Nia's Book #8: Hey, haven't I read this review already?

And the answer is a resounding "yes, now stop bitching about it!" Tommy's Tale by Alan Cumming was originally reviewed by WWB&B's own extreme reader Skippity Dee-bop about a month ago, and after finding out the my one true love, Alan Cumming (shut up about me and the gay boys), has written a book, I was so enthralled that she brought it in so I could share in the drug addled joy of it all.

As I just stated, most of this book is pure, drug-induced glee. It also includes a lot of good and amusing snogging and shagging. I really enjoyed the bond that our dear, confused Tommy shared with his flatmates. It made me long for the days of living with great friends and sharing in traditions and jokes that nobody else can possibly understand, because they probably wouldn't want to. Not to mention the annotated photographs and magazine ads covering our bathroom walls and elaborate written and practical tests that we put eachother's boyfriends through.

But I digress.


Tommy's fairy tale laced descent into drugs and sex is a fantastic read, but it really did seem like the ending was a total cop-out. Like he had just made everything more and more complicated, overwhelming, and horrible, and then he couldn't figure out how to write Tommy out of this hole in a proper fashion, so he just skipped over all that stuff and made everything better. A very disappointing ending to an otherwise worthwhile book.

Perhaps we should try writing "The true ending to Tommy's Tale"? It would probably help restore my faith in vice.

Nia's Book #7: Fairy Tales for the Over Disney-fied

I finally got my hands on Black Swan, White Raven edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, so I am very, very happy! They have edited 4 (at least) other collections of fairy tales like this, and I was delighted to find that this one measured up to my memories of the other 4 (especially considering some recent disappointments with sequels).

Basically, the idea for these books was to have current fantasy writers reimagine fairy tales, which have been sanitized and Disney-fied for hundreds of years. There are occasional stories contained in the book that are friendly to everyone, but the majority of these fairy tales are not for kids, whether due to violence, sex, or general "adult themes."

This particular collection seems to have more modern versions of the tales than I recalled from the other collections, but it has been years since I read them (this one is out of print, and I had a hard time finding a copy). There were only a couple of poems included, which was good, because those usually are disappointments.

Among my favorite stories were:

"Three Dwarves and 2000 Maniacs" - A version of Cinderella involving a somewhat unstable high school geek turned millionaire psychotropic drug creator, his slightly masochistic lady love, an asylum full of the last 2000 crazy people in the world, gorey movies, and a treatment to end all treatments. Pure, demented awesomeness.

"The Reverend's Wife" - Based on a folk tale that I don't know, but very amusing. A couple of neglected wives back in the times of yore (sometime in the past, I don't know when) scheme to get what they want from eachother's husbands. Kinda sexy. The funny bits are due to the total ignorance these guys have in relation to the female reproductive system and the kind of BS they will believe to rationalize cheating on their wives.

"True Thomas" - Based on a poem I don't know and an account of a 13th century girl being taken away by fairies. Very interesting. Thomas happens upon some fairies and is taken in by their queen after his body has been subjected to a number of procedures to enhance his ability to understand their non-verbal Language. Whe he returns to the human world (150 years later), he has amazing abilities to see the truth of people. It has interesting paralells to modern-day alien abduction stories.

"The True Story" - The truth of the Snow White story, from the perspective of the evil stepmother. Vastly different from any version I have heard before, but I really liked it. Probably because there is finally a mother figure in a fairy tale who seems to have a child's best interests in mind. It is a nice change of pace.

That's all for this one. Vacation time is good, I can read again. I will plan to bring this in for Skippity on Thursday, I hope you like it, too! And if you do, I have the other 4 books on my shelf.

Skippity's book 13: While I'm on a roll here...

Riding the Bus with My Sister is one of those true-life stories about a handicapped person that inevitably make you tear up now and then. It's written by a woman who is a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and her writing is really, really good. Her sister Beth is mildly mentally retarded, and to keep herself entertained, she rides the busses of her city every day except Sunday, when they don't run. Rachel, the writer, has totally thrown herself into her career and has become emotionally cold and has no inner life. When Beth invites her to ride the busses with her for a year, Rachel at first doesn't want to, but then relents when she realizes it will at least make for a few good columns. But of course she comes to find that she depends on these rides and on her sister's hidden wisdoms to warm her back up into a live human being again who does more than work herself to death. She gets to know the drivers of the busses and takes notes on the wisdom she inevitably finds in them as well. Sounds trite and like it's been done before, and maybe it has, but there's enough hardness in the book to make you know that it's not all sappy sentimentality. The story of how the girls grew up, along with their brother and other sister, is nothing short of horrifying in some places, and you get a lot more sympathy for both Rachel and Beth when you learn what they've been through that has helped shape them into what they are.
Having worked with handicapped kids for a living, I was able to very easily understand a lot of the frustrations and heartache that Rachel bangs her head and heart against when dealing with Beth and her limitations and obstinancies, and also the overwhelming feelings of joy and unworthiness when small triumphs occur. It's difficult to explain unless you've experienced it.

A good read. It kind of stretches you into a better person.

(I had a lot of time to read in the car and hotel this weekend. Sorry to unload three books all at once.)

*edit: apparently this was made into a movie with Andie MacDowell and Rosie O'Donnell. I'm actually going to check this out. You can also see artwork done by Beth on that site.

Neat.

Skippity's Book 12: Continuing on with a supernatural theme

Eva Moves the Furniture is totally a chick book. I don't mean that it's full of fluff or about those silly relationships between women that revolve around fashion and gossip. I mean it is, at its heart, utterly feminine. It takes place in Scotland after WWII.

Eva's mother dies giving birth to her, and Eva is raised by her father and her father's sister, who moves in to help out. Throughout Eva's life, she is visited by a woman and a girl who she calls "the companions," since for the first three quarters of the book they don't give their names. No one else can see these beings but Eva, and she ponders their nature throughout the book--are they dead, and come back to life? Angels? Aliens? They often act to influence Eva's life, by helping her in moments of need but also hindering certain of her desires; when Eva gets a job as a secretary, they misfile things Eva has filed correctly and bungle her typewriter so it produces errors. But they also arrange things now and again so that a man they want Eva to marry looks favorable to her.

The actual reading of this book was very enjoyable and I found myself thinking of it a lot while I was not reading it. The narrative voice is utterly and completely believable, and you feel about the main character the way you would expect to feel about a trustworthy and long-held-dear friend. The turns of the plot are also well laid out.

It's good stuff. I didn't want it to end. But when it did, I was okay with it, because it felt like the right place for the book to end.

It was all intuition, whereas April Witch was all cold logic. Kinda weird that I read those two books right next to each other when they so clearly contrast like that.

Skippity's Book 11: The Swedish female John Updike

April Witch by Majgull Axelsson is one of those books about women that reads like it was written by a man. But Majgull is all female, as evidenced by both the photo on the back of the book and the interview with her that was included with the "book club guide" or whatever the hell they call that list of questions in the backs of popular books that make you feel like you're back in high school taking a bluebook exam. I don't know how to really put my finger on what I mean by a book about women that sounds like it was written by a man--it's as if all the softness has been taken out of these characters. The book is told from the point of view of Desiree, who is an invalid who can't speak but possesses her full mental powers, and then some--she can leave her body and possess animals and even humans. She was turned over to the state by her mother at her birth, since apparently that's what you did in Sweden in the forties if you had a kid who was all messed up, and her birth mother then adopted three other girls (all unrelated to each other). Desiree decides one of them has lived the life she was meant to live, and she observes everything about the three girls from various vantage points, including a seagull. It's a kind of creepy book, but very interesting too. The ending disappointed me because it seemed to be building and building until the inevitable conflict when the four "sisters" would come together, but then it all petered out and there were some cliche moments that surprised me because everything else was so well written.

This book was originally written in Swedish and then translated, so I wonder how much of the feeling of the prose is due to the translator. It's not choppy or anything, it just seems that some of the word choices were interesting in that I wonder how well they can really translate--concepts that we wrap English words around to explain may be very different in Sweden. I don't know.

It was a pretty good book, but also dense and dark. The cover is very misleading.

Nia's Book #6 - It's a work thing

Thanks to the kindness of Skippity, Nattie, and Stinky, I am allowed to count the 68 page document of Acceptance Test Cases written by our 3rd party programmers that I had to read on Friday as a book. Whee!

My review: It sucked. I nodded off at least 3 times that morning, and I would never ever read this for any other reason. The really sad thing is that this is at least the second time that I have had to read this crap. Yeah. I had to review these specifications for a project, because it is being transferred to a new version of the technology, and I have to make sure the specifications are accurate to how the site actually works. Argh!!

Please, for your own sake, don't read the Acceptance Test Cases for NAI!! They are crap.

I am also reading a good book of reimagined fairy tales. I hope to be able to report on those soon.

Nia's book #5: Elphaba should be allowed to rest in peace

It took me over 2 weeks to read this book (I actually started it before I read The Glass Castle), but as you may be able to guess, I had a hard time reading it. And no, it wasn't because of the big words. So, I read Son of a Witch by Gregory Maguire, after having read his other 4 books, and I was sorely disappointed.

Liir was raised by Elphaba (the Wicked Witch of the West, to those unfamiliar with Wicked, his earlier novel), but throughout the book, he is not sure if he is actually her son or not. Generally, I found him to be an unlikable character, whining that he can't be of any use because he lost her flying broom. He is generally lame and ineffectual and I had no sympathy for him.

Even Liir's savior, Candle, was boring and entirely unsympathetic. Towards the end, she was hugely pregnant, had been abandoned in a run-down barn for 6 months, and was endlessly imposed upon by a tribe that suddenly appeared in the farmyard, and it was still written in a way that I really didn't feel bad for her. I guess I just couldn't care about these characters at all.

Despite the fact that Elphaba met her final bucket of water before this book even began, she played a significant role in this book. The poor, poor girl, hadn't she suffered enough? And the final reveal, the secret of her connection to the bland Liir (couldn't even be spiced up by a gay relationship, jeez) simply elicited a "well, duh" from me. Very big disappointment, since I enjoyed the story of her life so much.

I think that at least a portion of the problem I had with this book was due to the fact that it had been so long since I had read the original Wicked, having come out 10 years ago. In so many ways, I felt like I was totally missing something.

By the way, the anti-dragon message in the book hurt me deeply. It is just wrong. Some of my best friends are dragons, and none of them behave in any way like the way they are portrayed in the book.

Disappointment all around.

Skippity's Book 10: Damn, that was a real pick-me-up

Sike.

I picked up Project Girl by Janet McDonald on a recent (sorta) foray to that dangerous pithole of teeming adolescent hormones and firearms known as the Cincinnati public library. It is not the cheeriest book I have ever read.

I wonder what you have to do to get your autobiography published. I also wonder what the difference between an autobiography and a memoir actually is. Is it only a memoir if you're famous?

So far as I can tell Jan McDonald isn't famous other than for writing her autobiography, which is all about growing up in the nas-tay parts of NYC during the seventies and her continual identity crises as she tries to reconcile the fact that she has a brain with the fact that the place she comes from encourages anyone with even so much as a functioning brain cell to do themselves in via gun, drugs, prostitution or STD. She's doing a pretty okay job of pulling herself out of the trenches when she gets raped on the campus of her college, then it goes downhill from there for a really long while. There's a narrative break at that point--she switches from telling her tale in hindsight to just filling the pages with the journal entries she was writing at the time she was attempting to recover from this, which as you can imagine doesn't make for very happy nights spent on the couch with this book.

But, she did manage to pull it together by the end, which has her living in Paris practicing law (sorry to ruin the ending, but I doubt any of you will ever read this book).

Good, but depressing.

Next!

Skippity's Book Nine: Whack!

Cintra Wilson likes to kick words around like you might kick a tin can around an alley, if you were a little drunk.

Colors Insulting to Nature is one of those books you pick up and mean to just read a little of, because you have other things to do, but which you wind up unable to put down and miss appointments and bus stops and dinner for. The plot is freakin' fabulous. The characters are bigger than life and full of gritty detail. And the words are twisted together in the most delicious of ways. In the first couple pages for instance, we're introduced to Liza, 13, as she is going through an audition for a part in a TV commercial:

The judges squirmed in their seats, intensely disliking the thought of their own daughters or nieces belting out a song in this seamy, overwrought fashion--parroting the stage acts of overripe chanteuses, moist with the rot of numerous alcoholic disappointments in both Love and Life. The mother would probably be devastated if her child didn't land the gig... she might, in fact, lock herself in an all-peach-colored bedroom and wash down handfuls of muscle relaxants with cheap Polish vodka from a plastic handle-jug; her unfortunate daughter would be left for days without milk and forced to eat lipstick.

It goes on from there, following Liza's adventures through puberty and young adulthood, each incident in her life more sordid than the last. Liza's character through all of it is crass and admirable; you can't keep the crazy bitch down. I just loved her.

You know, come to think of it, it's a little like a female version of Fight Club. Only having nothing whatsoever to do with Fight Club, and conceived entirely independent from it.

It's good stuff.

Bud Light Daredevil

For my next amazing stunt, I will read one, count them, one chapter of "The God of Small Things."

(insert noises of pain)

Okay, I read chapter one. I hope the other 452 chapters aren't as painful.

I'm figuring a chapter every couple of weeks.

I don't get it, it seems like the Indians complain and bitch about each other a lot. Hey, that's kinda like OUR society. Mebbe there is something to this? I'll have to get to chapter two in the next week or so!!!



-The End.