on by the culmination of a truly great story. My two favorite meaning-feelings after finishing a book are these:

1. Grinning from ear-to-ear like an idiot
2. Like I've just been struck in the chest by a ten-ton wrecking ball

As you can probably tell just from the cover, Nic Pizzolatto's debut novel, Galveston, falls under the latter category. The books that leave me grinning from ear-to-ear are usually YA romances and the like, and Galveston is obviously not that. Galveston is, in fact, a crime novel that's drawing comparisons to Dennis Lehane, Raymond Carver and Dashiell Hammett and was nominated for an Edgar Award, which is a very prestigious award in the mystery community despite the fact that the Poe bust they give out looks like my six-year-old nephew made it at one of those places where you paint the pottery (ours was called Sunshine Crafts growing up, fun fact).

Roy Cady makes his living as muscle/hitman for a New Orleans mob boss named Stan Ptitko. Their relationship is strange and sensitive, intensified by the fact that Stan is now sleeping with Roy's ex-girlfriend, Carmen. Roy knows something is up when he's sent with an associate (another ex of Carmen's) into a dark house, supposedly unarmed (but Roy is smarter than to go into a situation so vulnerable), and it is--he's jumped by three pros in commando gear and his associate is killed. He only narrowly escapes due to a combination of preparation, skill, and luck, but he's not alone. There's a girl in the house, a young prostitute named Rocky, who Roy takes with him when he hits the road, hoping to outrun his would-be assassins.

But the thing is, Roy is dying anyway. He's got lung cancer at forty and he's unlikely to see forty-one. And yet he runs, towards Galveston, the scene of his most fondly cherished memories, of a vacation he once took with a girl he once loved. Rocky runs with him, and though Roy often thinks of ditching her, he's also protective of the girl, and even decides to stick with her after she convinces him to stop off at her childhood home in Orange, TX so that she can pick up some cash someone owes her, only to come back with $80 and a three-year-old girl, her sister Tiffany. What follows is a tightly woven noir novel that manages to be gritty and real, yet accessible to someone who's probably not always looking to enjoy a novel about a hit man (i.e. me). Roy is obviously a scary dude, but the author brings out a real human side to him, and many of Roy's experiences are straight-to-the-gut poignant.

The book is also full of tension, as Roy's paranoia over being caught by Stan Ptitko's men increases daily and his protectiveness over the young girls in his care leads him to make some risky decisions that have disastrous consequences. As he reflects on these events nearly twenty years later (his cancer doesn't consume him nearly as quickly as one would think, or as Roy would like) as Hurricane Ike swirls over Galveston, the reader is left with the sinking feeling that everything reverberates, nothing ends, and that there is a world, a great wide world, where a human life means nothing--even, some times, the person themself.

Top 10 Books of 2010

One of the hardest things about putting together this list is that, like a lot of readers, my reading habits tend to incorporate both new releases, old classics, and everything in between, so unfortunately, unlike all the rest of the lists we've posted up till now, this one won't be comprised entirely of books published in 2010--just books I read in 2010. That said, I'll mark each 2010 release with an asterisk, but something tells me y'all might not really care when these books were released. Let's get started!

1. Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins*: This was probably my favorite YA novel both released in 2010 and that I read in 2010. Anna and the French Kiss chronicles the Parisian adventures of a girl named Anna (obvs) whose father sends her to an American school in France for her senior year. Anna is reticent to leave behind her friends and family and especially Toph, a boy friend who might be becoming a boyfriend, if you know what I mean. More complications arise upon her arrival in Paris, when she meets the boy masterpiece Etienne St. Clair, a gorgeous American-English-French guy who just so happens to have a girlfriend. Still, as Etienne and Anna grow closer, and as Anna learns that the people we leave behind continue to live their lives without reference to us, their relationship becomes more and more complicated. What I loved about this book is that it's quite obviously a romance, but the twists and turns and mistakes and misunderstandings feel completely natural to the characters and to what we know about how human teens behave when they're head over heels in love. Perkins side-steps cliches and tropes easily; Etienne is no cad, he's just honestly confused and afraid. Anna is no doormat; she loves Etienne, but is willing to walk away with her dignity when she feels like what she's being taken advantage of. Plus, Paris! If you have ovaries, you should have read this back in December, because it is the best YA romance I've ever read, and I think Perkins has a long and exciting career in front of her.

2. How the Universe Got Its Spots by Janna Levin: I reviewed this book back in August, and I've read quite a few popular physics books in the past few months and this one has remained my favorite. I put this down to the intensely personal way it is written--part memoir, part epistolary narrative, part Physics 101. This also makes it sad in places, poignant in others, and is a huge testament to how big a part of oneself one's own work can be.

3. Faithful Place by Tana French*: I thought I had reviewed this on The Blogulator, but perhaps not. While not as deep or beautiful as French's previous two novels, In the Woods and The Likeness, Faithful Place still exhibits some of the best mystery writing being published today. French's prose is just so lovely to read, full but not dense, poetic but not overwrought. In this book, loosely tied to The Likeness through its main character, Frank, who played a medium-sized role in The Likeness, Faithful Place begins when Frank, a long-time cop who manages undercover detectives, gets news that a suitcase belonging to his childhood sweetheart, Rosie, is found in an abandoned home on their old street in Dublin. Rosie and Frank were supposed to run away together back when they were younger, to escape the poverty and alcoholism of their neighborhood and find a way to be with each other despite the feuding between their families, but Rosie never showed up the night they were set to leave. Now, twenty years later, Frank believes the suitcase, rotting with age, shows that Rosie didn't leave him and that something might have happened to her. Determined to discover what had become of his long lost love, Frank mounts an investigation in his own former backyard, digging deeply into the closely kept secrets of his old neighbors and even his family to get to the truth about what he believes was Rosie's murder. The solution leaves something to be desired, but perhaps this is because Frank was too small of a player in The Likeness--I'm not the only French fan who would've preferred she return to Rob Ryan, the damaged anti-hero of her first novel, In the Woods. But Faithful Place still delivers in many ways, and was one of my most anticipated--and most enjoyed--reads of 2010.

4. Heaven by Lisa Miller*: One of the only straight up pieces of nonfiction I read this year, Heaven is a woman's quasi-personal investigation of the history of the concept of heaven in the minds and hearts of human beings. It's a short book, by no means an exhaustive text, but more like a survey course that collects many complex historio-religious ideologies into sound bites, perfect for the casual reader and certainly worth reading for anybody interested in learning more about how other cultures view and have viewed the afterlife. Also, she can hold her own against Stephen Colbert, which is pretty impressive.

5. How Did You Get This Number by Sloane Crosley*: Like all of Crosley's writing so far, this book is only enjoyable if you like Crosley as a person, or at least as the person she presents herself as. I happen to like that person quite a lot, and find everything she writes funny in a personally pleasing way--it's not laugh-out-loud comedy, not joke after joke after joke, but more of a meandering journey through one life's more comedic flourishes, which gives Crosley room to be poignant and sometimes shocking as well. While not quite as enjoyable as Crosley's first full-length collection of essays (I Was Told There'd Be Cake), probably because most of Number's stories take place out of New York City, which is one of the most fun parts about Crosley's stories, Number is still hilarious and compelling reading. If you don't emerge from it wishing you could get a beer with her, I'll be shocked.

6. The Replacement by Brenna Yovanoff*: Trends being what they are, it's hard to find the truly original paranormal YA novels in a sea of Twilight knock offs these days, but The Replacement was one of 2010's best. The story follows seventeen-year-old Mackie and his life in Gentry, a small steel town that has recently gone to seed. Almost from the beginning, it is clear to the reader that Mackie is suffering from an increasingly debilitating illness that sets him apart from his fellow classmates, and it soon comes to light that he is not, in fact, Mackie Doyle at all, but a "replacement" sent up from the underground world of Mayhem that exists below Gentry. The Replacement draws heavily off the folklore of the changeling, a fairy child sent to replace a human child stolen by the fey, and it is the steel (myth tells that fey are hurt by iron) that is causing him to grow ill and possibly die. Mackie descends into Mayhem to find a cure for his illness, and eventually is pulled into a battle with the dreaded ruler of Mayhem in order to rescue a child that was recently stolen from her home. The book is dark and gothic and truly original, even though it draws off of tropes that have been used in many ways by many different writers. For fans of YA that have no interest in the vampires v. werewolves debate, I highly recommend this book.

7. Mockingjay by Susanne Collins*: Mockingjay is the much-anticipated third installment in The Hunger Games trilogy, which, if you haven't read The Hunger Games, get thee to a bookstore, stat! First of all, it's relevant because they're making it into the movie. Also, it's about A TELEVISED FIGHT TO THE DEATH with TEENAGERS. You're going to want to know what people mean in two years when they're all wearing t-shirts that say TEAM PEETA on them (or TEAM GALE, but those people are losers, don't talk to them). Anyway, yes, a televised fight to the death that turns into an insane take-down of a government run by heartless bloodsuckers in Mockingjay (there is an intervening installment, Catching Fire, as well). I will say that Mockingjay was the least fun book of the series to read, mostly because it's so bleak and the experiences of the main characters are so incredibly awful, but hey, that's war. It's still compulsively readable and intense, and one of the best YA series since Harry Potter.

8. Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas*: Hm. I seem to be saying, "It was good, but not as good as the first book/the author's previous novels" a lot in this best of. Oh well. 2010 wasn't an awesome year, I guess, in most respects. Because Our Tragic Universe, while one of my favorite books of 2010, did not compare to Thomas' previous novels, PopCo and The End of Mr. Y. Which is okay, I guess. It's still really well written--her prose is just a pleasure to read--and interesting, but by necessity (since the book is constructed to discuss the possibility of a "plotless novel") it is a plotless novel, which I find irritating, as a plotless novel can obvious exist, but isn't at all interesting to most people. There's nothing wrong with a plot. Our Tragic Universe is a great book to read if you've already read and enjoyed Thomas' backlist, but if you're just trying her out for the first time, go for PopCo. You'll like it better, I promise.

9. The Thieves of Manhattan by Adam Langer: The Thieves of Manhattan was a book that got a lot of media attention and nice bookstore placement, but which I never felt compelled to read until I ended up with a free copy from the publisher, saw that it was a not-too-long paperback, and decided to give it a try. And I'm really glad I did! The Thieves of Manhattan is a piece of meta-fiction, which I usually do not like at all, but Langer is no Jonathan Safran Foer (i.e. he's not an obnoxious self-obsessed git). The Thieves of Manhattan, I have to admit, is a book best appreciated by people who have been published, want to be published, work in/have worked in publishing, or follow the publishing industry closely. It is about a young man who works in a coffee shop and dreams of being a celebrated short story writer, but for some reason cannot get anyone to appreciate his stuff. This is probably because he's an obnoxious self-obsessed git who cares more about the trappings of authordom than the craft of writing. One day, he meets another man who makes him an offer he can't refuse. The mysterious man has a Da Vinci Code-style novel that he can't get published because the publishers think it's too unbelievable of a story to sell as fiction, so he enlists our friend to pretend that it all happened to him and publish it as nonfiction, his reward being any money and celebrity that comes as a result of publishing the book. As the narrator gets pulled deeper and deeper into the conspiracy the mysterious man has built around this manuscript, one thing becomes frighteningly clear--the events of the story are real, and he has just become the target of the villains of the novel. It's a short book and hopelessly meta, but also compulsively readable and really well done.

10. Mostly Good Girls by Leila Sales*: My last top ten book of the year (that I have read) is another YA novel, although this time it's not dystopian, not paranormal, and not even a romance. Mostly Good Girls is just a story about two friends who are in prep school outside of Boston and the evolution of their friendship over one year. Told in little vignettes by a hilarious and lovable narrator, Mostly Good Girls is just an exceptional piece of literature about teens. It doesn't take itself too seriously and it manages to make its characters sympathetic without attempting to cover up or distract from their flaws, and it's one of the best books I've ever read in the YA genre; though funny, it's unexpectedly poignant and true in many places, witty and clever and such a great read. I highly recommend it.

Now that I read it over, this list is a little bit more jumbled than usual. I had an odd reading experience this year; my end of the year "bookshelf" was very heavy on YA, light on adult and nonfiction in general. There were so many more books I could've put on, and I'm wondering now how I came to highlight the ones I chose, but what are you going to do? On to 2011!

Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas*

*If you think publishing talk is boring and awful, please skip the first paragraph.

You know what I find unfair, as I become increasingly more aware of the effects of packaging and marketing on book buying patterns? That the most beautifully tricked out books are often the most disappointing. I reserved Our Tragic Universe at my local Borders, so I hadn't seen it yet when I went up to the counter to pay for it. Turns out, it's totally gorgeous. First of all, it's hardcover; I might be wrong about this, but I think this is the first time that Thomas has been published in hardcover here. Second of all, it's got a totally bizarre trim size: 9.2 x 5.7, which is dork talk for tall and skinny (usually, hardcovers are 9.2-ish x 6.5-ish). Third of all, it's shiny--what we in the industry call "foiled"--and, also, what we in the industry call "paper over board", meaning that the cover is printed on glossy paper stock which is then wrapped around the hardcover; basically, there is no jacket. AND, the paper edges are black! It's like the Lamborghini of book packages--really nice, very expensive.

So, obviously Thomas' US publisher is finally showing a little faith, which is great. I mean, you know how much I loved The End of Mr. Y. It's a completely brilliant novel. And Our Tragic Universe is...good. It's okay. It's not great, and here's why: There's no story. I've recently tried to write my reviews as if I know the author is going to see it, because very often authors do see reviews (Google Alerts are very addictive) and I try to read the review again before posting through the author's eyes and guess what they're going to say in response to it. This is a long way of saying, I'm sure Scarlett Thomas, if she's reading this, is like, "DUH THAT IS THE WHOLE POINT OF THE BOOK." And I know I'm getting ahead of myself here, believe me. And, sorry about that.

Let's back up. The protagonist of Our Tragic Universe, Meg Carpenter, is a writer. Ostensibly. Or at least that's what she seems to think. She publishes crass, commercial fiction for teens under the collective pseudonym Zeb Ross, and used to have a series of sci-fi novels called Newtopia, about people who live second lives in the collective unconscious (a nod to Mr. Y, I'm sure). But her literary novel, her life's great work, has gone through so many drafts and versions and titles that it's less a novel and more a perpetual vanity project of infinite variation.

Meg has a couple of problems besides her writer's block: her boyfriend, Christopher, is THE WORST, a whiny, lazy, practically neutered male who Meg obviously hates but with whom she stays despite the fact that he contributes nothing to her life except excessive amounts of unnecessary guilt; she's basically in love with this guy, Rowan, who is much much older than her and married (in essence); her friend, Libby, is cheating on her husband; and her other friend, Vi, isn't speaking to her. And I guess all of these situations do come to logical, satisfactory conclusions by the end of the book, so to say that there's no change is incorrect.

But the novel is, in essence, a series of long, philosophical conversations about a variety of topics ranging from religion to physics to the end of the world to mortality to knitting to writing and storytelling. There's a lot of discussion of zen koans; a koan, according to Wikipedia, is "a story, dialogue, question, or statement, the meaning of which cannot be understood by rational thinking but may be accessible through intuition." Or, as Vi puts it, a "storyless story."

Now, I know that koans are useful and important philosophically and in many cases religiously or metaphysically for many people, and I don't want to bag on anyone's thing, but "storyless story" has got to be the worst phrase in the universe to me, and Our Tragic Universe is one big storyless story experiment. It's a testament to Thomas' pitch-perfect, always engaging, intellectually stimulating but not over-rigorous writing that I was able to finish the book in only a few days despite not being overly invested in what happened to any of her characters. But I wanted so much more from the book.

Because yes, I know, life is not a Zeb Ross novel. And if Thomas wanted to accurately depict a period of time in the life of a small group of people in a small geographical area, she did a great job. It all seemed very real and very familiar. But it wasn't compelling in the way Mr. Y or PopCo--which were not without their philosophical discussions and intellectual debates, by a long shot--are compelling. I didn't latch on to any of it. Truthfully, the parts I thought were the most interesting were the parts where Meg was talking about her career part of the Zeb Ross machine, because I have Opinions about packaged books and that was something I could really engage with. Otherwise, I was like, yeah. Okay. Sure. But so what?

OMG I just blew my own mind right there. It wasn't until I typed the words "But so what?" that I realized that that is my real problem with it. SO WHAT? Sure, life is like that, but SO FUCKING WHAT? I knew that already. I always expect Thomas to teach me something, and this time the only thing I learned is that lives like my own are boring and probably not ripe material for a novel of any kind. I wanted so badly to love Our Tragic Universe, and I fully accept that Scarlett Thomas is crazy smart, way smarter than I am, and the book is probably doing multiple levels of work that I didn't even pick up on, and that's all great. But at the end of the day, a novel is a storytelling vehicle; that is its purpose, its reason for being. And a novel that is, in essence, an attempt to write "a storyless story" is not doing its job.

But seriously, read PopCo, or The End of Mr. Y. Totally brilliant, the both of them.