The Help, by Kathryn Stockett

You probably know what this book is about even if you haven’t read it, since it’s been on at the top of the bestseller lists for about a hundred weeks. But if you don’t, The Help is a story about the black maids of civil rights-era Jackson, Mississippi, and the white woman who decides to write a controversial book about their lives. That sentence is boring, right? That’s because you can read it and instantly know exactly what you’re going to get from this book: aging white debutantes who care only about appearance and the Junior League; black maids who run the ever-nuanced Black Woman in the South gamut from saintly to sassy. Now, I think The Help is a relatively well-written book about a subject that’s tricky to portray, and it’s a pleasure to read: great plot, lively, with a note of unexpectedness that keeps it out of Oprah territory. But unless you’re a sort of unwitting racist type and it helps you come to the revelation that yes, white people have (in general) historically been very cruel to those “beneath” them–The Help is really not as insightful or important as people seem to find it.

Kathryn Stockett, who is herself white (a fact that becomes pretty obvious as soon as you start reading), wrote this book out of guilt and affection for the black woman who raised her as a child in Jackson. She’s great at writing from the perspective of Skeeter, the awkward and mildly subversive white girl (who is repeatedly described as not-cute in the book but is obviously going to be played by Emma Stone in the movie version). Considering the touchiness of what she’s trying to do, she’s not too bad writing as either of her two black narrators, who were originally intended to be the only narrators before Stockett decided it was too weird.

But as a Duke professor asked, “Who gets to tell these stories in a way that they earn public attention?” We trust the filter of a white female author; we’re comfortable with the fact that she writes the black characters in dialect, while the white characters’ accents were probably just as strong. There’s a significant, subconscious current of nostalgia in the writing, and I suspect there’s a bit of old-South nostalgia in the reading of it too. But also, no one said that every book involving black people has to be Invisible Man. So kudos to Kathryn Stockett here for attempting to write about something real. I can overlook tacky earth-mama sentences like “Truth. It feels cool, like water washing over my sticky-hot body. Cooling a heat that’s been burning me up all my life” for that.

The Shack, by William P. Young

So I looked up The Shack on Wikipedia to see how many copies have been sold and saw a helpful link at the top reminding me that this was not the page for the rebranding of RadioShack. Is RadioShack seriously trying to call itself The Shack these days? Like it’s a cool place for people to go hang out? That’s almost as funny as chapter 11 in The Shack—a bestselling Christian novel whose tag line is “Where tragedy meets eternity”—which is titled, I’m not kidding, “Here Come da Judge.”

Now okay, the actual thoughts in The Shack are far more palatable than those in most Christian books. The authors’ intent was to open up people’s ideas of God and faith past those put forth by contemporary evangelical Christianity, and return to the image of God put forth in the New Testament: a huge, unknowable, cryptic, obliquely but explicitly loving figure who doesn’t care so much about rules. Coming from my Texas mega-church background, I think that’s great; I’m generally pretty bothered by the socialized aspects of Christianity and I was personally satisfied to read the parts where Jesus says things like “I don’t create institutions” and “A lot of what is done in my name has nothing to do with me, and is often, even if unintentional, very contrary to my purposes” and particularly where he says “Those who love me have come from every system that exists. They were Buddhists or Mormons, Baptists or Muslims… I have no desire to make them Christian.” Of course, these are the parts of the book that have apparently made The Shack controversial, but I think these ideas are extremely reasonable.

However, slightly less than reasonable: pretty much everything else about the book. One of the collaborators, defending the controversy, said in an interview, “Art is incredibly subjective as to whether a story and style are appealing.” I actually giggled reading that because… art? The story of this book is that a broken man inundated with what he calls The Great Sadness (which is always capitalized and italicized) receives a note in his mailbox from “Papa” (God) instructing him to go to the shack where his daughter was murdered, which magically turns into a Narnia land of flowers and mountains where God awaits in the form of a big black lady named Elouisa, Jesus in the form of an ugly Middle-Eastern man, and the Holy Spirit as a crazy hippie Nepalese woman named Sarayu. The narrator is the sort of dad-jeans wearing guy who says things like “That’s just too cute” and prays with people he meets on camping trips, and there are many sentences such as “This was not that!” and “Looking at her through blurring tears, he could see that her smile was radiant.”

Art, this is not. I also think the sort of affirmative action at work in this book is more than a little tacky—we are frequently reminded that all the God figures, including God’s Wisdom personified in a Hispanic woman named Sophia, are so shockingly and crazily not white. I mean, it’s pretty undeniable that the historical Jesus would have been ripped apart by TSA airport scans, and are people honestly stupid enough to still think of God as a huge white dude who fixes your shit, like an out-of-costume Santa Claus? But I guess the reason why The Shack has sold about a billion copies and “changed people’s lives” is that people probably do still think like that. Well, we’ll all be smacked with reason eventually. Here Come da Judge.

Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins

So, I really liked The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, its sequel. I like the idea of America collapsing in some industrial apocalypse and being separated into numbered districts that all have to pay tribute to a Capitol—tribute in the form of goods as well as children who have to train as psychotic gladiators and fight to their death in a rigged and televised arena. Katniss, the main character, is super tough and occasionally unpleasant, which I like. I think I’ve been into ideas of this sort ever since I read The Girl Who Owned a City or whatever that awesome book is called—and I think the world has been into ideas of this sort ever since the story of the Minotaur was written—and of course the whole children-graphically-murdering-each-other thing really ups the ante.

And after reading Mockingjay, the third book, I am still impressed by the sheer violence in this series. In this book, all the districts have rebelled and are fighting the Capitol. The battle scenes in which they try to breach the city, in their dusty vagueness and complete reliance on technology, seem unnervingly similar to (what I imagine to be) scenes from America’s current overseas conflicts. And I like that these books are very clear about the psychological damage that comes from going hungry.

What I am not impressed by is how much the writing sucks in this book! Did I just completely miss it in the first two? I think probably I did–I recently received a comment on my Twilight post that made me realize just how fully my memory sucks. I am embarrassed and sorry at how my brain works sometimes, and even in my fully callous element I shouldn’t be forgetting important details like which schools offered me scholarships, or the terrible writing of Suzanne Collins. For example: “Real or not real? I am on fire. A creature as unquenchable as the sun.” Also, “I shrug to communicate that my hair length’s a matter of complete indifference to me.”

Also this: “They can fatten me up. They can give me a full body polish, dress me up, and make me beautiful again. They can design dream weapons that come to life in my hands, but they will never again brainwash me into the necessity of using them. I no longer feel any allegiance to these monsters called human beings, despise [sic] being one myself.”

Like I said, I like these books a lot, but this writing style is just absurd sometimes. Very “Middle School Anime Lover Uses the Thesaurus for the First Time.” Also, for a book with a 1.2 million first-run printing, shouldn’t the copy editing be just a little sharper?

The Rule of Four, by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason

The Rule of Four is supposed to be a well-written version of the Da Vinci Code. This to me sounds extremely unappealing, but I get it–we like Dexter and Law and Order and Sudoku and all those things that allow us to “use our minds” without using them. This novel has been translated into 25 languages and in 2007 was the best-selling debut of the decade up to the point. Unfortunately, it’s super, super boring.

Before this becomes rude, I should say that it’s not horrible. You get the sense that these authors are probably aware of the things that denote good literature (where it appears to me that Dan Brown spent his formative literary period watching Nicolas Cage movies). But to be frank, my threshold for boring has sunk pretty low. These days, I can spend a fascinating two hours detailing my eyebrows. So the fact that this book made time slow down to a maple-syrup pace–not good.

The Rule of Four is about a book called the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Here is a nice sample of two sentences to start: “For it wasn’t the seals that would undo Rodrigo and Donato. It was the heavy black wax in which those seals had been pressed.” The series of riddles at the center of the story concern, naturally, a history-changing secret (I’ll give the authors credit that they didn’t try to set their stakes quite as high, and had the decency to leave Jesus and secret societies out of this), an “ingenious” code buried within this Renaissance text, some murders, and the inner workings of Princeton–this last being by far the most boring aspect of the book. At one point the narrator freaks out, with mixed metaphors, about a tradition where a bunch of sophomores streak in the snow (“Mere thoughts of the Nude Olympics usually lights a fire under the cold months of college, but this year, with Katie’s turn coming around, I’m more interested in keeping the home fires burning.”) I read that and I was like, bitch would’ve had an aneurysm at UVA.

The New York Times Book Review called this “the ultimate puzzle book.” I’ll admit that maybe I was too impatient to get into it, or too bored to try very hard, but that’s the book’s fault. Like I said, I’ve got a good attention span. To me this book’s most puzzle-like aspect was the fact that these authors completely lack the ability to combine words and spatial logic. Every time they describe a room, a building, a path, or kind of anything that has to do with space and direction–and there was a lot of that, considering that this was a mystery plot set at Princeton–I got the semi-pissed feeling that I used to get in level 9 of Tetris, like, I have no room for all this bullshit that doesn’t fit together and I’m trying my best, goddammit!

Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen

I had noticed this book popping up as required reading for some of the high schoolers that I tutored this fall–and they all grunted “It’s all right” in response to my asking how it was, which was a considerable step above the usual “Dunno, I thought you would have read it Jia”–so I felt favorably towards this little guy. It’s about the circus, which is cool, and it’s a bestseller. But then I looked it up and saw that Sara Gruen wrote it as part of National Novel Writing Month, something which I have ill feelings towards, and then saw that there’s an upcoming movie adaptation starring Robert Pattinson and Reese Witherspoon, which is just… unfortunate. And then I read it. And then it sucked.

I will proceed in “negative sandwich” form–positive, negative, positive–the Peace Corps-approved method for giving any sort of criticism. Pretty much any person who has ever gone through school, rush, voting, debate, or life of any sort will automatically give feedback like this and probably not have to give it a silly name. Except for me when I write book reviews, and the format basically goes–bullshit, bullshit, three sentences about the book. Sorry.

Positive about Water for Elephants: there must have been a lot of awesome research that went into this book. Depression-era circuses, interesting for sure. Negative: I’d a thousand times rather read the research than read this book. Positive: there are a few great pictures at the end of really cute girls in circus costumes.

Positive: this book is long but not boring. Negative: this book has not a stitch of original writing in it. Positive: this is a good book for people who read bad books or no books, and who are unnerved by original writing anyway.

Well, I’m out of positives, so I’ll just leave you with a taste of the skills of Sara Gruen. This is literally the first paragraph I saw upon reopening the book. “Her throat is delicate, her shoulders square. A few curls of light brown hair peek from beneath the brim of her hat. She kneels on a cushion to pray, and a vice grip tightens around my heart. I retreat from the church before I can further damage my soul.”

Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld

Being a girl in rich old America is hard, right? You gotta be cool, you gotta get you some boy friendz, you gotta look like this chick to the left, and if you don’t have any of that, you’re fucked. Well, not fucked, and that’s the problemo.

This pressure is disguised in various ways and sublimated by religions of all sorts, but it pops up everywhere. Like Taylor Swift. I hate on this lady a lot, but she deserves it. For example, you know how in every one of her songs there’s a running theme of “She wears short skirts, I wear T-shirts” or some other variation of “I’m an awkward nerd but I understand you better than the pretty girl,” etc. I find this infinitely annoying in light of the fact that Taylor Swift is the most intentionally cookie-cutter, packaged, traditionally beautiful star we’ve got going these days–that, in a nation of girls struck with Princess Syndrome since they watched their first Disney cartoon, Taylor Swift is succeeding because she is that pretty girl. For girls who are truly sidelined in the social Venus fly trap of high school, the situation is very different: the lacrosse players look at them with mild confusion, and years pass full of daily battles of un-narrated insecurity and overthinking. And if a happy chance miracle does occur and the quiet girl gets picked–something which does happen, and happens in Prep–the story gets more and not less complicated. Boys don’t just bring flowers and tell you you’re pretty, and giving blowjobs does not a state of self-actualization make.

This is why I like Prep. It’s not a brilliant book by any means, but there’s also nothing else like it: nothing that so maturely and honestly takes you through every step of an out-of-place girl’s adolescence. It’s boarding school in the eighties, and Lee, the protagonist, is never going to look like the girl on the cover of Contra. That alone–an awareness of beauty, or personal magnetism generally, and how it can become a haunting, pervasive, objective force working its way through the social order of a school–makes Lee an amazing narrator. She’s fully aware of the contrast between her life and the lives of the Beautiful People (class is a huge factor) and she states things with a flat, minor melancholy that I love: “In my whole life, Ault was the place with the greatest density of people to fall in love with.”

But back to Taylor Swift. The real nugget of genius is about Prep is that Lee is a girl who’s grown up believing the Taylor Swift stuff–what high school girl doesn’t, at some level?–and before she realizes that it’s false, she feels the part of it that’s real. In the voice of an methodical, self-aware but lonely eleventh-grader: “Before and after I was involved with Cross Sugarman, I heard a thousand times that a boy, or a man, can’t make you happy, that you have to be happy on your own before you can be happy with another person. All I can say is, I wish it were true.”

You Cannot Hate Twilight Like I Hate Twilight

I was planning to write about Twilight at some point. First of all, it’s stupid as shit. Second, it’s about time; people have been going nuts over it for a couple of years, and the fuss is even dying down (thank God). But the reason I haven’t reviewed the book is–a reason that is probably already obvious–is that I hate Twilight so much that I can’t think about it without getting into Evil Grandpa levels of cranky. I know plenty of people I like have a fondness for Twilight but it’s just: why this of all things? Why a vampire romance? Why why why?

But I’m running low on ideas for books that most people have read (send me some!) so today I thought I would just take the plunge. I searched “twilight” on my computer because I knew I had gotten high and written a rant about Twilight at some point fourth year. Instead, I found this gem, which I had completely forgotten about and don’t remember writing. The reason for this is as follows: I turned in my thesis on March 31st and after that, I had not a thing due until May 3rd, when I had a ten-page criticism paper due. And so, in accordance with the way that I spent the whole intervening month, it turns out I did get high and write a rant about Twilight. Rereading it I was half angry that this is what I ended up doing in college, and half totally jealous of myself for taking classes that permitted me to get on my high horse like this.

The paper is called “Edward Cullen and To-Be-Looked-At-Ness: Reversal of the Cinematic Gaze in Twilight.” A) Ridiculous and B) I remember telling my dear friend Walt about it, and he said, “That sounds interesting but what is the reversal of the gays?” Generally it is a thick, silly essay, dripping with formal indignation and feminist rage and the writing of a person who has been drunk and wearing a bathing suit for two weeks. I feel like I have about ten friends who would think it’s funny so I’m posting it.

I don’t know if I’ll ever get to Twilight after all, it’s just so irritating to me. Here are my views in a nutshell: Bella is boring and sucks. Girls only like her because Edward likes her and they want to be her, which is a harmful way to think, because Edward sucks too. Twilight, like a Taylor Swift song but to a much larger degree, seems innocuous and perfectly contemporary but is really passive/objectifying/repressive and most importantly, lame. It’s the same hundred words recycled over and over again (Bella said Edward stared glitter vampire brooding attraction flying werewolf gaze rain silent powerful etc), which again, is just like Taylor Swift (fifteen boy date car eyes window dream love princess etc). And I heard that in the last book Bella has some sort of alien baby that tries to eat her. Yeah, America. This one’s on you.

The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins

Holy balls this book is awesome. Holy balls I want to mail you a copy right now. There is a select set of things that are awesome enough to be both mainstream and endlessly fascinating–the things that you’re like “I’m not going to bother explaining, just watch it/read it/eat it.” Like, I don’t know, Arrested Development and the margarita from Chili’s where you get the take-home shaker. The Hunger Games is like that. It’s so satisfying. It’s like late-night. Holy balls.

I will pause the party in my pants for a second to say, to be honest, this is pretty much my ideal book. Badass tough-girl protagonist, check. Post-apocalypse, check. American government gone amazingly psychotic, check. An annual nationally televised event starring twenty-four children who are trained for combat and then forced to kill each other in an elaborate rigged arena, fucking check. I knew that much about the book from reading reviews before I read it, and although my expectations were high, the book was all like, “Pssh Jia you think you know me?” and turned out to be better than I could have imagined. I mean, after I picked it up this weekend I could not put it down. As in, I’ve been skiing all day, I’m snowed into a comfy bed, I just ate a bacon cheeseburger and took three Tylenol PMs and still could not put the book down despite all other signs pointing to coma.

But don’t take my word for it. Read this book. It will take you two terrifically enjoyable hours. Don’t wait for the inevitable, slightly mishandled movie version starring Dakota Fanning with dirt on her face. It’s not perfect, but that’s because it’s too busy being perfect in other ways, do you know what I mean? Like, there’s no room to expand on the sociopolitical richness of the idea of post-collapse America divided into 12 economic “districts” and ruled by a pathological Capitol anchored securely within the Rocky Mountains–there’s no room to work those implications out while you’re guiding a dozen children through a Triwizard Tournament on serious acid. Sorry, I take that back, this book is perfect. Just read it.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson

Why are American book titles so stupid? I thought it was supposed to be the other way around, like how  Dirty Dancing was released in Asia as like, Baby Loses Her Virginity. But consider, with Harry Potter, Philosopher’s Stone to Sorcerer’s Stone. Whatever focus group was like “Uhhh philosopher sounds kind of lame” is–well–stupid, but representative of the general population, so let’s move on.

But from Men Who Hate Women to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: really, that’s silly. Considering how many people carry this distinctively-colored book around in airports, I would have read this book a lot sooner if it had had its original title. It’s a lot more telling about the cultural scope of the story, and the sort of understated, flatly-put drama of the plot. Stieg Larsson was a journalist, and his thriller gets directly at the high Swedish rate of violence against women (the sections begin with chilling statistics like “92% of women have not reported their latest sexual assault to police”), dormant Naziism, bad big business, et cetera.

There’s a blurb on the back cover comparing it to Bergman films, which, you know, that’s pretty ridiculous. But this book, while not what I’d recommend for an example of great writing, is still very well-crafted in terms of plot. The mystery loops and tightens in the perfect way, the characters–including the women–are delightfully free of that thriller disease where everyone become reducible to stock descriptions about powerful muscles and “slender, attractive” figures and smoldering green eyes, and the psychology of the villains (and victims) is as complicated and interesting as it appears to come. I’m glad these Stieg Larsson books have become such bestsellers. Everyone who reads Dan Brown should switch.

An enigmatic extra fact: you know how all the Harry Potter books are kind of all about socks? This book is the same way about sandwiches.

The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger

This book has been a huge bestseller for the last several years and recently was lamed up into a movie–but if you’ve had exposure to neither, the title gets straight to the point. Henry is a librarian who time-travels uncontrollably (Billy Pilgrim as imagined by Nicholas Sparks) and Clare is his (eventual) wife. Their partnership is wildly unstable but also pre-written in time: Henry, from various points in the future, keeps materializing in a meadow where he meets a tiny redheaded child named Clare, and thus is their weird, earth-shattering love born. It’s good that the timeline is a little complicated, because the cadence of the narrative jumps is just sharp enough to conceal the fact that you’re going to cry at the end, like you did at the end of The Notebook where they were all dying on each other in the old folks’ bed.

So although this book is full of interesting, fairly extreme, gritty things (drugs, bloody fetuses, frostbite, amputations, death, iron cages, giant sculptures of birds, etc), it’s really just best-in-show in the Doomed Love category. But I don’t hate it. I love this book, actually, although I can’t read it anymore because I read it too much in high school. And I’ll freely admit what got me: in the same way that only a really disgusting night can make you truly appreciate sobriety, the jaggedness of the Henry/Clare story recalibrates your appreciation of ordinary between-moments in love. Sometimes I think there’s no greater luxury than that of being able to blink awake in a bed with someone, and love them inconsequentially, purely, like you love the thunderstorm that puts you to sleep–and all the while be anchored by the knowledge that the stakes are low. And Audrey Niffenegger did really write a memorable pairing here; the love between Henry and Clare is so powerful as to be impossible, which is apparently what people want to read about and warp their minds accordingly.

Be warned, some of the writing is pretty ridiculous. Sentences like: “We laugh and laugh, and nothing can ever be sad, no one can be lost, or dead, or far away: right now we are here, and nothing can mar our perfection, or steal the joy of this perfect moment.” YIKES. That sounds exactly like something I would furiously try to etch into a tree trunk if I were tripping on mushrooms.