June Book Review

My recent reads (or, as in the case of the first book listed, “almost-reads”) have been fairly eclectic. I know one job position at People magazine is that of book reviewer, so here I will indulge myself and do a little book reviewing online. In chronological order of what I have read, here is what I have to say about the novels I have finished (or at least attempted to finish) since coming to New York City.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

This is the second time I have read this book cover-to-cover. I don’t know what made me return to it; perhaps because I own it and because I recalled it striking me as a bit bizarre and quirky the first time around. After finishing it this second time, I fully understand why I would have found it so bizarre the first time I read it. I was initially given the book by my friend, who is a middle-aged librarian. At that time, I was still in junior high school.

This book is about a boy who has just entered high school as a freshman and makes friends with high school seniors. His conservative typical-American home life is contrasted with the rebel/hippie nature of his older friends. What I loved most about returning to this book is how familiar everything was. The drugs and alcohol and love affairs of the narrator’s older friends did seem rebellious and therefore desirious, and yet the suburban setting tempered everything in a way I could immediately recognize and which also explained why the novel has such a “safe” and realistic feel to it. These kids could be perceived as “hippies,” yet they weren’t, because they are the wrong generation. They’re closer to my generation; they’re not about to wear bell-bottoms and put flowers in their hair and tent camp across America to attend Woodstock. The time frame feels just on the brink of inventing cell phones.

I also loved the epistolary style of the novel—it is written as a series of anonymous letters to the reader, who is also perceived by the narrator as an anonymous recipient, but also as a “friend.” Why aren’t more novels written this way (that is, as letters)? It inspires me to write one, just because I like the style.

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

This is the one novel which I declined to finish. I say “declined” because I could have—it was not unreadable. However, I read to about the middle of the book—page 361—and still felt no sense of compulsion to continue. Except for what I knew from the excerpt on the back of the book, I felt no sense of guidance telling me what this book was about. Two men had fallen from an hijacked airplane; one was potentially becoming an angel, one potentially a demon; they might or might not still be on earth; both had been in the acting business; one had previously been trying to escape his Indian heritage by becoming as British as possible; several supposedly allegorical tales had been told (but to what end I could not determine—they seemed pretty arbitrary in content and particularly in placement to me); and Rushdie particularly loves using esoteric vocabulary words almost as much as he loves making up his own.

Needless to say, I attended a book fair during this reading jaunt and eventually decided to move on to more enjoyable summer (or lifelong? I no longer have to consider myself confined to “summer”) reading.

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

This is not the sort of book I would ordinarily pick up of my own accord. The back jacket is filled with praises such as “Magical and outlandish,” and “wildly inventive,” all of which are not at all inaccurate. This author plays with the boundaries between the real and the surreal, bordering right on that point of being artistic for the sake of being artistic. He’s not the kind of abstract artist who splashes paint across a white canvas and expects you to derive meaning, but more like Salvador Dali, where everything is so overly complex and convoluted that you are liable to miss the meaning, anyhow.

The novel is structured around a very realistic plot, which is what kept me going: a fifteen-year-old-boy runs away from home to escape his father and, in theory, find his mother and sister, who abandoned him as a young child. It turns out that his father cast a very ominous prophecy about the boy—who adopts the name Kafka—and he has run away to avoid fulfilling this prophecy, but like Oedipus, he is fulfilling it in spite of himself. Meanwhile, a parallel plot is occurring involving an elderly man who can speak to cats and becomes implicated in a murder, and a third storyline, involving a woman paralyzed in time by the loss of her lover, intersects the two. However, in spite of the intersections of these storylines, they never seem to truly come together.

For someone like me, who grew up connecting the dots between evidence in Nancy Drew novels, I tend to prefer tidy endings that have everything “make sense.” However, when I finished this book, I felt that it wasn’t that sort of story. I was supposed to feel content with each story hanging in its own sort of limo. I am not sure if I would call Murakami’s writing its own sort of “fantasy” genre, but it is certainly a style I have never encountered before.

The Man of My Dreams by Curtis Sittenfeld

Although I would recommend Prep before I would recommend this novel, The Man of My Dreams was no disappointment. Sittenfeld did a good job of spanning time and making Hannah—the main character—mature over time, which can be tricky. I particularly love the fact that the novel starts out in Pittsburgh (!!!), and the last romantic encounter depicted in the novel (which is then analyzed in a letter by Hannah herself) eerily reminds me of my memoir and the pieces I have left to write. I now own this book—having purchased it at the fair second-hand—so if anyone wants to borrow it, just say the word!

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

I feel like this memoir succeeded by slotting itself into two of the memoir categories I have found most popular: bizarre childhoods and trouble/struggle-filled childhoods. This combination, it seems, is a guaranteed seller. I do not mean to come across negatively Walls’ memoir. Had this been one of the first memoirs I ever read, I would likely be raving about it right now, announcing that it as one of the best ever. However, after having read through childhood poverty struggles in Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and witnessing one of the most bizarre upbringings ever in Augusten Burroughs’ “Running with Scissors,” the gist of the material presented in The Glass Castle isn’t really new to me. It’s more wacky, drunken, immature parents who impose hunger and raggedy clothing upon their tag-along children.

Nevertheless, the bottom line is: I am enjoying this book. I am compelled to continue reading; it’s a fast read in spite of its length; and the writing (such as character development, particularly of the narrator Jeanette and of her brother Brian) is solid. Certainly worth reading; I guess I was just looking for something more “innovative” in the genre.