Author Archives: Kinsey

Every Day

by Kinsey

As with Gone Girl, I feel like I’m making a fairly unoriginal recommendation here, but Every Day by David Levithan is so good that I will be the latest in a long line of people saying how awesome it is. In fact, when Anna and I saw John Green speak recently, he even specifically recommended this book to the audience. (He and Levithan wrote another awesome book together called Will Grayson, Will Grayson, so they’re clearly friends, but it’s a good recommendation nonetheless.)

Okay, stay with me here, because this is going to sound odd. Every Day is about a teenager who wakes up every morning in the body of someone else. Sometimes it’s a boy, sometimes it’s a girl, but it’s always a teenager, and always someone within a few hours of the person the day before. On one day the main character (who has no name and no gender) falls in love with a girl, and after a lifetime of floating through bodies without leaving a trace, there is suddenly a reason to try to take control and get back to this girl.

Now, this sounds pretty high-concept and I held off reading this book for a while–it sounded sort of overdone and like it would be a slog. But the writing is clean and elegant, and the conceit of changing bodies every day comes to feel normal very soon, allowing the reader to focus on the story. Levithan not only makes his central idea functional, but by the end of the book it seems almost normal–plausible, even.

It’s not a cheery book–I’m going to call it “tinged with sadness”–but it’s both a good story and an impressive feat of writing. Made even more impressive because reading it doesn’t feel like it takes any effort at all.

Attachments

by Kinsey

I’ve mentioned Linda Holmes of NPR and the fabulous Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast here before–both the blog and the podcast are wonderful places to hear intelligent talk about movies, TV, music, other podcasts, and all sorts of other good pop culture-y things. I wouldn’t have said that they talked about books that much, but I’ve gotten a couple of good recommendations from them lately. Gone Girl was something I was probably going to read anyway, and their recommendation just encouraged me, but I would never have found Attachments without Linda’s recommendation on a recent episode, so I am passing it along.

Written by Rainbow Rowell (who has maybe the best author name ever), it’s the story of a guy working in IT at a small-town newspaper during late 1999. His job is to read the employee emails that have been flagged as inappropriate content and issue warnings to the employees, but he finds himself so interested in the emails that two women at the paper are exchanging that he can’t bear to stop them. In fact, he finds himself falling in love with one of them–but can anything ever come of a relationship with such a beginning?

Does that make the book sound creepy? It’s not at all, it’s sweet! The main character knows he’s in a potentially creepy situation and spends a lot of the book trying to figure out how to make it less so. And the emails between the two women are fun, and give the book a very epistolary feeling. Plus, all the references to Y2K are sort of charmingly retro. Remember when were so worried about that? Remember when email was so new and fun? I would describe this book as light, but thoughtful–it’s a sweet romance, but the lives of the people involved feel very real and important.

So at this point, I’ve got a 100% satisfaction record with Pop Culture Happy Hour recommendations and I will do whatever they tell me to do. (But even they can’t make me read comic books.)

Most Awesome Things I Saw On the Internet This Week

by Kinsey

No book review today, although I’m working on a post about Tana French because I just finished her latest and thought it was amazing. But I did want to quickly share the two greatest things I’ve seen online this week.

First, another book review blog that has the BEST NAME EVER: Clear Eyes, Full Shelves. The best, right? (If you don’t get it, you need to go watch yourself some Friday Night Lights.) I am both mad that I did not think of this myself and admiring of them that they did. Plus, they cover YA and fantasy and have all sorts of good lists of books. And, they offer a recommendation service! You fill out a form saying what you’re looking for, and they will recommend your next book! Go check them out.
Second, I must have seen this in twelve places on the Internet today, but I need to do my part to make sure no one misses this genius cartoon. You’ll want to devote some time to this one–once you start clicking and dragging, it just goes on and on, and there seem to be endless wonderful things to find.

The Many Books of Cassandra Clare

by Kinsey

Sometimes when I see an interesting book and realize it’s the first in a series, I feel overwhelmed by the task in front of me and don’t even both starting. Too many pages! Too much commitment! So I understand that recommending two interconnected series of seven books (so far!) is dicey. But don’t panic! Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instruments series will not be a weight upon your reader’s conscience. This series just makes me happy, because I know I can count on more books coming.

City of Bones, the first book in the series, tells the story of Clary, a New York City teenager who finds out that she’s actually part of a world of demon hunters and vampires and werewolves, etc. I know there are a million young adult books out there with this same basic plot, but Clare creates a very detailed world and whole giant cast of interesting characters. There’s passionate teenage love, parents who don’t understand, fairies who strike bad bargains, a magical city in another dimension, secret governments, warlocks–it goes on and on. I don’t necessarily think the characters are that realistic (they really don’t read like teenagers to me) and the books aren’t going to offer tremendous insight into the problems facing our world now (for that, go read Bitterblue). But they’re fun and dramatic and surprising and engaging and ultimately satisfying.

There are five Mortal Instruments books so far, and clearly at least one more coming. I initially said that there are seven because Clare has started a second, companion series, set in the same universe but 100+ years back in Victorian London. The Infernal Devices has two books so far and I think I might actually like it better that the modern day books right now (but I am a sucker for period stories set in England). So please give Cassandra Clare a chance, starting with either City of Bones or Clockwork Angel. If you don’t like the first, you don’t have to read any more because they’re very similar. But if you like them, just think–you won’t have to worry about having something fun to read for many, many hundreds of pages. They’re also in the process of making the first one into a movie and I’m pretty sure they’re going to position it as the new Hunger Games, so just think how ahead of all the teenagers you will be!

Required Reading

by Kinsey

In the comment section of Rebecca’s post on 40 Modern Nonfiction Books Everyone Should Read, she and Anna and I got into a discussion about the list of books she was reviewing. I said that I thought the list was dull. Most of the books on it are self-help or management books, which may be informative but aren’t particularly interesting or inspiring. (To me at least–maybe you find The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People riveting!)  Of course, the guy who wrote that list didn’t call it the Most Exciting Nonfiction Books Everyone Should Read, but I like to think that if I were giving people a list of books they should read, those books would be entertaining as well as useful. I made a couple of suggestions along those lines in the comments, and was then challenged to write a post on it.

So I made a list of the eight books I think everyone should read–the eight that immediately jumped to mind as the ones that have most powerfully influenced how I live my life. As I said to Anna and Rebecca in the comments, these aren’t necessarily books that are going to help anyone get a job or buy a house or whatever, but they are the books that I find myself going back to again and again for advice on how to function in the world.

1) The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin
This is the book that has had the greatest impact on my day-to-day life. It’s half general ideas and research about happiness and half practical advice. The book is based on Rubin’s super-popular blog and in some ways the daily reinforcement of the blog is probably more powerful, but the book is very good. I have given stacks of these as gifts.

2) This is Water by David Foster Wallace
Wallace’s commencement speech at, I think, Kenyon College, used to be available out there on the internet, but then someone decided to publish it in book form and make people take down the free versions. But it’s well worth buying (and hard to begrudge his family the money). It presents a very kind, thoughtful, gentle way of moving through the world. Good advice for new graduates, good advice for those of us who graduated long, long ago.

3) Take the Cannoli by Sarah Vowell
I first heard Sarah Vowel on This American Life and of late she’s published a great string of books on American history, but my favorite work of hers is still these essays. There’s one, in particular, where she talks about how she doesn’t believe in God, but she does believe in all these other things, that I really love.

4) Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed
A newcomer to the list! This collection of Strayed’s Dear Sugar advice column for the Rumpus just came out, but it’s a powerful one. These aren’t your standard requests for advice and they’re not your standard responses. I read this in a restaurant, while I was out of town on a business trip, and it made me cry in public.

5) Paula Spencer by Roddy Doyle
The only fiction on the list, even though I wasn’t really thinking about that when I made the list. This is an odd sort of stream of consciousness story about an Irish woman who is, well, living her life. It’s about how she makes it through the day and tries to relate to her kids and tries to improve her lot. The style, and the Irish vocabulary, can be a bit challenging, but for me this reads like a handbook on how to find joy and satisfaction in everyday life.

6) The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman
The amazingly detailed, thoughtful story of a young Hmong girl with epilepsy and the challenges that meshing traditional Hmong beliefs with modern medicine created for the girl’s family and her doctors. This one story was the best explanation I have ever read of cross-cultural communication issues, and just in general shows how well-meaning people with the same goal can still have to work terribly hard to understand each other.

7) Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott
Lamott can be a little Jesus-y for me sometimes, but this journal of the first year of her son’s life, where she tells the story of being a scared single mom barely hanging on to sobriety and sanity, is a wonderful example of faith.

8) In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan
The politics of food and eating are so fraught and political I hate to even include this, but I did find it really useful, so it goes on the list. Michael Pollan can be awfully preachy and kind of oblivious to some of the baggage that food carries for many people, but this book presents an extremely straightforward, simple, actionable philosophy of how to eat. If you want something similar but with more of a narrative story and a call to action, you could also read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver.

And an honorable mention, although I know I’ve mentioned it on the blog before, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. This is such a powerful, heart-breaking book that I think everyone should read it as a personal version of the psychopath test–if you can read this without crying, you should probably do something to address your lack of a soul.

Gone Girl

by Kinsey

I am fully aware that recommending Gone Girl at this point is like making sure that everyone knows that Apple makes a nice phone. Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn, seems like the book of the summer and everyone has read it/is reading it/is recommending it. Well, that’s because it’s AWESOME. I picked it up to read on a business trip, thinking that it was a sizable enough book it should last few though a few days of work and travel. I started it when I got to the airport, read like a mad person, and finished it before I even got to my destination. It made summer afternoon air travel–which included thunderstorm delays, a drunk guy getting escorted off the plane, and a transfer in Charlotte (haaaate)–all seem enjoyable.

I don’t want to give away too much of the plot, but it’s the story of a woman who has gone missing, a la Dateline or 48 Hours or one of those awful-true crime shows. Did her husband do it? He claims to be innocent, but each chapter reveals a new bit of information that makes the reader swing back and forth between being sure he’s guilty and having no idea what happened. I believe that people call books like this “literary mysteries” or “literary thrillers,” maybe to try to make themselves feel better about reading a really exciting, plot-driven book? But there’s no need to worry on that front–it is a thriller, but what makes the book stand out are the really finely-drawn characters and focused writing. Even though your perceptions of the husband and wife are constantly changing, they feel like very complete, real people, and there is not an unnecessary word in the book. And the plot twists make the reading experience a bit like a roller coaster. The fabulous Linda Holmes from Pop Culture Happy Hour said that when she read this there was a point at which something happened, and she actually closed the book and hugged it. And I know exactly what point she’s talking about because I DID THAT TOO. My airplane seatmate thought I was crazy. I don’t care how many thrillers and mystery novels you’ve read, this one takes you to new places and does it in new ways.

I should say that this is not a happy books, and you end up spending hours of time with unlikeable people doing despicable things. I felt sort of icky when I had finished, but I was enthralled the whole time. If you have a plane flight or jury duty or just a free weekend day coming up, and you need a book that will make eight hours feel like nothing, Gone Girl should be at the top of your list.

Bitterblue

by Kinsey

One of the hazards of writing a book review blog is that if you’re not careful about what you review, giving books as presents becomes tricky. Your friends won’t be surprised by the books you give them for their birthday if they’ve already read your glowing review, and since probably 90% of the presents I give are books, this has made shopping somewhat challenging. So now when I read something that I know I want to give as a gift, I avoid writing a review even if I love the book. When I read Bitterblue a few months ago I knew immediately that it would be perfect for my friend Hannah’s birthday, so it’s only now that she’s opened the present that I will tell you how awesome Bitterblue is.

Kristin Cashore has written three young adult fantasy books set in the same world–Graceling, Fire, and Bitterblue–and they’re all great. I wouldn’t quite call it a series, since they all center on different characters and jump around in time quite a bit. But there a lots of overlapping characters and plotlines, so it helps to read them in that order. I loved Graceling, thought Fire was perfectly nice, and now think that Bitterblue might be the best of the bunch.  But telling you even the teeniest bit about the plot of Bitteblue will give away all sorts of things about the other books, so instead I am going to just list some of things I like about all of them.

  1. They all feature strong young women at the center, but the women are very distinct. One has incredible physical/athletic strength, while another is a bookworm whose power is more political. They show a nice range of different ways a girl could be in control of her life.
  2. The world they are set in is, in some ways, your standard YA fantasy fiction world: castles, princes, magic, sailing ships, etc. We’ve all read a ton of these, but this one feels original and complete, and the magic follows some very specific and interesting rules. Cashore even manages to make the political part of the story–which kingdoms are trying to overthrow which other kingdoms–compelling, and that is generally my least favorite part of any fantasy book.
  3. I found the story resolutions in each book unexpected. I did not know where any of these were going, right up until the end.
  4. Cashore addresses some pretty intense political topics, while still keeping these young adult books. I’m going to assume she was not actually trying to create a parallel of post-Qadaffi Libya, but it was still an interesting take on what that might be like for these characters in this world.
  5. On a similar note, all three of the books do feature some romantic storyline, but the relationships that the characters have are all very complex and layered. Especially in Bitterblue, I was impressed by how willing the story was to leave a lot of the romance storyline up in the air.
  6. All of the books are big and long and chewy. I read fast and it can be disappointing when a good book only lasts a day or two. With Bitterblue I stayed up until two in the morning, on multiple worknights, reading as fast as I could. Each of these kept me busy for a while.

So I guess I’m recommending that you make a 1000+ investment, since I think you really need to read the first two before you get to Bitterblue, but it’s worth it! I’m now just waiting for the next one.

Refining My Theory of Memoirs

by Kinsey

I’ve mentioned before that I much prefer memoirs that center around one concept or event, and then use that frame the story of the author’s life. Recently I’ve read two books that support my theory and one exception that might prove the rule.

I Never Promised You a Goodie Bag by Jennifer Gilbert is the story of how Gilbert, as a recent college grad, survived a brutal attack and then recovered and built a thriving party planning business (hence the title) and family. Gilbert has an inspiring story, and I could have read an entire book about her narrowly-avoided party-planning disasters, but the book reads very much like a one-thing-after-another narrative account of her life. I’m sure that to her it felt like it was all part of one story, since it’s her life, but I’m not sure it hung together as a narrative for the reader. Also, I only figured out by Googling her later that she was one of the real housewives of New York, something she never mentioned in the book at all. (Apparently, she was phased off the show because she wasn’t dramatic enough, which probably speaks well of her.) So, you know, it was fine.

Then I read Wild, by Cheryl Strayed, about a young woman who decided to deal with grief over the death of her mother and a divorce by hiking the Pacific Coast Trail. Strayed talks about her childhood and marriage and about all sorts of things, but her story is all centered around her hike, which gives the story a solid structure that supports her tangents and digressions. I really liked Wild, but it was not necessarily a happy, feel-good story. Strayed was seriously grieving and seriously unprepared for the trail, and there are parts that were so harrowing I had to essentially read through squinted eyes. But Strayed so clearly described how empowered she felt by the hike that I felt kind of empowered myself. (She also describes her blisters and black toenails in such detail that my feet started hurting.)

Finally, A Girl Walks Into a Bar by Rachel Dratch didn’t have any single, centering event, but I found it so charming that I didn’t mind.  The book is nominally about how Dratch stumbled into a relationship and baby in her early forties, when she had all but decided she would not have a family. In reality, big swatches of the book are about her start in comedy, and Saturday Night Live, and dating in New York, and the story just sort of ambles along. But Dratch is funny and sharp and sounds like she would just be an awesome person to hang out with, and the book is fun and quick. So I think the exception to my memoir rule is that if you are a professional comedian, then you can write a less-structured memoir. Otherwise, I suggest everyone read Wild and then write your own memoir around a very specific event.

Too Hot to Read

by Kinsey

I’ve been struggling to write an entry the past couple of weeks. It’s been so hot and miserable that I’m hardly motivated to do anything more than slowly sip a cold beverage while staring into the middle distance–even reading seems like a lot of work–and nothing I’ve read lately has been inspiring. I want to tell you about books that I love, but recently every book I come across is one I am basically okay with, they’re all fine, whatever. But other people seem to like all of these books, so let’s do a quick round-up:

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles–This has gotten rave reviews and it seems like something I should love–bright young things in New York City in the 1930s! And I did love the descriptions of what it was like to work as a secretary and eat at the Automat. But the main male character (who I guess I was suppose to be pining over?) was a total blank to me and the best friend seemed like a terrible friend that the main character was better off without. Plus, I felt like we were eternally on the edge of a more interesting story that we never quite got to–the book kept making allusions to the fact that the main character was Russian but had Anglicized her name to get ahead in the world, but we never learned anything about her family or why she did that or what the costs were. I wanted more. If you know the perfect glittering 30s book, let me know.

The Pirate King by Laurie King–This is the latest in the Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes mystery series (short version: after Holmes retires to the country, he teams up with a young girl and they end up solving mysteries together). I ADORE the first three, but the later ones have seemed lightweight, like generic mysteries that could be solved by any generic characters. The first few books were so enjoyable because Holmes and Russell and their relationship was so clearly drawn, and I feel like that’s been lost a bit. Only for diehards.

Shape of Desire–Remember when I was talking about how much I love Sharon Shinn? I do still love her, but please don’t read this one. I think this is her attempt to get on the Twilight bandwagon, not with vampires, but by setting a supernatural romance-type story in this world. I am on board with supernatural romance, but this one felt like a twenty-page short story blown out into a whole book. Go reread the angel books instead.

Slow Love by Dominique Browning–A memoir about a woman who gets laid of from her job and finds herself seemed like it would be right up my alley. It’s subtitle is “How I Lost My Job, Put On My Pajamas & Found Happiness,” and doesn’t that sound fun? Eh. Way too much of the book was taken up by her whining about a relationship that ANYONE could have told her was pointless, and as far as I could tell, her happiness consisted of her using her enormous severance to retire to the vacation house she already owned. Less inspiring than I had hoped.

Here’s hoping that my upcoming beach vacation results in a whole stack of books I love and can heartily recommend.

The Cranes Dance

by Kinsey

I am fascinated by any sort of TV show that shows people behind-the-scenes at work. Deadliest Catch? Ice Road Truckers? Dirty Jobs? Any of those 24 Hours in the ER things? I’m in. I love watching people do their jobs. So it was predicable that I would get completely sucked into Breaking Pointe, an extremely cheesy summer reality show on the CW. It’s set behind the scenes at a ballet company in Salt Lake City, following a number of young dancers and they fight for roles and get ready to perform their big ballets of the season. Unfortunately, Breaking Pointe spends way too much time on the dancers’ (completely dysfunctional) relationships, and not enough time letting us watch them get yelled by Russian teachers in rehearsals. Luckily, The Cranes Dance by Meg Howrey was there to meet my needs.

The Cranes Dance is fiction, told from the perspective of Kate, a twenty-something professional ballerina in New York City. Kate’s younger sister Gwen is a more successful dancer in the same company, but it’s clear from the very start of the book that Gwen has had some sort of mental breakdown and has been taken back home to the Midwest by their parents to recover. Left by herself in New York, Kate has to sort out how she feels about her caretaker role as the big sister, where she fits into the ballet world without Gwen, and whether she is still the “sane” one if there’s no one there to compare herself to. Oh, and all this is happening while she’s rehearsing for performances and dealing with a serious neck injury, partner problems, and other assorted daily ballet annoyances.

I initially picked this up because I wanted to read all the behind-the-scenes stuff about bleeding toes and eating disorders and ballet company politics, and all that is there in spades. Howrey was a dancer and you can tell. But I ended up being much more moved by the emotional story of the book than I expected. Kate is a really compelling character, smart and capable and funny even when she’s making terrible decisions. I’ve seen reviewers compare this book to Black Swan and there are similar elements, but they feel very different. While Black Swan was about someone falling apart, I found The Crane’s Dance to be more about Kate fighting her way out of the darkness. The book does fall somewhat into that category of first-person stories that show the main character going crazy by making the writing crazier and crazier (the two books like this that jump to mind are The Egypotologist and House of Leaves, both of which I found disturbing). I’m not usually a fan of that technique, but this only does a tiny bit of it and it works well.

My one quibble with the book, when I first finished it, was that things wrapped up awfully swiftly at the end and it felt a little jarring. But the more I think about it, the more true to life the ending feels–sometimes there’s not a huge event that helps snap us out of a cycle, it’s just the forward momentum of life, and that’s what The Crane’s Dance describes.