Review: How to Buy a Love of Reading

Title: How to Buy a Love of Reading

Author: Tanya Egan Gibson

Publisher: Dutton

# of Pages: 400

Favorite Line: "I don't know how to say it sophisticatedly. I just know everyone wants to be able to close their eyes sometimes and know someone's there."

Rating: 6/10

This review is based on an advanced reader's copy.

Product Description
Fall in love with reading all over again.

To Carley Wells, words are the enemy. Her tutor’s innumerable SAT flashcards. Her personal trainer’s “fifty-seven pounds overweight” assessment. And the endless reading assignments from her English teacher, Mr. Nagel. When Nagel reports to her parents that she has answered “What is your favorite book” with “Never met one I liked,” they decide to fix what he calls her “intellectual impoverishment.” They will commission a book to be written just for her—one she’ll have to love—that will impress her teacher and the whole town of Fox Glen with their family’s devotion to the arts. They will be patrons— the Medicis of Long Island. They will buy their daughter The Love Of Reading.

Impossible though it is for Carley to imagine loving books, she is in love with a young bibliophile who cares about them more than anything. Anything, that is, but a good bottle of scotch. Hunter Cay, Carley’s best friend and Fox Glen’s resident golden boy, is becoming a stranger to her lately as he drowns himself in F. Scott Fitzgerald, booze, and Vicodin.

When the Wellses move writer Bree McEnroy—author of a failed meta-novel about Odysseus’ failed journey home through the Internet—into their mansion to write Carley’s book, Carley’s sole interest in the project is to distract Hunter from drinking and give them something to share. But as Hunter’s behavior becomes erratic and dangerous, she finds herself increasingly drawn into the fictional world Bree has created, and begins to understand for the first time the power of stories—those we read, those we want to believe in, and most of all, those we tell ourselves about ourselves. Stories powerful enough to destroy a person. Or save her.

I have said before that I really dislike books with excessive amounts of drama, especially of the teenage kind. This is one of those books. I didn't dislike it as much as one might expect, but I don't think I really liked it, either. This book is the meeting point of the sex, drugs and money of Gossip Girl and the long-winded existentialism of Dawson's Creek. The heroine even says to the hero, "You're, like, part of me." Deep stuff. I am all for realism in books, and I know I break out the "like" in conversation quite often. But I don't need to read it in books.

And that's really what this book is- deep thoughts, buried in teenage angst wrapped in a drug-induced haze and sitting on a great big pile of dirty money. I am not familiar with many children of millionaires and billionaires, but I can't imagine that every single one of them is a drug addict who drinks and drives. Supposedly, the kids in the book all attend high school, but we never once see them there. They spend all their time getting high or lounging around their homes or attending massive parties. It's ridiculous.

But realism aside (maybe it is realistic- I don't know), the book does have a message. There are very complex characters who face very difficult situations. There are also very shallow characters who face not-so-difficult situations. I started the book not really liking Carley (it is hard, on principle, for me to like someone who so dislikes reading) and being very intrigued by Hunter. I ended the book thinking Hunter was a twat and being quite proud of Carley.

I liked more aspects of the book than I disliked. It was kind of funny to come across the nuggets of wisdom scattered throughout (almost always scattered by Carley, the ugly-outside-but-beautiful-inside, not-book-smart-but-life-smart heroine). But I can't really describe how angry the characters made me. Every single one. The high schoolers, the teachers, the parents- all of them were so self-absorbed, so wrapped up in themselves that it made me want to scream.

I would neither classify this book as chick lit nor as young adult fiction. I don't think it fits into any genre. It was certainly a gripping read- great wordplay and an important message- but it was wrapped up in a package that I found exhausting.

Note: The author of this book, Tanya Egan Gibson, contacted me very soon after I posted my review on LibraryThing. She seems, from her e-mail, to be a really fun and down-to-earth person, and is hosting on her website a contest for readers. She said the following:

I'd love it if you submitted a story to my web site about how reading changed your life in some way. I've added this section to the site because I'd love to put together a community of stories *about* the power of stories.
All submissions will be posted, and between now and the novel's release date on May 14th, three of them will also be chosen to be made into flash-animated "books" on the site's virtual bookshelf. (The winners will also each receive a signed copy of HTBALOR.)

Gibson's website is located here. Enter if you'd like- I'm sure we all have stories about how reading has changed our lives!

Review: Fludd

Title: Fludd

Author: Hilary Mantel

Publisher: Holt Paperbacks

# of Pages: 192

Favorite Line: But there was a whisper at the back of her mind, and only he could have put it there: I have come to transform you, transformation is my business.

Rating: 8.5/10

From Publishers Weekly
Originally published in 1989 in the U.K., Mantel's slim, intense novel displays the author's formidable gift for illuminating the darker side of the human heart, offering metaphoric and literal incarnations of the powerful central images of Catholicism. Her circa-1956 setting of Fetherhoughton, a provincial English village surrounded on three sides by gloomy moors, is stark and dreary, a dead end where unwanted people are unceremoniously dumped. Such is the case of Sister Philomena, a sturdy farm girl-turned-nun banished from an Irish convent because her sister Kathleen breaks convent rules. It becomes apparent that Philomena will not fit in anywhere, as she is a strange mix of innocence and knowledge, a sage romantic. Philomena finds an unlikely confidant in Father Angwin, the parish priest, who has lost his faith, thinks the town tobacconist is the devil and fears the threat of a youthful replacement for his post. When a rain-soaked man named Fludd arrives on a stormy night, Angwin assumes it is the newly appointed curate, but even so, the two become close friends and, in time, Angwin sheds his bitterness and paranoia to become a more compassionate, wiser person. Fludd sweeps the nosy housekeeper, Agnes, off her feet with his gentlemanly manners and cool confidence, but Philomena is also strangely attracted to the devilish Fludd, who magically transforms everyone he meets. The monstrous Mother Perpetua, headmistress of the St. Thomas Aquinas School, is the lone exception, and she ends up being a key player in the rural face-off between good and evil. Hawthornden Prize-winner Mantel (The Giant, O'Brien) uses her knack for dry wit and lovely, scene-setting detail to liven up crisp, utilitarian prose, revealing, as her characters do, the ever-surprising divine in the mundane. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Well, I admit to not really knowing what I think about this book. It is one of those to mull over for an extended period of time in the back of your mind, the way you would allow a sip of wine to rest on your tongue in order to understand its complexity.

I have just returned from a wonderful trip to California and Sonoma Valley, so wine is on my mind :-)

So is Hilary Mantel's Fludd, though. I have only read one other book by Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety (which I reviewed on my old blog here). I loved that book and would highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in the French Revolution, though it is certainly a door-stopper. Fludd, on the other hand, is a very slim volume that could probably be read in a day. Understanding it fully, however, probably takes much longer than it took me to read A Place of Greater Safety.

Do you ever get that feeling when reading a book that you're a part of something special and very important, but you aren't entirely sure that you can grasp the entirety of what the author is presenting to you? That is the feeling I had with Fludd. It didn't seem as though there was much plot to the book until the very end, and then all at once I was finished and was left feeling as though I had read everything closely but had somehow missed The Big Picture.

The book is about religion and faith and the positive and negative effects the two can have on people. But there is so much more to it. Symbolism, I might say, up the wazoo. There are statues and nuns and obscure questions of faith ("If one uses dripping to cook on a Friday during Lent, is that considered eating meat?"). A never-ending carafe of whiskey. A priest who claims disbelief in God to Fludd, but who then says that the devil lives in Netherhoughton. (Can you believe in the devil but not in God? Is that not depressing?) And then, the biggest enigma of them all, there is Fludd.

He arrives and miracles happen. No one can really describe what his face looks like. He appears to finish the food on his plate, but no one ever sees him put food in his mouth. He doesn't seem to do much of anything, but he comes and he goes and things are different. His name, at the least, suggests a great deal about him.

I realize that I haven't so much reviewed this book as made oblique references to how much it has remained in my mind after I finished reading it. Isn't that a stellar review in and of itself? I should think most authors want readers to continue chewing over their stories after reading the last word. I am still chewing (much as Fludd spent much of the book chewing without seeming to eat anything). But I think I know enough about my reaction to recommend the book- it is a misleading slim volume, but it will stay with you after you're done. Which is good, because then we can discuss it!

Thank you, Elizabeth!

Today, I was making blog rounds, and I noticed that I won an award! Elizabeth at As Usual, I Need More Bookshelves awarded me with the following:


"This blog invests and believes in the PROXIMITY-nearness in space, time and relationships. These blogs are exceedingly charming. These kind bloggers aim to find and be friends. They are not interested in prizes or self-aggrandizement! Our hope is that when the ribbons of these prizes are cut, even more friendships are propagated. Please give more attention to these writers! Deliver this award to eight bloggers who must choose eight more and include this clever-written text into the body of their award."

So very kind! I feel so honored. Thanks so much, Elizabeth. And now to pass the award along. I love all the blogs I follow and am so lucky to have met so many wonderful people through reading. Here are a few blogs that some of you may enjoy.:

Beth at Belly of the Beest

Blodeudd of Mur-y-Castell

Kailana at The Written World

Zibilee of Raging Bibliomania

Jessie at love + love = marriage

Teddy Rose at So Many Precious Books, So Little Time

Marg at Reading Adventures

Wendy at Musings of a Bookish Kitty

Obviously, I love so many people's blogs and would give everyone a review if I could- except creating hyperlinks can be very tiring ;-) Thanks to everyon who reads this blog, thank you Elizabeth for the award and happy blogging to everyone!

Review - The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England

Title: The Gentleman's Daughter - Women's Lives in Georgian England

Author: Amanda Vickery

Publisher: Yale University Press

# of Pages: 294, plus footnotes and appendices

Rating: 9/10

From Library Journal
This meticulously researched social history should be welcomed by specialists in British and European women's history. Vickery (British women's history, Univ. of London) challenges the standard argument that once the industrial revolution took production out of the home, women's lives were marginalized in the domestic sphere. Using the letters, diaries, and account books of more than 100 women from the "genteel" classes, she theorizes that women's activities actually expanded as they involved themselves in new areas of community life. Indeed, she concludes that the struggles of the Victorian suffragettes may have stemmed not from a sense of oppression but from a desire to expand the gains of their Georgian predecessors. Unfortunately, Vickery's insistence on proving her provocative thesis overwhelms the richness of the descriptive material she presents: there is good information here on household management, servants, material culture, shopping and consumption, and female attitudes on courtship, pregnancy, motherhood, and child rearing.
Marie Marmo Mullaney, Caldwell Coll., Livingston, NJ
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This book is the most recent in my bout of Georgian era gluttony. I think it may be the last for at least a little while, though I have gotten my grubby hands on at least five other non-fiction books about the era since I last posted. I have grand visions of myself having one of the foremost collections of authoritative literature on 18th and 19th century England by the end of my life. I'll have to keep on top of that!

Amanda Vickery's book is about the life of genteel (note that genteel does not equal aristocratic) women in the 18th and early part of the 19th century. It is divided into seven chapters that roughly coincide with major events and duties in a lady's life (courtship, marriage, motherhood, householding, shopping and entertainment). Vickery's thesis is that women were not marginalized in society during the 18th century, and did not operate in separate spheres leading up to the Victorian era. (She does not touch the Victorian era at all.) She proves this point well by sharing anecdotes from letters and books, newspapers and prints. But the book is also littered with jewels of information about all aspects of female life.

It is always implied that people in prior centuries had better spelling and grammatical skills than people today. When you really consider this, it's pretty unlikely; how many people in prior centuries were really that educated to write with proper grammar? Especially women. In the mid-18th century, it is estimated that 81% of upper-class women were literate. Judging by the letters Vickery quotes in her book, this literacy does not translate to good spelling. Granted, spelling may have changed a bit from the 1750s to the 2000s. But not that much. It was very interesting (and disturbing) to see. Clearly, spelling has never been a real priority with people! Additionally, the book has several grammatical errors unrelated to citations from its sources. That gets very annoying.

Note: In reading another book, it has come to my attention that prior to dictionaries, words were spelled phonetically. So, technically, I suppose there weren't any spelling errors in the letters I read. So I will accept those, but I stand firm on the grammar issue :-)

My favorite chapter was that on childbirth and motherhood. Sudha, if you are reading, there is a really fascinating excerpt on how midwives were slowly replaced by "male midwives," and then by physicians. "Ladies of quality" in the 18th and 19th centuries are given the short end of the stick as mothers. The belief persists that they were rarely invested in their children's lives; this is based mainly on the fact that many did not breast feed and apparently were too busy leading very busy lives to bother with their children. (If that is the criteria, then God only knows how mothers today would rate.) Vickery proves this completely wrong, which is gratifying, to say the least.

Vickery's book can be slow-going at times due to the large number of citations that she makes in it, but that is the nature of an academic work. It is also full of interesting tidbits; for example, there was a ladies' debating society in the late 1700s which, among other things, debated whether a woman pledging obedience to her husband in her wedding vows required her to always follow his orders. It is definitely more in-depth in its material than many other books, so if you enjoy delving into history, this is for you.

In Praise of Pretty Tomes

I came home from work today to a fun brown box from Amazon! And in it, one of the most beautiful books I have ever seen (the one pictured above, since somehow, it's not allowing me to place the picture below this text). It is City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth Century London, by Vic Gatrell, and it is gorgeous.

I am not reviewing the content of the book here- just its looks. I know you're not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but there's nothing wrong with judgment based on the whole package, right? So allow me to wax lyrical for a few moments.

In this age of mass-market paperbacks, a well-made hardcover book really stands out. I don't have anything against mass market paperbacks (except their propensity for spelling and grammatical errors), but hardcovers excite me. I love the cracking sound that the spine makes when you open it for the first time. I love the smell of a new hardcover. I love dustjackets. I love, in non-fiction books, those pockets of glossy pages with pictures.

Speaking of glossy pages with pictures, City of Laughter is full of them! All of the pages are glossy and several of them have pictures (many in color!). It's almost a small textbook, but one that makes you drool.

I know that my reviews lately probably haven't appealed to a wide demographic, being mainly focused on 18th and 19th century Britain. Such as this book. And such as the book I will next be reviewing. But every book lover has seen a book before that excites her, right? And for me, City of Laughter is one of those books.

Can you name a book that you saw and then just kept itching to open?

Review: The Regency Underworld

Title: The Regency Underworld

Author: David A. Low

Publisher: The History Press

# of Pages: 200

Rating: 6/10

Product Description

Alongside the world of Pride and Prejudice and Vanity Fair, Byron, Keats, Constable and Nash, there also existed a pulsating underworld where crime and vice of every kind flourished. Venture into this forgotten world, and discover a fascinating place filled with pleasure-seekers, criminals and body snatchers at work. This revised edition has a new introduction by the author, and is illustrated with a variety of contemporary prints, portraits and cartoons to bring the period and the characters of this sinister period to life. Anyone with an interest in the period, or in the underground activities which tended not to be explored in the novels of the time, will find this essential reading.

Well, if you've read this blog for some time now, my love of Regency England is probably well known to you. I had The Regency Underworld on my Amazon wishlist for years, actually, and then finally last month, in a bout of purchasing, I got it along with other Regency-era non-fiction books (all of which will be reviewed in due course- don't worry!). It was the one I was most excited to read, actually, as it sounded like it would dig below the surface to the areas of life in London that Austen and Heyer and the rest usually glossed over.

There are many books which are claimed to be "essential reading" on whatever topic they are about; most don't really live up to the claim. I think The Regency Underworld has interesting information in it- I found especially fascinating the chapters on gambling and on "resurrection men," the latter being men who stole bodies and sold them to surgeons for dissection. But there wasn't much presented in the book about which I didn't already have at least a working knowledge. I think my main complaint with the book is that I don't think the title is very fitting for what is actually written. When I think of the "underworld" in the extended Regency period, I think about smugglers bringing French liquor in from the coasts, the gaming hells, the courtesans and the parties they hosted, con artists and the like. I did not expect to read about Harriette Wilson or Beau Brummell, and certainly not about the Duke of York. The first two were celebrities of the day and the third was a member of the Royal Family, for goodness sake- how is there anything "underground" about any of them?

I picked the book up hoping to get more detailed information about an aspect of Regency England I know little about- I came away with some more esoteric knowledge, yes, but nothing that I would call "essential reading" or that really improved my understanding of the era. Granted, the book is only 200 pages long- it isn't an in-depth treatise by any means. But in my opinion, it also doesn't really do what the title says it should, and that disappointed me.

If you are new to Regency England and find it interesting, then I think this is a non-fiction book that would be a fun and entertaining read. But if you already have bookshelves full of books on the period like me, then I would recommend giving it a pass.