I have been in a non-reading place the last couple of weeks. I started reading Twilight, but just couldn't get into it. It is very young, and so detailed I got bored with it. Plus Christmas is a week away, and I am crashing on a cross-stitch project for my Mom. I already finished one for Mike's Mom (well, almost finished - need to sew the edges and stuff) and I really like to give one homemade gift to each Mom. All I have left to do is the outlining and the finishing, so I am in pretty good shape.
Anyway, I probably won't be reading anything but the paper until after Christmas. So Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and Happy New Year to everyone!
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Monday, December 7, 2009
Her Fearful Symmetry
Okay, so I am generally a fan of mystical realism, and this book is by Audrey Niffenegger, who wrote The Time Traveler’s Wife. So I should have loved it, right? Well, I didn’t. I didn’t hate it, and I finished it in less than a week, so it was definitely interesting. Let me try to describe it.
Valentina and Julia are the twin daughters of Edie, who is the twin of Elspeth. Edie and Elspeth haven’t spoken in 20 years, and live on opposite sides of the Atlantic, but when Elspeth dies she leaves everything to the twin girls. The only caveat is they must live in her flat for a year, and their parents are not allowed in the place. That sounds like an interesting story, doesn’t it?
Things start to get weird after the girls move to the flat in London. They meet Robert, Elspeth’s much younger lover and neighbor, who develops an attraction for one of the twins. And they meet the ghost of Elspeth, who is trapped in the flat.
The plot takes some very strange turns, and I sort of saw the end coming but was still a bit shocked by it. The most striking thing to me about this novel was that I really didn’t care for any of the characters, except Robert and Martin, another neighbor in London. I found the twins to be vapid, insipid girls, and Elspeth selfish and conniving. And there is a “big family secret” that doesn’t really seem to add much to the plot, except to give the reader an idea of the kind of people we’re dealing with.
As I said, it was interesting, and I wanted to find out what happened, but it was creepy, and I felt a little dirty. It’s definitely NOT a book I’ll read again, but it wasn’t a waste of time.
Valentina and Julia are the twin daughters of Edie, who is the twin of Elspeth. Edie and Elspeth haven’t spoken in 20 years, and live on opposite sides of the Atlantic, but when Elspeth dies she leaves everything to the twin girls. The only caveat is they must live in her flat for a year, and their parents are not allowed in the place. That sounds like an interesting story, doesn’t it?
Things start to get weird after the girls move to the flat in London. They meet Robert, Elspeth’s much younger lover and neighbor, who develops an attraction for one of the twins. And they meet the ghost of Elspeth, who is trapped in the flat.
The plot takes some very strange turns, and I sort of saw the end coming but was still a bit shocked by it. The most striking thing to me about this novel was that I really didn’t care for any of the characters, except Robert and Martin, another neighbor in London. I found the twins to be vapid, insipid girls, and Elspeth selfish and conniving. And there is a “big family secret” that doesn’t really seem to add much to the plot, except to give the reader an idea of the kind of people we’re dealing with.
As I said, it was interesting, and I wanted to find out what happened, but it was creepy, and I felt a little dirty. It’s definitely NOT a book I’ll read again, but it wasn’t a waste of time.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Shanghai Girls
If you loved Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (as I and many of my friends did), you will love this new book by Lisa See too. Shanghai Girls follows the lives of sisters Pearl and May, who we first meet in Shanghai in the 1930's when they are comfortably bourgeois "beautiful girls" of 21 and 18. The novel follows their lives for the next 20 years, through tragedy, joy, and everything else that life can throw at you.
See does a fabulous job (in my uneducated opinion) of capturing life for the Chinese who fled their country ahead of the Japanese, came to an America that really didn't want them, and made a life as best they could. But this novel is not just a touching and sometimes discomfiting historical novel, nor is it just a study of East vs. West; it is in its essence a story of sisterhood. Pearl and May go through so many life events together, and at the end of the novel we learn how differently they experienced those events. Still, no matter their problems and their differences, they still have their "sister love."
See does a fabulous job (in my uneducated opinion) of capturing life for the Chinese who fled their country ahead of the Japanese, came to an America that really didn't want them, and made a life as best they could. But this novel is not just a touching and sometimes discomfiting historical novel, nor is it just a study of East vs. West; it is in its essence a story of sisterhood. Pearl and May go through so many life events together, and at the end of the novel we learn how differently they experienced those events. Still, no matter their problems and their differences, they still have their "sister love."
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