The Corrections

Imagine sitting down at your favorite fancy restaurant, ordering all of your favorite foods, the crispy fried calamari appetizers, the sourdough rolls and butter, the salad with the sweetened pecans and goat cheese, the 14 oz. juicy steak....medium all the way through, the potatoes au gratin, asparagus, chocolate mousse, a latte. Imagine your eyes being bigger than your stomach yet eating your way through this delightfully delicious meal, getting fuller and fuller yet not being able to help taking one more bite...just one more bite. So stuffed, you're ready to burst but you want one more bite, it's such a fantastic meal. Such is the experience of reading "The Corrections", such is the delight in savoring every page, even when I was too tired late into the night to close the book...I'd go for one more page and then one more after that, and just one more after that one, and even though I didn't want it to end, now that I've finished it, I know it will stick with me for a long time....as only the very best stories can. As Andrew said, "Perfection".

The Corrections

This was great!

Who remembers the scandal Jonathan Franzen caused back when this book was published? Oprah chose it for her book club, and Franzen was all like, "Okay, but you're not putting your Oprah's Book Club logo on my book cover because that is not the audience I was writing for," and then America was all like, "WHAT?! Let's throw things at this ungrateful, pretentious author. How DARE he try to preserve some control and prevent the pigeonholing of his own novel?! What. A. Snob."

It was a great practice run for Americans who were just about enjoy voting for Bush over Gore (what a nerd!) and Bush over Kerry (what a bore!), supporting an unsupportable war, and choosing things like his preference for Dijon and arugula as reasons to steer clear of Barack Obama. And making hateful disdain for education and excellence fashionable.

Reading this book is bizarre, because it was written and published before September 11, 2001. There is no mention of W. None of that had happened. And yet the book is startlingly familiar - it's, on the one hand, an intimate look at an America that disappeared shortly after the book's publication. On the other hand, it's a prescient dagger to the heart. Politics aside, this book is also full of gut-wrenching observations on family, work, and the pursuit of happiness in America. I sometimes had to put it down to give myself a break, but that's okay. Mostly I couldn't stop reading it.

I loved it! This is the best fiction I've read in a long time. I feel energized.

The Corrections

And another form of perfection...

Perfection....

Perfection: A Memoir of Betrayal and Renewal by Julie Metz

Did you do a double-take? Expected a book cover, didn't you? Well, behold 'perfection' in its purest form since the book by Julie Metz is not. Julie's husband, Henry, dies suddenly in

his 40's of cardiac arrest. Julie is left a single parent to their 6 yr. old daughter, Liza, and is grieving so deeply for her perfect husband and perfect marriage that she leaves the task of cleaning out his office to her friends who discover that Henry's been a bad boy all throughout their perfect and loving 13-year marriage. 5 affairs to be exact, one with a close friend and neighbor. When Julie finally snaps out of her grief, she goes on a mad rampage and contacts every single one of Henry's women and when she snaps out of her anger, she finds a boyfriend and lives happily ever after. I was really into this book during the first half when she was biting the heads off of the other women but it fell short towards the second half when I

started to feel that I was back in "Eat, Pray, Love" Land. "Oh, look at me, listen to me, watch me, pay attention to me." Gets a little tiring. But since this is a reader's blog, I will now include the picture of the pretty book cover.

Frank Lloyd Wright and the women who adored him...

"The Women" by T.C. Boyle

This is the third book that I've read by T.C. Boyle. No doubt that he knows how to spin a story but this one was a tedious, wordy read. It didn't pick up speed until the last 100 pages (of 451) and by then, I was getting frustrated, but the subject matter was of interest to me and I did like the way Boyle executed it. A fictional Japanese apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright named Tadashi Sato narrates the story of the 4 women who obsessively loved Mr. Wrighto-San (as he refers to the master), working backwards in time from the last wife and ending, tragically, with the murder of his 2nd wife. His first wife, Kitty, is mentioned in brief. Although this is a fascinating story, I'd suggest a better rendering in "Loving Frank: A Novel" by Nancy Horan. And if you're looking for a T.C. Boyle that races with excitement, read "Tortilla Curtain". Much better than this one, in my opinion.

Anne of Windy Poplars

or
"Well, all I hope is it won't be a case of marrying in haste and repenting at leisure."

I thought I would do one entry for the rest of the Anne series. But that would have been mammoth. So I split 'em up.

I'm including a list of the books, in order of when they take place, along with their original publication dates. I reported on Anne of the Island before on this blog; since then I finished the rest of the series:

Anne of Green Gables (1908)
Anne of Avonlea (1909)
Anne of the Island (1915)
Anne of Windy Poplars (1936)
Anne's House of Dreams (1917)
Anne of Ingleside (1939)
Rainbow Valley (1919)
Rilla of Ingleside (1920)

I did a little bit of research this time around and found that my two least favorite Anne books are the ones that were actually written out of the chronology of the characters' lives, long after the initial series was finished. It explains a lot. Anne of Windy Poplars and Anne of Ingleside are the books most guilty of treating Anne Shirley in a way that I find to be too nostalgic, too obviously foisting her classic traits on the reader and too liberally abandoning the narrative of the books to place Anne in wacky matchmaking schemes and/or hilarious misunderstandings in which she eventually wins friends and fans. And the stakes in these two later books just don't seem high enough, with a couple of exceptions in Anne of Ingleside. At times, they seem like an indulgence for lovers of the earlier Anne books. Imagine if, fifteen years from now, J.K. Rowling wrote another Harry Potter book that took place between books two and three and was mostly about entertaining and inconsequential bits from Ron's and Hermione's summer vacations or Harry's journals from Privet Drive. Or something.

Anne of Windy Poplars (#4/1936) covers the three years of Anne's long-distance engagement. Her fiance is in medical school, and she is boarding as the principal of a school in another town on P.E.I. A lot of the book is presented in the form of letters from Anne to Gilbert - it alternates between her first-person narrative (the only time in the series we get to experience Anne's unfiltered point of view) and the normal close third person. The big stories are Anne's struggle with the clannish Pringle family's grudge against her, and Anne's attempts to break through to the unhappy and unfriendly Katherine Brooke, a fellow teacher. Katherine Brooke's story has always been a favorite of mine; it's a good example of Montgomery's willingness to explore characters and situations that aren't as sparkly and blessed as Anne's own world. Though, in most cases with these less fortunate characters, all turns out well in the end, it usually takes some sort of major trial or agony or revelation or leap of faith to bring about the happy ending. This book has some great parts (and, really, no book is a waste that introduces Rebecca Dew to the world), but it does include a lot of that tiresome Adventures With Anne business that I just don't enjoy very much. Seriously, how many people's lives does she have to improve by happy accident and well-intentioned nosiness?! If you ever want to know which of these stories I still love in spite of myself, just ask. That's another entry.

Rainbow Valley

or

He looked exactly like a great black tomcat, that he did. I could never abide such a man in the pulpit every Sunday.

Rainbow Valley (#7/1919) was originally published after Anne's House of Dreams. At the opening of this book, the Ingleside children are all older and more interesting. Even better, there is a fresh bunch of characters that are, without exception, thoroughly enjoyable. Glen St. Mary has gotten a new minister, John Meredith, a widower with four young children. He is a highly special minister but an absent-minded man and father, and his children run wild. But of course they're golden at heart and somehow all of their misdeeds are hilarious and spring from honest intentions. They become best friends with the Blythe children, etc. Rainbow Valley has lots of little adventures, but it also has a larger story that threads throughout and deepens the experience for the reader. The Merediths become just as important as the Blythes have been - indeed, they play the larger role in this book. The central conflict centers on John Meredith and his slow struggle with being a better father and recovering from the death of his wife. Montgomery also hints at what is to come, as these children come of age on the eve of WWI. Judging by the publication dates, she wrote this book as the war was ending, and then Rilla of Ingleside after the war was over. Rainbow Valley simultaneously grounds and enshrines just what all the young men will be fighting for when they enlist in a few years' time. Montgomery's dedication reads:

To the memory of Goldwin Lapp, Robert Brookes, and Morley Shier, who made the supreme sacrifice that the happy valleys of their home land might be kept sacred from the ravage of the invader.