Voices: Decide to Live as Veronika Decides to Die

I read this book because a lady, Gemma Bulos, on the Echoing Green website had it on her books to read about making the best of your life. Because I’m always trying to see what the world changers are up to, I read it. The author of the best-seller, The Alchemist magically weaves this tale about life, purpose, meaning and death.

From the first page (and the title) you know what the protagonist is thinking. One day she simply decides to die.

As the book continues, you understand why she chose to end her life or monotony and quiet desperation. For all those bored with the simplicity of their lives, take a cue from Veronika, a young, Slovenian girl who realizes too late all she wants is the one thing she was willing to throw away. Given one week to live she begins to live without the debilitating fear of judgment that ruled her life, she remembers the things, hobbies and places that had once brought her joy. I enjoyed this book though it was a little slow after Veronika’s initial decision to kill herself, because I could see the transformation from a person sleep walking through like to one with such a passion for it I almost forgot she was going to die.

Most of the book takes place inside an insane asylum where Veronika is sent after her attempt and the other patients represent the full spectrum from schizophrenics to healthy adults who enjoy the carefree, regimented shelter of the insane asylum life. The book has even more meaning as Coelho, having spent time in an Argentinian asylum himself, has hinted to it being loosely based on his life.

And to top it all off, drumroll please…its being made into a movie! I would definitely recommend reading this book first, but Buffy is to star as Veronika in the movie of the same name in early 2009! Jonathan Tucker, David Thewlis and Melissa Leo round out the cast. I’ll be back with the comparison as soon as it hits the big screen.

--Melissa Johnson

Voices: 'Love in the Time of Cholera'...and Melodramatic Movies

In keeping with the theme of great books and great movies, I recently watched the 2007 film adaptation of Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, soon after completing the novel. Let's start with the novel: beautiful, enchanting, compelling. I loved reading about the intense love triangle between the beautiful middle-class Fermina Daza, the awkward, poor Florentino Ariza and the confident, rich Dr. Juvenal Urbino.

The version that I read, translated from Spanish by Edith Grossman, featured lush details and memorable scenes and characters as it weaved the tale of Daza and Ariza's young love, courtship and engagement that is hindered by Daza's father's quest for his only child to marry a wealthy and important man. Dr. Urbino, a European-educated Cholera expert, is perfect and begins to hunt Daza endlessly until she gives in to his proposal. The story then follows Daza and Urbino's peaceful, if not exactly passionate, 50+ year marriage and Ariza's 50+ year pursuit of the woman he loves.


The film, to its credit, is painstakingly true to the book. However, the two mediums are so different and even with Marquez's brilliant scenes and dialogue, the adaptation falls flat. The characters, so complex and three-dimensional in print, become caricatures of themselves on screen, with Lorenzo Daza, Fermina's brash and curiously wealthy father, becomes a foot-stomping, cigar-chomping joke on-screen, played by John Leguizamo. Fermina, so fierce and smart and thoughtful in the book, becomes something of an annoying damsel in the film.

To his credit, the Spanish actor Javier Bardem, does Florentino Ariza (who kind of annoyed me in the book) a lot of beautiful, romantic justice. But one great performance does not a good movie make. There is a reason why Mr. Marquez protested to having his books made into movies...he knew they'd suck.

The book is wonderful, 5 stars. The movie, not so much. The entire time I kept feeling as if I was watching a really long Mexican soap opera, complete with overly expressive glances and long, drawn out gestures. But read the book and watch the movie to draw your own conclusions!

--Whitney Teal

Seduced by a Cover

You would think us bibliophiles would know better than to judge a book by its cover. But sometimes we just can't help ourselves. Nicole and Whitney have already confessed. Now I'm fessing up too. But then again I don't know many avid readers who wouldn't agree that sometimes the cover illustration screams "read me!"

For my graduation party in May I received many wonderful and thoughtful gifts from loved ones, the best of which included gift cards for Barnes and Noble! It seems as though my love for reading is as commonly known as my last name. Well I couldn't wait to get myself into a Barnes and Noble. I was so impatient, in fact, that instead of waiting until I had time to go to the nearest one (which is 30 min away from my house) I decided to peruse the website.

Mr. Barnes and Mr. Noble are officially my homies because I bought 17 brand new books for $60 bucks. Yes you read that right, 17 books. I just couldn't say "no" to any of them at the ridiculously low sales prices: $1.99, $3.99, and one for $5.99! I normally buy bargain books - used of course - on half.com, at thrift stores, and at the library's used bookstore but brand new!? You don't get that everyday my friends.

Take a peek at some of the ones that I bought because the cover and/or title was appealing. Luckily, many of them were on B and N's bestsellers list. Now I need to find a table to hide the books under (my mom and I hide books from my dad because we have bookshelves all over the house that are stuffed to the brim)!

ttyl dearies,
Mademoiselle

P.S. I also bought the Breakfast at Tiffany's DVD because I love me some Holly Golightly! I need to read the book someday.

P.S.S. I feel bad for the delivery man. That is going to be one heavy box...

Me & Barnes, We Think Alike

I've been on a hunt to find A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, our 3rd official UL selection. I wanted to take Mme. M's suggestion and get it from the library, but, if you can believe it, the New York Public Library only has 36 copies in circulating in all of their dozens of branches that spread across 2 boroughs. And, of course, they were all checked out. Go figure.

So I walked a couple of blocks north and found a Barnes & Noble (as ubiquitous in NYC as Starbucks) and went to search for the book. To my delight, no searching was required because I ran smack dab into a table marked "Summer Reading," that not only displayed our selection, but lots of other books that are on our To-Read lists like The Stranger by Albert Camus (it's on the Strand 80), To Kill A Mockingbird (which we want to eventually read alongside The Secret Life of Bees), and other classics like The Slaughterhouse-5, The Bell Jar (our first read) and Things Fall Apart.

(Note: You can see A Tree in the picture above, it's in the center, right under the R in Reading, on the front row.)

I walked away from the table with A Tree and Things Fall Apart (my copy from high school has long gone the way of the birds) and walked smack dab into yet another display, this one with a few first-time authors. I'm a sucker for a good book cover and I immediately went to grab a few before I remembered that they run about $20 each and can quickly add up. Plus, I'm currently reading 3 books simultaneously and I fear that adding more will fuel a combustion. But, I would like to eventually read these titles:

Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician by Daniel Wallace: Big Fish was a pretty cool movie (although I never knew it was also a book), so I feel pretty comfortable in the hands of Daniel Wallace.









The Painter from Shanghai by Jennifer Cody Epstein

I love anything by Amy Tan and completely fawned over Memoirs of a Geisha (book, not movie), so I'm not surprised that I was drawn to this elegant, simple story. Definitely on my To-Read list this summer.






Nicole finished one of her summer reads, Mademoiselle deviated a little from her list, and I'm steady adding to mine. What about you?

Whitney

Voices: Come Full Circle With Everything Is Illuminated

Jonathan Safran Foer writes a refreshingly rich and complex love letter to his ancestors and the people of the Ukraine in Everything Is Illuminated.

In short, Everything Is Illuminated is the story of a young Jewish American in search of his family’s history. Armed with a beguiling translator named Alexander Perchov, his grandfather and their dog Sammy Davis Junior Junior, Jonathan Safran Foer embarks on a journey through the Ukraine looking for Augustine, the woman in the photograph he carries who he believes helped save his grandfather during WWII. The novel seems to be broken up into three parts: the actual events of the family’s history from 1791-1942, Safran Foer’s reconstruction of these events in his unpublished novel, and the letters that he and Alexander share in 1997.

Everything is Illuminated introduces itself like a comfortable acquaintance, a foreigner you might meet by happenstance on a train who gladly shares the events of his/her life through slightly butchered English and deep, sad eyes. The most unmistakable element of this novel is its humor. Safran Foer encourages you to laugh at Alexander and his idolization of America and how he uses elevated words to express simple phrases. (I.e. “Amid Grandfather and I was a silence you could cut with a scimitar” or “I feel oblongated to again eat a slice of humble pie (my stomach is becoming chock-full)”. However, by book’s end you almost feel ashamed of laughing if for no other reason than your understanding of Alexander as a hopeful young man whose dreams have been deferred.

Safran Foer has an amazing command of language and literary techniques. His novel incorporates several of them, even becoming so bold as to create a few new ones by writing statements that seem to bleed into one another and comprise one streaming sentence, not to be confused with a run-on. I’ve highlighted several passages written with imaginative metaphors such as, “He left the oven door open, and would sit for hours and watch her, as one might watch a loaf of bread rise” or “He was someone whom everyone admired and liked but whom nobody knew. He was like a book that you could feel good holding, that you could talk about without ever having read, that you could recommend.”

The most difficult part about reading Everything Is Illuminated would have to be the complexity of the relationships and their overlapping. Staying cognizant of the chronology of events that happened in 1790-1942 and those happening in present day was no easy feat, either. Safran Foer has created a story within a story and a letter within a letter, revisiting the lives and trials of his great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother and grandfather. This, coupled with secret (and not-so secret affairs), makes the story’s plot even more involved and at times confusing, but nevertheless significant.

Through this effort to retrace his family’s history, Safran Foer illuminates the ills of human society as it relates to hideous hate crimes (particularly the Holocaust where Jews were pitted against Jews in the name of survival). What is also illuminated is the power of love to ripple through time and penetrate even the bleakest circumstances. Safran Foer does a lovely job of reflecting on forbidden love, unrequited love, and even the first fruits of love. The characters in this novel suffer through an overwhelming sense of yearning. They yearn for closeness, they yearn to forget or bury the tragedies of the past, and then there is yearning from Jonathan Safran Foer himself, as well as Alexander, for clarity and understanding all the secrets of their family’s past.

Everything is Illuminated is a mixed bag of all that is great about reading literature: history, love, tragedy, irony, exuberance, extreme sadness, imagination, humor, a distinctive style. If you are looking for familial story filled with humor, honesty, and an unconventional approach to a very conventional theme—trying to discover one’s family roots—I strongly recommend Everything is Illuminated.

--Nicole Crowder

Book Lovers Guide to Going Green: Starting with The Black Dahlia

I'm not big on this whole "going green" trend, but today I thought about one thing all book lovers can do to contribute to society: use your library card more often.

You probably thought I had something clever to say. Sorry to disappoint but let me explain. The following explanation is strictly for those analytically minded individuals such as myself. All others, feel free to scroll down to the summary.

Mademoiselle's Analysis of The Black Dahlia:

324 pages in the book

67 pages until the plot begins to unfold

300 pages before the book becomes unputdownable, as I like to call it

What does that leave us with?

...approximately 67 pages of wasted paper and 233 pages worth only borrowing from the library

... only 7.4% (24/324) of the book worth purchasing

Granted, I only paid about $5 for the book (thanks to half.com) technically I should've only spent like 40 cents. Plus think about how many trees that could've been saved if James Ellroy, the author, had simply gotten to the point.

But who's counting...?

The core of the plot is based on a 1940's Los Angeles murder mystery. The body of a young woman was found in a vacant lot mutilated, cut in half, and disemboweled. Two detectives, ex-boxers, take on the case and become overly obsessed with this young woman's life - and death - to the point where it literally destroys their own lives.

What I really struggled with while reading this book was the inclusion of random storylines as well as the excessive - and mostly pointless - details that made the book way longer than it needed to be. For instance, the first 67 pages of the novel are spent developing the relationship between the two detectives and describing their boxing past. The author also over-used police jargon which only made it harder for me to connect with the characters. The book's only saving grace was the last 30(ish) pages where the twisted plot came into focus.

In conclusion...

What I liked: the twisted mystery plot

What I disliked: Ellroy's inability to focus on what was important to me, the reader

While this book may be worth reading for you mystery/suspense lovers out there, I would strongly suggest that you save our trees and borrow The Black Dahlia from your local library. Don't let another wasted page get published.

Smooches dahlin!

Mademoiselle

Voices: A Very Snobby Awakening: 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'

This you must know before I tell you about my reading of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce: I'm a bit of a snob. I like snobby drinks, snobby restaurants, and, as evidenced by this blog, snobby books. I like the challenge of reading books that are difficult, full of hard to ascertain themes. I love the big words that I gleam from reading these books and the intimate knowledge of places that I've never been. But this book, that is ALL about the spiritual + intellectual awakening of Stephen Dedalus, is snobby, even for my taste. As one character puts it in chapter 5, "You're a born sneerer, Stevie," meaning, Stephen's as snobby as the day is long.

I'm a big fan of coming-of-age stories (see The Wonder Spot and The Bell Jar, two of my favs), but a coming-of-age story that, in my opinion, lacks any real connection to the main character is a hard pill to swallow.

Here's a re-cap: the book's hero, Stephen, is a smart, sensitive young Irishman. We find him first as the youngest student at an all-boys boarding school, being bullied and literally thrown into a cesspool by his peers. We follow him to another boarding school, where his heroism is evidenced by his willingness to stand up to the religious clergy that run the school for unfair treatment. He then attends yet another school and finally a University before making a decision to leave Ireland. In the midst of this we learn that his father is not well-off and kind of a traitor to the Roman Catholic church. Stephen is deeply conflicted (and deeply conflicted in a very academic, boring way, mind you) about religion, his sexual relationship with a young woman that he believes will send him straight to hell (and there's nearly an entire chapter devoted to the hellishness of hell) and about his country, which at the time is deeply conflicted about its relationship with Britain.

I am a lover of James Joyce's short stories (I read many from Dubliners as an English minor in school), but I don't love the lack of a real story in this book. I never felt like I was rooting for Stephen, nor that I really knew him. Consequently, the "portrait," that I was promised was more like a lightly sketched drawing...in black and white. You know how movies based on Shakespeare's plays are always translated into modern language? I'd love to see that happen with this book. I feel, unfortunately, that so much of the beauty is lost on my modern mind. As one in A Portrait said: "Even in literature, the highest and most spiritual art, the forms are often confused."

Join us as we four read through the undeniable classics of the Collegeboard's 101 Great Books List. We'll also be reading contemporary classics and writing our own list of Uptown Literatti Contemporary Great Books.

Our next book will be something more recent, so stay tuned!

With bibliophilic love,
Whitney