S: The Stranger, The Space Between Us, & Suits

The Stranger by Albert Camus
Genre: literary

It was written in French. I’m recommending Matthew Ward’s translation, done in 1988 or so (as opposed to what I believe was the more common translation, done by an Englishman in the late 1940s). I think the publisher’s description best sums it up: An ordinary man unwittingly gets drawn into a senseless murder on a sundrenched Algerian beach.
 
How it starts: "Maman died today. Or yesterday, maybe. I don’t know."

It’s relatively rare that I come to a classic as an adult, without it already having been ruined for me because I had to write a paper on it for a teacher who saw all sorts of things in it that I didn’t. But I found this book to be more interesting than many classics. At least, until it was “reinterpreted” for me at my book club meeting as representing Albert Camus’ relationship with the philosophy of existentialism (though I’ve since found out that Camus strongly refuted this idea). But I recommend it anyway, as a fascinating story in its own right. This is not a particularly likable protagonist, so if that’s important to you, you should probably skip it. But the way events spiral is, to me, a mark of good storytelling.

The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar
Genre: general fiction

The Space Between Us centers around Sera, an upper middle class housewife of an abusive husband, and Bhima, a poor woman who has worked in Sera’s household for over twenty years. A life-changing event connects the two of them, and they're forced to make choices they never imagined. The story is set in Bombay, India (Or Mumbai, if you’re below a certain age).

For most of the world outside Europe and the USA, having household staff seems to be the norm, and the relationships between people who know each other as well as family but are most definitely not family is complicated and sometimes painful.

Suits
Genre: Television

This is a fairly new show – the second season will be on television in June. Basic premise: Mike Ross has a photographic memory, and since being kicked out of law school, mostly makes a living by illegally taking the LSAT for people. While doing an (also-illegal) favor for a friend, he stumbles into a job interview for a prestigious law firm, and impresses the attorney so much that he’s offered the job, even though they both know the firm only takes Harvard grads.

So far the show is doing a lot less with Mike’s photographic memory (which was what attracted me to it to begin with) and a lot more with the web of lies he and his boss have spun. Still, I’m looking forward to the second season.

Awesome tag line: "Two lawyers. One degree." And Gina Torres (Zoe from Firefly) plays a founding partner of the law firm. J

I: Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? & I Do Not Come To You By Chance

My “I” titles are super long!

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? by Mindy Kaling
Genre: memoir

Mindy Kaling is an actor (and a writer and producer) for the American version of the TV show The Office. I've only watched the British version (which the American version is based on). Still, the title and cover grabbed me, and the book was sooo worth it.

Kaling talks about everything from being bullied by the popular Senagalese boy in her (Cambridge, MA) high school class to accidentally breaking her best friend's nose during a play, only to have the producer force them back on stage to perform the last ten minutes for the horrified audience. She describes a guy as being really cute, in a "hottest guy in AP-calculus kind of way." READ. THIS. BOOK.

For a rather awkward segue, I’ll throw out that Mindy Kaling says she was conceived in Nigeria, which happens to be the setting of the next book… 

I Do Not Come To You By Chance by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani

Genre: general fiction

Kingsley graduates from university in Nigeria with an engineering degree, and struggles to find a job in a terrible economy. But then his father, who had been ill for years, dies in the hospital. The family is left with hospital bills they can’t pay, and as the oldest child Kingsley is now expected to support his mother and help clothe, feed and educate his younger siblings. Kingsley also wants to get married, but his girlfriend’s parents aren’t interested in her being with someone with no income or prospects.

So Kingsley takes up his uncouth cousin’s offer to become a 419 scammer (419 is the article of the Nigerian Criminal Code against financial fraud), and starts spending his days sending scam emails (with just the right number of misspellings and grammar mistakes) off to foreigners. He becomes a rich man. And then his troubles really begin…

I was so impressed with this book. Nwaubani managed to make Kingsley sympathetic without ever sugarcoating the fact that he was a criminal. Kingsley, Cash Daddy (the uncouth cousin), and the other 419ers are villains to their victims, heroes to those they help, irredeemably tainted to their more honest acquaintances – and altogether very human in their struggles.

And the book is funny!

G: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, The Ghost Brigades, The Giant's House

This is becoming a (bad) habit. I dug through all my print books, then realized just before midnight that the reason I couldn’t find my print copy of Guernsey was that I don’t have one. But I do have an archived ebook. Grrr.

Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society by Annie Barrows & Mary Ann Shaffer

Genre: historical, general/literary

This book combines elements I wouldn’t have thought could be combined in one book. I certainly would never have picked it up on my own, but my “literary” book club read it, and I’m glad we did.

General premise: In a series of witty letters, it tells the story of some Guernsey folk who formed a book club while under Nazi occupation. Guernsey is an island between England and France, and I believe was the only part of the United Kingdom actually occupied by the Germans during WWII. Much like the kids in the Narnia books (I'm assuming people are more likely to be familiar with those than with English history), the kids on the island were evacuated to live with strangers in England just before Guernsey was attacked.

The word I’ve heard used most often to describe this book is “charming”. And it is. It’s amazing that one could maintain such a lighthearted, humorous tone in a book about people trying to hold onto something approaching a normal life while starving alongside ill-supplied invading forces and watching their neighbors be carted off to concentration camps. I’m not describing it very well. Just give this amazing book a shot.

 

The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi

Genre: SF

General premise Jared Dirac is a member of a unique military unit nicknamed the Ghost Brigades, cloned from the DNA of dead recruits and then seriously genetically enhanced. Unlike the others, Jared was cloned from a living person, Charles Boutin, who has defected to the enemy with secrets the Colonial Defense Force is desperate to keep. At first Jared seems like a failed experiment as he has none of Boutin's memories, but slowly they start to filter into his brain, creating conflict between the viewpoint he inherited with his DNA and the soldier he has to be.

The Ghost Brigades comes after Old Man’s War and is one of my favorite SF books. I believe it’s the only SF that’s made me cry (and no, that’s not why I love it). When people who have never really read science fiction ask for recommendations, I suggest Ender’s Game (profiled earlier) and Old Man’s War.

The Giant’s House by Elizabeth McCracken

Genre: literary/general fiction

The general premise is daring – a twenty-five-year-old librarian named Peggy (who fits all the stereotypes of a librarian, except for her sly wit) falls in love with one of her students. James, like Peggy, is a lonely misfit. When she first meets him, he’s eleven years old, already 6’4”, and would never stop growing.

There are plenty of stories about men falling in love with inappropriately-young women. Very rarely do we see the reverse, and the author wrote a fascinating story without going anywhere gross with it, focusing more on the growth and tragedy both characters experience over the course of a decade as giantism takes its toll on James.

Child narrators

Jason O'Mara and Stephen Lang

I watched the season finale of Terra Nova yesterday. Check out the original script of the pilot episode. Or better yet, this summary. It started out as a darker show. Less-admirable main family. Less "shiny" colony camp. No watered-down plot to attract a general audience. Harsher premise that was, IMO, harder to mess up with lame dialogue.

Still, they're doing many things right - a science fiction premise, lots of minority and female actors, and Stephen Lang looking even more kick-ass and science-fiction-y than he did in Avatar. And dinosaurs; don't forget those.

But there was a point where the little girl asked if she could shoot the gun if their camp was attacked. Her mother laughed and said no. Like every third line or so in Terra Nova, it struck me as a missed opportunity. I wasn't sure if we were supposed to be surprised that Zoe wanted to shoot the gun or defend her family or what. There's nothing remotely surprising about that. When girls are allowed to be themselves, some like dolls, some like guns, many like both, and most love their families. I had hoped they'd set up the question for a slightly more imaginative reaction from her mom.

Which (very loosely) leads me back to
The Rich Part of Life by Jim Kokoris

I'd forgotten how funny and poignant this book is, and in rereading it I never once got that deflating feeling of seeing a potentially great setup followed by the most predictable result, which is what Terra Nova has done all season (I'm still watching it, though - there's almost no science fiction on television, and beggars can't be choosers).





Quick recap from my earlier post on The Rich Part of Life:

Genre General fiction

How it starts Teddy's mother played the lottery for years before she died in a car accident. On a mournful whim, Teddy's father plays her lottery numbers - and wins $190 million. Eleven-year-old Teddy starts planning out what he wants to buy, beginning with two mountain bikes for himself and one for five-year-old Tommy, and a farm in Wisconsin.

General premise Teddy's father, a civil war historian, hasn't yet recovered from his wife's death, so Teddy takes care of little Tommy and keeps an eye on his dad. When they win the lottery, in swoop his uncle (a director of failed vampire movies), and his great-aunt (who constantly exclaims in Greek even though she's lived her entire life in Chicago). Everyone in the small town wants a share of the money. Since his father isn't around much, Teddy gets the requests, including those from a classmate who regularly writes his African penpal to ask for money; the school officials who want a new furnace; and the hot woman across the street, whose son has warned Teddy that if their parents sleep together, he's going to kick Teddy's ass.

(Ordinarily I'd consider this a spoiler, but it's mentioned in the official book description on Amazon, so I'll use it as a "good writing" example.) Once the family wins the lottery, people crawl out of the woodwork to ask for money - including Teddy's biological dad, a wife-abusing low-life. Teddy's recently learned his mother was in the process of divorcing his absent-minded-professor-dad when she died, and hadn't even known he had any father other than the professor. In the background, Teddy's professor-dad and uncle are frantically dealing with lawyers and phone calls, but no one actually tells Teddy what he needs to hear - the only father he's ever known wants to keep him.

Anyway, he has this conversation with his five-year-old brother, Tommy:

Page 252 Quote
After I finished and was getting in bed, Tommy asked me if I was still his brother. He was sitting on the floor, sucking his thumb and hugging his candy bag with his free arm, like a life preserver.
"Jerry Ryan says you're just a half-brother."

"I don't know," I said. Tommy's question made my heart drop. "I guess I'm your half-brother."

Tommy continued to suck his thumb, a sure sign that he was deep in thought.

"What half of you is my brother?" he asked.

Child narrators

This book surprised and amused me over and over. It's cringe-inducingly realistic - adults can be shameless in the presence of money, and so often kids say exactly what they shouldn't, and keep to themselves the things that need to be asked or said. Oh, and then there's the civil war battle re-enactment they get dragged into, where, God help us, the organization paid black actors to be the slaves (because, they said, they didn't have any black people in their organization). Oy.

I wonder how this book would be different if it came out today. Teddy might be older, to draw in the YA market. Or Uncle Frank, easily the snarkiest and most outrageous family member, might be the narrator. Actually, I don't know what sorts of things people who write literary fiction are told - most of my reading about what every writer has to do this week is in genre fiction.

I miss child narrators. I've read more than one agent blog that suggests burying the age of an under-21 narrator unless you're writing YA. I'm assuming thousands of writers have heard this advice, too, because I can't remember the last time I read a newly-published adult book narrated by a kid. Such a missed opportunity for unique viewpoint.

This is why I profile old books as well as new ones - some things are just different from anything being published today. Different, and sometimes better.

More child narrators:

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Genre: YA-ish

I don't have much to say about this. It gets lots of attention, many people think it's a great book, and you probably read it in school.

I find Harper Lee herself really fascinating. Just one book? Apparently she wrote short stories before this one, and has some half-finished pieces she's abandoned because they weren't turning out like she wanted. I understand the success of her first book would be impossible to top, but still. Maybe she has a million stories stashed in her drawers that relatives will publish after her death and other writers will be outraged by because if she'd wanted them published she would have done it herself.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
Genre: historical

Unlike the one above, this is a book I keep meaning to go back and reread, partly because of how I felt about it when I read it, but also because in reading the reviews I'm wondering if I would get even more out of it now. Is this school-reading, too? I think I read it on my own.

This coming-of-age story starts in a Brooklyn tenement in the early 20th century, and follows 11-year-old Francie Nolan as she grows up.



Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney
Genre: MG?

Technically this doesn't belong here, as I'm profiling books I think were meant for an adult audience, whether or not they're sold as YA or assigned in school. But Diary of a Wimpy Kid, about a boy navigating the pitfalls of middle school,  is entertaining at every age level. It's also managed to offend people who think kids should only read about people who change for the better. Oh, well. I think Greg is sharp, lazy, sarcastic, self-centered, and totally hilarious.





More child narrators?

Lottery winners

In writing a completely different post about this book, I realized I'd read other books about lottery winners. This is my favorite, though...

The Rich Part of Life by Jim Kokoris

Genre General fiction

How it starts Teddy's mother played the lottery for years before she was killed in a car accident. On a mournful whim, Teddy's father plays her lottery numbers - and wins $190 million. Eleven-year-old Teddy starts planning out what he wants to buy, beginning with two mountain bikes for himself and one for five-year-old Tommy, and a farm in Wisconsin.

General premise Teddy's father, a civil war historian, hasn't yet recovered from his wife's death, so Teddy takes care of little Tommy and keeps an eye on his dad. When they win the lottery, in swoop his uncle (a director of failed vampire movies), and his great-aunt (who constantly exclaims in Greek even though she's lived her entire life in Chicago). Everyone in the small town wants a share of the money. Since his father isn't around much, Teddy gets to relay the requests, including those from a classmate who regularly writes his African penpal to ask for money; the school officials who want a new furnace; and the hot woman across the street, whose son has warned Teddy that if their parents sleep together, he's going to kick Teddy's ass.

Page 12 Quote

"When did your wife die?" a reporter asked.
"A year ago. A year ago today actually. Yes, today."
"She's up in heaven though," Tommy said. "She's up in heaven and we're going to to pay some money to get her to come back."

Lottery winners

I've known people who won the diversity lottery, but not millions in cash - not that I can think of, anyway. Apparently more lottery winners are back in debt in a few years than go on to live a long life of luxury. This American Life had a piece about a guy whose job was buying the remaining annual payments off broke lottery winners so they could pay their current bills.

The Rich Part of Life isn't exactly a rags-to-riches story, and the lottery is mostly a catalyst for change. Teddy's dad is the only one in town unaffected by the money, since, except for his wife's death, he already has the life he wants. Because his father can't - or won't - pay attention, Teddy gets a lot of the attention his dad should be dealing with: the confusion (and scorn) because they haven't bought anything extravagant, the concerned questions when little Tommy starts acting up in school, and the plethora of outrageous requests that is the daily life of lottery winners.

I'll write about child narrators in a different post, because that's a fascinating part of this book and where the constant humor comes from.

Pot of Gold by Judith Michael
Genre: single title romance? Romantic suspense?

I haven't read Pot of Gold in years, but it also revolves around an introvert whose lottery win upends her life. Claire's biggest problem isn't managing the money or the requests for it, but the rich parasites who want to prey on her and lure in her gorgeous, underage daughter with fame, fashion and drugs.

Claire is a thirty-four-year-old woman, and not particularly stunning or take-charge. Kind of rare in this golden age of aggressive YA fiction. How often do you see a fully-dressed adult woman (including her face! Sort of) on a fiction cover these days?


Burn by Linda Howard
Genre: romantic suspense

Jenner has finally gotten used to her massive lottery win. But a vacation with her best friend turns into a nightmare when they're taken hostage by a group that doesn't seem interested in money.

Leaving aside the Stockholm Syndrome aspects, this was an interesting experience for me. I read a lot about finance in school and beyond. Seeing the same information over and over in articles and web clips always made me wonder if people really needed to hear such basic things about accounting and debt. Near the beginning of Burn, Jenner's fumbling with a phone book, trying to figure out under what she should look up a money manager. The scene was masterfully set up, and eye-opening. More knowledge is available to us now than at any other time in history. But only for those with access to it.

Heartbreak

How to Say Goodbye in Robot by Natalie Standiford

I had a different book picked out for the "Most Heartbreaking" title, but I'll give it a shout-out at the end instead. This book snuck up on me - I read about a quarter of it and set it aside for almost a month. Not sure what made me pick it back up. I can't say I liked this book. "Like" is such a trite word to use for the wrenching experience I had. Especially since I might not have the strength to read it again. It was too hard on me. Maybe the same reason I haven't reread most of the books I'll mention here.

The basics...

Genre YA

How it starts Beatrice is holding a funeral for the new pet gerbil, Goebbels. Her mother, who had wanted to name him Peaches, calls Bea a robot because she's not crying.

Quote Location 132 - my Kindle version doesn't have page numbers; maybe they've updated since I bought it.

In Ithaca I'd listened to the radio to fall asleep - the Bob Decker Show out of Albany, full of late-night conspiracy talk about the pyramids, alien invasions, shadow people, 9/11, clairvoyant spies, the Kennedy assassination, and on and on. Somehow the paranoia in the callers' voices soothed me. I guess I found it reassuring to know I wasn't the only one who felt a vague, hard-to-define anxiety and was looking for something to pin it on.

General premise Bea's family moves all the time. Now they're in a small town for her senior year, where everyone has known everyone else since kindergarten. Bea tells herself she doesn't care, until she meets Jonathan, who everyone else calls Ghost Boy. He's pale and quiet and very white. The class held a funeral for him once, complete with eulogy about how much they would have missed him if he'd ever said or done anything memorable, and after that they'd jump like they'd seen a ghost every time he walked into the room. Turns out Jonathan actually had a twin brother who had been in a car crash with their mother. Shortly after Beatrice meets him, he finds out his father has been lying to him for years, and his brother is alive and in a home for the mentally disabled. Jonathan decides he's going to rescue his brother, and things spiral from there.

Heartbreak

This book has a desperate beauty to the friendship between Bea and Jonathan. The focus is definitely friendship, with dysfunctional families a close second. I don't think the friendship was a healthy one for Bea, but having a healthy friendship with someone as emotionally scarred as Jonathan would probably be impossible.

The characters were so real and so peculiar, in ways that didn't feel designed for their audience (whether that's the readers or the other people in the book). I don't think I'd particularly like Bea and Jonathan, or the things they did together. But I can understand wholehearted glee at something you connect with that just sounds weird when you try to describe it to other people (like the late night radio show they listened to), or dreading what everyone else is convinced will thrill you, and proving yourself right (like dating the most popular boy). A lot of stories about "weird" teens make them sound like they're rebelling for rebelling's sake. And lots of kids do. But in this case, it genuinely felt like Bea and Jonathan were being true to themselves, and were okay with being different because what everyone else liked would make them miserable.

This book made me cry. It was heart-wrenching.

Other sad books:

Fool's Fate by Robin Hobb
Genre: fantasy

Fool's Fate was my original choice for this post. It's been so long since I read it, I don't even remember the plot, just the gut-punch of how it made me feel. The idea of reading it again to remind myself freaked me out a little. It's part of a much larger story starting with The Farseer Trilogy, where Fitz, an illegitimate son of the royal family, is raised almost from birth to be an assassin for the king.






The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi
Genre: Science fiction

Jared Dirac is a member of a unique military unit called the Ghost Brigades, created from the DNA of dead recruits and then seriously genetically enhanced. Unlike the others, Jared was cloned from a living person, Charles Boutin, who has defected to the enemy with secrets the Colonial Defense Force is desperate to keep. At first Jared seems like a failed experiment as he has none of Boutin's memories, but slowly they start to filter into his brain, creating conflict between the viewpoint he inherited with his DNA, and the soldier he has to be.

My second choice for this post. It made me so sad I actually reread it hoping I'd missed something. I hadn't. I think it's safe to say this is the only SF I've read that made me sob like someone died.

A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick
Genre: historical fiction

Ralph Truitt places an ad for a "simple, honest" woman to be his wife, but the mysterious beauty who shows up is anything but. Her plan is to be a wealthy widow as soon as she can make it happen.

I think what made this book sad wasn't so much how it made me feel, as that the characters seemed to be living unhappy lives of their own making. Realistic and sad aren't necessarily synonymous, but both work as labels here.




Broken Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin
Genre: fantasy

Oree Shoth, a blind artist, takes in a suicidal homeless man and finds herself engulfed in an epic struggle between gods.

Probably the most satisfying sad book I've ever read. I can confidently say I didn't feel that way about the other books I've profiled. For the others, I might have been happier (and relieved) if the characters had made different decisions. With this one, the characters would have had to make a completely different but not necessarily better journey to end up with a happier story.

I'm almost afraid to ask about other sad books that work well. I'm not sure I could take any more right now...

Best Portal Story (and I mean that)...

So how do you decide what books to buy? When browsing a bricks-and-mortar bookstore, the first thing I'm drawn to is book covers. I've gleaned over the years that this is a terrible way to choose a book, but I can't help it.

Mostly two types of covers lure me in for a closer look. Traditional fantasy in the vein of:

                             

These are by Matt Stawicki, Darrell Sweet, and Michael Whelan. I had originally (unintentionally) grabbed three books with covers by Michael Whelan. His art is gorgeous, but I hadn't realized I owned so many books he'd illustrated. In contrast, I also love Todd Lockwood's art, but apparently don't own any books with his covers.

I'm also drawn to what is often called literary fiction, which i prefer to call general fiction (or lit fic, which makes it sound more like a genre and less like a college course). covers like these:

           

Which brings me to why I picked up
The Magicians by Lev Grossman

 The cover was obviously general fiction,

but the name implied fantasy. So I read the back cover (not everyone does this, which intrigues me - how do you know whether to go further if you have no idea what the book's about?), and then I read the beginning (some people open to a random page in the middle to check out the writing. Maybe I'll try that one day, but since I usually buy books on Kindle, it's not likely).

Here's the first part of The Magicians:

Quentin did a magic trick. Nobody noticed.

They picked their way along the cold, uneven sidewalk together: James, Julia and Quentin. James and Julia held hands. That's how things were now. The sidewalk wasn't quite wide enough, so Quentin trailed after them, like a sulky child. He would rather have been alone with Julia, or just alone period, but you couldn't have everything. Or at least the available evidence pointed overwhelmingly to that conclusion.

I was hooked. I liked Quentin. And more to the point, I loved everything the infamous New York Times reviewer hated (I'm not linking to it because, really; why?). Not sure I could have been more furious about that review if I'd written The Magicians myself. A Narnia-style adventure with gritty realism and adult fears and dangers and disappointments? How could you not at least be curious?

Genre I'll go with urban fantasy, since a decent chunk of the book takes place in New York City.

How it starts Quentin and James arrive at their interview to find the Princeton alumnus dead. The paramedic who takes the body away is gorgeous but a bit odd, and insists on giving them envelopes with their names on them, supposedly found in the house. Because James refuses, Quentin accepts his own. This quickly leads to his taking the strangest exam of his life.

General premise Quentin is a math genius graduating from high school. He's also capable of performing magic, and because of that is accepted into an elite, secret college in upstate New York. But magic turns out to be far more sinister and dangerous than in the fairy tales he'd adored as a child.

Page 20 Quote

"Good afternoon," he said. "You would be Quentin Coldwater."

He spoke very correctly, as if he wished he had an English accent but wasn't quite pretentious enough to affect one. He had a mild, open face and thin blond hair.

"Yes sir." Quentin had never called an adult - or anybody else - sir in his life, but it suddenly felt appropriate.

"Welcome to Brakebills College," the man said. "I suppose you've heard of us?"

"Actually no," Quentin said.

"Well, you've been offered a Preliminary Examination here. Do you accept?"

Quentin didn't know what to say. This wasn't one of the questions he'd prepped for when he got up this morning.

"I don't know," he said, blinking. "I mean, I guess I'm not sure."

"Perfectly understandable response, but not an acceptable one, I'm afraid. I need a yes or a no. It's just for the Exam," he added helpfully.

Portal fiction

I've always loved portal stories. Alice in Wonderland. The Narnia books. The Mirror of Her Dreams. But usually they're aimed at children, or they're a thin excuse for the author to more easily describe a new world from the perspective of someone with our background, rather than through the eyes of a native who doesn't find it strange at all. The Magicians is the kind of book I'd always wanted to find - an adult transferred into an alternate universe, and not on a one-way trip.

Portal books aimed at adults are almost always time travel. Time travel's great, but I want more books where someone's entering an alternate world, not just a past one.

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
Genre: crossgenre fantasy/historical fiction

This is definitely time travel, but chosen in honor of the book I'm anxiously waiting for. It's 1945. Clair Randall, a WWII combat nurse, is in Scotland on a second honeymoon with her husband. While exploring, she walks through a standing stone and directly into a skirmish between a Scottish clan and an English army unit in 1743.


I must say the Outlander books are not for the faint of heart. Until fairly recently, fantasy tended to dress up war and old-timey goings-on with nice clothes and jeweled relics and people who swore at each other using quaint expressions. This book has everything they left out - gruesome battles, disease, rape, alarming superstition, and people with a horrifying lack of reverence for human life.

The Mirror of Her Dreams by Stephen R. Donaldson
 Genre: fantasy

Terisa Morgan lives in New York (hey, something else in common with The Magicians) in a fabulous apartment paid for by her neglectful-yet-overbearing father. When Geraden comes crashing through her wall-sized mirror looking for a champion to save his land, he insists she's the one he came to get.

The Search for Fierra by Stephen R Lawhead
Genre: Science fiction

I read this in my early teens, so it's been a while. Orion Treet is abducted at gunpoint and offered millions to chronicle the growth of a colony on another planet. But he goes through a wormhole and, instead of a new startup, finds a civilization that has developed its own history of hatred and deadly conflict over several millennia. Based on the time-travel aspect, I would consider this fantasy, but it has...you know. Spaceships. Wormholes. Needle guns.





Any recommendations for adult portal books?

Best Unnamed Protagonist

Past Imperfect by Julian Fellowes

First I'll gush about being a huge fan of Julian Fellowes' period piece, Downton Abbey. Television doesn't get any better than that. I've also read Snobs, though I haven't yet gotten around to watching Gosford Park. Maybe I will today. Anyway, all this to say I was already primed to love this book.

The basics...

Genre General Fiction

How it starts The narrator finds a letter from Damian Baxter among his bills and daily mail. It's a surprise because he hasn't spoken to Damian in forty years. It's also a surprise because he hates Damian.

Page 4 quote

I hasten to add that I wasn't offended by this unexpected delivery. Not in the least. It is always pleasant to hear from an old friend but at my age it is, if anything, more interesting to hear from an old enemy.

General premise Damian Baxter is dying. He wants to leave his five-million-pound fortune to a child he fathered almost forty years ago, but his only link to the child is an anonymous letter. Even though they haven't spoken since their dramatic falling out, he asks the only other person who knew all the women he'd slept with back then to track them down and discreetly figure out which of their children is his - including the woman both of them had been in love with. The book seamlessly goes back and forth between the modern-day search and the London Season of 1968, when Damian Baxter burst into the lives of the upper class kids these people had been, and changed them forever.

Nameless Narrator

This book does many things well. I'm highlighting this aspect because I started writing a review and only then realized I didn't know the narrator's name. It's the most impressively unobtrusive use of this style I've come across. I didn't miss the name at all.

More interesting are the questions Past Imperfect raises. Would you do a favor for the person who ruined your life? Why would having inherited money, a family crest, and a traceable lineage inherently make people "better" than those around them, even when it becomes clear those people can't survive in the modern world without a system that props them up - and the system's crumbling all around them? Does it ever do any good to tell an idiot that they're an idiot?

Another fascinating thing was the "bottom of the top" nature of the narrator's life. He had the pedigree allowing him access to the aristocracy, but just enough to be invited to the right parties when someone else had canceled, and he didn't have money or good looks to make up for that lack. He has quite a memorable bit to say about being young and ugly.

You may have friends without number, but when it comes to romance you have nothing to bargain with, nothing to sell. You are not to be shown off and flaunted, you are the last resort when there's no one left worth dancing with. When you are kissed, you do not turn into a prince. You are just a kissed toad and usually the kisser regrets it in the morning.

The narrator felt this lack keenly, though he assumed those outside of the aristocracy, looking in, didn't see it. It's like that conversation in Good Will Hunting, where Professor Lambeau tells Will that only a handful of people can tell the difference between the two of them, but he himself is one of them. I guess feeling like a fraud (or more kindly, a visitor within the group you want to belong to) is not unusual. I love stories about people who live in the overlap between two worlds and don't fully belong in either.

Anyway, the quest for Baxter's child isn't the most compelling thread running through the book. It's the narrator's reliving of his past; going back to see people who made up the upper echelon of his social world, and seeing how much they've changed. For both him and Baxter, the social structure has upended itself. While people he'd envied or pined after were now trying to hold their lives together (financially or emotionally, depending on the individual), he was now a fairly successful writer, and Damian had of course blown them all out of the water with his fortune. But there's so much more to life than financial success, and as his father warns him near the beginning,

You've been made to go back into your own past and compare it with your present. You've been forced to remember what you wanted from life at nineteen, forty years ago, before you knew what life was.... Eventually, in old age, almost everyone with any brains must comes to terms with the disappointment of life, but this is very early for you to have to make that discovery. You've been rendered discontented when it's too late, or nearly too late, to fix, but soon enough for you to have many years ahead to live with that discontent.

Two other books where the narrator isn't named:

Old School by Tobias Wolff, set in a boys' prep school in the 1960s. Good stuff. Wish we'd read this in high school instead of A Separate Peace (John Knowles is dead, so, coward that I am, I will express a less-than-glowing opinion of his book on the internet).

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. I actually set aside this post while trying to summon up the motivation to go back and skim this book in order to write a summary. I read a lot of stuff in high school I have no real interest in revisiting. Fortunately, Sarah Rees Brennan did a fortuitously timely (and hilarious) recap of it on her blog recently.

Other nameless narrators?

In the beginning...

Nothing makes me happier than a good story, except getting to gush about it. So that's what I'll do - talk about stories (usually books, occasionally movies or TV shows if they make the cut). I'll focus on an aspect of the story that impressed me. Of course, books I love impress me in all sorts of ways, so some stories will show up more than once. Not many. But it'll happen.

I'll start with a random day where I list what I'm reading now. First, two books I read earlier this week:

Warrior by Marie Brennan
Genre: fantasy

Miryo has just failed her initiation test. The urge to use her magic will overwhelm and kill her (along with innocent bystanders), unless she hunts down and kills her doppelganger, Mirage. Unfortunately for Miryo, Mirage has spent her life training as a hunter and fighter.

This book is teeming with good-book traits - women who fight and think and aren't primarily seeking or worrying about romance, a world that feels ancient, where the consequences of misremembered history are real and painful. Needless to say, I'll be giving this book its own post in the future.

Open Minds by Susan Kaye Quinn

Genre: YA science fiction



I'm just going to borrow the tag line here, because it's brilliant:

"When everyone reads minds, a secret is a dangerous thing to keep."


This book will also be getting its own post at some point, but in the meantime I highly recommend it.

And the book I'm currently reading:

Admission by Jean Hanff Korelitz

Genre: general fiction

 

I'll probably finish this in the next couple of hours. It's hurtling towards a point I'm desperately hoping it won't really end up, but we'll see. Exquisitely written. And certainly the first book I've read set in the admissions office of an ivy league school.

So there you have it. What are you reading?