Why You Must Worship Librarians

My good friend Obajoo found this and I can't help but pass it along. Chances are, if you read this blog you will appreciate this:

Why You Should Worship Librarians

Man, makes me want to go in for my MLS!

Review: Coraline

It's a good thing I went to the library yesterday, because I woke up this morning S-I-C-K. I think I've caught my annual summer cold. Thankfully I have a nurse for a mom, plenty of throat antiseptic, and the wonderful, horrible freedom of unemployment.

At any rate, the first on my reading list (and #41 in my overall count this year!) was Coraline by Neil Gaiman. I did not see the movie (I do not have fond associations with stop-motion claymation, and there were plenty of other good movies I wanted to see at the time), but I thought I had pretty much figured it out from the trailer. I was very wrong, and greatly underestimated Gaiman's command of the English language. It turned out to be quite the delicious, if horrifying, treat.

Genre: novel, children's

Plot: Coraline is an adventurous young girl who one day wanders into a mysterious door in her home, and gets caught up in a dream-world somewhat akin to what I think a Tim Burton and Lewis Carroll collaboration would be like.

The plot was deceptively simple, and yet--like Gaiman's prose itself--the more you pondered it, the greater it seemed to get. It is easy to summarize, but very well crafted. Equally, the villains don't seem particularly gruesome, but somehow they are still pretty scary.

Structure: The thirteen short chapters were well paced; I finished it in about 2 hours. After so many books with prologues, epilogues, etc. etc., it was refreshing to get just a straight-forward narrative structure.

Execution: This is my first encounter with Gaiman, but I'm quite impressed. His prose reminded me greatly of C. S. Lewis (an all-time favorite author), in that what was said had a charming sort of polish to it, the kind that generates a quiet smile or amusing smirk. It was also very similar to the Alice in Wonderland series, only with more deliberately creepy elements.

I think in this instance, a sample is well-justified. Here was on my my favorite passages:
"Miss Spink and Miss Forcible made a point of telling Coraline how dangerous the well was, and they warned her to be sure she kept away from it. So Coraline set off to explore for it, so that she knew where it was, to keep away from it properly."

Theme: England, children's fantasy/horror

Read this if you're in the mood for children's horror. I know that sounds stupid, but that's really the best way I can describe this. Besides, I'm sick remember?

4 out of 5 stars

Other works:
Gaiman is an amazingly proficient author with awards in SEVERAL fields. I will here only focus on his other novels:
Neverwhere
Stardust
American Gods
Anansi Boys
The Graveyard Book

If you liked this, you might also like:
Kipling's The Jungle Book
Carroll's aforementioned Alice in Wonderland
Lewis' classic The Chronicles of Narnia

Wove, Twu Wove

Just for the record, I want everyone to know I have the best fiancé ever.

"So, you want to go by the library?" he asked me this morning.

"Sure, but what do you want to go for?"

"Oh, nothing really. I just thought it'd be something you would enjoy."

Now there's a man after my own heart.

Review: Mary of Nazareth

Is there anything worse than the heart-wrenching sense of betrayal?

You think you know someone. You read three of there books and enjoy them thoroughly, and then WHAM! The fourth one comes way out of left field, slaps you silly, then laughs as you whimper and curl into a ball. And then it starts kicking you.

Ok, ok, I exaggerate, but only a little. It's true I am (was?) a fan of Marek Halter, a French novelist whose prior three entries, the highly-lauded Canaan Triology, focused on some of the well-known women of the Old Testament. Sarah. Zipporah. Lilah (well ok, she was fictional, but she still was very well imagined). So I guess after tackling the Old Testament, Halter decided to take on Mary of Nazareth. Too bad his ego got in the way of his research, because this novel was offensive not just as a Christian, but as a student of history.

Genre: novel, historical fiction

Plot: The world knows Mary of Nazareth as the Virgin who gave birth to Jesus. But you can forget all the stereotypes you normally think of when you imagine her, because Halter sets out to make her into a post-modern feminist, complete with radical ideas formed with shallow words and empty cliches. This Mary is a philosophy-touting, ghost-talking, down-with-the-man shouting rebel who ASKS God to give her the Messiah to birth. At first I was surprised at Halter's portrayal, but it began to make much more sense when in the last few pages he reveals that he (supposedly - I don't really buy it) discovered the Gospel of Mary, which is what he based his work on.

What really bothers me though, is not just that this is not the Mary of the Bible, but that this Mary is not at all authentic. And if you're going to write a historical novel, you had better be authentic. There are so many instances where ideas flow out of the character's mouths that would have been unthinkable to the Jews of the day, even the radical ones. It's clear that Halter based his work entirely on this gnostic gospel, which scholars know is a very late source, and ignored a lot of other historical (and may I add, secular) works that would have given him a more solid historical base.

In more objective terms, I found the plot extremely predictable and the dialogue wooden and contrived.

Structure: A short prologue, the rest of the novel in two bulk chunks, and an epilogue where Halter confesses (contrives?) how he discovered the Gospel of Mary in Poland.

Execution: Halter's prose is bulky and unrefined. There's just no polish to anything. As I said earlier, I really found the dialogue lacking, too. Overall it came off as a slipshod work without any real forethought.

Theme: first century Israel, Essenes, Barabbas, Mary

Read this if you're a fan of the Jesus Seminar

1 out of 5 stars

Other works:
Lilah
Zipporah
Sarah
The Book of Abraham
Stories of Deliverance

If you liked this, you might also like:
Donna Jo Napoli (one of my favorite childhood authors)'s Song of the Magdalene is a much more compelling version of Mary of Magdalene's story

Review: Waiting

A few months ago, I mentioned that Janice Y. K. Lee (author of listed her favorite books at her site. My local library actually had one of her recommendations so I decided to give it a try.

Lee described Ha Jin's Waiting as "deliberate, painstaking prose by a master of extrapolation." For the most part I found this blurb accurate, but what really blew me away was the author's uncanny emotional realism.

Genre: novel

Plot: Lin Kong is a man conflicted. On the one hand, he is an army doctor of a respectable rank living in a fairly large city in Communist China circa 1960s and falling in love with head nurse Manna Wu. But due to government policies and the intricacies of his own heart, he cannot divorce his country wife Shuyu with her bound feet and backwards ways, living in his hometown and caring for their daughter Hua. Each year for 17 years, Lin returns to his small village and attempts to divorce his wife. But each year he is denied. This year, he promises life will be different, but he cannot foresee all the ways his world will change.

Structure: Fairly typical structure: prologue is set in the current time, the subsequent middle chunk is set in the more distant past chronologically plowing along until the prologue's events, and the conclusion is the aftermath.

Execution: Ha Jin's prose is indeed quite deliberate, and strangely moving in its subtlety. His main strength is his ability to capture, in a more convincing way than I think I have read in a long while, the way people process situations emotionally. So often I think that we as readers fill in the gaps with a few clues that authors present, the way that our brains subconsciously fill in the words of a friend's sentence on a noisy street. But Jin's book does all the work for us, and the result is a wonderful emotional story if not a very exciting or surprising one plot wise.

It's also one of the most aptly-named books I've ever come across.
Theme: Communist China, 1950s-80s.

Read this if all the summer blockbusters have left you wanting some emotional storytelling instead of all the high-gloss explosions.

3 out of 5 stars

Other works:
He's written several poetry and short story collections, but his other novels are
In the Pond
The Crazed
War Trash
A Free Life


If you liked this, you might also like:
Nicole Mones' The Last Chinese Chef and Lost in Translation
Janice Y. K. Lee's The Piano Teacher
Janette Turner Hospital's Orpheus Lost

Review: The Witch of Cologne

One of the many, many, MANY things I've done in the past 10 days while in Chicago was finishing Tobsha Learner's The Witch of Cologne. I was a fan of Learner's Soul (2008), which I found highly enjoyable (but not "unputdownable" as one critic lauded), so I was pretty eager to test this one out.

The Witch of Cologne is set in the late 17th century Germany, when the chaos of the Thirty Year's War, the plague, the Spanish Inquisition, and racism still rocked the fledging country-state of Cologne. The main character, Ruth, is a Jewish (actually she's more modern-atheist-Jewish than medieval-Jewish) midwife whose dangerous ideas about philosophy, science, and mankind land her firmly in opposition with the Inquisition. As if that wasn't hard enough, the book is replete with gory details of medieval life that make it a marvel anyone survived long enough to breed more miserable miscreants.

Genre: historical fiction

Plot: Learner started strong, really strong, but she got carried away a la Peter "which ending is the real one?" Jackson. There were at least 3 times when I was confounded by uncomfortable juxtaposition between the emotional closure I felt on the page and the blunt fact that there were still more pages to read. On top of this, the novel was just far too predictable. The climax was hardly climactic (unlike the numerous, NUMEROUS sexual liasons) and the offing of the main villain just plain weird. It felt very deus ex machina, and I found myself once again saddened that a plot with such promise was sacrificed to poor planning on the author's part. The biggest problem was that it was dragged on too far and lost a good deal of the emotional energy an earlier closing in the plot would have provided.

Plus, I for one got bored reading about a certain priest's fondness for cunnilingus (6 different instances, by the way).

The supernatural elements were gimmicky, too. Even as a woman of faith I found them far too Hollywood to be very effective, and particularly the aforementioned final scene of the inquisitor. I nearly laughed aloud. But the tension that Ruth felt between science/logic/knowledge and faith/superstition/the supernatural is a real enough one that I and many of my friends can relate to. I guess I can say one good thing about this book after all!

Structure: Learner's book is divided into 10 sections which roughly (I imagine) follow the 10 divisions of the Kabbala holy book, the Zohar. A good idea, perhaps, but often I failed to see the connection between plot and supposed heading, so it ended up just feeling rather arbitrary.

Execution and Style: If there was a portion of this book that wasn't mediocre at best, this was it. Learner writes beautifully, although Jasper Fforde she is not. Still, her background as a playwright is quite clear in the theatrical atmosphere, and she writes almost entirely in the third-person present tense.

Theme: The Thirty Year's War, Benedict Spinoza, Kabbalism, Lilith, medival midwifery

Read This If: you're feeling medieval-y but all your D&D friends are out LARPing without you.

2 out of 5 stars.

Other Works:
Soul
Quiver (anthology)

If you liked this, you might also like:
Philippa Gregory's The Other Boleyn Girl
Ken Follett's World Without End
Theresa Tomlinson's The Forestwife