Posts Tagged ‘ novels ’

Book Mania: LibraryThing

OBSESSED currently with LibraryThing. It is an online book cataloging service with social media applications that combines a love of books with a mania for organizing. It allows all of us to indulge in our librarian fantasies without actually having to get a Library Science degree.

I found out about Library Thing last May and immediately began entering the books I was currently reading. I could rate them, review them, classify them in all sorts of ways, see who else was reading them and what they thought. I even figured out how to add gadgets of books I am reading (see far right column) to my websites.

In January 2010 I moved, a daunting task for any book lover. While packing up box after box of books, I decided that when unpacking them I would catalog them all on LibraryThing. I am currently in that process, and am I ever glad I have done this. In picking up and looking over each book, I have relived many memories, discovered old friends (both of the book and people variety). Remembered who gave me books, where I bought books, how certain novels and poems made me feel, how one particular novel changed the way I thought about writing in general (Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf, which I am going to reread and blog about soon). My personal library contains my own personal history.

This sorting out of memories and possessions bring forth one of the great draws of Library Thing: books are more than dusty bound sheets of paper, they carry ideas and emotions and likes, dislikes, prejudices. This site not only gives me the chance to sort all of that out, but do it in a public way. Other people can see what books I own, see how I have rated or reviewed them. Reading can be such an isolated activity, and so many of us have used books as an escape form others, so it is nice to find an outlet for book people that makes me feel a little less isolated.

I have connected online and through email with a couple of authors, but more importantly, I have revived the most passionate love of my life.

http://www.librarything.com

Photos below are from LibraryThing.com, and are generic screenshots and publicity photos they provided.

Day the Falls Stood Still: A Test of Female Faith and Strength

Buchanan, Cathy Marie. (2009). The Day the Falls Stood Still. New York: Voice/Hyperion. ISBN: 978-1-4103-4097-1 320 pages.

Fiction: Novel: Historical Fiction

Gist: A young woman grows to maturity in Niagara Falls during and after World War I. She endures loss in many forms, testing her faith and her strength. Based loosely on real life events.

This is the story of Bess Heath, a young woman coming of age in Niagara Falls during World War I. Her family struggles and failings are rendered in exquisite prose, showcasing the female point of view in a way few novelists have achieved. Bess is pulled away from the expectations of her society and her family toward something she sense is more authentic, even amid a staggering amount of pain and loss.

Tom Cole is at the heart of Bess’s fascination, and the mechanics of their relationship are beautifully and poignantly told through every phase, from their meeting to the very end. Bess’s point of view is also elucidated very well, but Tom remains mostly a predictable character. He is carved out of some mythical essence of nature/spirit man and the romantic notion of man versus the corrupting influences of modern progress. All we see of his personality is the true but flat view of the strong, silent male, handsome and attractive to the sheltered young woman. Cathy Buchanan has set out to tell us a mythical tale, reinforced witha grand setting with natural beauty that is awe inspiring, and told in a man who helps change the central character and helps her find herself. But we never get to see Tom as a human being, and while Buchanan shows us that she can write beautifully about sex, heroic rescues,and the emotions of war and battle, these pieces are not strung together into a believable male character.

It isn’t just Buchanan though; this seems to be a theme in novels of the last few years: a strong female voice, descriptively beautiful that illuminates the female mind. These novels have created great role models for women, except that none of them seem to understand (or care to) what masculinity is all about. They delight in writing graphic scenes of physical sex that don’t empower either person and only reinforce the concept that the men are in the story as an object, a set dressing. If these novels could give more than just glimpses of the male characters as real, and more importantly as connecting to the female characters and the readers in more than a romance novel way, the current crop of novels would be truly great. Without that, they remain entertaining escapist works that can appeal to unfulfilled women.

The novel has themes of environmentalism, war, and human greed woven into a family tale in a way that is quite commendable. The historic inspiration of the story is full of possibility, and yet the author’s notes at the end of the novel seem to invite questions as to why she chose to leave out or include certain events. It si as if she was trying to balance the outrageous, over the top, mythical aspects of the story with a more personal, psychological exploration, and it would perhaps have been better to focus more solely on one aspect or the other.

2007 Pulitzer: The Road is realistic rendition of a common nightmare

McCarthy, Cormac.(2006). The Road. New York: Knopf.

2007 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Fiction

Everything in The Road is reduced to the minimum; the language and writing style are stripped along with the lives of the characters. No linguistic decoration or extraneous description, luxury or sense of comfort. No neat tidy chapters or markers to tell us where we are in the book. No names for the characters.

What happens because of this is that we, like the characters, are forced with an immediacy, an identification with the events and the people. This immediacy creates a strong identification with the characters, and of all the apocalyptic and disaster novels and books in recent memory, this one comes closest to revealing the core of the human spirit. The essence of why life is worth living. Cormac McCarthy creates a poetic rhythm that shows how beautiful language can be used for unbeautiful experiences. W.B. Yeats phrase ” a terrible beauty” comes to mind. And yet the book leaves the reader with an oddly positive view of human nature.

The Piano Teacher Shows Reality of War, Human Nature

Lee, Janice, Y.K. (2009). The Piano Teacher: a novel. Viking Adult. ISBN: 9780670020485

A story about Hong Kong during World War II and after, it blends historical fiction, mystery and extreme realism as easily and successfully as it blends time and cultures. The contrasts of privileged society and the too painful realities of war– both experienced by the same characters– makes this a novel that is difficult to put down and painful to read at the same time. Everyone (Chinese, British, American, Japanese) and everything (circumstances, relationships, intentions) is clouded and nothing is truly clear until the very end. A well-crafted story by a writer who, in her first novel, has mastered contemporary narrative structure and who also has conveyed a sense of human nature.

This is done by telling a story in a place that is a collusion of cultures and traditions, in a time when that place is upset by the extreme unrest of wartime. This brilliant combination enhances and strengthens the real nature of the characters.

2009 Pulitzer: Olive Kitteridge a study in loneliness and humanity

Olive Kitteridge: Fiction

2009 Pulitzer Prize, Fiction

The most striking this about this novel is its structure: it is a landscape novel with the title character as a running theme or motif as a constant among thirteen stories. This landscape is lonely; each character essentially lives life within him or herself, despite living in a close, small Maine community. The narrative voice is strangely detached, heightening the sense that the characters are separate from one another. The reader is therefore kept at an emotional distance. Death is a frequent visitor to the characters, and marriages are presented as mostly contentious and negative.

A nonlinear, nonchronological narrative structure must be built with extra care so as not to confuse the reader. Strout reveals this as the greatest strength of this work: by keeping the narrative voice simple and clear, she avoids the complexity trap that has befallen so many experimental storytellers. Jumps in time are kept to a manageable number, and are cleverly elucidated.

Of all of the different interpretations of loss and pain that are portrayed, it its Olive Kitteridge herself that, surprisingly, emerges as the most whole. The reader encounters different views of her from various perspectives as other characters give their views of her. We see her argue with her husband, son, and commit childish acts. But it is the revelation of who she is that adds depth and push to stories that otherwise would have a tendency to get sleepy. Olive is the type of character that leaves an impact far greater than her personality or actions might suggest.

The mature, embittered woman encountered early on becomes more so by the end, only the reader comes to understand Olive better by seeing different angles of who she is. Elizabeth Strout achieves the coveted feat of making us like an unlikable character , mainly by showing that Olive Kitteridge is human just like we are.

All the Living a Haunting, Melancholy Novel

Morgan, C.E. (2009). All the Living, a novel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN: 9780374103620

A young woman from poverty in the rural south goes to live with her lover on his farm after his entire family is killed in an accident. A story rich with details of people acting, living and thinking by themselves and yet forced to relate to one another.

Much has been made about this being C.E. Morgan’s first novel, and rightly so, because their is a depth of feeling, a wealth of human experience captured just so in the language. The author has a special gift for crafting a story; she reveals the exposition cautiously but with just the right intriguing pace. She doesn’t overstate, she lets the images do much of the work in telling the story.

One of those recurring images is sex, presenting here in a raw form. Aloma and Orren’s sexual relationship shows the powerful human need for sex and also the ways sex can be used as a tool. It is refreshing to see a female character honestly, directly face her sexual nature, but it comes off as sort of passively accepting what he world brings instead of taking ownership of the experience. The choices the characters make, not just sexually, affect not only themselves but others, and yet the characters seem so often pulled along by fate.

As beautifully written as the book is, it is a heartbreaking tale of people who do not know how to relate to one another. Aloma, the lead female character, blindly accepts conventional female roles, puts her own dreams of accomplishment last, and seems to value her partner primarily through sex. It sin’t that this isn’t realistically portrayed, but that it is profoundly sad. Again, though, it is a magnificently constructed novel in that it shows this sadness, these situations the characters are in, and it doesn’t try to judge or make tidy solutions. The reader can think about the story, and this is one story that promises to stay with the reader long after the book has been put down.

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