The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion

I'm just going to start with this — I don't think I understood this book. I don't think anyone in my book club (for which I read this book) understood this book. I made this discovery at the book club meeting, during which we found some discussion questions including (to paraphrase) "How did Didion use humor in this book?" and "What parts of this book were exhilarating?"

We couldn't come up with humor. We couldn't come up with exhilaration. We came up with introspection, detachment, plodding...

Which is not to say that I disliked this book. I didn't like it, perhaps, but I found it very intriguing, which is more than I can say for some of my fellow readers!

The Year of Magical Thinking is Didion's memoir about the death of her husband, which happens suddenly if not unexpectedly at the dinner table, and how she makes it through the first year after his death. This is not easy after forty years of marriage and the rocky previous year in their relationship, and it is especially difficult because Didion's daughter is, from five days before the death to the end of Didion's narration, in and out of the hospital herself with mystery ailments that don't bode well for her.

I did not find it an exhilarating book; in fact, Didion seems to go out of her way to make everything very rational and straightforward, even the things that aren't naturally so, and provide a sort of road map to life as a widow. She speaks of being called a "cool customer" by her social worker, of saving her husband's shoes just in case he comes back, of dealing with the panic that is set off by the most innocuous of memories. I haven't lost a spouse of forty years, but I have lost some loved ones in my time, and I can see a lot of Didion's reactions in my own, if scaled down.

I can only think that I would have understood and appreciated it better if I actually knew who Didion was outside of the scope of this book, and knew the context of her life in which to place all of these events. I felt absolutely lost when Didion would mention friends or locations that meant nothing to me, or when she referenced previous novels by her or her husband. I knew there must be a connection to be made, but I had no idea what it was or how to make it.

So on the whole, I found this book fairly depressing and a bit under-explained in places (and over-explained in others), but I did find it an interesting read for the simple honesty of it all.

Recommendation: I really don't know who this was written for. I'm going to say that if you know Didion or have gone through similar troubles, you might be interested. But I'm not sure.

Rating: 5/10
(A to Z Challenge)

Bossypants, by Tina Fey

I liked this book surprisingly a lot, considering that my first knowledge of it came at work, when I stared at that super-creepy cover for way too long as I processed a dozen or so copies. I didn't really know anything about Tina Fey at the time outside of some random Weekend Updates I'd seen and of course her portrayal of Sarah Palin that confuses my husband to this day (Scott: "Wait, Sarah Palin didn't make finger guns and go 'pew pew pew!'?")(dang that's a lot of punctuation marks in a row), and so I was like, "I am definitely not interested in this... but let's check out that back cover and book flap." I don't quite remember what they said, but I absolutely loved the fake blurbs (including a time-capsule one from Mark Twain) and the description of the book sounded not terrible, and I needed something to listen to at work, so I put the audiobook on hold. And waited.

In the meantime, Scott and I discovered 30 Rock, and holy HECK why didn't you people make me watch that show sooner? I am holding all of you responsible for this. There are certainly a few too many scenes where I have to close my eyes and cover my ears and tell Scott to tell me when it's over because otherwise I would die of empathetic embarrassment, but there are also some freaking hilarious jokes (my current favorite: "It's not a Lemon party without old Dick!").

So by the time the audiobook arrived, I was super excited. And I was not wrong to be. Tina Fey has a sense of humor and timing and sarcasm that I just love. And there is so much less awkward in this book than in her show! The stories that she tells run the gamut from hilarious to interesting to prescient to kind of weird, but no matter how I felt about the content, Fey's presentation was spot-on. I need Tina Fey to read me things all the time.

One problem with loving Tina Fey as narrator, though, is that I really can't remember what she talked about, I was so busy enjoying her voice! A few things stick with me really well, like her story about climbing a mountain for a guy she liked and the one about how she ended up doing the Sarah Palin gig, but everything else is just in bits and pieces. Funny bits and pieces, of course.

Recommendation: If you love Tina Fey, you've probably already read this book. So... if you like humorous essays as written/spoken by a dryly sarcastic wit, you'll probably go for this.

Rating: 8/10

She's Not There, by Jennifer Finney Boylan

I've finally read another one of Laura's books! Good job, Alison. And it was really good, so I'm glad I did.

She's Not There is Jennifer Finney Boylan's memoir of first being a transgendered person, and then finally going through with the surgery to make her a woman. What makes it especially interesting is that even though James Boylan had always known himself to be a woman, he had felt cured when he met his wife, Grace, and shoved that part of himself aside until well into their marriage. So when he realized he couldn't live as a man anymore, it sort of threw the whole world upside down for everyone.

Boylan throws in a lot of anecdotes about being a boy who knows he's a girl, but I was most interested in her stories of being a woman. I found myself nodding my head at her unconcious adoption of feminine conversational traits, like turning facts into questions (we talked about this a lot in my favorite gender studies class), and lamenting the fact that once Boylan started dressing as a woman she suddenly had to protect herself from jackasses who wanted to take advantage of her. And Boylan makes it clear how difficult it is to transition — one thing I had never thought about was the fact that for a transgendered person, any sort of affectations that are too male or too female are perceived as the person's bad impersonation of the other gender, even if those affectations in a cisgendered person would be accepted as a normal variation.

This book was really illuminating and I recommend it to anyone who has ever wondered just how transgendered people can know they are transgendered, because Boylan does a pretty good job explaining it.

Rating: 8/10

See also:
[your link here]

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Wishful Drinking, by Carrie Fisher (2 November — 5 November)

Well, I finished up that book I was talking about yesterday and it did not disappoint. Scott even listened to it with me and enjoyed the stories even out of context. Good times.

Wishful Drinking is Carrie Fisher's memoir about... lots of things. Growing up with Debbie Reynolds, being Princess Leia, enjoying drugs and alcohol a titch too much, having a friend die in her bed (no, really, and jeez, that sucks). The stories are a little bit all over the place and I got confused a couple of time while listening to it when I missed her reading a new chapter title. :) Oops!

Listening to the book was fun, though. The first few chapters/tracks/whatever are a little stilted, kind of like listening to a graduation speech, but soon Fisher relaxes and starts getting into her narrative and, um, she's really good at swearing so you probably don't want to pick up this book if you're sensitive to that (though I think they were all fairly appropriate uses of cussing, if there is such a thing). Her "uggghs" and pointed pauses really made her stories that much more hilarious.

Unfortunately, as a completely terrible auditory learner, I can't really remember many of the stories Fisher told, but I can promise they were all at least moderately entertaining. Oh, and the one about what she did when a fan at a show told her to go [bagpipes] herself is pretty much the weirdest story I've ever heard. Actually, I'm not sure you want to have that image stuck in your head. Maybe you can skip it.

Rating: 8/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2008)

See also:
The Outlaw Culture Group
Books 'N Border Collies

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Funny in Farsi, by Firoozeh Dumas (16 August)

I posted a while back about how I don't read enough funny books; I'm starting to think it's because I don't have the right sense of humor for them. I don't know what sense of humor you need to read this book, but I certainly don't have it.

The stories in the book were definitely interesting; Dumas talks about her life as an Iranian transplant to America and how she grew up translating things for her parents (even before she spoke English well) and how much culture shock there is between Iran and California. But there was only one story that actually made me laugh, and it had nothing to do with either of those topics — this story (the second to last in the book) detailed a trip to the Bahamas during the spring break season which led to Dumas and her husband judging a beauty pageant. Oh, yes.

I think the problem I had with Dumas's stories was that she tried really hard to shoehorn a moral or just a point into almost all of them. Of course, a story should have a point, but I feel like if you have to tell the reader what the point is, the story didn't have one to begin with. I found myself thinking of a Certain Journalism Professor throughout the book; he says that after you write a story, you should remove the last sentence and see if it still works. If it does, kill the last sentence. CJP would have used a trusted assassin for this book.

Rating: 5/10

See also:
books i done read

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.