June in Review

First, I finished Admission (Jean Hanff Korelitz), which was so interesting, just for the insights it offered into the logistics of handling thousands of college applications and the competition for spots in Ivy League schools, but there was a deeper philosophical layer that asked questions about what makes us exceptional, how important college really is in determining who we become, our struggle with being ordinary, etc. These deeper existential questions made it all the more disappointing when she headed for a conclusion so contrived that I couldn't have seen it coming. Still, Korelitz has an appealing writing style, and bad endings are a common flaw of first novels, so I'd likely give her another chance.

Alan Bradley's first novel, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, doesn't make any mistakes, so I'm not at all surprised that the publisher opted the entire series based on the first novel. Wiseass precocious kids, as long as you don't actually have to live with them or be the target of their snark, are a delight, and a little girl obsessed with chemistry, tormenting her older sisters, and solving a murder was so much fun. Flavia is one of my favorite characters in a long time.

I think I can knock my "grocery store" fiction out in one paragraph, and not just because they're both by the same author. Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child just released their latest Pendergast installment, Cemetery Dance, and I also listened to Preston's Tyrannosaur Canyonduring my walks. I was a little disappointed with Cemetery Dance, partly because it felt a little rushed and hollow, but mostly because zombies where pivotal to the plot, but played such a small role. Zombies! If you have zombies and voodoo, you have a huge, rich history to mine for a backstory, but for the most part, nada, zip. Tyrannosaur Canyon was much smarter, full of the kind of esoteric knowledge and odd bits of information that I've come to expect from these guys. And it made me want to go walk four miles every day just so I could hear it all unfold!

A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick was my midlist fiction gamble for the month, and I mostly just came away feeling "meh" about the whole thing. It was okay, but just okay, and I didn't care about or like anyone involved. (It is, by the way, an impressive skill to create a work of fiction in which there is not a single likeable character, but in which you are still interested. Ruth Rendell is a master of creating people that I can't stand, but I just want to see what they do to each other with their nastiness!) And, just when I was about to find some aspect of the book to hang onto, Goolrick tossed a huge plot contrivance in that the entire storyline hinged on and lost me. By that point, I just wanted to know how it ended, so I hung in there. Bad endings, first novels remix, but not enough in the writing style for me to make a return trip, I don't think.

Sarah Vowell's The Partly Cloudy Patriot made for a nice listen while we were on the road. They were essays, so if felt a little directionless at time, and not nearly so funny as Assassination Vacation, but she's always entertaining.

Somewhere in there, Andy finished reading Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery) to me, and I realized why I was never interested in the rest of the Anne series. She grows up, learns to repress, suppress, sacrifice, etc., and just becomes someone else. She stops being Anne, which makes me just as sad as Matthew dying! We've moved on to Montgomery's The Tangled Web, a much more optimistic tale....

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was just okay. Seth Grahame-Smith takes Jane Austen's classic, turns the Bennet girls into zombie hunters, and adds scenes of zombie mayhem. Entertaining at first, even made me giggle occasionally, but it probably speaks to the enduring nature of the original that about one hundred pages in, I was more interested in sorting out the original storyline and digging out Austen's work than in Grahame-Smith's added absurdities. The central plot remains true and solid, though, so if this introduces more people to a classic, then it might actually be worth it.

I also made it through Michael Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip in June. Strange and interesting contribution, although I don't think I found it as morbid or depressing as some people seem to. As a historian, I think I saw it more as a reality check, a reminder that life has never been neat, clean, orderly and happy for everyone. We tend to view Victorians as restrained, emotionally tidy people, and Lesy's collection of newspaper accounts from Wisconsin in the late 1900s makes it clear that suicide and marital discord and death and misfortune and insanity were just as rampant in society then as they've ever been. I was intrigued by the woman who never caused any other trouble, but had numerous arrests for smashing shop windows. She might go on my list of people I'd like to travel back in time to visit with....

Finally, I read Emily Chenoweth's beautiful book, Hello Goodbye, about a family struggling to come to terms with death. This was such an honest, gentle story about someone disappearing into illness, and even then, Chenoweth found a way to leave the reader not with the impression of death and diminishment, but with a life-affirming sense of love and family. My fourth "first novel" of the month, and probably the best.