Book #8: Love Kinection

Title: Love Kinection

Author: Jennifer James

Grade: 9/10

“Every woman is a princess to someone. Or, she should be anyway.”

I don’t think I’ve ever had the occasion to bring this up, but I really really really really really like romance novels. Like, I walked into Half-Price Books one day and came out with a giant box of fifty books that cost me five dollars. Naturally, some of them were disappointments and the vast majority of them were regency, medieval, or otherwise historical novels, which, like any genre, gets a bit old when it’s all you read. The tropes aren’t fun anymore, the language gets tired, it’s just boring. I felt that way about the romance novel for about five months now and then there was this book, Love Kinection, and yes, the alternative spelling is on purpose.

Jennifer James taps into one of America’s most underutilized romantic resources: nerds. The two main characters, Abby and Tom, are nerds who meet at work, after Abby spends her morning tearing down cardboard cutouts of Cupid and dropping her phone because her sister is marrying her ex-fiance in Vegas exactly a year after he left her at the altar. Abby’s cubicle is covered in Nerdy Stuff, from her TARDIS mug to a plush towel with 42 printed on it. She likes Star Wars and Monty Python and Princess Bride, hates working out sometimes, drinks a lot of wine, and loves to cook. Although I love Tom, and trust me when I say that I really love Tom, Abby is the person who puts this book on her back and carries. She is a stark contrast to what you would normally find in romance novels, the helpless and innocent virgin who needs a big alpha male to save her. Abby needs Tom, but isn’t him that can save her from her past and the pain it causes her. She, ultimately, is in charge of her own destiny, and that makes all the difference.

Love Kinection is a lovely little book that doesn’t try to be anything more than what it obviously is. It isn’t high literature, it isn’t trying to send its reader some high handed message from the mouth of God. It’s fun and light-hearted and meant to be gobbled down like a bag of half-price post-Valentine’s chocolates. There’s nerdiness and video games and leftover Chinese and bitchy sisters and more than one awesome sexy scene, and all of the pieces lead to a very satisfying whole. Love Kinection may not be trying to change the world, but it does get across the message its male lead tells Abby: all women deserve to be princesses. Whether your princess model of choice is Leia, Peach, or Zelda, whether you are a damsel in distress or a woman ready to grab a battle axe and save a prince, we deserve to be treated with respect and we deserve to heard and to be in control of our own lives.

That’s a message I can get behind.

Long may we reign.

Book #7: The Great Gatsby

Title: The Great Gatsby

Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

Grade: 9/10

“No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.” 

Out of all the books in the American canon of literature, two are most considered “The Great American Novel.”: Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huck Finn and this slender beast, The Great Gatsby. Now, I haven’t read Huck Finn since eighth grade, but I have to side with those that favor Fitzgerald’s most popular novel, perhaps not for it’s greatness or novel-ness, but because at its heart it is completely and wholly American.

The novel tells the story of a young man from the Midwest named Nick Carraway who comes to Long Island to live in the less fashionable West Egg, across the bay from Tom and Daisy Buchanan and right next door to the titular Jay Gatsby. We’re never told much about Nick except for a smidge of backstory, but the horror of his misadventures at Tom and Daisy’s house is very clear. They’re horrifically boring, dull, and listening to either of them talk is like pulling teeth. But when Nick goes across the bay to Gatsby’s, the world of the American Dream comes alive. The parties are spectacular, the liquor flows free, and, most importantly, Gatsby’s parties have Gatsby.

Gatsby serves as the main character that is what makes this book, as the title suggests, Great. He stares off at the green light at the end of the bay because it symbolizes not only his dream, but the American Dream. We think that if we just push a little hard, go a little longer, that we can reach our own green light, but we never realize that that dream isn’t in front of us. We left it behind in the dust a long time ago and creating a perfect picture of the past does nothing to create the perfect vision Gatsby has for the future. He cannot have Daisy or the life and love that he so longs for, even though he has enough money to buy gold cars and enough whisky to crash them. But he refuses to believe that, and that, ultimately is what makes this novel so wholly American.

It is hard not to walk away from Gatsby without a sense of hopelessness, after having seen a man with, as Carraway says, “such a talent for hope” get cast down, but it is also hard not to hang on to Gatsby’s hope, to believe that we, too, will be allright in the end, and that makes all the difference.

Book #6: Ella Minnow Pea

Title: Ella Minnow Pea

Author: Mark Dunn

Grade: 9/10

“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”

Picture, if you will, the twenty-six letters of the American English alphabet, laid out as tiles that spell out the sentence above. Imagine that you’re entire life revolves around that sentence, so much so that the very language you speak and write in becomes an art form. It’s perfection in tiny squiggles of ink.

Now imagine one of those tiles falls. The Z. And it’s gone from the language, stricken from existence, and its use comes with pain and exile.

That is the world of the island of Nollop and the premise of Mark Dunn’s debut novel Ella Minnow Pea.

Written in letters, Dunn composes both a heartfelt dedication to language itself and an all too vivid portrait of the dangers of totalitarianism. The letters take on a quality of magical realism, and the artform that langage is on Nollop jumps off the page. I have been very fortunate to have chosen high quality books to read so far this year, but this slender beast just may be my favorite. As an English major, words are my trade, and Dunn uses them as a master artist would use oil paints, building from the center of the canvas out. I burned through this book and it left me delighted and more than a little afraid. Dunn’s portrayal of how the control of language affects the control of a populace is reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984. The creativity and eventual silliness of his writing as the letters begin to fall more and more frequently, reminded me of how Dr. Suess would play with language. Though all of his characters are well developed, more often than not they fall into the background and the beauty of language itself is left to shine.

Nollop was famous for his paragram, a sentence that contains all the letters of the alphabet  Perhaps Dunn with eventually be known for the same.

Book #5: Warm Bodies

Title: Warm Bodes

Author: Isaac Marion

Grade: 10/10

“She is Living and I’m Dead, but I’d like to believe we’re both human. Call me an idealist.”

Of all the yet to be created creatures on this good Earth, the zombie is my favorite. Crawlers, runners, stumblers, walkers. Big or small, love them all. So imagine my delight when I picked up the novel of a film I was buzzing with anticipation to see and discovered it was about my favorite kind of zombies: philosophical walkers still human enough to understand what they’re doing. R, the hero of Marion’s novel that, at times, is so deep I can’t even see it anymore, narrates his moral and physical upheaval at the hands of Julie, a human that he takes home instead of kills. He’s a zombie that’s too aware of his own humanity, however diminished, and it is the pure poetry of his thoughts that made me devour this book like a zombie with a fresh brain.

Marion does a fantastic job of writing zombies as the ultimate metaphor for mankind. The Zombies eat brains not only because they feel physically compelled, but because they absorb and experience the memories of the person the brain belonged to. It is this aspect of zombification that really kicks off the book. R goes with M and his fellow zombies on a hunt and obtains the brain of Julie’s boyfriend, Kevin Perry. As R consumes the brain, Kevin becomes less of a faceless victim and more R’s guru for How to Be Human 101. The book is amazingly romantic, following Shakespeare’s plot of Romeo and Juliet in all the right ways without falling into tropes. It’s also astonishingly funny with most of the comic relief coming from M, R’s closest friend. R’s living space, a broken down plane, is filled with memorabilia of what the world used to be, complete with Frank Sinatra records, and it becomes his own microcosm  a physical separation between himself and those of his species. The devil is in the details and Marion pulls his strings like a master.

Warm Bodies says a lot about zombies. It says a lot about humans. It says a lot about life. It says a lot about death. But mostly it says a lot about the spaces in-between, about the things mankind cannot fit into tiny boxes, no matter how hard we try. The beauty of Marion’s prose breathes new life into a genre that many have seen as dead on its feet. It can be read as a treatise on the zombie as the most human of monsters, as a mere extension of mankind’s ability to be mindless. But it can also be read as a testament to the human spirit, regardless of the condition it finds itself in. John Lennon, one of R’s favorite singers, sums what may be the point of Marion’s opus:

Imagine. It’s easy, if you try.

Book #4: The Hobbit

Title: The Hobbit

Author: J. R. R. Tolkien

Grade: 9/10

“In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit.”

Sometimes, it takes a modern adaptation to breathe new life in a book. Though my seven-year old self was a proud owner of the VHS of the 1970s cartoon of The Hobbit, I didn’t get the kick in the pants I needed to actually read the book until Peter Jackson’s adaptation kicked off this December. Now, I’ve never read The Lord of the Rings, though it is on the really intimidating list of books I want to read this year, but the films were and continue to be some of my favorites. I had tried and failed several times to read The Hobbit, to take that journey with Bilbo there and back again, and finally, about two months after I said I was gonna finish it, I finally did.

The back cover calls it a perfectly written fairy tale, and while I started out doubting that statement, it isn’t false advertising. Bilbo Baggins, the hobbit of the title, is a character that I saw myself in on a level that I haven’t experienced in recent readings. He’s not a hero in the way that we have been conditioned to think a hero should be. He whines about pocket handkerchiefs and misses his books and misses his little hole in the ground. He’s kind of like Arnold from The Magic School Bus in that the majority of the book his spent with him thinking that he should have stayed home today. He is the everyman, taken from the quiet life of the Shire out into the wild world with all of this danger, magic, and dragons, and even though he wants to give up, has a lot of chances to do so, he doesn’t. He defeats Gollum at his game of riddles, he saves Thorin and Co from the dungeon of the Elvin King of Mirkwood, he steals from the dragon Smaug, and survives the battle of the five armies to come home again. In the words of another giant of English literature, though he be small, he is mighty.

Ultimately, Bilbo puts this book on his back and carries you through it. The dwarves, Gandalf, Beorn, the White Council, the elves of Mirkwood, Smaug, and the goblins of the Misty Mountains, are just elements of a fairy tale without using Bilbo as the lens through which we are allowed to see them. Though the book functions as a prelude to Lord of the Rings, given the acquisition of the One Ring by Bilbo Baggins, it does very well on its own. There are things that you could get more out of if you read the books, but that doesn’t hinder the enjoyment of it as a stand alone story. We go there and back again with Bilbo regardless of its your first visit to Middle Earth or the hundredth  Tolkien’s prose isn’t fast and it isn’t easy, but it sure as hell is satisfying.

In short, I greatly enjoyed this first visit into Middle Earth through the written word and I am ready to grab my elven forged blade and join the War of the Ring.

Book #3 Kingdom Keepers

Title: The Kingdom Keepers

Author: Ridley Pearson

Grade: 10/10

“I’m sorry, my dear child, but there is no skipping this ride.”

As an English major, I’ve been trained to believe that reading and writing are “serious business” and that if you can’t understand something and don’t enjoy it on a purely entertaining level, it obviously must be the most amazing thing ever put in print.

Well, I say that’s bullshit.

I first heard of the Kingdom Keepers series when I was in seventh grade and still able to fill out book orders through my middle school. Why it took me so long to read the first one I could never tell you, but I’m sure it had to do with my mom thinking, quite wrongly, that I had enough books. After borrowing it, a mere seven years later, from a friend I met at university, I wondered if I would like it know that I had grown up.

In short, I don’t think I would have enjoyed it nearly as much as I did. I devoured the tale of Finn and his friends within twenty-four hours and throughout the entire thing, I was transported to a land where Disney World comes alive at night, the good and the bad. I knew of Pearson from Peter and the Starcatchers, which he penned with Dave Berry and is also very good, and was familiar enough with his style that I could dive right in, thankfully.

It is not shameful to me to admit that, at the age of twenty, I enjoyed a book written for young children more than many of the books that are in my curriculum. After all, something that’s important to the English canon may not necessarily be enjoyable. After being steeped in the world of high literature, Austen, and Old English poetry, Kingdom Keepers was nothing less than a breath of fresh air. It was creepy and scary in all the right places, from the laser wielding pirates to the dolls that come to life. It incorporated Disney lore, as well as the history of Disney himself, in such a way that it feels as if you could be a host running through the park, trying to save the world, and sometimes, that’s really all you need.

Important books are, obviously, deemed important for a reason, and there is certainly nothing wrong with reading and writing about them, but perhaps it is not such a bad thing to read a children’s story. To read about a boy and his friends and how they became heroes, to see their journey from skepticism to belief, and the wise old men that helped them along the way. Sometimes it is not such a bad thing to simply see good triumph over evil.

Sometimes it is not such a bad thing to believe in magic.

Book #2: Pure

Title: Pure

Author: Julianna Baggott

Grade: 8/10

“I was,” he says again. “And now I’m not.”

I’ll be the first person to admit the bias I have for the dystopian novel. There’s just something about the complete loss of hope and the regeneration of the self that comes with the territory. However, after a while, the forumla becomes apparent  and everything starts to sound the same.

Pure almost, almost, falls into that category. The beginning reads so much like something out of The Hunger Games, with the outcast female protagonist in the desolate wasteland of post-nuclear America. But when Pure gets going, it goes hard. It replaces the racism of our modern day with the grudge match between the Pures, who live in the Dome, safe from the Detonations, and the Wretches, those who were left on the outside to face death and mutation. The story centers around Pressia, a Wretch who has a doll’s head for a fist, and a Pure named Partridge, a boy who longs to get out of the Dome and save his mother. Baggott’s narrator is third person limited, hopping from character to character as the chapters progress, giving the reader a view of life from both ends of the spectrum.

While the story of how Pressia and Partridge meet and go on their adventure is certainly exciting enough to hold interest, it is through the side characters that Baggott’s prose really shines. The characters of Bradwell and El Capitan, boys who had to be men too soon, speak far better to the desperation, corruption, and loss of self that accompanies the disaster they had to live through. Lyda, Partidge’s girlfriend, stays in the dome while her boyfriend escapes, and her experiences shed light on the creepy rehab centers and gender roles that have been assimilated into Dome life. Finally, the character of Partidge’s father, the man who put the entire idea of the Dome together, is the pinacle of good science gone mad, a regular Anakin Skywalker who has gone to the Dark Side.

Pure is the first in a series, and as such, the ending doesn’t really satisfy. No one gets what they want, no one’s plot lines are resolved. They are left standing in front of a burning world, unclear of what’s to happen next, and perhaps that’s the best way Baggott could leave them for now. If there’s one thing Pure never does, it’s bullshit its audience into believing that the apocalypse was anything then that ugly, confusing, and, ultimately, twisted, and it is this honesty and unflinching fear to depict what wretched creatures mankind can become, that makes the whole ride worth it.

Book #1: Life of Pi

Title: Life of Pi

Author: Yann Martel

Grade: 9/10

“If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.”

There are few books in my life that I can say have changed the way I think about myself. I often change the way I see or think about other things after I finish a book, but it’s rare that a book fundamentally shifts my view of myself. Life of Pi is such a book. It is a beautifully crafted piece of storytelling, weaving a tale of religion, a lifeboat, a Bengel tiger, and a boy named Pi, into something that damn near magical. Though I feel it fails to do what it promises, to make the reader believe in God, it certainly makes you believe in the human spirit and the animalistic instinct to cling to life, at any cost, that hides just beneath the surface.

Pi Patel is the son of a zookeeper in Pondicherry, India, forced to move with his family to Canada on a fateful journey that leaves him stranded with a lifeboat and a Bengel tiger. He is a devout practicing Hindu, Christian, and Muslim, despite protests from his family and the holy leaders from each of his faiths. He loves God unreservedly, and it is this love, so fully fleshed out in the first part of the novel, that creates such a stark contrast to his adventures at sea. It is difficult to write about religion without preaching. It’s even hard to write about religion and not sound annoying as hell. Martel manages to avoid both with an almost effortless ease.

With a superb first part under his belt, it is disappointing that the second part is so, well, long. For the majority of Pi’s journey through the Pacific, I was caught up with what was going on with him. The constant threat of death from animals, especially the tiger Richard Parker, keeps the tension up and the reader intrigued. But as time goes on, the novel suffers from what some may consider to be Moby Dick Syndrome. The various facets of how to survive at sea become tedious. Pi falls into a routine in his months at sea, and like the endless ocean around them, it all just starts to look the same.

Martel redeems himself with an ending that doesn’t satisfy, on purpose. The reader is told a story with Pi’s voice, a version of what happened to Pi that doesn’t involve the animals. A Chinese cargo ship worker stands in for a zebra with a broken leg, a French cook is a hyaena ravishing everything in his path, and Pi’s mother becomes the gentle but dangerous orangutan. Pi himself stands in for Richard Parker. He becomes the animal he spent the entire book fearing.

We are not told which story is true, we’re never told if anything we have read is what actually happened, but when asked the Japanese officials who have come to interview the now safe Pi tell him the better one is the one with the animals. The one that doesn’t have the humans stripped bare of the mask of civilization they wear with such pride. People don’t deal well with the possibility that we may be no better than the animals in the zoo.

It is possible that Pi was no exception, and perhaps it is best that we never know.

Thank you, and, as always, happy reading.

The Fifty Book Challenge

Hello, my name is Rachel, and I’m a 20 year old college student from Cleveland, Ohio, just trying to get a few more books into my life. I’m going to be reading and reviewing at least fifty books this year, and this blog (yes, this one right here) is where all the magic is going to happen. As time goes on, I’ll be putting together directories, be reviewing much more than just books, and sharing a little bit of my writing and general life adventures. Please stick with me throughout this year, and feel free to drop me a line or recommendation. 

Thank you, and, as always, happy reading.