THE MIRACLE AT SPEEDY MOTORS

I mentioned earlier this month that I haven’t really been able to stick with Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series. I do enjoy the books while I'm reading them—they’re warm, charming, and pleasant, with a unique premise—but ultimately I grew tired of how numerous and forgettable they are. I used to enjoy this episodic interchangeability from time to time; Law & Order has the same quality. But lately I’ve been thinking, What’s the point of watching a show if I can’t even tell whether I’ve seen it or not until I’m 30 minutes into it? Why spend time reading a book I won’t even be able to describe two weeks later? There are so many other things clamoring for my attention, things that might make more of an impression. So I’ve quit watching L&O unless I’m honestly sitting around channel-surfing with nothing better to do, and I’ve skipped the last few N1LDA books, though I still felt conflicted enough about this to keep them sitting on my to-be-read list.

Finally, though, with the lamentable layoff of my carpool partner forcing me into solo commuting, I’ve hit upon the perfect solution: audiobooks. I’ve never really bought into audiobooks, even though I know a lot of people who like them. I’m just such a stubborn old-fashioned book reader that I can’t help but think that (at least for me) listening to a book is Not Quite the Same Thing as REALLY reading a book. But on my long, desperate commutes, when even NPR occasionally fails to entertain, I started thinking that although I would never use audiobooks to replace actual reading (i.e., I wouldn’t listen to a book I really wanted to read), it might be a perfect way to get through all those books I only sort of want to read. Those books tend to be light and diverting, a good way to pass the time, and if I space out and miss a few plot points or artistic turns of phase, oh well.

So I tried it, checking the CDs for The Miracle at Speedy Motors out of the library, and it was pretty good—very well narrated, by a South African actress who handles all the accents and pronunciations masterfully. I did find myself getting frustrated from time to time; the books move along in a placid, leisurely manner, and I tend to be a fast reader, prone to bouts of slight skimming when feeling impatient, but while listening I was forced to give every word equal time and weight, which occasionally made me want to shake Precious Ramotswe for being so slow on the uptake. But at other times I was excited to get back in the car and find out what happens next, and overall I was suitably distracted from the horrors of traffic. I’ve already got the next N1LDA audiobook on hold, and I’m trying to think about which other books I might like to listen to (although my library doesn’t appear to have a large selection).

Side note: I’ve been watching the N1LDA HBO show on DVD and it’s really great. It’s impossible for the show to capture McCall Smith’s sly, gentle narrative voice, which is half the fun of the books (for instance, certain phrases, like “tiny white van” and “traditionally built woman” are repeated throughout the books until they almost become in-jokes in themselves), but the characters are spot-on and the cintematography is gorgeous.

NEVER LEARN ANYTHING FROM HISTORY

I have already professed my love for the online comics of Kate Beaton in detail. It pretty thoroughly sums up why, when I saw that Beaton had published a collection of her history comics in this book, I immediately had to buy a copy—and another for a friend. Sadly, I brought my own shiny copy with me to the doctor's waiting room during A’s hernia surgery, and there was an unfortunate accident in my purse with a water-filled snack baggie of carrots, and now the book looks like I’ve been reading it in the shower. Luckily, even if it will never close completely again, the pages remain perfectly legible, so I’m still able to enjoy the contents. Now I just need Beaton to publish a second book containing her more recent gems, like the Acton, Currer, and Ellis Bell one here. Or better yet, can’t a major publisher sign her up and give her a ton of money and produce a huge, gorgeous compendium? Get on that, major publishers!

THE FOOD OF A YOUNGER LAND

The subtitle of this book is A Portrait of American Food—Before the National Highway System, Before Chain Restaurants, and Before Frozen Food, When the Nation’s Food Was Seasonal—rather clunky, but it does sum it up. During the 1930s, the WPA launched a project to document American regional food traditions, but Pearl Harbor put an end to its funding and the piles of unedited manuscripts were never transformed into the planned book, America Eats. Mark Kurlansky dug the materials out of the Library of Congress and has assembled them more or less in their raw state, with commentary. I loved the idea of exploring these quirky lost foods (fried beaver tail, anyone?), as well as the background from Kurlansky describing the WPA project, but found the actual reading a little dry. Because it was meant to be assimilated and polished into a series of longer essays, and perhaps also because the writers were not always very accomplished, the writing is uninspired, often no more than lists of ingredients or sketches of recipes, so it can be exhausting to read from cover to cover. It was fun to page through (I was happy to see both booyah and lutefisk representing Minnesota), but I ended up skimming most of it and feeling unsatisfied afterward. This is an interesting historical document, but not an especially compelling read.

Just now, in double-checking the correct spelling of Kurlansky’s name on Amazon, I came across a link to another book, America Eats! On the Road With the WPA, by Pat Willard, that sounds like what I wish I’d read: Willard details the WPA project and includes excerpts, but also takes her own roadtrip across the U.S. to investigate how many of these foods still exist today. Darn it, why didn’t I find that book first? I’ve put it on my to-be-read list, but will need a break before I tackle it, as The Food of a Younger Land may have burned me out on the subject for right now.

VERA

Although full of the trademark wit and perceptiveness Elizabeth von Arnim demonstrates in the lovable Christopher and Columbus and The Enchanted April, Vera is much darker—a tragedy, rather than a comedy, of manners. The setup is similar to Rebecca (although Vera was written first; did du Maurier read von Arnim?), with an innocent young wife marrying a wealthy, secretive husband and moving into the home haunted by the spirit of his dead first wife. But in Rebecca, nothing is as it first appears to be (i.e., the husband is good and the dead wife a bitch); in Vera, it’s just what you feared: a nightmarishly realistic portrait of an emotionally abusive relationship.

I can’t say I loved this book, but only because it angered me so much, because it was so masterful in its portrayal of banal selfishness and cruelty. von Arnim alternates points of view throughout the novel, so for better or worse, you’re right there in the characters’ heads. This means that the husband, Wemyss, isn’t some mustache-twirling caricature of unspeakable evil, but a monstrously childish, needy, narcissistic control freak whose actions seem perfectly reasonable according to his own twisted logic. He’s the kind of character that makes you wish you could jump into the novel and punch him in the face, but you know that even if you did, he would never understand why you were being so horrible to him—in other words, he’s exactly frustrating enough to have driven his first wife, Vera, to suicide. (The hints we get of Vera’s constrained married life are chilling; for instance, Wemyss claims that she never left the house because she had no interest in traveling, yet her bookshelves are pathetically full of Baedecker guidebooks. It makes you wonder how she lasted as long as she did.) And the new young wife, Lucy, seems maddeningly naive to a modern reader, yet von Arnim gains your sympathy for her early in the book (after the death of her father, Lucy poignantly reflects, “Life—how terrible it was, and how unsuspected. One went on and on, never dreaming of the sudden dreadful day when the coverings were going to be dropped and one would see it was death after all, that it had been death all the time, death pretending, death waiting.”) and keeps you with her every step of the way, through her struggles and rationalizations, as she gradually realizes Wemyss’ true nature yet still, pathetically, keeps trying to find ways to make the relationship work.

In a way, this is a 1920s version of a Lifetime movie, with the Charming (a Little Too Charming) Meet-Cute, the Escalating Warning Signs everyone but the ingenue can see, and the Protective Motherly Figure—in this case, Lucy’s spinster aunt, Miss Entwhistle—whose instincts keep telling her This Man is No Good, who is ultimately proven right, and who must finally save the ingenue when the Evil Abuser reveals his Evil Ways. Yet von Arnim boldly explored these tropes before they were tropes, and (spoiler!) in her version there’s no climactic rescue, no spunky heroine finding her inner strength, no punishment for the villain, no happy ending—just everyone soldiering on along the same disastrous course. In my view, this is a classic feminist horror story on par with The Handmaid’s Tale (less extreme, sure, but far more likely to actually happen to you or someone you know). I’m not sure I’d want to read it again, but it demonstrates that von Arnim’s talent ranged far beyond the light, sparkling stories I love her for.

BETSY AND JOE

(By Maud Hart Lovelace; see here, here, and here for previous installments in the series.) Against the usual backdrop of wholesome high-school fun (picnics, auto rides, football games, dances, movies at the Majestic, ice cream at Heinz’s, singing around the piano), abundant food porn (“cold ham and chicken, potato salad, green corn on the cob, baking powder biscuits, and plum cake,” a midnight snack of “milk, cold sausages, and part of a chocolate cake,” Christmas dinner with “four kinds of dessert—caramel ice cream, mince pie, fruit cake, and plum pudding,” a party spread of “ice cream and cake and cookies and jelly roll and soda pop and rye bread and egg salad and sausage and cheese,” a breakfast—breakfast!—of “coffee cake and a plateful of cookies, thickly sliced homemade bread, and a bowl of milk”), and baffling old-timey fashions (“serge bathing suits, trimmed with white braid around collars, sleeves, and skirts, long black stockings, laced bathing shoes, bandanas on their heads,” “a tweed suit with a brown velvet collar and a brown tricorn Gage hat,” “the pink chambray dress which was made in princesse style, long and close-fitting, with white rickrack braid,” a coveted opera cape of “pale blue broadcloth lined with white satin, trimmed with silk braid and gold and blue buttons,” “coquettish little mobcaps, trimmed with lace, flowers, or bows of ribbon,” “a pale blue picture hat with the sweeping pale blue plume”—and what the heck is a “cravenette”? I’m not even going to get into the mystifying hairstyles), change and adulthood loom large during Betsy’s senior year (Class of 1910, woot!). I think that’s why I never liked this book as much as the previous three when I was younger; I wanted to read about kids, not grown-ups, and wanted everything to stay the same, even though of course that wouldn’t make for much of a plot. Among the major developments: Betsy’s older sister, Julia, is studying opera in Europe; several members of the Crowd go off to college; Betsy finally wins that darn essay contest; and shy, uninterested-in-boys Tacy is wooed by 27-year-old salesman Mr. Kerr (a bit creepy when you remember she’s only 17, but things were different back then, and Kerr is a good guy; the plotline seems much sweeter to me now than it did when I was a preteen and 27 seemed incredibly old).

As the title suggests, the main event here is that Betsy is finally dating Joe Willard, who after three years of holding himself aloof from a normal social life has become class president, a star reporter for the town paper, and a fixture at the Ray house. At the same time, however, Tony Markham, Betsy’s freshman-year crush before they settled into a sibling-like friendship, has suddenly developed romantic feelings, and because Tony is always just on the verge of getting into wild and dangerous pursuits (he’s now hopping freight trains up to Minneapolis and threatening to drop out of school), Betsy leads him on to some extent, for fear of alienating him. Juggling two beaus is fun for a while, but then it leads to hurt feelings all around (Joe briefly dates the Crowd’s most alluring girl, Irma; Tony runs away to sing on Broadway; and Betsy is generally miserable) before Betsy and Joe eventually reconcile and end the book making plans for the future.

I continue to like Joe much more than I did as a kid, when fun Tony seemed like the more dashing option. Having mostly shed his Mr. Darcyesque pride from the earlier books, which was sexy while it lasted but would make for a frustrating boyfriend, Joe comes off as smart, funny, noble, and respectful of Betsy’s intellect, if a tad overidealized (it’s a mutual lovefest between Joe and Mr. Ray, for instance). Naturally, I’m going to be sympathetic to any relationship built on a love of books, so for me the moment where Betsy and Joe accidentally give each other the same Christmas present, a copy of As You Like It (apparently, back then, “It was proper for a boy to give a girl only books, flowers, or candy”), was perhaps the most romantic moment, even above the scene where Joe declares that he likes Betsy’s hair in its naturally straight style (significant because Betsy has spent the last four years obsessing over curling it every night; Betsy thinks, “If he had looked through all the poetry books in the world he couldn’t have found a better compliment to pay her”). Of course, it was also hard to suppress an “Awwwww” after reading this:

Then he kissed her. Betsy didn’t believe in letting boys kiss you. She thought it was silly to be letting first this boy and then that one kiss you, when it didn’t mean a thing. But it was wonderful when Joe Willard kissed her. And it did mean a thing.

This was the first of the books that I’d read in the awesome new editions, which include biographical information about Maud Hart Lovelace specific to each book. The most interesting thing that I learned about Betsy and Joe was that “Almost every character in the high school books, even the most minor, can be matched to an actual person living in Mankato in the early years of the twentieth century”—with one notable exception: Joe. Although Joe is based on Maud’s husband, Delos Lovelace, (a) Delos was two years younger than Maud, and (b) the couple didn’t meet until after high school, so everything about their academic rivalry and halting courtship is fictionalized (in reality, Maud’s opponents in the essay contents were other girls). However, Joe’s life and character are still based entirely on Delos’ background, so you can read the books as a romanticized if-only-we’d-met-earlier version of their relationship.

THE SWEETNESS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PIE

If there’s anything I love more than cozy postwar British country-house mysteries, it’s books about brave and precocious young girls, so as soon as I heard about this book by Alan Bradley (via a glowing review in Entertainment Weekly), I put it on hold at the library. Maybe I let my expectations get a leeetle too overblown—although how could I not, when Publishers Weekly compared it to Harriet the Spy?—but once I finally got my hands on the book, it took me a while to warm up to it. I like my literary kids preternaturally mature, eccentric, and brilliant, but even I found it hard to buy Flavia de Luce, budding chemist and detective, as an actual 11-year old; her disconcerting lack of affect made the book feel flat to me. (Perhaps having read Ellen Klages set my bar too high—see The Green Glass Sea and White Sands, Red Menace for fully realized, spunky postwar young girls who have rich intellectual lives but still believably age-appropriate emotions.) But eventually, perhaps because I let go of expectations of realism, I came around. It may not have rocked my world (and Flavia can’t hold a candle to Harriet, so let’s just nip that comparison in the bud right here), but ultimately this was a fun, absorbing read and I’m looking forward to the sequels. Bradley has already been contracted for five more Flavia books, and although in the past I’ve demonstrated a tendency to fall away from contemporary series that showed promise but ended up generating too many similar books too fast (Thursday Next and the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, I’m looking at you), I think this is one I can stick with.

JULIA CHILD

After enjoying the blog, the book, and finally the movie of Julie & Julia, seeing her kitchen at the Smithsonian, catching a French Chef marathon on PBS and checking the DVDs out of the library, and then happening to learn that she grew up just a few blocks away from my apartment (without knowing it, I’d biked past both her childhood homes and the Montessori school she attended—which remains a Montessori school today—at least once a week for the past five years), I was thoroughly in love with Julia Child and ready to learn a little more about her. The definitive biography is Appetite for Life by Noel Riley Fitch, but it weighs in at 569 pages and I didn’t know if my Julia crush was just a momentary fancy or an abiding devotion, so I decided to start with this slender Penguin Lives volume (by Laura Shapiro, the author of Perfection Salad, which I read a few years ago). It turned out to be a great biography, zipping right along with just the right balance of facts and analysis. It gave a good overview of all the major elements of Child’s life, so it will satisfy anyone who has a casual curiosity about her. But it also added so many intriguing details and quotes (the description of how The French Chef was filmed was full of awesome tidbits, including the fact that Paul was backstage washing dishes the entire time) and raised so many interesting issues (not shying away from her flaws, including an evenhanded look at whether she was homophobic) that it made me decide I still want to read the Fitch biography someday, just because I want more Julia. Highly recommended.

(P.S.: This was the second volume of the Penguin Lives series I’d read, after Jane Smiley’s bio of Dickens a couple of years ago, and I was impressed with both. It kind of makes me want to read the whole series, because I like the way authors are matched up with subjects in surprising yet sensible ways—Carol Shields on Jane Austen, Bobbie Ann Mason on Elvis—and I feel like the books give me just the right amount of information; they’re not as slight as Biography episodes, but they don’t start off, as so many massive tomes do, by detailing the subject’s ancestors for generations back.)

THE MAGICIANS

The Magicians, by Lev Grossman: This isn’t quite a lovable book, but I really liked it, had a hard time putting it down, was still thinking about it days after finishing it, and look forward to reading it again, which for me is a ringing endorsement.

While the critical reaction to The Magicians was mainly positive, a few reviews I read accused it of being derivative. This is inaccurate and, I think, unfair. The book is knowingly referential and satirical, using the classic tropes of fantasy stories in a highly original way to explore what it might be like to actually experience them (verdict: less fun and scarier than you might expect). In a way, it’s like Northanger Abbey, with Narnia instead of Gothic novels. The main character, Quentin Coldwater, is obsessed with a series of World War II-era British children's books about a set of young brothers and sisters who find their way into a magical land called Fillory and have adventures there. Quentin’s fascination with Fillory continually motivates his actions throughout the book, for better or worse.

But it’s not just Narnia being referenced here. The Magicians gained a lot of buzz when it was published because of its familiar setup: An ordinary boy suddenly learns that he’s a magician and is whisked away to attend magic school. The similarity ends there, however; Brakebills is a college, not a secondary school, and Quentin is no world-saving hero but rather a somewhat self-centered, morally ambivalent, high-achieving student who, when offered admission to Brakebills, cynically (and delightfully realistically) wonders if it’s his best option:

Maybe he should ask to see a brochure….how much did he know about this place? Suppose it really was a school for magic. Was it any good? What if he’d stumbled into some third-tier magic college by accident? He had to think practically. He didn’t want to be committing himself to some community college of sorcery when he could have Magic Harvard or whatever.

There are nice little jokes about quidditch and hobbits throughout, but this is definitely a book for world-weary adults, not young Harry Potter fans. An early review I read compared it to The Secret History (thus sealing my decision to read it, because The Secret History was one of my favorite books at a formative age), and that’s what I was most strongly reminded of. (Runner-up: It also reminded me slightly of Pamela Dean’s (coincidentally similarly titled) The Secret Country trilogy, in which a group of children discover that the imaginary land they created really exists, but is more real and dangerous than they ever intended.) At Brakebills, Quentin falls in with a clique of brilliant, charismatic, debauched students who ultimately discover that Fillory is a real world, gain the power to travel there, and must then deal with the horrifying consequences of their actions. While the characters aren’t as fully realized as in The Secret History (one of my favorite thing about that book is how deftly Donna Tartt makes you feel first fascination, then affection, then revulsion, all for the same set of people), the tone is similar. Both are books that probably work better on an intellectual level than an emotional one. For instance, Quentin isn’t always likable (in fact, I occasionally wanted to punch him), but he doesn’t really need to be, since the story follows the shattering of his illusions and the ramifications of his own flawed decisions.

There aren’t a lot of warm fuzzies in The Magicians, but it’s not all darkness by any means; wry humor abounds. And Grossman’s world-building doesn’t rely entirely on others’ work; there are plenty of genuinely cool magical touches. As a bookworm, I loved his description of the Brakebills library:

Visiting scholars had been so aggressive over the centuries in casting locator spells to find the books they wanted, and spells of concealment to hide those same books from rival scholars, that the entire area was more or less opaque to magic, like a palimpsest that has been scribbled on over and over, past the point of legibility.

To make matters worse, some of the books had actually become migratory. In the nineteenth century Brakebills had appointed a librarian with a highly Romantic imagination who had envisioned a mobile library in which the books fluttered from shelf to shelf like birds, reorganizing themselves spontaneously under their own power in response to searches. For the first few months the effect was said to have been quite dramatic. A painting of the scene survived as a mural behind the circulation desk, with enormous atlases soaring around the place like condors.

But the system turned out to be totally impractical. The wear and tear on the spines alone was too costly, and the books were horribly disobedient. The librarian had imagined he could summon a given book to perch on his hand just by shouting out its call numbers, but in actuality they were just too willful, and some were actively predatory. The librarian was swiftly deposed, and his successor set about domesticating the books again, but even now there were stragglers, notably in Swiss History and Architecture 300–1399, that stubbornly flapped around near the ceiling. Once in a while an entire sub-sub-category that had long been thought safely dormant would take wing with an indescribable papery susurrus.

I can see why a few reviewers might complain that The Magicians left them cold, but for me, the book was so smart and intriguing, and such a clever commentary on the fantasy genre (I’m always a sucker for that intertextuality) that it was a slam dunk. I’ve added Grossman’s previous book, Codex (which sounds like a wacky version of Possession, involving scholars studying a newly discovered manuscript, but also somehow involving online role-playing games) to my to-be-read list, so we’ll see how that stacks up.

FINN

A follow-up to my rereading of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn last year, this novel by Jon Clinch is a dark, masterful take on the story from Huck’s father’s point of view. As in Twain, Finn is first-nameless, an outsider, a racist, and a terrifyingly brutal drunk, which makes being inside his head, as you are for much of the novel, a disturbing experience. The big twist here is that in Clinch’s version, *SPOILER BUT OTHERWISE I REALLY CAN’T EXPLAIN WHAT MAKES THIS BOOK SO INTERESTING* Huck’s mother is black, a runaway slave whom Finn basically kidnaps, abuses, and then eventually murders after she tries to seek a better life for their light-skinned son by surrendering him to the Widow Douglas and passing him off as a white orphan. Finn clearly cares for her and their son (at least to some extent, in his own manner, as much as he’s capable of it) but repeatedly torments, fails, and betrays them, in the end robbing them both of their very identities. The book makes you simultaneously sympathize with him and hate yourself for doing so, rendering his violent end (in that house floating down the river that Twain so eerily evokes, where Huck and Jim will stumble across his body) both tragic and victorious. Although—as Clinch himself acknowledges—there’s no evidence Twain ever intended Huck to be anything other than white, reimagining Huck as mixed-race does fit well into the world of the novel, helping to explain Huck’s thorough knowledge of folk wisdom and his marginalization (in Twain, all the mothers in town warn their sons to stay away from him). This wasn’t an easy read, and I’m not sure I would want to read it again, but it was a powerful and memorable exploration of some of the darker themes and undertones of Huckleberry Finn.

One quibble: Apparently Clinch irrationally hates em dashes, because they don’t appear anywhere in the book, even when they’re desperately needed—for example, to convey an interrupted sentence in dialogue, such as:
“I thought you said—”
“Never mind what I said.”
“But—”
Instead, in Finn, we get periods:
“I thought you said.”
“Never mind what I said.”
“But.”
This is both disconcertingly choppy and incredibly confusing, and it left me just plain annoyed. I understand disliking certain punctuation marks because you feel they’re ugly or overused; I tend to be peeved by lazy use of ellipses. But they exist for a reason. In the case of ellipses, no other punctuation mark can really convey that sense of a sentence gradually trailing off, and in the case of em dashes, no other punctuation mark can convey sudden interruption—and certainly not a period, which conveys an intentional ending. IT’S JUST WRONG. It gets in the way. It doesn’t express what you want to express. Who are you to think you know better than the accumulated tradition of grammatical rules and commonly accepted usage? This is why I’m not a fiction editor, because there are certain “artistic” authorial whims I refuse to put up with when they go against good sense.

SHELF DISCOVERY

Shelf Discovery: Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading—A Reading Memoir, by Lizzie Skurnick: I adored the now sadly defunct (I think?) Fine Lines series at Jezebel, which revisited beloved YA novels of my generation (Island of the Blue Dolphins! Jacob Have I Loved!). I was happy to see that someone else had read the All-of-a-Kind Family books, one of my favorite childhood series: “You should also go to Coney Island circa 1903, the better to plunge into the Atlantic wearing 8 petticoats, holding hands with your sisters, stopping only to get lost and be taken in by an Irish policeman ( ‘Air ye now! Well, ye come along with me...’) who buys you a peanut-candy bar and a lollipop and an ice-cream and it is magically not creepy at all.” And the writeup of Summer of Fear cracked me up especially; check it out for the Lois Duncan tropes alone (“The Malevolent Double,” “Perky heroine, just getting breasts, hotter boyfriend than she deserves”) if you read any of those books when you were a kid. (My college friend M and I rediscovered Summer of Fear in a used bookstore circa 1998, bought it, and passed it back and forth between us for weeks, each marking it up with mocking commentary, MST3K-style. Good times.)

So I was thrilled when I learned there would be a book based on the feature. The book is pretty much like the blog (which is to say, brilliant—both entertaining and insightful), and the only time I was disappointed in it was when I wanted it to be more like the blog (some of the pieces were excluded or shortened, and some new pieces were added). Needless to say, I now have a list as long as my arm of young-adult books I want to read or reread.

I’m deficient in Judy Blume, Cynthia Voigt, and some of the other YA classics because I didn’t really go for hard-hitting realism as a kid—I mostly devoured books about animals (The Incredible Journey, Misty of Chincoteague, Black Beauty, Paddington); the intersection of real and fantasy worlds (Oz, Narnia, Roald Dahl, Susan Cooper, Madeleine L’Engle, Alice in Wonderland, Mary Poppins, Freaky Friday), Olden Times, preferably involving hardship (Little House, The Secret Garden and A Little Princess, All-of-a-Kind Family, Anne of Green Gables, Betsy-Tacy, Island of the Blue Dolphins); and ordinary, mostly wholesome, adventurous, precocious girls (Ramona Quimby, Anastasia Krupnik, Harriet the Spy, Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, Pippi Longstocking). I was an advanced reader, but not an emotionally mature one, so I had little interest in reading about dating, drugs, alcohol, or other grown-up things, and by the time I was finally interested I was mainly reading adult books. I may have skipped the Sweet Valley High stage entirely (although I ardently loved the Babysitters Club for a few years), and I know I never had a V.C. Andrews phase. So about half the essays in Shelf Discovery had me nodding in agreement and recognition, while the others had me frowning in puzzlement (Did I read that one? Does it sound vaguely familiar?) or thinking, “Wow, this sounds awesome! How did I miss it?” (except for the V.C. Andrews ones, which had me thinking, “Ew! I would have hated this then and I would hate it now”).

My friend A was just telling me that she and her coworkers have started a book club where they read only YA books (perfect for book clubs, because they’re short, nostalgic, fun, and generally packed with issues) , which had me seething with jealousy. I want a YA book club! Anyone want to start one with me? At least maybe I’ll make reading or revisiting classic YA books a regular blog feature next year...er, along with the 200 or so other books I really want to read. Sometimes the amount there is to be read excites me, but often it just thoroughly oppresses me.

I suppose one solution is just to stop reading books about books, which are always guaranteed to make me want to read more books.

BEYOND HEAVING BOSOMS

Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches’ Guide to Romance Novels, by Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan. Aside from a few late-night group giggling sessions over the dirty parts of someone’s mom’s old collection of bodice-rippers when I was a teenager, I’ve never read anything shelved in the Romance section. Furthermore, I’ll admit I’ve tended to look down on the genre. But Wendell and Tan go a long way toward earning it my tolerance, if not my grudging respect. Even if you’re not a romance fan, their awesomely named website, Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, is worth checking out for its mixture of humor (I recommend the Cover Snark category, as well as many of the book reviews with D and F grades, in particular the review of The Playboy Sheikh's Virgin Stable Girl) and thoughtful writing on plagiarism (Wendell and Tan were the ones who broke the Cassie Edwards story, which you may have read about) and the joys and frustrations of being a reader (for instance, this piece). Similarly, their book is a hilarious celebration of romance-novel tropes (for instance, The Heroic Wang of Mighty Lovin’ and the Magic Hoo Hoo) as well as a levelheaded defense of the genre and a critical examination of its development, trends, challenges, and shortcomings (including the themes of rape, racism, and homosexuality). Even if, as I was, you’re reading mostly for the humor, it’s their affection for the genre that places this several cuts above all the “Let’s make fun of X” (where X may be Lifetime movies, Babysitters Club books, ugly cakes, or one’s own childhood writings) phenomena spawned by the Internet. In other words, they snark because they love. As Wendell and Tan put it:

Romance novels, we thought, deserved the harsh eye simply because we loved them as much as we loved the literary canon at which we were encouraged to level the power of our sexy, sexy literary analysis abilities…And when a genre is as crapped upon and denigrated as much as romance is, the only people we think are qualified to criticize it are those who read it and love it. So we brought in the noise, the funk, the snark, and the “Oh, hell, no.”

I didn’t feel inspired to check out any romance novels after reading this, but I was consistently amused by the writers’ sharp wit, and at least I’ll stop rolling my eyes at readers of romance novels from now on.