Loved it. I especially like the strong female character Amy. She’s one of those geniuses who’s too smart for her own good. Smart, neurotic, driven.
Here’s my favorite passage from Amy:
I was told love should be unconditional. That’s the rule, everyone says so. But if love has no boundaries, no limits, no conditions, why should anyone try to do the right thing ever? If I know I am loved no matter what, where is the challenge? I am supposed to love Nick despite all his shortcomings. And Nick is supposed to love me despite my quirks. But clearly, neither of us does. It makes me think that everyone is very wrong, that love should have many conditions. Love should require both partners to be their very best at all times. Unconditional love is an undisciplined love, and as we all have seen, undisciplined love is disastrous.
I appreciate her unconventional, but important message. For example, just because women are married shouldn’t give them free license to eat a bunch of twinkies and hoho’s. Yet you see this happening all the time. You have to care about your appearance. You want to be confident and sexy, not just for your husband, but for yourself too. Marriage should be a commitment to be your best self in honor of your spouse, but the way most people think of it, it’s like, this is what you’re stuck with!
Anyhow, I found that message to be refreshing and different. I liked the main character Amy, but I also liked how the chapters flip-flopped between Amy and her husband Nick trying to one-up each other. Drama!
Click on the image of the book to buy it on Amazon.
Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s book centers on women referred to as ‘wenches,’ slaves who are also mistresses to their masters. The main character Lizzie lives a comfortable life on the plantation of a lenient master. She lives in the main home, bears the master his two only children, and can read. She spends her summers at a resort where Southern men vacation with their black mistresses. Over several summers, she develops close friendships with three other women. Set before the Civil War in the slave-free state of Ohio, this is the story of the complicated relationships between owners and slaves, mistresses and wives, slave owners and abolitionists; and the divisive struggle for freedom. I highly recommend this book, it’s a unique historical perspective that’s beautifully told.
This was a book club pick: Cheryl Strayed’s “Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail.” I rarely read autobiographies or biographies in general, but this one is stand-out. It beats Jeannette Walls’s “The Glass Castle” and Gabrielle Hamilton’s “Blood, Bones & Butter” which I both enjoyed. The reason “Wild” is so good is because of the writing. Cheryl Strayed is a damn good writer. Carefully-crafted, insightful, it’s some of the best writing I’ve read in a while. I dog-earned so many pages where I thought she did a phenomenal job of capturing the experience, the emotion, and what she was learning from it. It’s the story of her at 26 years old in personal turmoil, coping with her mother’s death, a divorce, and drug abuse. She decides to hike the Pacific Crest Trail and details how the experience changes her life.
I finished this book a while ago, but quickly forgot about it. I never really got into it. Maybe because I couldn’t relate to the characters. Maybe because I thought the writing was mediocre. Here is my biggest gripe about the writing. Cormac McCarthy limits his use of character names. He’s constantly using pronouns (i.e., ‘he,’ ‘I’). He’ll do this for pages and pages until you’re scratching your head, wait, who is he talking about?! How hard is it to reference your characters’ names every other paragraph or so. The ambiguity was maddening.
Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge is the exact opposite of Vendela Vida’s The Lovers. It’s an old classic. It’s very much written like other serial page-turning literature like Charles Dickens. And it’s GOOD. So good. It’s been a while since I’ve read classic literature and I’ve realized I need to do more of it. It takes a couple of chapters to get into the writing, but once you do, you’re stuck in that world. There’s a reason why this is considered a great novel. You can’t find this type of twisted, smart plot in fiction these days. Plus I really got into the characters. They were well-developed with distinct voices. I liked that Hardy was true to his depiction of the main character’s hubris from start to finish. The ending was exactly the way it should have been, instead of the readers scratching our heads on how the ending can veer so far form the plot–which so often happens in modern fiction. I started the book on our flight to Austin and almost finished it on the way back, but needed another week. I’m thinking of picking another classic when it’s my turn.
I’ve got two book clubs coming up, one week after the other. This week, we’ll be discussing Vendela Vida’s The Lovers.
