Hollow City

Title: Hollow City: The Second Novel of Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children

Author: Ransom Riggs
Pub Date: 2014
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
Nutshell: The peculiar children of Miss Peregrine's loop struggle to help their injured headmistress while keeping safe from hollows

I read the first book in this series (Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children) about a year or so ago. It's an odd premise--a novel seemingly built around a series of photographs the author found, more or less. But the narrative itself is quite good and definitely draws you in, and the quirky pictures eventually take a back seat to the story.

This is the second novel, and you have to have read the first to really understand what's happening. Suffice it to say that Jacob and his peculiar friends have been ousted from their safe home and are on the run from forces that want them dead. This book is the story of their journey toward London in their search for help for their wounded headmistress, Miss Peregrine, and also to rescue the other kidnapped ymbrynes that hollows are keeping locked up. On the way, they will meet other peculiars and learn a great deal about what they're up against.

This is another engrossing tale and a very quick read. There aren't a lot of punches pulled here, so for all that it's YA, very young readers might be a bit overwhelmed. But I would have loved this series at about age 11 or 12. Adults will also find it most enjoyable.

The Devil Wears Prada

Title: The Devil Wears Prada
Author: Lauren Weisberger
Pub Date: 2003
Genre: Fiction
Nutshell: A young woman gets a job as a personal assistant for the diva editor of a fashion magazine

So, "chick lit." This is a difficult world for me, because while I should technically be a consumer (being a chick, and being a consumer of lit), I have a very hard time finding much in the genre that I can like very much. This book turned out to be not much of an exception to that. It was okay, but the further I got into it, the harder it was for me to stay with it or to like much of anybody in it.

So we have Andrea, fresh out of Brown University on some kind of Literature or English degree, who accidentally walks into a job working as the junior personal assistant to Miranda Priestly, the uber-bitch editor of the fictional Runway magazine. Andrea knows nothing about fashion, has no idea who Miranda is, and zero experience as an assistant of any sort, but quickly learns that her job is to be a sort of highly-comped servant to be misused and abused at all hours of the day and night by Priestly, a sort of caricature of a rich, out of touch society woman who has never been told no in her life loud enough to have heard it after reaching a certain level of power.

As her year of servitude drags on, Andrea begins to lose her friends and relationships to the all-consuming task of being Miranda's assistant. She cannot take personal calls. She cannot make plans, even on weekends. She must be available at all times, because she never knows if she will be summoned to a black tie event or a week in Paris. Her best friend becomes an alcoholic, her boyfriend grows distant, and yet Andrea continues to be Miranda's complaining lackey, because at the end of the year, she might be able to get in the door at The New Yorker, her dream job, at a much faster speed than trying to do it the old-fashioned way.

The real problem with the book for me is in the characterization. Maybe it's because I have never lived in New York. I'm Kentucky born and raised, and we don't understand or exactly trust Yankees in general and New Yorkers in particular. Maybe it's because I am a grizzled and weathered 35 instead of a young and naive 22. But I cannot believe that anyone behaves in the ways that either Miranda or Andrea behave. The rest of the supporting cast is fine, but the main two are just complete aliens for me. I didn't see the movie, and I'm sure that Meryl Streep managed to make the role of Miranda divine in that way of hers, but in the book, she's just horrendous without mitigation. There is one moment in Paris when she is almost human, but you almost by that point get the idea that she might just be a sociopath by that point, grooming her victim. Or maybe she's just trapped in an echo chamber of her own making, and Andrea just has a martyr complex. Either way, I cannot really like either one of them. Andrea's incessant whining and yet continuous running and fetching gets old quickly, and Miranda's complete inhumanity just start to grate. I would tell both of them to get a grip inside of five minutes.

This was an easy enough read, I suppose. Certainly not mentally taxing. But probably I won't hang on to it. Maybe I'll catch the movie some time and see what Meryl does with the part. 

Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales

Title: Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales
Author: Kenneth Hite
Pub Date: 2008
Genre: Literary criticism
Nutshell: A Lovecraft scholar takes us through the writer's collection of stories

Obviously, there's a certain barrier to entry with this book. If you haven't already read Lovecraft's works, you're probably going to want to either before or as you're reading Ken Hite's book, because otherwise there's not much purpose to the exercise. This is a companion piece and not a standalone work. 

However, if you, as I, are a Lovecraft nerd, or even just a Ken Hite fan, this is worth the 8 bucks you'll pay for it on Kindle (it is totally out of print). I came to Lovecraft in my 20s, after a thorough affair with Poe, and then discovered Hite through the completely excellent and yet manifestly silly H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast (hppodcraft.com: all the Lovecraft stuff in the history is free--it is now a subscription model with one free episode a month as they're going through stories mentioned in Lovecraft's essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature"). I also heard Hite speak last year at GenCon in Indianapolis, and the man clearly knows his stuff, and a lot of it.

Hite is the rare author that still makes me consult a dictionary every few pages. The Kindle format is great for that, since you can just long press on a word and off you go. For me to have to look up a word is pretty rare, but he definitely does not hold back on the vocab. He is an unabashed fan of Lovecraft, and while he and I do not always agree on what we like, there is enough here to be interesting ephemera to the original stories. Probably only for a true fan, though. You have to have already fallen into the wormhole. If you don't like Lovecraft and don't really care, then this isn't for you. Otherwise, this is an interesting and cheap and well-written companion piece from a guy who obviously knows quite a bit.

The Bridges of Madison County

Title: The Bridges of Madison County
Author: Robert James Waller
Pub Date: 1992
Genre: Fiction
Nutshell: A photographer and an Iowa housewife engage in a passionate and brief affair in the summer of 1965.

At one time, this book would have fallen into what I call "housewife porn." And in a way, I suppose it still does. There are certainly elements of romance to it that appeal to a woman--especially a woman with responsibilities who might find herself a bit bored with normal life. But reading it now (for the first time--I saw the movie years ago and liked it fine. I'll watch about anything Meryl Streep does, and I thought the cinematography was lovely), this is much more a story for and by an older man than any kind of narrative meant for a woman, whatever its audience ended up being. 

I'm not going to go all feminist critique up in here. I'm pretty far out of school for that (thank goodness). But, for all this is ostensibly a narrative told about and ultimately by a woman, this is very much about a man. It reeks of it, especially after a certain point.

I don't think I'm going to be giving much away, here. The movie was huge, and the book is hardly coy about what ultimately happens. It's a very short read (took me maybe two hours all told), so you're going to know what happens fairly quickly, even if you somehow don't already. Francesca Johnson, age 45, lives on an Iowa farm with her husband and two children. One summer afternoon while her family is away at the Iowa State Fair showing a steer that got way more attention than she did, she meets photographer Robert Kincaid, age 52, who is in Iowa taking photos of covered bridges. Kincaid is everything her husband is not--complex where he is simple, thoughtful where he is careless, poetic where he is dull. And lo, they fall in the sort of love that only ever really happens in fiction, where they cannot separate themselves from the other and they become some other thing entirely. 

Let it not be said that I am not a romantic, for indeed I most certainly am. I found the love of my life at the age of 30 and I am still with him five years later, still every bit as much in love with him now as I was then, and we are gloriously happy together. I left behind more than a few obligations and responsibilities to be with him, because I had to. To not be with him was quite frankly not an option. And non, je ne regrette rien. So don't tell me about certainty and love, Robert James Waller. I know quite a bit. But if my love, this man, ever spouts off something like, "I am the highway and a peregrine and all the sails that ever went to sea," I would probably ask if he had maybe had some kind of drug interaction. If he said it during sex, I would honestly fear an aneurysm. Because people--and I don't care how old you are or how many places you've been--people do not talk like that outside their own heads unless they've ingested enough substances that I don't think sex would be on the table at that point. 

But this guy, Robert Kincaid, is the last of a dying breed. He's a shaman. He's a wanderer. He's -- as soon as they start having sex, any narrative drive Francesca had in the book ceases and everything shifts over to him and his bizarre cowboy fantasies about being on the dead end of an evolutionary chain. It's not until he leaves that it returns to her. It's very odd, for all it's supposed to be from her journals. 

And in the end, this book isn't about Francesca. She is merely the necessary object to be acted upon and against and through in order for him, Robert Kincaid, to have his experience. It could have been anyone, it happened to be her. Anything interesting about her as a person sort of vanishes in the middle of the book and never exactly comes back. It's frustrating. This isn't as much housewife porn as it is exceptionalist old guy porn, in a way. It's inoffensive, to be sure. The writing is lovely, and the setting is evocative. It's a very fast read, and you could certainly do worse for yourself on a lazy afternoon. But it left a weird taste in my mouth all the same.

People Who Eat Darkness

Title: People Who Eat Darkness
Author: Richard Lloyd Parry
Pub Date: 2011
Genre: Nonfiction; True Crime
Nutshell: The mystery of an English woman who suddenly went missing in Japan

The story of Lucie Blackman, who disappeared in Tokyo while working as a club hostess in 2000, is a sad an incomplete one. Her disappearance ripped her family apart, and became a minor cause celebre for a time within Britain and other countries. The European stereotype of Japanese "strangeness" increased because of it. 

Richard Lloyd Parry tells a riveting story with access to all sides--Lucie's father and mother, who split in an acrimonious divorce years before her disappearance and whose mutual hatred of each other caused a great deal of pain and complication for their children; Lucie's siblings, a brother and sister who loved but at times barely knew their older sister; Lucie's friends, some of whom knew her better than others and watched her become someone difference the closer she got to leaving for a foreign country and the deeper she fell into debt; and the man accused of causing her disappearance in Tokyo. Stories sometimes mesh and sometimes are hopelessly far apart, and Lloyd Parry does a good job of keeping all the balls in the air and keeping the reader interested.

This is essentially a true crime story with a lot of history and sociology thrown in as necessary, due to most Western readers' general unfamiliarity with Japanese life and customs. Many Americans and Europeans may not have any idea about the sort of hostess bar where Lucie Blackman worked, or the feelings the Japanese have about Westerners in general and Western women in particular. The section about Lucie's accused kidnapper also deals with the plight of the ethnic Koreans of Japan and the racism they still face even in the modern era. It is much to take in, but Lloyd Parry weaves everything in without making anything boring or too much like a lecture. Lucie is at the center of everything and we are never too far away from her and the search for where she has gone.

I'd recommend this book for any fans of true crime or Japanese culture. The Japanese police don't get a shining grade in this story, but one could easily argue they probably shouldn't. Lloyd Parry is English and may not have all the cultural facts or understanding as an outsider, but I think he did a pretty good job reporting overall and I don't believe he set out to insult anyone. 

Methland

Title: Methland
Author: Nick Reding
Pub Date: 2009
Genre: Nonfiction
Nutshell: The effects of crystal meth on one small town in Iowa and on the US as a whole.

This is the rare piece of factual reporting that is so easy and quick to read that it doesn't feel like it's factual or reporting. For the subject, it isn't dry or particularly tragic or preachy. Reding manages not to demonize anyone or make anyone into a helpless victim or a villain. Meth changes people, and he just eloquently charts those changes.

Most of the stories take place in tiny Oelwein, Iowa, a place few of us could find on a map but which serves as an excellent microcosm for middle America as a whole. Once a prosperous farm and railroad town, the local meat packing plant eventually got taken over and started offering substandard wages before finally shutting down entirely, putting the majority of the town out of work and into meth. Meth is, as Reding puts it, a quintessentially American drug. It helps you work harder for longer. It's seen as a route to success. And with our Puritan work ethics and appetites for having the finer things, we are easy pickings for addiction.

Reding charts the move from homegrown "batchers" who make their own product in their kitchens, often blowing up their own houses in the process, to the more sinister encroachment of the Mexican cartels, who have no real organizational structure and are much more dangerous than the more familiar specters of the South American drug smugglers from several decades ago. We are left with the very real threat of the Mexican VTOs teaming up with terrorist organizations, each getting funding from the highly lucrative meth trade. It's a sobering thought.

Overall, this was a fascinating read. It covers so many topics, from the drug trade to the changes of small town life to the problems of policing in the 21st century. And Reding does it all with a light hand, never getting bogged down. He obviously comes to care about all his subjects, meth user or law officer or doctor or whoever. Everyone is a human and deserving of their own story. It's a remarkable book.

The Astronaut Wives Club

Title: The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story
Author: Lily Koppel
Pub Date: 2013
Genre: History, Biography
Nutshell: The stories of the women whose husbands went into space.

So, you probably don't know this about me, but I'm a big space dork. I know way more than the average person my age about the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. I wrote papers about the Saturn V rocket in school. So this book was more or less in my area of interest.

This is a pretty easy book. You don't have to know much about the early space program to understand the book, which is mainly about the wives of the astronauts and what they had to deal with. These were mostly all military wives, and the wives of test pilots to boot, so they were already used to quite a bit of pressure before their husbands were ever chosen to go into space. But once the men became astronauts, they also became famous, and women started coming out of the woodwork, adding a whole new stress to their lives and marriages. NASA was also a difficult organization to work for in the 60s, for both the astronauts and the "astrowives." This is basically a story of those issues and problems, and how the women handled them.

Some wives are better profiled than others. Obviously, the Mercury wives get the longest stories, since they were around first. Women like Annie Glenn, Betty Grissom, Marge Slayton and Rene Carpenter are characters in their own right and are duly focused on. Some of the later wives get much shorter shrift. Names become hard to remember, although there are plenty of photos of the astronauts and their wives and families for reference, which help. 

I suppose I wanted this book to be a bit more interesting, but I'm not sure what I was expecting. The life of an astronaut's wife wasn't all that exciting. It was a life of waiting and consistently being left behind. And occasional press crawling through the windows. I can't imagine what it must have been like, but this book does give a fair idea. But it did take me a while to read because it wasn't really gripping, but you can't expect that from this kind of history. If you have some spare time and are interested in women's history or the little-known history of the early space program, this is an interesting read.