The Woods

Synopsis
Essex County prosecutor Paul Copeland has a lot going on. He's prosecuting a rape case against a couple of privileged frat boys (think the Duke lacrosse scandal). He's a single father with a six-year-old daughter. He's also haunted by the twenty-year-old case of the disappearance and presumed murder of his sister at summer camp (in the titular woods). When another supposed victim of the summer camp murders turns up dead in the present day, Copeland starts to wonder whether his sister might still be alive and whether all of his assumptions about that case might be wrong.

My thoughts
I love these page-turner mysteries, but I have to force myself to take some time off between them; otherwise, they get too predictable and pat. I got this one for a plane ride and fell right into it.

This was my first Coben read, and there was more than enough in the plot to keep me entertained. I guessed some of the twists, but there were so many that I was pleasantly surprised more than a few times. If I have a complaint it's that maybe there's too much stuffed into one book. There are about half a dozen minor mysteries in addition to the main one (whether Copeland's sister was really murdered all those years ago). Seemingly extraneous details such as Copeland's grandfather's involvement with the KGB turn out to be completely relevant.

Bottom line
Read it when you have a few hours with nothing to interrupt you.

Fine print
The Woods, by Harlan Coben
Genre: Mystery
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library

Library Loot—November 9-15

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Marg from The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries!

This sounds like such a fun idea. I'm just sorry I don't have more to share ... so I'll pad this with a confession. I just figured out how to use the holds at my library. Like, last week. In my defense, it had never been an issue before, when I lived a few blocks from my library's central branch. That branch had multiple copies of every book I ever wanted, so I just waltzed on in, got my books, and went home. But a few months ago I moved a mile away from the central library and discovered that the closest branch library never had any of the books I wanted. I'd look up a book on the library website, see that there were no copies at my branch, and trek up to the central branch to grab one of theirs. It got to the point where I started wondering whether my neighborhood branch actually had books at all.

And then last week I struck up a conversation with a woman who absolutely raved about The Invisible Bridge, which was published last year. Here's the thing. I almost never read books when they're popular. I put them on my enormous to-read list, where they languish for years before I finally get to them. The Invisible Bridge was already on my list, but this woman was so excited about the book that I decided to see if my library had it now. And that's when I noticed something I'd somehow never seen before—I could put the book on hold and select the branch I wanted to pick it up at! When I put the book on hold I was 9th in line for one of 15 copies, and less than a week later it was in my hands! I don't mind the walk to the central library, but I'm so happy I figured this out before it started snowing.

So—the lone book I checked out from the library this week was The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer (photo from Goodreads). It's a novel about a Hungarian man studying architecture in Paris in the 1930s. It's headed somewhere tragic—how could it not be with a Jewish protagonist in pre-WWII Europe?—but I'm ready to be drawn into that world.

Also this week: I returned Nom de Plume and I Capture the Castle to the library and finished The Woods (review coming [edit: it's here]). On deck: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which I'll be rereading for at least the 23rd time. And I also have my eye on Redwall. I'll be reading that for the first time, but my brother loved the series when we were growing up and I found a copy in great condition at my library's used book sale.

Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseydonyms

Synopsis
A series of essays detailing the lives of various authors who used pseudonyms.


My thoughts
What can you tell from a name? Not a whole lot. From my full name, you could guess my gender and a fraction of my ethnicity, but you probably couldn't figure out my age and you definitely couldn't figure out my political persuasion, sexual orientation, or any of the other things that make me me. (Oh, um, Clio is not my real name; I just chose it because Clio was the Greek muse of history and I was a history major in college.)

I picked this book up because I've always been fascinated by people who use aliases, the reasons they use them, and the reasons they choose the names they do. The profiled authors range from the ones I'd read (the Brontes) to the ones I've been meaning to read (Sylvia Plath) to the ones I've never heard of (Henry Green), and their reasons for choosing alternate identities range from the standard (women wanting to publish in a male-dominated field) to the bizarre (Fernando Pessoa seemed to actually inhabit each of his names). As mini-biographies they're all very interesting; as profiles of pen names, some are more successful than others. In the essay on Georges Simenon, his noms de plume seem like a footnote; they disappear halfway through.

The essays that held my attention best were the ones that profiled authors who had unconventional reasons for disguising their identities. I knew O. Henry's parents hadn't actually named him O. Henry, but I didn't realize he was a convicted felon who went to great lengths to hide his criminal record from his daughter. And then there was Fernando Pessoa, who not only made up dozens of alternate names but created completely separate identities with different moods, interests, and writing styles. (This reminded me of one of the spies in Operation Mincemeat, who made up an intricate network of false contacts and kept the Nazis fooled for years.)

Nom de Plume comes full circle very neatly. It starts with the Bronte sisters, George Sand, and George Eliot, who created fictional male alter egos because the prevailing opinion of the time was that women couldn't write as well as men. It ends with Pauline Réage, who many people (falsely) suspected to be a man simply because they assumed a woman couldn't write good erotic fiction. (Interestingly, Réage wrote Histoire d'O as a love letter to her partner and didn't initially intend for it to be published.)

Bottom line
I thoroughly enjoyed the book, but it seems like it would appeal to a very narrow audience. My advice? Don't miss the essays on Mark Twain, O. Henry, and Fernando Pessoa. Skim the ones on authors you've read or are interested in. Skip the rest.

Fine print
Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms, by Carmela Ciuraru
Genre: Biography
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library

A Game of Thrones

Synopsis
Intrigue! Treachery! Good vs. evil! Undead enemies! Romance! Incest! Direwolves! Dragons! Winter!

This fantasy epic has everything—it's meticulously plotted, it has a diverse array of fully realized characters, and it has more than enough plot twists and omg! moments to keep me thoroughly entertained and amazed.

WARNING: This review contains spoilers for this book and the others in the series.


My thoughts
A Game of Thrones has been on my radar for years, but I only got around to reading it when HBO debuted the show based on the book. I flew through it and then devoured the rest of the series. (I even bought the ebook for the latest book on a layover because none of the airport bookstores had the hardcover and I couldn't wait six hours to start it.) I haven't gotten this excited about a series since I discovered Outlander. I wanted to talk about it with random people on the subway, and I wanted all of my friends to read so I could talk about it with them.

I'm usually a little leery of fantasy, but GoT works on many levels.

Setting
I adore history and fiction, and GoT gives me the best of both worlds. It's better written than most historical fiction, and it doesn't have to contort itself to fit in actual historical events. GoT's setting is loosely inspired by medieval Europe, but mostly it sprang from George R.R. Martin's imagination. The kingdom of Westeros, inhabited by Starks and Lannisters, is recognizable as England circa the Wars of the Roses, but only if Scotland were full of mysterious malevolent creatures that bring the dead back to life. Most impressive is that Martin has given his world a rich history and multiple religions.

Page-turning action
Martin knows how to keep the action coming: he opens with the undead, then beheads a deserter, unmasks an incestuous pair of siblings (and introduces an entire incestuous dynasty), paralyzes a seven-year-old, marries a thirteen-year-old off to a ferocious warlord, and scatters the Starks to distant corners of the kingdom—and that's just the first hundred pages. In the next fifty pages, the seven-year-old narrowly avoids death again, a prince nearly gets his arm ripped off by a direwolf, a would-be assassin does get his throat ripped out by another direwolf, and a third direwolf is killed. And Martin is still just getting warmed up. (And if you're not hooked by then, you might just be dead inside.)

There's a lot of heart-pounding action, but I absolutely couldn't put the book down after one chapter where the dead come alive. Martin introduced this concept in the prologue, but it was totally nerve-wracking once I'd come to know the characters.

Characters
There are a lot of them, and even the relatively minor ones have impressive backstories that often become relevant in future books.

The Starks are the heart and soul of the book, and all of them (except Rickon, who can be forgiven since he's three) have tremendous character arcs. Martin splits the narrative between eight different characters, six of them Starks (only the eldest, Robb, and youngest, Rickon, are left without their own chapters). Patriarch Ned provides the moral compass for the book. Jon Snow, Ned's illegitimate son, is interesting both for his mysterious parentage and for his perspective on the happenings in the northern part of the kingdom. Arya, the feisty younger daughter, quickly became one of my favorite fictional heroines of all time. She's nine and she's awesome. Middle son Bran is one of the most intriguing characters in the series. He's the paralyzed seven-year-old and his return from the dead hints that he has a greater purpose in the series. One thing that's been lost in the TV show is the depth of the interactions between the siblings, and I think it's partially because the characters are older in the show. But reading the vulnerability that Robb shows in Bran's chapters and the reactions of Bran and Rickon to their father's death absolutely broke my heart.

Back to the characters. The Lannisters are easy to hate. Tyrion, the only one who gets to share his point of view, is the only likable one and he's maligned by his own family because he's a dwarf. Tyrion's twin siblings are carrying on an incestuous affair with each other, which makes them instantly despicable. Also, Cersei is married to the king, so that complicates matters. And their son Joffrey is an arrogant fool who matures into an evil sadist by the end of the book.

Meanwhile, in the book's third theater of action, Viserys, the prince of the exiled Targaryen dynasty, plots return to power by marrying his younger sister, Daenerys, to a warlord and using his army to invade Westeros. On the surface, Viserys is a bullying psycho (because insanity is what happens after generations of inbreeding); the TV show does a fantastic job of uncovering his layers—the pressure he feels to restore his family's dynasty, his devastation upon realizing that he is incapable of earning the love and respect a leader needs, and the incurable arrogance that ultimately leads to his tragic downfall. However, Daenerys is the one who comes alive in the book. She starts as a helpless pawn sold into marriage, but she manages to forge a connection with her husband, Khal Drogo. In the end, she grows into a woman who can stand up for herself and she becomes a leader in her own right.


Plot twists
Martin seems to take an almost perverse delight in playing with his readers. The Lannisters get blamed for the death of Jon Arryn, which kick-starts the entire story; two books later, that turns out to be a giant red herring. They're also blamed for trying to kill Bran as he lies in a coma; two books later, that one is revealed to be true, although the conspirator turns out not to be any of the usual suspects. Martin drops hints, but they're subtle and there are so many false leads that it's difficult to pick up on the correct ones.

But the thing that makes people love Martin or hate him is his utter ruthlessness. He kills off both Ned and Drogo, and both deaths seem to come out of left field. (Jason Momoa's reaction is classic.) Their deaths force the other characters to grow, but that doesn't make them any less shocking. (Then there was Viserys's death, which was shocking in a wholly different way.) Ned's death was unexpected because he had been a point-of-view character and his story seemed far from over. Drogo's death threw me because of the potential ramifications for Daenerys, who was just beginning to feel secure. Martin is a cruel genius—he started with a character who had nothing at the beginning of the book and gave her a promising future with her husband and their unborn baby (who was destined to be a great leader) and then he took it all away.

And the biggest plot twist—Jon Snow's true parentage—still hasn't been revealed, but Martin brilliantly lays all the groundwork for it in GoT. (Yeah, I'm an unapologetic R+L=J-er.)

Here's my reasoning: Over the course of the book, seemingly every character takes the time to point out that Ned has never done a dishonorable thing in his entire life—except for that one time when he cheated on his wife and fathered a bastard. The only logical conclusion is that he never cheated on his wife, which means Jon can't be his son. ("Logic!" said the Professor half to himself. "Why don't they teach logic in these schools?" *Ahem.* Sorry.) If you listen carefully, you can hear Martin chuckling in the background, poking his readers and going, "Do you get it yet?" (I finally did, embarrassingly late in the book, while I was driving through rural Croatia and didn't have any problems of my own to think about.)

Anyway, if Ned isn't Jon's father, then why has he always treated him as his son and how/where did he find a child who looks so much like a Stark? Ned's chapters frequently include flashbacks, which are useful both for establishing the recent history of Westeros and for slipping in references to his beloved sister, Lyanna. The party line is that Robert Baratheon was betrothed to Lyanna, who was the love of his life; Robert went to war when Lyanna was kidnapped by the Targaryen prince Rhaegar. But! Ned remembers that Lyanna was a free spirit who didn't think Robert would make a good husband. Is it possible that Lyanna was more Dinah-in-The-Red-Tent than Dinah-in-the-Bible? In his deliberately vague flashbacks to her death, Ned mentions blood (she died from complications after childbirth), crushed rose petals (from the wreath Rhaegar gave her when he named her queen of beauty at a tournament), and a promise (that Ned should raise Jon as his own son).

If you're still not convinced, maybe you'd enjoy the fascinating society Horace Miner describes in his essay on the Nacirema.

Bottom line
Thoroughly enjoyable and easily one of the best books I've read this year.

Fine print
A Game of Thrones, by George R.R. Martin
Genre: fantasy
Photo from Goodreads
I bought this book (twice, actually; I gave my first copy to a friend)
I read this book in April 2011

I Capture the Castle

Synopsis
Seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain struggles with poverty and love in pre-WWII England.

My thoughs
Poverty and castles don't seem like they'd go together, but the charm of this book is that it makes everything so natural. Cassandra's family used to have money, but that was when her father's book was selling well, before her mother died. At the beginning of the book they have a 40-year lease on a crumbling castle, but they don't have enough money to pay for food or clothes.

Cassandra's family is wonderfully eccentric. Her father is a genius who can't find an outlet to express himself; he rides his bike around the countryside and wanders around with leftover fishbones for inspiration. Her stepmother occasionally communes with nature (which looks a lot like running around naked to the untrained eye). Her sister Rose is useless at pretty much everything (except gold-digging, as it turns out). Her brother Thomas sort of wanders in and out of the action, but toward the end he fully emerges as both practical and funny. Then there's Stephen, who got stranded with the family when his mother died. His mother was their maid and he sticks with them and takes care of odd jobs even though he doesn't get paid for it. The secondary characters are also delightful, especially the kindly vicar with the wicked sense of humor.

The action begins when the Mortmains meet their new landlord, Simon Cotton, after the old one dies. He happens to be American, and he brings his mother and brother into the mix. They upend the Mortmains' life. Rose sets her sights on Simon and Mortmain seems to think of Mrs. Cotton as his new patron. Meanwhile, Cassandra develops feelings for Simon and has to fend off advances from Stephen.

I was conflicted about the ending. I didn't want either Rose or Cassandra to end up with Simon, and I didn't want Cassandra to end up with Stephen, so that was satisfying. I wish Cassandra had ended up a little more self-sufficient, but I loved the way she and Thomas forced their father to get over his writer's block.

The book is narrated by Cassandra—it's basically a collection of her journals. This sort of conceit annoyed me here because it got in the way of the story. Cassandra starts some of her entries by saying that she wishes she could just skip to the exciting parts, but since she can't I had to slog through the next 15 pages before the action picked up again.

Bottom line
I enjoyed the book, but it's not my favorite. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn doesn't have a castle, but it's a much better coming of age story.

Fine print
I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith
Genre: fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library

The Red Tent

Synopsis
A fictionalized account of the life of Dinah, the daughter of Jacob and Leah. In the Bible, Dinah is raped by Shalem, and her brothers avenge her family's honor by killing all the men of the town. In The Red Tent, Dinah falls passionately in love with Shalem and her brothers murder her beloved and the other men of the town for their own self-serving reasons.

My thoughts
I first read this book six or seven years ago, and I reveled in every word. It was beautifully written and the story was pure magic. The topic of favorite books came up at lunch last week and I started raving about The Red Tent. "Ugh, didn't the obvious bias against men bother you?" one of my friends asked. Far from it—it hadn't even made an impression on me. I remembered that the book had a strong female voice, but any memory of male-bashing escaped me completely. But where I saw potent feminine pride, he saw misandry. Obviously, I needed to reread the book.

I can see what upset him. Laban especially doesn't come out well in this retelling (not that he's an upstanding citizen in the Bible either), and the men of The Red Tent in general beat their wives, have sex with the livestock, and view women as chattel. But honestly, men in the Biblical era were, to put it diplomatically, unenlightened when it came to women, so any modern-day portrait of them is bound to be unflattering. Diamant also slips in remarks about "boys, who were forever peeing into the corners of the tents, no matter what you told them," but I took these as the ancient equivalent of good-natured complaints about men who never put the toilet seat down.

If I was surprised by anything, it was the depiction of seemingly modern men—Shalem, Benia, Jacob—who genuinely love their wives and care about their happiness. Shalem is especially intriguing. Of course, in order for this retelling to work, he has to be transformed from a rapist to a passionate lover. I'm just not sure I buy it. I want to, but I don't know if I can. 

And now I have to admit ... I didn't love The Red Tent as much as I did the first time around. It's supposed to be Dinah's story, but the real heart and soul of the book is the bond between Leah, Rachel, Bilhah, and Zilpah, and the heritage they pass on to Dinah, the only daughter of the next generation. The book suffers when her story diverges from theirs. It's still strong, but it pales by comparison. However, even with a relatively weaker second half, The Red Tent is in a class of its own.

There's so much that's right here, particularly the love-hate relationship between Leah and Rachel and the mother-daughter tension between Leah and Dinah. And now that I've embarked on my own infertility journey, Rachel's story took on new meaning for me. The warm tone of the book brings you into the red tent and makes you feel like you're part of the sisterhood.

A large part of the beauty of the book is Diamant's masterful grasp of storytelling. This is a book that can be experienced with all five senses, and Dinah and her mothers all come vividly to life. Diamant gives a voice not only to Dinah but to all Biblical women.

Bottom line
A masterpiece by a woman, about women, for women.

Fine print
The Red Tent, by Anita Diamant
Genre: fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I bought this book