Reading Saturday
Jan. 11th, 2014 06:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhI am a few weeks behind on this, so have a random Reading Saturday to help me catch up!
What did you just finish?
Born Confused by Tanuja Desai Hidier. A YA novel about a teenage Indian-American girl in New Jersey, her white best friend, and the Indian guy her parents set her up with. The content and plot of this are fairly standard (teenage angst! love triangle! ABCD- American Born Confused Desi, thus the title- struggles with her identity!), but it's saved by having very well-drawn characters and an interesting approach to the writing style. Here's a random selection:
Then an interesting thing happened. A full-on trip down memory lane ensued, filled with remember-the-times and whatever-happened-to-so-and-sos. The emptier the glasses got, the further they went, the more visibly relaxed my mother became—and the less I knew what the frock they were talking about. This was also due to the fact that more and more Hindi and Marathi and Gujarati words began to nest in the conversation, like lost birds migrating home, until there was hardly any English left.
It felt strange listening to them, like they’d all shared another time, another planet, and you really had to have been there to get it. They were nearly giddy, in fact, all three of them. When they laughed it was together now. It was gut-clutch laughter. It almost reminded me of Gwyn and me.
Their voices became a constant comforting drone in my ears, like a fridge in a room when you’re just getting hungry or the whirring summer night itself, now beginning to unleash its insect orchestra.
See? It's hard to describe. Not quite purple prose and not quite complexity, it's just a twisty, unusual way of using language, but one which very much worked for me. I ended up liking this much more than I expected to. It's not doing anything unique, but it does what it sets out to do very well.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid. EXCELLENT book. A novel about a young Pakistani man who goes from top-of-his-class at Princeton to a very well-paid and high-status job at a small exclusive business firm, and how he turns from that life to become, well, a 'reluctant fundamentalist'. The really interesting thing about this book is also its style; the entire thing is written as a monologue from the main character to an American he happens to encounter in Lahore while they share tea and a meal. Because it's written this way, there's a constant awareness of what the main character is choosing to tell, leave out, or change, and why he's giving all of this information to a stranger in the first place. It's like the unreliable narrator trope taken to an extreme. I really liked it, perhaps because it's very well-written- somehow it's a total page-turner despite not having much action- and fairly short. The American character, despite not actually getting to speak on-page, also has a real presence, and one that becomes more important as the book goes along. Very good, and very much recommended.
Haunting Jasmine by Anjali Banerjee. OH GOD I HATED THIS BOOK. Our main character, Jasmine, is a high-powered investment banker, but really she just needs to learn open herself up to emotions and love again. This is complicated by her recent divorce, after her husband cheated on her. And it's not that I'm not sympathetic to her situation- I'm sure it would be very painful to be cheated on- but when the book asks us to congratulate Jasmine on somehow finding the strength to not turn her sister's engagement into an argument all about Jasmine... well, no. I am not super proud of a character for managing the basic level of human decency.
Anyway, luckily Jasmine's aunt was granted the magical power to see the ghosts of authors by Ganesh, and she has figured out that Jasmine is about to inherit this ability, so she invites Jasmine to take over her bookstore for a few weeks. There, Jasmine makes friends with the incredibly cliched gay assistant, does a great job of leading the weekly book club (actually the scene reads like the worst and most half-assed book club meeting ever) and falls in love with Connor Hunt, who she somehow does not figure out is a ghost until the very end, despite it being incredibly obvious. Connor is clearly an upstanding guy not at all like her ex-husband, because he is a doctor who worked in Africa (not, you know, a specific region or country or city. Just Africa):
He’s silent a moment, then: “In some places in Africa, the sky is so dark, the stars so abundant, the universe seems made of them.”
“What was most surprising to you? Or unsettling?”
“The extent of suffering. Preventable, treatable pain. Many of the people we saw had never been to a doctor.”
“Never?”
“Not once in their lives. Not to a doctor or a dentist. When I went as a physician, I found people with parasites, gum disease—common ailments that had gone untreated for so long, they’d caused other complications. We treated what we could.”
“What happened to those people after you left? What did they do?”
“That’s a good question. Even with all they go through, their life has a kind of warm simplicity. Ironically, they seem happier than most people here. They’re not inundated with advertising, with reminders of the material things that are supposed to make their lives better.”
A winking light moves across the sky, against the stars. A plane. I could hop that plane and hitch a flight to Africa, to a life of happy simplicity.
YUP. IT'S THAT KIND OF BOOK. Connor has suffered nobly during his work in Africa (the word 'noble' is actually used to describe his actions repeatedly), and now his ghost-self is here to teach Jasmine about how much more important it is to work in a bookstore in the rural Northwest instead of in LA, because everyone who works in banking is soulless and unhappy, obvs. The continent of Africa is a) not actually appearing in this book, because it takes all sorts of fortitude to endure visiting there, and b) basically functioning as Jasmine's Magic Pixie Dream Girl, but in the form of Hot White Doctor Man.
In the end of course Jasmine quits her banking job and takes over the running of the bookstore, because she has learned about 'happy simplicity'. It's just the worst kind of simplistic, stereotypical 'chick lit'. (I also need to mention the part when Jasmine sees the ghost of Jane Austen and tells her she's much prettier than her surviving portrait. BECAUSE I'M SURE THAT'S WHAT THE GHOST OF JANE AUSTEN CARES ABOUT.)
Ravan and Eddie by Kiran Nagarkar. A novel about two boys growing up in the same apartment complex in Bombay in the 1950s and 60s. This is well-written, has great characters, and is a fantastic exploration of differences of religion, language, class, and gender. It's funny in a black-humor way and has genuinely tragic moments. But with all of that said, the book feels unfinished. There's no overarching plot or theme; it's structured just as random stories and events in the lives of these two and their families and neighbors. In the author's note at the end, Nagarkar notes that he originally came up with the two main characters for a movie script that was never filmed, but that they stuck around in his head and he eventually wrote this book as a back-story for them. And... yeah, it really feels like that. Clearly the author loves these characters, but he never quite communicated to me why I should care about them. Every individual page of this book is enjoyable, but overall there was no weight to anything, or a change, or any reason to be telling this story in particular. It's worth reading, but it's not the sort of thing that sticks with you afterward.
And that is all the books I read in 2013!
What did you just finish?
Born Confused by Tanuja Desai Hidier. A YA novel about a teenage Indian-American girl in New Jersey, her white best friend, and the Indian guy her parents set her up with. The content and plot of this are fairly standard (teenage angst! love triangle! ABCD- American Born Confused Desi, thus the title- struggles with her identity!), but it's saved by having very well-drawn characters and an interesting approach to the writing style. Here's a random selection:
Then an interesting thing happened. A full-on trip down memory lane ensued, filled with remember-the-times and whatever-happened-to-so-and-sos. The emptier the glasses got, the further they went, the more visibly relaxed my mother became—and the less I knew what the frock they were talking about. This was also due to the fact that more and more Hindi and Marathi and Gujarati words began to nest in the conversation, like lost birds migrating home, until there was hardly any English left.
It felt strange listening to them, like they’d all shared another time, another planet, and you really had to have been there to get it. They were nearly giddy, in fact, all three of them. When they laughed it was together now. It was gut-clutch laughter. It almost reminded me of Gwyn and me.
Their voices became a constant comforting drone in my ears, like a fridge in a room when you’re just getting hungry or the whirring summer night itself, now beginning to unleash its insect orchestra.
See? It's hard to describe. Not quite purple prose and not quite complexity, it's just a twisty, unusual way of using language, but one which very much worked for me. I ended up liking this much more than I expected to. It's not doing anything unique, but it does what it sets out to do very well.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid. EXCELLENT book. A novel about a young Pakistani man who goes from top-of-his-class at Princeton to a very well-paid and high-status job at a small exclusive business firm, and how he turns from that life to become, well, a 'reluctant fundamentalist'. The really interesting thing about this book is also its style; the entire thing is written as a monologue from the main character to an American he happens to encounter in Lahore while they share tea and a meal. Because it's written this way, there's a constant awareness of what the main character is choosing to tell, leave out, or change, and why he's giving all of this information to a stranger in the first place. It's like the unreliable narrator trope taken to an extreme. I really liked it, perhaps because it's very well-written- somehow it's a total page-turner despite not having much action- and fairly short. The American character, despite not actually getting to speak on-page, also has a real presence, and one that becomes more important as the book goes along. Very good, and very much recommended.
Haunting Jasmine by Anjali Banerjee. OH GOD I HATED THIS BOOK. Our main character, Jasmine, is a high-powered investment banker, but really she just needs to learn open herself up to emotions and love again. This is complicated by her recent divorce, after her husband cheated on her. And it's not that I'm not sympathetic to her situation- I'm sure it would be very painful to be cheated on- but when the book asks us to congratulate Jasmine on somehow finding the strength to not turn her sister's engagement into an argument all about Jasmine... well, no. I am not super proud of a character for managing the basic level of human decency.
Anyway, luckily Jasmine's aunt was granted the magical power to see the ghosts of authors by Ganesh, and she has figured out that Jasmine is about to inherit this ability, so she invites Jasmine to take over her bookstore for a few weeks. There, Jasmine makes friends with the incredibly cliched gay assistant, does a great job of leading the weekly book club (actually the scene reads like the worst and most half-assed book club meeting ever) and falls in love with Connor Hunt, who she somehow does not figure out is a ghost until the very end, despite it being incredibly obvious. Connor is clearly an upstanding guy not at all like her ex-husband, because he is a doctor who worked in Africa (not, you know, a specific region or country or city. Just Africa):
He’s silent a moment, then: “In some places in Africa, the sky is so dark, the stars so abundant, the universe seems made of them.”
“What was most surprising to you? Or unsettling?”
“The extent of suffering. Preventable, treatable pain. Many of the people we saw had never been to a doctor.”
“Never?”
“Not once in their lives. Not to a doctor or a dentist. When I went as a physician, I found people with parasites, gum disease—common ailments that had gone untreated for so long, they’d caused other complications. We treated what we could.”
“What happened to those people after you left? What did they do?”
“That’s a good question. Even with all they go through, their life has a kind of warm simplicity. Ironically, they seem happier than most people here. They’re not inundated with advertising, with reminders of the material things that are supposed to make their lives better.”
A winking light moves across the sky, against the stars. A plane. I could hop that plane and hitch a flight to Africa, to a life of happy simplicity.
YUP. IT'S THAT KIND OF BOOK. Connor has suffered nobly during his work in Africa (the word 'noble' is actually used to describe his actions repeatedly), and now his ghost-self is here to teach Jasmine about how much more important it is to work in a bookstore in the rural Northwest instead of in LA, because everyone who works in banking is soulless and unhappy, obvs. The continent of Africa is a) not actually appearing in this book, because it takes all sorts of fortitude to endure visiting there, and b) basically functioning as Jasmine's Magic Pixie Dream Girl, but in the form of Hot White Doctor Man.
In the end of course Jasmine quits her banking job and takes over the running of the bookstore, because she has learned about 'happy simplicity'. It's just the worst kind of simplistic, stereotypical 'chick lit'. (I also need to mention the part when Jasmine sees the ghost of Jane Austen and tells her she's much prettier than her surviving portrait. BECAUSE I'M SURE THAT'S WHAT THE GHOST OF JANE AUSTEN CARES ABOUT.)
Ravan and Eddie by Kiran Nagarkar. A novel about two boys growing up in the same apartment complex in Bombay in the 1950s and 60s. This is well-written, has great characters, and is a fantastic exploration of differences of religion, language, class, and gender. It's funny in a black-humor way and has genuinely tragic moments. But with all of that said, the book feels unfinished. There's no overarching plot or theme; it's structured just as random stories and events in the lives of these two and their families and neighbors. In the author's note at the end, Nagarkar notes that he originally came up with the two main characters for a movie script that was never filmed, but that they stuck around in his head and he eventually wrote this book as a back-story for them. And... yeah, it really feels like that. Clearly the author loves these characters, but he never quite communicated to me why I should care about them. Every individual page of this book is enjoyable, but overall there was no weight to anything, or a change, or any reason to be telling this story in particular. It's worth reading, but it's not the sort of thing that sticks with you afterward.
And that is all the books I read in 2013!
