jodiwilldare's reviews
1523 reviews

As I recently confessed over in Book Riot's Buy, Borrow, Bypass for most of my life I thought I had read Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. Turns out I read Watcher in the Woods, which is not at all A Wrinkle in Time. It's like the Silver Eyes/Tiger Eyes episode all over again.

Now, thanks to A Wrinkle in Time: The Graphic Novel Hope Larson's adaptation, I can say that I've sort of read the L'Engle classic.

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David Levithan’s novel The Lover’s Dictionary, is long on concept and short on content. In his first novel for grown ups, Levithan tells a romance alphabetically using the definitions of certain words to explain the relationship between the male narrator and his significant other.

From the dating site to the first date to the cohabitation, the unnamed narrator has an anecdote for each word in his dictionary. Through these definitions we learn more and more about the relationship. It starts sweet and grows sour, and there is a certain will they make it tension throughout. But still, it’s not very much to hang a novel on.

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On its surface The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg is the kind of the book I dismiss out of hand. Jewish suburban ennui? Been there. A fat character wrecking her family? Done that. Unhappy marriages and bratty teens. Got the t-shirt. Beautiful writing with a light plot? Don’t even get me started.

And yet to dimiss Attenberg’s sensitive and ridiculously readable The Middlesteins based on those surface descriptions would be a huge mistake.

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It would be really easy to dismiss Sheila Heti’s “novel from life” How Should a Person Be? by claiming not to be the target audience. Or, I could say that I am unable to relate to this gaggle of apolitical artists and playwrights who seem to be affluent enough to not worry about finances and the world around them. But then I remember that when writing is good, you don’t have to be able to relate to the characters because the story will make you feel their situation. And perhaps, on that level, Heti has succeeded here if what she wanted me to feel in this situation was unending annoyance and total boredom about these people who spend all their time wanking on about art and what it means and friendship. Actually, that does sound like a pretty good book, but sadly this one is not pretty good.

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“It was 135 pages that felt like 500.” This was one of the most astute, smart things ever said at my Rock & Roll Bookclub. My friend, Atom, was talking about a novella we had all read that took each of us an entire month to slog through. Yes, thirty days for only 135 pages.

And this is exactly how I feel about Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son, a 400ish page book that felt like 1200. It took me more than two months to read this one and I only perserved because I’ll be discussing it at Book Riot and my resolution was to read more books outside of my usual taste.

Man, what a miserable failure this one was. For me. I have to add the for me part because this novel has been pretty widely lauded by reviewers and those readers whose opinions I respect, and yet this left me frustrated and bored.

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The titles of Karen Russell’s books make my brain do a kind of Weird-Al-esque karaoke. I like to believe this has more to do with Russell’s imaginative stories infiltrating my brain than anything else. When I read her fabulous debut novel Swamplandia!, I sang The Decemberists’ “O Valencia!’ for two weeks straight.

Now she gives us a batch of equally wonderful stories called Vampires in the Lemon Grove and if you can say that title without singing it to the tune of J. Geils Band Centerfold, well you probably weren’t in 4th grade 1981 when this song was all the rage. You’re singing it now, aren’t you? Good, because this is a short story collection worthy of being stuck in your head.

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What a strange, lovely book this is, Terry Tempest Willams’ When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice. Part memoir, part feminist essay, part poetry, and part environmental screed, Williams’ book defies easy summarization, which is what made it such an enjoyable read.

On her deathbed, at the age of fifty-four, Williams’ mother says she is leaving her daughter all her journals. Apparently, this is a Mormon culture thing. Women have babies and keep journals. The only caveat is that Williams’ cannot look at the journals until her mother is gone. A month after her death, Williams’ turns to the three shelves of clothbound journals seeking solace, and finds that each of the books is empty. She has inherited a library of blank pages and lost her mother all over again. Read more.